The consequence is that I put a lot of effort in the preparation of an occurrence which is essentially made of free flow. The cost to reach over –maintaining a week-long mindset and working towards meditation-like conditions– is enormous, and I am fully aware of the contradictions at hand.
It is very frustrating when, in the midst of a session, I am still struggling to let the music penetrate, fighting not to fight, looking for signal among noise. The questions are then endless.

In one such unsuccessful moment I reflected that listening seemed to become more difficult, or less fruitful, as I grow older. I felt exactly like the day a three-year-old was drawing pictures under my eyes and I realized I would never again be able to draw like that. There is something truly artistic, the mark of a genuinely spontaneous and sincere expression, in a kid’s passionate scribbling. I tried drawing like this too but the weight of concepts made for very different (and much colder) results.

A toddler’s drawing comes to life because there is something said but we know we shouldn’t be looking for that something. The drawing –the coming together, the sharing– is the purpose, and the answer to the question “What is it?”, which all adults need answered, does not matter much.

I was always taught language as a medium. From the first kindergarten sessions up to high school we have always been looking for patterns in language as tools to convey meaning. Even poetry is explored as an intricate condensate of language technique: I don’t remember anyone suggesting that it could be much like a children’s game, a joyful improvisation within imaginary rules that needs no justification to the outside.

Learning different languages (I use “languages” here in the largest possible meaning) is important; I am grateful today for all that hard work as I assemble letters into words, words into sentences to shape text. We continually aim for rich, powerful language because the more meaning we convey and the stronger the bond with our audience becomes.

But I have come to find that we don’t merely use language; instead we partkake in it. It appears to me that in the same way that we learn languages mostly to convey meaning, we convey meaning mostly to participate in the conveyance.
In other words, music is not a language but “language”, in and by itself. The connection –as Eben Moglen would put it, the exchange of tokens of meaning– may well be the real purpose of the exchange. Here are some words, together they make text and carry meaning, and if you can relate to that we may connect in an ever more subtle way.

In that sense, one can view language as just one way to experience the world. Meaning may last forever but the narrative doesn’t; that storytelling may well be all that we strive for. Languages as baskets to carry meaning, and meaning as a pretext to partake in language. It’s all toddler drawings. We’re social animals all right.

And some enlightenment in Suso Baleato’s words live on stage on December 28th:

I am not trying to win nothing;
I am trying to increase the quality of the liberation.

This one is, to me, because with it I have climbed to the mountaintop of my computing landscape.

I started climbing when on the computer I installed the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. After many years of knowing Debian, coming to use it felt like a privilege. The program is a masterpiece of understatement, and the contrast with Ubuntu, which I have used for a long time and which is based on Debian, jumped to my face.

Ubuntu, the sleek, thoughtfully-interfaced youngster; Debian, the utterly modest, simple clockwork giant… I found the sight of the elegant construction, fitting inside and taking care of the little machine, to be simply marvelous. Here was to a third kind of beauty in software: Not that of a simple, focused, resource-sparing program; Not of a clean, crisp and fluid interface; Rather, the beauty of the multitude of pieces coming together in an orderly, tidy and functional fashion. Debian’s mission seems to be to Just Work. It does it Well and Beautifully.

Words were failing me as I played within the elegant construction, contemplating all of the marvels made available to me… a modern, secure web browser running less than two minutes away from powering up. A CD read&write drive that works, with software to run it; software to edit maps, to transcode videos, to chat, to draw, to write, to share; tidy menus and automatic updates for them all.
I had always perceived software freedom as a race, a permanent battle for existence, and one that we were slowly losing. But beyond market share, network effects and all the mean technical and legal tactics, in front of that little computer I realized suddenly how much there was left: how much would never need to be re-written, because it works, and it empowers the users, and it’s compatible with everything else. I thought of all the components written already, up from the little core utilities like cp and mv and echo, all the protocols and formats, all the layers of abstraction, that were finished for good and ready to be built upon. The loving work of two entire generations of programmers fitting elegantly on a single CD and an Internet connection.

I was searching for words, and those of Eben Moglen were in my head; it struck me then that I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yes, the breeze up there, and the perspective! Turning this old computer on, I feel like I am stepping in the library of Alexandria, suddenly able to appreciate its construction and the depth of its contents. It is an emotional, intimate, humbling and joyful feeling.

