Wondering

🎶🎶 I suppose it might be  because I spent a lot of time watching Mr. Roger's Neighborhood with my young daughters. Or maybe the excessive time spent prepping my 1990 book Taming the Wild Tube: A Family's Guide to Television and Video - but I have always been a bit more comfortable in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe than in the "real" neighborhood outside my door. 

It's not that I do not enjoy and appreciate the wonders of the world in which I live. I do. I am constantly staggered by the beauty of this world. But I am occasionally chagrined by the necessity to distinguish between a fiction and non-fiction view of the world. 

My recent post on Harmonic Entanglement -

https://schragwall.blogspot.com/2026/08/harmonic-entanglement.html

defines one of my favorite spaces in my personal Neighborhood of Make-Believe so I thought I would share a bit of a ramble through the issues that "harmonic entanglement theorists" would have to confront once that became an established technology and academic discipline. Like all sciences, these theorists would be guided by things they "wondered about." So I'll go that way.

Remember to be “Harmonically Entangled” (HET) means that the string-based chords of two entities are sympathetically linked, a close personal relationship.

I wonder if: Folks who are physically related as evidenced by shared DNA, like siblings cousins, etc., are more prone to be harmonically entangled than entities with no such physical relationship.

The argument of "nature versus nurture" would follow us into the world of Harmonic Entanglement Theory. Does the intense weight of shared DNA enhance the possibility of Harmonic Entanglement [HET]? At the moment I'm inclined to believe that shared DNA increases the possibility of HET. So I'd say probably. If we consider that our DNA permeates the vast majority of our cells, and our "blood kin" share varying degrees of that DNA it is logical that those shared DNA structures would vibrate harmonically in those related entities increasing the possibility of entanglement. Which might shed some light on the "special relationship" that often seems to be the case with twins.

However, it is important to realize that physically related entities often share a close common "growing up" environment - where that "nurturing" element occurs - which can result in competition and conflict which might actually reduce the inclination toward entanglement.

I wonder if: Familiarity breeds harmony? Or, do periods of extended proximity. enhance the possibility of HET? Again I am inclined to think so, assuming that the folks in "extended proximity" are there because they want to be. For example, college roommates who started out strangers, but eventually decide to move off campus to a shared apartment - not a romantic relationship, but "close friends" who have become HET. Similarly, folks who work together for extended periods of time - particularly if they work together to solve mutual tasks. The potential downside of this possibility for HET is competition. If the co-workers are in competition for advancement or rewards then the odds for HET decline.

I wonder if: HET can exist with other "lifeforms." Again, I think so. Our pets are the best examples. I'm a dog person. And dogs are often cited for their ability to provide unconditional love, which could be seen as code for HET. Contrarily, I am not a cat person - and cats are often cited for their "independent nature." Maybe code for not inclined to HET with me. Although, I am sure cat people would strongly object to my assessment. But their inclination to reverse the perception re cats and dogs, would not argue against the possibility of HET with other lifeforms.  I'm sure there are folks out there who would speak up for hamsters and ferrets.

I would, however, point out that HET with non-human life forms is a two way street, which, I assert, should rule out exploring HET relationships with non-domesticated creatures. There are sad, and terminal, examples of those who sincerely believed they were harmoniously entangled with wild carnivores only to belatedly discover that they were - when push came to shove - dinner.

I wonder if: HET can exist with non-sentient entities. This is where things can get rather strange. First, I would define non-sentient entities as entities without biology - which conveniently avoids some of the fascinating communication that occurs between plants, insects, etc. I, tentatively, would further divide non-sentient entities into entities created with communicative intent - aka the arts. And pragmatic entities - entities intended to serve our pragmatic needs - shelter, clothing, etc., Maslow's physiological and safety needs.

First, those entities created with communicative intent. Here is a good place to remind ourselves that Harmonic Entanglement occurs at the string level, when the strings that create and define one entity are harmonic - play a symphony that is in tune with - the strings of another entity. So here we are considering the relationship between us - our dominant chord - and the strings, the dominant chord - of a creative/created artifact - paint, stone, clay, etc. My, delightfully data-free personal inclination, is to assert that such a harmonic relationship - an HET - can exist between a work of art and an individual. And possibly an indirect HET between artist and observer facilitated by the art work.

The "evidence" for me is in my reaction to art forms that literally move me - either internally or physically. Music that calms me, helps me sleep - or gets me up to clean the kitchen or down to the treadmill to do my "steps." For me the paintings from the Hudson River School are the visual equivalent of nocturnes - they calm me. My own art - which makes me chuckle or sigh.. . .  I could go on, but we are in the realm of the purely subjective here and you need to supply your own examples.

