A New Kind of Gimmick
I’ve had a few discussions lately about what I want to do with my life. These discussions inevitably revolve around my educational aspirations—studying mathematics (and, given time, physics)—which, without fail, elicits an honest, “Well, okay; but what do you want to do with that?”
I tend to approach the answer very indirectly (no surprise), not only because I’ve a penchant for impish obfuscation, but also because, well, I don’t know. I can’t look to public or private sectors and find the One True Career Path. This has as much to do with the fact that that pinnacle will rest not only upon pillars of science and math, but also of aesthetic exploration and creativity, and—dare I say it—fun. There’s a certain cachet in working for the likes of the NSA, the single largest employer of mathaticians worldwide; but the prospect of whiling away the day creating unbreakable codes to conceal the coordinates of which Al Qaida bunker we’re blowing up today doesn’t really evoke the sort of warm fuzzy feeling I’m after.
There are a few examples in commerce which approach the One True Career Path. For instance, while I wasn’t as engaged with the software as I’d hoped to have been (and, in all fairness, I didn’t give it a really decent shot), groBoto at least conceptually embodies the sort of thing I’d like to be doing: you can fart around and play inside its faux 3D environment, wandering into some really cool spaces; you can create animations and make those spaces dance; you can use physics models to generate hybrid constructions of science and art; and you can create games combining all those elements. The potential for greatness is extremely high, should the development match its seminal ambition. Apparently, the imminent release of the long-planned groBoto 2.0 promises to bring the software closer to its goal. We’ll see.
When I think about this, this Where the hell are you going, man?, though, my mind always finds a perch in Champaign, IL, at the primary campus of Wolfram Research, Inc.. Stephen Wolfram’s brainchild continues to redefine “scientific computing”, or at least tries. There is, of course, Mathematica, the flagship product and a staple of math departments the world over. The mathematical community at large seems to poke fun at Wolfram Research, remarking about a perceived tendency of the company and its products to flirt with style in the face of the expected academic austerity. I, too, find it easy to be dismissive of a company who’s founder purports to redefine science through application of his own product; but you can’t deny that Mathematica output is beautiful, and also that, as with any successful artist, Stephen & Co. keep us interested.
The newest Wolfram bauble won’t stay their critics, but I wouldn’t be so quick to write it off as rubbish. WolframTones allows users to generate ringtones of some musical nature, using points in a “computational universe” as seeds for algorithms which generate the sounds. From the site:
WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story–and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.
Whatever you might think of this (it does seem a little trite), there is some solid scientific foundation there. Science has at its core the need to make sense of data. Most of you are familiar with scatter plots and bar diagrams and Venn diagrams; and there are more sophisticated resources for mining and interpreting data. But researchers have for centuries sought novel ways to appreciate the stories that data have to tell, and I’m not sure that if you strip away the faddish, gimmicky angle of WolframTones, you won’t find an inspired interpretation scheme.
No, it’s not science, because science is the practice of not only interpreting patterns within data but also applying them to theoretical frameworks; and a ringtone just doesn’t cut that muster. But it shares with science a wonderment with the What Might Be; and, whatever their faults, I’d have to say that going to work each day with the intent of exploring ways of manifesting that wonderment in a shareable medium would go a long way toward finding the One True Career Path.
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