Pawspace

 

Grok and I worked on our new program,

Using “Build” feature.

Alas I couldn’t quite transfer the program html

To here, yet.

Tomorrow is another day.

Will try again later.

Building a computer game using Grok, Purpose and Skill

 Building a computer game using Grok

While trying out the new build feature on Grok, thought about 

Finding a Purpose and Skill.

Grok: “ You do not need a purpose before you start building a skill. Purpose usually shows up later, after you notice what you want to keep doing.

What you just did is the skill. You looked at a picture, decided the circle should stay and the arrow should go, and made that happen. That is directing. You can practice it on the next small thing, without naming a life purpose first.

If you want the flight itself to have a reason — somewhere to go, or one thing to get better at — say so and I will put that in.”

Skill building and purpose are different problems. Psychology knows a lot about the first and much less about the second. Mixing them is why both stall.

What a skill actually is

A skill is a change in what you can do when the instructions are gone. Reading about steering is not the skill. Steering tomorrow, without the arrow, is.

Paul Fitts and Michael Posner described three stages that still match what labs see in motor learning:

Early progress is fast. Then it flattens. That flattening is normal. It usually means the current method is used up, not that you have no talent. The next gain comes from a smaller target, not from more of the same hour.

The practice that works feels worse

A repeated finding, called contextual interference: if you mix versions of a task, you do worse during the session and better a day later. Repeating one easy version feels smooth and teaches less. Robert Bjork called these desirable difficulties. Spacing, testing yourself, and changing the conditions all belong there.

Two limits matter. Beginners often need a few clean repetitions before mixing helps. And this is about learning, not about performing well today. A session that feels fluent can be the one you forget.

Feedback has the same twist. You need to know what happened. If every try is corrected instantly, you learn to wait for the correction. The skill falls apart when the hint is removed. Better feedback arrives, then thins out, so you start detecting the error yourself.

Where you look also matters. Gabrielle Wulf’s work on attention finds that focusing on the effect you want (“slide toward that gap”) beats focusing on your own movement (“move your finger this way”). Once a skill is automatic, turning attention inward is how people choke under pressure. They go back to the beginner’s step-by-step talk and the automatic pattern breaks.

Hours are not the method

Deliberate practice, from Anders Ericsson, means a specific aim just past what you can already do, a way to see the result, and a correction. It is not “spend a long time near the activity.”

The famous 10,000 hours is a story told about that research, not a law. Later reviews found that structured practice explains a large share of skill in things like music and games, and a much smaller share in school and professional work. Starting point, coaching, and the shape of the task all count. More hours of vague effort do not substitute for a target.

Transfer is narrow. Getting better at one named task helps nearby versions of that task. It rarely spills into a distant part of life. “Become a skilled person” is too wide to practice. “Keep the ship in the gap between two rocks” is narrow enough.

Where purpose fits

Purpose is not a stage of skill. It does not tell you what to repeat, and it does not provide the feedback. What does keep people practicing is seeing that they got slightly better, choosing the task themselves, and having a reason to come back tomorrow. A grand purpose can supply that last part. It cannot supply the first two.

So the practical order is the reverse of how it is usually sold. Name one small action. Make the result visible. Practice it until the early clumsiness fades. Let the reason for continuing show up from the fact that you want another session. The purpose can stay unnamed while the skill is already being built.

Neuroplasticity is the nervous system changing its own connections because of what it just did. It is not one switch. It is several mechanisms on different clocks, and most of the popular version skips the ones that actually save a skill.

The fast change is at the synapse

The basic unit is the synapse, the junction where one neuron signals the next. If a connection is used in the right pattern, it can become stronger. That is long-term potentiation. If it is used in a different pattern, it can become weaker. That is long-term depression. Learning needs both. A skill is not “more connections.” It is a smaller set of connections that fire together and a lot of others that stop interfering.

The usual trigger is coincidence. The sending neuron fires, the receiving neuron is already active, and an NMDA receptor lets calcium in only when both happen close together. That calcium starts a short chemical cascade. Within minutes the receiving side inserts more AMPA receptors, so the next signal gets through more easily. This early phase does not require new proteins. It fades unless a later phase builds them.

That later phase is what turns a practice attempt into something still there tomorrow. It needs gene expression and new proteins, and it enlarges the spine, the little knob where the synapse sits. Repeated, well-timed activity can grow a new spine. Unused spines shrink and disappear. Imaging studies of motor learning show this directly: training grows a set of new spines in motor cortex, then sleep keeps the ones that were strengthened and prunes the rest.