Using the snippy software center, I installed Tor. Running the program (through its little graphical interface Vidalia) makes my computer part of the Tor network, which anonymises communications on the Internet. Now, my computer is one among several thousand nodes run by volunteers, which relay information from one to another, not knowing the recipients and unable to comprehend what they are transmitting.
On the edge of the network, ordinary people communicate. People like you and me read and write freely;  they install the Tor Browser Bundle and they are only two clicks away from being able to exchange information without surveillance. In China they can read news which contain the keyword Tibet; in Iran they can discuss about political protests; in Mexico they can write about drug cartels without their life ending in horror; in Thailand they can hold political views without being jailed. Everywhere, they can browse the web without feeding the great corporate databases that are auctioned off to unscrupulous organisations.
A tiny part of that traffic transits through the laptop in my apartment. I acknowledge that some of it is reprehensible. I know that some of it is of immense human value — so immense that several totalitarian regimes have my IP address blacklisted now. I take joy in knowing that most of it is ordinary — youtube videos of cats and emails with pictures of the latest baby in the family.

In a process so streamlined that not even the fan can be heard, so well designed that only a few clicks were needed to set it up, my laptop encrypts, decrypts, relays information, from unknown sources to unknown recipients, contributing minutely to a better world, on the table on which I take my meals. This is my mountaintop.

All I hear all year round about the Internet and computing in general seems to relate to things made for distraction. Broadband providers behave like the Internet was their television network. My government thinks Internet is a city in which it will re-mold the unpleasant parts. Many journalists and most of my work colleagues mistake it for Mark Zuckerberg’s or Eric Schmidt’s private toy.

When I think of Internet and computing, I think of the mountaintop in my apartment… the purest machine I know, peacefully carrying unknown tokens of meaning day and night, connecting souls. That’s the word — it’s a soul machine.

Last of a series of posts about an aeronautical engineering course I created this year.

Background (introductory) remarks | Course homepage.

What a journey. It took many weeks to recover from teaching the course and many more to be able to look back calmly. I view the course as a success, but there are significant weaknesses I would like to address.

• First and foremost, the course is run at an insane pace and makes tremendous demands on the students’ energy reserves and timetable. This goes directly against the self-initiative and explorative learning that I want to encourage.
  This problem has its roots deep within the education system and in its engineering sector in particular. The area is intensely competitive and the value of courses (as well as the recognition of their teachers and to some extent the choices of the students) is measured in great part by their difficulty. For me, working at home or in class is a continuous battle trying not to give in to the irrational and counter-productive fear that the students find the content too easy; and there is no incentive whatsoever to walk at a pace slower than the most extreme one students can sustain.
  With this in mind, it will be difficult to remove content on the premise that more will be learned — even though this is an obvious truth and the most straightforward path for me to improve this course. I will try.
• Second, the in-class time was not used optimally.
  By starting with the student presentations from the previous project, I mis-used the first 45 minutes of each session, which is the prime slot for student attention.. Kicking in a new lecture with wholly new concepts and vocabulary one hour into the session is making poor use of the student’s time and energy.
  As for the projects, they require significant ground-work and number churning before they yield interesting results. Late starts due to presentations and long lectures meant that the truly interesting aspects of projects —new conceptualizations, important decisions, conclusions etc.— most often took place much later during the week, and outside the class. It is regrettable that I could not help steer and encourage students in these moments.
  Next year, I will likely move student presentations to just after the lunch break and try to shorten the lectures. I also intend to hand the projects out very early on (perhaps even one week ahead), and —gasp— make the hand-outs a little more specific as to where the interesting parts are.
• I need to work on improving student participation and well-being in class. My friend David lead by example and left me with many leads for nurturing class participation and involvement during lectures. I should also have much more time next year to address the teamwork issues that undermined so many projects.
  In the coming edition, I will invest time in talking about efficient team-work and problem-solving practices — this course has shown me that here too, a little “top-down” theory helps in practice. I will also ask groups to designate group leaders, which I think will help with structuring and reporting progress.
• Finally, I will work on improving marking. Overall the grades were not outstanding, as I was often disappointed by the structure and solidity of the students’ work (rather than the actual results). I went to great lengths to explain what I thought needed improvement in each report and presentation, but I felt some dis-satisfaction and sometimes even plain de-motivation among the students when they received their mark.
  This is understandable. The key to effective marking is keeping a close relationship between the graded work and the obtained mark: a timely correction, transparent marking criteria, and a human connection to mesh and comment them. In this case, the timespan for handing in projects is one week, and I then need three to five days to correct and mark them. So by the time I got to discuss the mark of, say, project A with someone, they would have handed in project B and would already be working on project C, each week within a newly-shuffled group!
  To ensure better connection between the handed-in work and the corresponding mark, I will dedicate time within class sessions to de-briefing previous projects orally with individual student groups. I will also “freeze” groups for several weeks in a row so that feedback can be gathered and acted upon more easily.

