Read A Blog - A Literary Engineer's Notebook - Exploring the real and surreal connections between poetry and engineering

Contents:

Memory of The Future

If you have a choice between experiencing a perfect moment and having an everlasting memory of such moment but never actually experiencing it, which one would you choose? There was a time when I would choose the former, like Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl, for a brief moment of warmth before the eternal oblivion. Now it is the latter, perhaps because of a desire to relive certain moments that become real again upon recollection. Moreover, the selective recollection can be done at will.

In my line of work, memory is actually tangible, semiconductor memory, that is. From the early days of Texas Instruments’s series 51 that offered a few hundred bits of memory to the multi gigabit devices of today, the amount of memory that can be stored in a small space is amazing, if you would just let yourself to be amazed. To put things in perspectives, the size of all six volumes of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is 200 mega bytes, a mere fraction of what can be stored in a 16 giga bytes NAND flash device whose die size is 20 mm X 13 mm. Conventional non volatile memory is built with transistors. In the not too-far-off future, the fourth fundamental element, the memristor, can be used in building persistent memory devices with higher density and consume less power. Unlike the resistor, the memristor retains its last value when there is no current flow through it. It too has memory.

Of course it is not always good to be able to retain so much memory. Not because of nothing that Dali painted the persistence of memory so eloquently and eerily. Sometimes it is a blessing to forget. To use the words of Emily Dickinson:

To flee from memory
Had we the Wings
Many would fly
Inured to slower things
Birds with surprise
Would scan the cowering Van
Of men escaping
From the mind of man

Emily Dickinson

It takes a copious amount of self-delusion to filter out the unwanted memory and to add beauty to the wanted. Is it total honesty? No, but the dappled shade added later to block out the falling branch provides a needed contrast to make the leafy lane appear a lot greener, a lot more pleasant to revisit this November evening. What about “To thine own self be true”? Such hard choices.

The Integrals In Things Past

The integral sign $int$ reminds me of the salt water taffy machines in the sweet shops of the Oregon coastal towns we visited during the summers of my girlhood. I remember pressing my nose against the glass partition to watch the machine pulled the strands of candy in a mesmerizing pattern over and over, stretching them into almost living things – supple and touchable. As I look back, those summers appear pleasantly long and unfocused like the desultory walks along the beaches, trading taffy flavors and seashells with my sisters. The fact that a mathematical sign can invoke such nostalgia made me reach out for an old textbook tonight. Full of equations yellowed out with highlighters by my former self, it patiently repeats to me that the Volterra series has the ability to capture the effects of memory. Differing from the Taylor series that approximates the response of a non-linear system such that the output is solely dependent on the inputs at a particular time, the Volterra series calculates the output using the inputs at all other times. Specifically, it is a series of infinite sums of multidimensional convolutional integrals and can be used to calculate the intermodulation effect of audio signals.

The integral of rational functions can also be used to calculate the drag force effect on the free fall of a sky diver. But this fact was of no use to John Gillespie Magee whose parachute failed to open one summer day in 1941. But how he had lived!

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds…and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of…wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.

And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space…

…put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds…and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of…wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.

And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space…

…put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John was nineteen when he died. It was a farmer who saw him falling from the plane. The same force must have acted upon Icarus of the Grecian myth, another boy who fell out of the sky. W. H. Auden offers some commentaries on how these tragedies were perceived and interpreted by arts.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

It is cold comfort to be offered the permanence in the nature of gravity. Looking at the poems from another angle, I see that there are worse things than to be desensitized by arts. After all, having a susceptible heart I need all the help I can get to be inoculated against the rampant pain radiating from too many tragedies, both real and mythical.