Second, those pragmatic entities - "things" created to serve our physiological and safety needs. It will probably not surprise you, but I am going to assert that HET relationships are possible with these entities. Perhaps it is because I look for them, that I think I see them. My daughter's relationship to her lost stuffed bunny, my stuffed panda that holds my head at the perfect angle to read my iPad in bed, a family member's affection for an aging car, rarely driven but cherished, my wife's affection for her extensive collection of cookbooks, my red sweatshirt with its perfect pockets and familiar hood. 

These are all manufactured entities - but that does not mean they are not, in every element of their construction made up of [at the tiniest most fundamental level] strings - those minuscule vibrating elements that manifest a chord that may, somehow, strike a responsive chord with us.

I wonder how: We can become harmonically entangled with those pragmatic, non-sentient entities. I'm saving this for last because it is probably the strangest. I think the best analogy is RFID tags - radio frequency identification tags. I'm going to steal a couple definitions from the FDA website. In RFID -

1. Every tag contains a microchip (integrated circuit) to store data and an antenna to send and receive radio signals.
2. Communication: An RFID Reader emits radio waves, which trigger the tag to transmit its stored information back to the receiver.

Here is my thinking as to how to translate that into my notion of how we become harmonically entangle with pragmatic entities:

All entities - bees, bears, and boards and beer - have within them a "chord" by virtue of the vibrations of the strings that underly every atom of their make up. Those quiescent chords are the "tags."

We are the "readers" that, as we touch, hold, observe, interact with the quiescent pragmatic entities, triggering the tags, awakening the chord of the pragmatic entity and make the HET possible - hence we become entangled with bunny, our MG, a red sweatshirt.

And that, were I an Harmonic Entanglement Theorist when such things were possible, would be my story, and I'd be sticking to it! 

 TTFN.

A Penny for Your Thoughts

A Penny for Your Thoughts

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  I wrote, oh, it seems like a long time now, that I was going to flatter Edward Hopper by imitating his Nighthawks by casting it in a more optimistic tone. I was going to call it Skylarks, as an upbeat version of Hopper's work.

Nighthawks - Edward Hopper, 1942

But after I had messed around a bit with it and sat down to compose the newly created blank spaces my markers colluded with the paper to say "Not so fast, Roberto. We have some other ideas. So, I listened to them and this is the piece that came out.

We call it A Penny for Your Thoughts:

A Penny For Your Thoughts - RL Schrag 2026

 

Three Little Words

The Professor

Depending on which particular site you choose to believe, there are somewhere between 180,000 and a million words in the English language - and it is usually listed as either the language with the most words, or at least up there in the top three.  Yet, if you stream "neo-noir" movies, war flicks or limited series on your screen - you might guess at a much smaller number, with various four-letter words heavily over-represented. But I digress. 

Point is that when you opt to communicate in written or spoken English you have an incredible number of words from which to choose.  And the ones we choose to use say a lot about who we are and what we think, what we value. Parents wait breathlessly for baby's first words - debating whether the kiddo was addressing Mom, Dad or the family pooch. Then they have to endure - 10 or 15 years later - the phase when their teen disappears into a language which is really a code designed to make their communication with their peers indecipherable to their parents. Eventually, hopefully, they get a job, a home of their own - and a new "language of their profession" shared and expected by their occupational peers. And that is where I am headed with this post.

I officially entered my dominant "language tribe" in my early 20s when - having completed my PhD - I took a job as an Assistant Professor up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. And it is the second part of that title that draws my attention to the implications of its etymology - itself an interesting word that means the history, meaning, and evolution of a word. "Professor" - most simply means "one who professes - to declare to have skill or expertise in, to claim to have knowledge in." So, some kind of "truth-teller."  And over the next 50 years, in New Mexico and mostly in North Carolina, I moved through Associate Professor to Full Professor - a title which once prompted me to inquire of my fellow "Fulls”  - what is a Full Professor full of?" 

More seriously, within the academy, and among the students, often the perception is that a Full Professor is full of truth. Debates did arise within the community as to just how this "truth" was best disseminated. A couple of points from that debate:

I have often heard the old self-deprecating cliche employed by some of my fellow professors: "I learn more from my students than they learn from me."  To which my - usually unspoken - reaction was "Then they ought to sue you for malpractice." I mean really, we were teachers, for crying out loud. We were being paid to share with our students the information and knowledge we had acquired in our decades of reading and research.

A more nuanced version of the discussion considered the question of whether it was best to be "a sage on the stage," or "a guide on the side." There were solid points to be made for either perspective - but regardless of where you chose to stand, the bottom line was you were the "professor" either providing your students with, or guiding them to, the truth.  A notion that brings me to the title of the post - "Three Little Words,”  that really should have a completing phrase - "and what makes them so hard for professors to say."