So much for the criticism. I won’t elaborate on the positive points — these were eight intense, demanding weeks crammed with new knowledge. Also, a great deal of new material was released under a Creative Commons license for the benefit of all who wish to study it. The students’ feedback was rather good and I think much was learned overall.

I set out to build this course with the hope of going by two precepts: learn by yourself, and learn by doing.
“Learn by yourself” in the sense that I hoped to engage students in the set-up of the projects as well as the selection of topics, and more so because I wished to let them choose and identify their areas of interest within projects, working without a precise set of instructions.
“Learn by doing” in the sense that I tried to have us work from real-life examples (e.g. a 777 MTOW take-off) up into the underlying theory, instead of the opposite (e.g. “what real-life application would illustrate the use of that equation?”). I hoped to provide students with near-real-life problems that they could solve with the analytical or methodological tools of their choice. Using a new tool or method because you need and chose it to do something is a much more effective learning experience than starting from the tool and then looking for applications.

These two high-level pedagogical objectives would best be pursued with loosely-defined, fully-customized, mostly-improvised sessions in class.
Of course, any teacher will know that this is not a realistic proposition. My employer will not hire me, the head of studies will not allocate a slot for the course, the students’ future employers will not give the diploma credibility, unless a detailed, fully planned-ahead course curriculum is written out. As a consequence, when the course begins a very large amount of structure and limitation is already built-in, so that naturally we neither have completely “learn by yourself” nor entirely “learn by doing”. I’ve lived with this limitation ever since I wanted to teach.

The one big thing that I have learned going through this course, however, was that these practical requirements are not the only obstacles to enabling true learning. I have found that countless small elements not directly related to the course content have their importance. Ensuring that groups communicate efficiently, that they keep track of their progress, ferociously battling student timidity and over-subordination, carefully scheduling sessions all the way down to 15-minute slots, all these seemingly insignificant things end up determining whether or not most students will have a successful learning experience, even if the content is well-prepared and of high quality.
This discovery triggers a series of thoughts and ideas about the process of learning and the weight of social and cultural habits in our universities — but enough for now. “Aspects of Aircraft Design and Control” been a terrific experience. I look forward to next year.

We are almost done with a series of posts about an aeronautical engineering course I created this year.

Lecture 8 & Project 8 release notes | Course homepage.

Lecture 8 — Longitudinal stability
Project 8 — Designing Canards

The objective of this eighth and final project was to explore the notion of longitudinal stability and the constraints it imposes on aircraft design and operation. The accompanying lecture is focused tightly on the concept of stability and the tools needed to solve the problem.

The lecture tackles the notion of stability in a very progressive and visual way. It is one great virtue of such informal, project-based lectures that they let us focus on the essential only. Here, all subtleties such as tail/wing interaction, their respective efficiencies, vertical offsets, or dynamic effects are left aside, leaving us to work on the very concept of stability un-distracted.

The last part of the lecture is dedicated to answering the question “how can canard aircraft be stable?”, which if done correctly, neatly captures the concept of, and constraints brought by, longitudinal stability.
As a whole, the lecture is short, neat, and leaves me very satisfied.

The project problem can be solved rather easily (only three sets of two simple equations need be solved) but leaves room for experimentation and initiative; the balance was struck in the right place.
Because I wanted to alleviate the work load on the students, who were caught within multiple deadlines, as well as hasten the publication of the final results, I proposed that the project be completed in-class within four hours, and the class accepted. Working with a close-by deadline tremendously increases productivity but this comes at the cost of the serenity and slow-pace exploration that characterize true learning. Cutting-off students in their work at the end of the session simply reinforces the teacher-judge/taught-judged cleavage, and everyone’s frustration. I will not do this anymore next year.

All in all, a nicely constructed lecture and project. To me, the session was special in two ways. First, longitudinal stability had been a devouring, partly-unsolved center of interest ever since I studied it in university, and the first topic I ever desired to teach. Second and most important, it was the last session that I would be able to spend together with a class I’ve known for three years and with whom I’ve spent many an interesting or intense experience. Working on the design of a great-looking, terrific-sounding hypothetical aircraft was a nice way to part.