An Attraction Unexplained






Certain words are easy on the eyes.  Take,  for instance, iridescent, dapple, lilting, peal, sparrow.  Of course one reader's pearls  are another reader's sands.  Subjectivity aside, within one single perception, what makes certain words more appealing than others?  Is it the way their letters interplay? Is it the way they roll off the tongue of the whisperer, you know the one, in your mind's eye?  Do you have to understand a word in order to be attracted to it?  For me, the words that appeal do not necessarily always belong in the conventional domain of poetry and literature.  In fact, the other day when I was reviewing certain areas of signal processing theory,  instead of absorbing the technical aspects of such words as harmonic transformation, abscissa of convergence, abelian and tauberian, convolution, I saw them standing aloft,  austere and beautiful.  That they appear austere has to do with the fact that they carry exact meanings -- mathematically, the convolution of two functions is the integral of the products of these functions after one of them is reversed and shifted.
I read somewhere that inconsolable is the saddest word in the English language.  There is logic in that observation if you dissect the word.  For me bereft is another one.  The tendency to brood lingers as I follow this line of thoughts.  Thankfully, the following poem provides a diversion, albeit not a complete one, by observing nature.  Read it with me slowly, savoring the rhythm and the alliteration as the poet follows a stream back to its fount.
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
       





Of Negative Capacitance And Nightingale







The trinity of passive circuit elements have descriptive names: resistor,  inductor, and capacitor -- the resistor resists current flow, the inductor stores energy in a magnetic field and uses this energy to induce current, the capacitor is capable of holding electrical charge.  The capability of a capacitor, or its capacitance, is the amount of electric charge it is capable of storing.  As a passive element, a capacitor is charged by the voltage applied.   A less well-known fact is that not all capacitors are passive.  In fact, the capacitor used in an operational amplifier configured as a negative impedance converter in an astable multivibrator has negative capacitance and functions as a source, not a passive load.

Negative capability is also a quality that characterizes John Keats whose Ode to the Nightingale has provided much uneasy pleasure to generations of poetry readers, myself included.
.......
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
.....
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Keats wrote these lines one spring morning sitting under a plum tree in a friend's garden in England as he listened to a nightingale singing its deathless song.  The poem confirms the poet's negative capability, the ability to negate one's self to enter the state of being of others to speak of and for them.  He left his "sole self" to travel with the nightingale through time -- the poem invokes summer, not spring - and space - sunny Provence, not drab England -- to articulate its joyful song even though he himself was in pain.  The tension between  pleasure and pain  in the poem is palpable.  The nightingale's immortality accentuates my awareness of the poet's short life.   As you know, Keats died of tuberculosis when he was twenty six.
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Deja Vu Deconstructed


Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house

in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s

      gloom,

ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue

down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day

torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,

black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,

giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off

      light,

lead me then, lead me the way …
Memory is amorphous.  I still remember the first times I read that D. H. Lawrence’s poem.  The first time, you will want to correct me.  But I still can’t be sure.  All I remember  is that when I opened that volume of poetry, a graduation present, the morning after the commencement and read that poem,  I know that I had lived that moment before,  had followed those very words while the sunlight cast a peculiar  sheen on my graduation gown hanging on the hook next to the bookcase and the room was heavy with the scent of L’air Du Temps — another gift from my mother that I promptly broke in the excitement of the night before.   But it was not possible.  How could it be?  Nevertheless  the double sensation remains firmly in my memory years later.
But perhaps I had experienced that moment just a moment before.  If human memory is like certain type of  semiconductor memory that needs a clock to register, perhaps  deja vu can be explained as being a glitch on the clock edge.  At the first clock edge, my consciousness registered the entire tableau — the poem, the sunlight,  the scent and all.  The glitch followed immediately and I relived the same experience.  Even though very small, actual time has elapsed between the two edges,  making the two experiences similar and yet separate.  The question remains to be answered is the cause of the glitch and whether it can be induced.  Regardless of how or when I first read the poem,  the word Michaelmas was full of melancholy even before I looked up its meanings.  It is September and I am trying to be reconciled with the changing of seasons.
       




				

				
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