Outside my professional community, people would probably vote for "I love you" being the three words in question. But not really. We say them easily to babies, to puppies, kittens, etc., to celebrities should we meet them. So we have a lot of practice with those three words.  It is when we find ourselves faced with the scenario in which we feel moved to speak them to another person, with whom we would like to spend our lives, that they may become a bit of a stutter. But somehow we muddle through.

For those of us who spend our lives in the academy the stuttering phrase is different - and while difficult - actually should be the foundation of our community. 

The phrase is "I don't know."

It reflects a state that is difficult to admit, because in our continuing role of "profess - er," -  one who professes, a "truth-teller" we are suppose to know. That is our job - knowing, professing. To say "I don't know" seems tantamount to saying "I'm not doing my job." 

Actually the opposite is true. The real job of every "professor" is to discover what - at the end of their lengthy education - they do not know. And then seek to address that deficiency. Bring new depth, more data to that which they profess approaches truth. If we are to function as guides then the task is to guide our students along the path that takes them with us to what we don't know, and then encourage them to help find the next step, the next answer.

Both within, and outside of, the classroom there are linguistic structures that can simultaneously address the uncomfortable reality of "not knowing" and the accompanying desire to acknowledge and value all that one has learned. For example:

"I don't know. But if I were to guess I would guess that . . ." 

Or "I don't know, but we might figure it out by . . ."  

Or "I don't know, but it seems that . . . " 

Or "I don't know. But [some credible source] appears to imply that . . . "

It's a bit of a semantic balancing act, but it might work. What do you think?

I don't know. 🤷‍♂️

Harmonic Entanglement

As Monty Python used to say - Now for something completely different: 

Harmonic Entanglement

The known world can be a little boring, and occasionally depressing. So I often find a pleasing respite in indulging in the playground of the unknown.  Back a few posts ago I mused,"While finally drifting off to sleep to the early morning twitters of the birds in the trees beyond my window, a thought came to me: "panphonism" - the notion that maybe everything really is made of music, and maybe someday we will figure out how to listen to it."

Let's pretend we had done that - that we could listen to the vibrations of the strings. That we could hear the music that those vibrations produced. Which lets me stretch my notion of "chord theory" even further than I did in my 2009 book, The God Chord - String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart. Let's pretend that we can that we can "hear" everything. Not just people, but everything critters, bugs, even entities that we consider "insensate" - dumb, things rocks, boards, silverware, paintings, sculpture, everything, because remember everything is made of strings, so everything produces vibrations, that we can now hear.

OK, that is a touch weird - but here in the playground of the unknown we can play with that assumption. So here is what I have fun thinking about. Those weird connections - not just to people we love, but to paintings we love, sculpture we love, forest paths we love, puppies we love, sweatshirts we love - all those connections we now - in the playground of the unknown - realize are the result of harmonic entanglement.

Now we understand, in the playground of the unknown, that harmonic entanglement is different than the entanglement of quantum mechanics back in the playground of the known - that bizarre phenomenon that Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" where two quantum particles were linked so that no matter how distant from each other in the universe , if you knew the condition of one particle you could instantly infer the condition of the other. Piffle - easy peasy compared to the wonders of harmonic entanglement.

In harmonic entanglement any two entities might share string vibrations that result in strong sympathetic ties between the two entities. Another way to think of this is that the two different entities's billions and billions of strings vibrate at rate that create similar chords, which are in harmony with each other. This, now obvious, relationship sheds light on some previously inexplicable phenomena:

The Some Enchanted Evening Phenomenon. This is the "love at first sight" phenomenon that occurs when two highly harmonic entities come in contact for the first time and instantly become "entangled." We tend to think of this with a humanist bias - two human entities meeting. But the phenomenon can have wider applications Picture yourself shopping for a puppy. You go to a pet store, a breeder's facility, an animal shelter where you find a plethora of puppies all wiggling and whimpering, "pickmepickmepickme!" But you see a little one, sort of at the back, just looking at you. Tail slowly wagging and "Bam! Some Enchanted Evening!" "I'll take that one!" The Some Enchanted Evening Phenomenon can also be triggered by just about any entities that share harmonic chords - people, puppies, pictures, books, whatever.

It can even impact with a place. A number of years ago we hired a young assistant professor from a school out on the West coast. She later asserted that upon arriving in her new east coast home, " I just immediately felt at home, that this is where I was meant to be." Apparently harmonically entangled - as she eventually married, had a family, and swiftly climbed the academic ladder. Seemingly still entangled.