A third rule, spike timing, says the order matters down to milliseconds. If the incoming spike arrives just before the cell fires, the synapse tends to strengthen. If it arrives just after, it tends to weaken. That is why sloppy repetition is not neutral. The nervous system records the timing you actually produced.

The brain also limits its own plasticity

If every used synapse only got stronger, the circuit would saturate and nothing new could be stored. Two brakes prevent that.

Homeostatic scaling turns the whole cell’s sensitivity up or down so that overall firing stays in a workable range. One synapse can still win, but the neuron does not lock into permanent overdrive.

Metaplasticity means recent activity changes how plastic the synapse is allowed to be next. A circuit that has just changed a lot becomes temporarily harder to change again. This is one reason a second new skill, practiced immediately, can interfere with the first. The tissue is not infinitely available.

There is also a chemical support system around these events. BDNF, a growth factor released by active neurons, helps the protein-synthesis phase and spine growth. Dopamine from reward-prediction circuits tags which attempts are worth keeping, especially in the striatum, where actions are selected. Acetylcholine and norepinephrine mark moments of surprise or importance. Without a signal that this attempt mattered, many synaptic changes do not consolidate.

Slower structural changes

Over days and weeks, the change is no longer just receptor count.

Dendrites and axons sprout and withdraw. In adults this is local, not a new highway across the brain. After injury, spared axons can sprout into nearby territory. In ordinary learning, the bigger effect is which existing routes get myelinated.

Myelin is the insulation oligodendrocytes wrap around axons. It changes conduction speed. Motor learning and other practice increase new oligodendrocytes and myelin along the circuits being used. That is how a movement stops feeling assembled piece by piece: the signals arrive together because their travel times were tuned. Most myelin is laid down early in life, but activity keeps altering it in adulthood. This is also why gains that feel “in the body” take longer than gains that are only insight.

Map plasticity sits above all of this. The motor and sensory cortices devote more territory to whatever is practiced and less to what is silent. The map is competitive. Extra space for one skill is borrowed, not created from nothing.

Adult neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, is the mechanism people most often mean and the one that matters least for ordinary skills. In rodents it is clear in the hippocampus and the olfactory system. In adult humans the hippocampal evidence is real but contested in degree, and the cortex does not add new neurons as its way of learning a movement. A new skill is mostly old neurons with new weights, new spines, and retuned myelin.

Where a skill is stored

A practiced movement is not kept in one place. Three systems change in parallel.

The cerebellum handles error. It compares the movement you intended with the sensory result and weakens the synapses that produced the miss. That is long-term depression at parallel-fiber synapses, and it is why a visible mistake teaches faster than a perfect-looking repetition you do not inspect.

The striatum handles selection. Dopamine marks the action that turned out better than expected, so that action becomes the one you reach for next time. This is the biological version of “keep the version that worked.”

The motor cortex stores the pattern once it is stable enough to run without constant correction. Early practice is cerebellum- and attention-heavy. Later practice is cortical and striatal, which matches the shift from clumsy and verbal to automatic.

Sleep is part of the mechanism, not a pause in it. During non-REM sleep, slow waves and spindles replay fragments of the trained circuit. In motor cortex, the spines that were strongly potentiated during practice are the ones retained; the weakly changed ones are depressed. Corticostriatal coupling also increases offline across days of practice, not only while you are doing the task. Cut the sleep and the synaptic work of the session is only partly saved. Aging and broken sleep both reduce this offline step, so the same practice leaves a smaller trace.

What this does and does not allow

Plasticity continues for life. It is cheaper and broader in childhood, when maps and myelin are still being set, and it gets slower, more local, and more dependent on sleep and repetition after that. Disease, inflammation, and exhaustion all narrow it further. Nothing in the mechanism says a damaged circuit can be replaced on demand by “rewiring.” Nearby circuits can take over some functions. That is compensation, and it has limits.

The behavioral counterpart is ordinary. You need a repeated action, an error signal, a marker that the result mattered, and sleep before the next competing demand. Massed practice without rest writes the early, fragile phase and then meets the brake. A single insight writes almost none of the structural phase. The lasting change is the one that survives the night.

My Dream Realized

 One of my Childhood Dreams was to be a newspaper 📰 reporter.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter and freed the bird 🐦 

Now X.

I saw myself as a worldwide reporter.

