Hello from Sapporo
I’m a computer scientist and I work with AI. My way of working has changed significantly in the past few years. My writing and thinking here is partially an escape mechanism. I live in Sapporo, up on the northern island of Japan, where winter arrives early and stays long, and the snow piles high enough that the city seems to shrink.
This is the first post, so let me say what this place is for.
I’ve wanted to write for a while, mostly because I keep noticing that the things I care about turn out to be the same thing turn out to be the same thing seen from different angles. I plan to write about four of them here: life, language, math, and the music I make. They sound like separate subjects. To me they’ve never quite behaved that way.
Life, for now, means the particular strangeness of building a life somewhere that isn’t where you started. Ordinary errands become small puzzles. Snow reshapes the calendar. I want to write about that texture, the way a place slowly stops being foreign and starts being home without a sudden announcement.
Language, which for me means Japanese and will be a constant exercise. Learning a language as an adult is a strange kind of engineering. You assemble meaning out of parts you don’t fully understand, deliver it and watch a real person’s face to see if it was successful.
Math means the playful kind. Patterns, puzzles, the pleasure of a structure that turns out to be simpler or stranger than it first appeared. I came up reading the sort of recreational mathematics that treats a good problem as a toy rather than a test, and I never grew out of it. Expect some of that here, kept friendly enough to enjoy without a blackboard.
Music is the fourth thread, and the one that ties the rest together in a way I still can’t fully explain. I make dark drone: long, slow, low pieces built from sustained tones that shift so gradually you barely notice them move. It’s the least verbal thing I do and probably the most honest. A drone is almost mathematical, a handful of frequencies beating against each other. I’ll write about the making of it and the tools I build to make it.
If there’s a thread running through all of it, it’s this. Language is a formal system whose whole purpose is to reach someone. Math is a language we invented to be exact. Music is what happens when you stop trying to be exact and let a structure ring. And life is where all of them get tested against something that refuses to sit still. I find I can’t think about one for very long without wandering into the others, so I’ve stopped trying to keep them apart.
I don’t have a grand plan for how often I’ll post or how long each one will run. Some will be short observations. Some will go deeper. All written from a desk in northern Japan by someone who finds the world more interesting than he can quite keep up with.
Thanks for reading the first one. There’s more coming.