Category Archives: Literature

Sword of Truth – the Rule Unwritten

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Warning: this may perhaps contain spoilers.

I’m a fairly big fan of Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, which just concluded with the release of the book “Confessor”. Although at first glance fantasy, the series is actually more of a Objectivist philosophical treatise (at least towards the end) than a collection of fantasy novels. Each book states its theme rather clearly in the form of a “wizard’s rule”, which can sort of be viewed as the “take-home lesson” from the book.

Anyway, the last book threw us all for a loop because the wizard’s rule, and thus the theme, is not given to us. It’s introduced as the “secret of a war wizard’s power”, but the book by that name in the series is discovered to be blank.

After some thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not only intentional, but that this IS the rule. It’s also how Richard (the protagonist) ultimately triumphs at the end of the book – the antagonists did not understand the rule, but he did, which is why even their moment of triumph was ultimately defeat.

I believe it is this:

Truth is sought internally. Truth handed down is insufficient; truth reasoned out is not. You must come to your own conclusions.

Not only does it fit the nature of the rule itself (nothing written down), but it is also a recurring theme in the book: why the antagonists could not accomplish their objective despite having precise instructions to do so (they didn’t think, they just obeyed) and why Richard and Kahlan’s love could endure (because it was twice discovered independently rather than simply told).

Ender's Shadow Series

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Did the characters, who had earlier made the novel very entertaining through their subtlety, all suddenly become very stupid by the time Shadow Puppets was released? The novel was disappointingly predictable, and for someone who “is the smartest person in the world with the record to prove it”, some of the mistakes made by Bean (and Peter, for that matter) are painfully predictable.

The same phenomenon occurred with Ender in the later novels of the main “Ender’s Game” series. It’s as if Card’s characters flare out as they age.

Books on composing classical music

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Why can’t I find books on composing classical music? I can find books on individual components of compositions, such as harmony and counterpoint, but not on composition in the classical tradition (which is, incidentally, the title of a book that has nothing to do with composition or music; it’s apparently on an ancient Greek form of argument). Does no one care, or have too many people moved to a different style by now?

I always feel as if I’m missing something when I write music (probably training), because I can hear entire pieces springing fully formed into my mind, but I can never write them. I have a fairly well-developed sense of relative pitch by this point and I still can’t write down the music without having to undergo a tedious trial-and-error sort of process. For me, writing is a chore, but the glory of composition, as distinct from writing, motivates me to complete pieces.

Paper writing

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You know, we could easily write papers that are far more accessible to a lay audience. We don’t normally speak the way we write academic papers, and that sort of language is not required to accurately convey a precise meaning.

…But then our papers would never get published.

Ruminations Over Salad for "The Optimization of Systems"

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While eating at the local Wendy’s (basically the only source of food that is open past 2 PM in all of Templetown – words cannot describe how much I hate this city), I noticed two important things:

  1. Potentials (Materials, Ideas, Things that aren’t yet in their final Form) always existed in one form or another since the birth of the universe, yet are only usable after undergoing a change or series of changes. The essence is eternal, but the structure is only transient. For example, “this salad did not exist yesterday”: certainly the salad as an assembled component did not, but the lettuce, tomatoes, and partially hydrogenated soybean oil did exist. Even before they existed in those forms, they existed as part of a plant. The First Law of Thermodynamics guarantees this.
  2. Wendy’s now serves breakfast.

Expanding more on the Potentials, this should be a very intuitive, even downright obvious, idea. What makes it interesting is the particular framing of my thoughts: I realized that this could be used to derive a potential function (as in the amortized analysis technique) that serves as a “signature” of the changes physical objects undergo. I need to develop the idea further, but it’s something to talk about if I ever get around to writing “The Optimization of Systems”.

Some musings I will probably include in my Treatise…

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Lest I forget it in the chaos…

“Does C minor care about the Pathetique, or evolution about Darwin? Will hard work make one equal to the canvas upon which one paints? Of course not; to ask such questions is nonsensical. However, to deny the influence of Beethoven, Darwin, or Picasso on their respective arts would be folly. Thus, the tools and the workers evolve simultaneously, creating a powerful feedback loop that resonates across the ages throughout all of society.

And so we have the meme: an idea that propagates through its users, much as a gene propagates within organisms in which it is present. If the idea as it is practiced is advantageous – that is to say, it is used in a revolutionary way – it will spread as practice imprints itself on theory. Thus the revolutionary becomes commonplace: we associate C minor with heroic struggle, we accept that great complexity may arise from unguided processes over long spans of time, we construct art from simple geometric shapes, and culture advances.

Due to the inherent fluidity of our tools, it would be incorrect to call any of them truly Platonic in nature. Certainly, an Ideal art or science may exist, but what if we were to attain it? Would that system be able to answer all of our questions? What about the Gödelian, undecidable ones? Would everyone agree with the resulting conclusions or aesthetics? And, most importantly, how would our previous work be incorporated into such a system? Would it be a subset of the Ideal? If so, what if we had chosen a different path? If not, why did we come up with it in the first place? Attempting to quantify and describe Ideals in mundane terms leaves us with more questions than we started with. To say that we see shadows is too generous for such a condition; we are stumbling in darkness because we cannot understand the light!”