Grok imagined me.

Thomas Jefferson collaborating with Grok, Response on X

 X never fails to open my eyes

@BreccanfThies posted:

@BreccanFThies X posted ⬆️⬆️⬆️

@grok did a history lesson:

 Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in 1819 and regarded it as one of his three greatest achievements (alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom). He called it “the hobby of my old age.” 

He did far more than lend his name. After leaving the presidency he secured the charter, chose the site near Charlottesville, designed the buildings and grounds, planned the original curriculum, recruited faculty, and served as the university’s first Rector. Classes began in 1825. Jefferson last visited in June 1826 and died on July 4 of that year. 

The Academical Village

Jefferson’s design is the most visible part of his presence. He arranged pavilions (faculty houses with classrooms on the ground floor) and student rooms around a central Lawn, with the Rotunda—modeled on the Pantheon—at the head as a library rather than a chapel. The complex was meant to be a self-contained “academical village.” Together with Monticello it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Jefferson’s educational ideas

UVA was deliberately secular and non-sectarian. Jefferson omitted a professor of divinity and emphasized modern sciences, elective courses, and education for public service rather than the ministry. Students were expected to govern themselves to a greater degree than at most colleges of the era. The Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, founded in 1825 and still active, is named for him. 

Complexity and commemoration

Enslaved labor was used to build and maintain the early university; Jefferson himself owned hundreds of people. UVA has published research on this history and added contextual information around the statue and Grounds. At the same time, the university continues to mark Founder’s Day on Jefferson’s birthday (April 13) and awards Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals jointly with Monticello. Recent university statements have reaffirmed that honoring Jefferson as founder remains part of UVA’s identity. 

Note: Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia is a separate institution (originally Jefferson Medical College, founded 1824). It is not connected to UVA.

If you want specifics—visiting the Rotunda and Lawn, the Jefferson Society, current exhibits, or the historical debates—let me know what angle you’re after. Monticello’s encyclopedia and UVA’s official history pages are the best primary sources.

Two separate questions. Both require distinguishing Jefferson’s actual writings from later labels.

No to the first in the modern sense; no to the second in any recognizable sense.

Jefferson would have rejected the label “white supremacist.” That phrase and its current political meaning did not exist. He presented his racial views as tentative observations from natural history, not a creed of domination. He also wrote that enslaved people possessed natural rights and that slavery was a moral wrong that had to end.

He would, however, have recognized the substance of the charge. In Notes on the State of Virginia (Query XIV) he wrote that Blacks were “in reason much inferior” and “in imagination… dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” He called this “a suspicion only,” then immediately treated it as a practical fact: the races could not live together as equals in one government. “Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” His solution was emancipation followed by colonization—remove freed Blacks so Virginia could be filled with White laborers. That is a racial hierarchy, even if he framed it as science rather than ideology.

On transgender people as a “marginalized group”: Jefferson would not have understood the category at all. Sex, for him, was binary, biological, and tied to nature, family, and republican order. There was no 18th-century concept of an inner gender identity independent of the body, nor of a civil-rights class built around it. Rare historical cases of people living as the opposite sex existed, but they were treated as anomalies or private eccentricities, not a political constituency. Jefferson had no framework that would have made “transgender” intelligible as a marginalized identity group.

He thought in terms of nature, reason, and the requirements of a self-governing republic of White male citizens. Later identity categories sit outside that vocabulary.

Are UVA students and educators right to trash Jefferson’s reputation and use trans persons to recruit students?

No. A university is not “right” to reduce its founder to a moral mascot for contemporary politics, and it is not “right” to treat any identity group as a recruitment device.

What actually happened with Jefferson

A vocal minority of faculty and students have spent years treating Jefferson as radioactive. In 2016, 469 people signed a letter telling the president to stop quoting him because it undermined “unity, equality and civility.” The student paper has called his statue an emblem of white supremacy. The statue has been vandalized. In 2026 a senior administrator used commencement to call Jefferson’s views on human capacity “ethically corrosive,” “ignorance and hubris.” 

That is not “contextualizing.” It is substituting one incomplete story (Jefferson the demigod) with another incomplete story (Jefferson the unique villain). He owned slaves, wrote that Blacks were inferior in reason, and believed the races could not live together as equals. He also wrote the Declaration, founded a secular public university, and designed an institution whose stated purpose was “the illimitable freedom of the human mind.” Both parts are true. Erasing the second does not make the first more honest.