The Getting to Know You Phenomenon. By sticking to Rogers and Hammerstein's works, but jumping from South Pacific to The King and I, we discover this phenomenon. In the end the result is still entangled harmony, but it takes a little longer to recognize the harmonic chords. Thinking about this type of entanglement always takes me back to the TV series Frazier, and an episode about Frazier's father Martin's chair. It is a piece of furniture in significant contrast to Frazier's high end furniture which includes an exact replica of Peggy Guggenheim's Paris sofa and many objets d'art. But when Frazier accidentally throws the chair off the balcony and suggests a high end replacement Martin explains why that chair is the only one he every really wanted. He says:

"Okay, I'll tell you what chair I want. I want the chair I was sitting in when I watched Neil Armstrong take his first step on the Moon. And when the US hockey team beat the Russians in the '80 Olympics. I want the chair I was sitting in the night you called me to tell me I had a grandson. I want the chair I was in all those nights, when your mother used to wake me up with a kiss after I'd fallen asleep in front of the television. Y'know I still fall asleep in it. And every once in a while, when I wake up, I still expect your mother to be there, ready to lead me off to bed..."  

Martin and his chair had become - over the years, and through shared experiences - harmonically entangled. Think about it. You probably have some thing that you have hung onto over the years. A sweatshirt, a poster or picture of some person, place or thing, maybe a stuffed animal, a childhood book - anything that perhaps started out as just a "thing" but one with which you have - over the years - now become harmonically entangled."

This is all very plausible here in the playground of the unknown, but unfortunately seems more than a little strange out there where the real kids run around in their playground, texting their friends, posting pix on Facebook, TikToking away. All activities that seemed more than a little strange before there were smart phones which now, occasionally, provide tantalizing glimpses of a future in the playground of the unknown.

 

The Elephant in The Room

Having taught courses focused on the media and society for 4 decades I suppose I should share my thoughts on the giant elephant in the room. Well, Dumbo's ears weren't all that big . .  . OK, so not Dumbo. AI. Artificial Intelligence.

Seems like you cannot access any information source these days without encountering some prediction regarding the impact of AI on our lives. Like that lady over there. I tried to hide a bit in fiction and so picked up Dan Brown's 2017 offering Origin. Bad choice. Interesting novel, but all about how humanity will eventually evolve into some sort of human/AI hybrid. Yech.

First point. AI isn't one thing.  AI is simply a new way of utilizing and distributing information. The latest step in a evolution that probably began with hand gestures - "dangerous beast over there." Then speech, writing, printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, and digital media - of which AI is the latest multi-faceted iteration. And it is that "multi-faceted" aspect of AI that makes it an error to attempt to discuss AI as "a thing." It is many things with varying impacts in each environment.

Point two. I make no claim for deep insight into the hard sciences. But from what I have read, this seems to be where AI makes its greatest potential impact by simply reducing the time it takes to perform the multiple iterations necessary to legitimize results in a variety of fields - medicine, physics, chemistry, etc. However, one must keep in mind that human beings must first pose the initial intellectual seeds, the questions, that trigger these various AI endeavors.

Point three. AI doesn't always get it right. Some would assert that AI gets it wrong a significant amount of the time, sometimes with harmful, even fatal results. It strikes me that the error of considering AI to be one thing, might fuel some of these concerns. But we need to keep in mind that all versions of AI spring - initially - from human programmers creating computer code. Fingers on keyboards typing very fast. Then code talking to code. There is a very real possibility of the oops factor creeping in.

Point four. And I'll admit to a personal bias here - there are some fields of human endeavor where AI has, if no place at all, then only a very small one. I addressed this assertion more fully in this previous post: https://schragwall.blogspot.com/2026/04/artificial-intelligence.html 

But I wanted to do a little reprise here. My concern is with distancing the artistic product from the hand of the artist. I freely admit that my own 2D artistic output is compromised by my inability to draw. Took a couple of drawing lessons when I was 10 or 11, but never kept it up. [See previous post: https://schragwall.blogspot.com/2026/07/practice-practice-practice.html ] So I do compromise a bit by sometimes stealing an established piece of art and repurposing parts of it as a canvas for my "doodles." [I'm currently working a piece I cribbed from Hopper's Nighthawks. Coming your way once I figure out just how I turn it into my concept: Skylarks.]

Anyhow, I feel that many of the proposed uses of AI in the arts - music, painting, 3D sculpture, dance, theater - just feel like a bridge too far. To fire up ChatGPT and ask it to create "a forest glade beside a river in the style of the Hudson River School" and have it actually do a pretty good job, reeks to me of the hand of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, or perhaps more accurately, a painting devoid of any creative hand. And the same goes for other "artistic" products created by/with AI.

I do realize that my bias seems a bit antediluvian, but fortunately, AI's grandparent, Google, allowed me to find a rather posh, although a touch dated, bit of support:

"Importantly, our report highlights that the creativity involved in artmaking remains beyond the capabilities of current ML [Machine Learning - rls] technology."

Ploin, A., Eynon, R., Hjorth I. & Osborne, M.A. (2022). AI and the Arts: How Machine Learning is Changing Artistic Work. Report from the Creative Algorithmic Intelligence Research Project. Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK.

Yeah. Me too. Still.