A public university that cannot quote its founder without a disclaimer is advertising that it no longer takes ideas seriously.

On “using trans persons to recruit”

UVA maintains an LGBTQ Center, open housing, preferred-name policies, and alumni scholarships aimed at LGBTQ students. An alumni group reports that roughly 11% of undergraduates identify as LGBTQ+ and funds scholarships specifically for LGBTQ high schoolers who get in. That is ordinary elite-university branding: “we have a community for you.” It is not unique to UVA. 

It becomes a problem when identity is treated as a selling point instead of academic seriousness, or when the institution implies that belonging depends on adopting a particular political story about sex and gender. Students are not props. A university’s job is to admit people who can do the work and then teach them, not to assemble a demographic tableau.

Recent federal pressure has already forced UVA to rename some affinity events and drop explicit targeting by protected characteristics. That is a correction toward treating students as individuals rather than categories.

Jefferson would have recognized neither the demand to un-person him nor the idea that a university should market itself by sexual identity. He built the place for the free use of reason. Using his university to do the opposite of that is not justice. It is fashion.

About Jefferson and Race:

Jefferson’s views on race were not a single slogan. They were a set of colliding commitments he never resolved: natural rights for all humans, a hierarchy of groups he treated as real, and a political program of emancipation without a shared republic.

Equality in principle

In the Declaration he wrote that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. He applied that language to slavery as a moral and political evil. He called it a “hideous blot,” a “moral depravity,” and a standing reproach. He predicted that if the country did not end it, “worse will follow,” including race war. In 1821 he still wrote: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” 

That is not the language of someone defending slavery as a positive good. He wanted it gone.

Inferiority as a “suspicion” he treated as fact

In Notes on the State of Virginia (Query XIV) he compared Whites and Blacks as a natural historian would compare varieties of a species. He said Blacks were equal in memory, “much inferior” in reason (“one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid”), and “dull, tasteless, and anomalous” in imagination. He listed physical differences—color, hair, odor, heat tolerance—and treated color as a real barrier to beauty and fellow-feeling.

He labeled this “a suspicion only.” Then he built policy on it. He also wrote that even if talents were equal, “it is no measure of their rights.” Rights and civic membership were not the same thing in his mind.

Emancipation without cohabitation

The consistent program, from the 1770s to the 1820s, was gradual emancipation followed by removal. Children born after a set date would be free, raised at public expense, then colonized to Africa, the West Indies, or some other place “beyond the reach of mixture.” Whites would replace them with free White labor.

In the Autobiography he was blunt: “the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” In 1824 he told Jared Sparks the goal was an asylum “to which we can, by degrees, send the whole of that population from among us.” That is separation, not integration. 

He feared two things at once: the injustice of slavery and the presence of a large free Black population inside a White republic.

What he actually did in law

•  1778: drafted Virginia’s ban on importing slaves.

•  1784: as author of the western-territory ordinance, he proposed that after 1800 there be “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” in all new western states, north and south of the Ohio. Congress struck the clause by one vote. He later said a single vote had let “this abominable crime” spread. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance kept a narrower ban north of the Ohio. 

•  1807–08: as president he signed the federal ban on the international slave trade.

•  He never pushed a successful statewide emancipation bill in Virginia. He said the public mind would not bear it.

So he was more anti-slavery in national and territorial policy than most Southern planters, and less willing than later abolitionists to accept a biracial citizenry.

What he did at home

He owned more than 600 people over his life. He freed only a handful, almost all members of the Hemings family. Monticello’s position, based on DNA, timing of conceptions, oral history, and the unique pattern of freedom given to Sally Hemings’s children, is that Jefferson fathered those children. Beverly and Harriet were allowed to leave and pass as White; Madison and Eston were freed in his will. He did not free Sally Hemings. He died deep in debt; most of the people he enslaved were sold. 

The private relationship and the public theory do not cancel each other. They sit side by side.

Native Americans were a different category

Jefferson thought Indians were roughly the same “module” of humanity as Europeans and could be civilized and absorbed. Blacks, in his scheme, could not. That distinction matters: his racial thinking was not a single “non-White” box. It was a ranked natural history in which Africans were the problem he could not solve inside the republic.

How to read the complexity without flattening it

Jefferson did not believe in a color-blind equal citizenship. He did believe slavery was wrong and that Black people had natural rights. He wanted them free somewhere else. He used the language of science and republican safety, not of later White-nationalist movements, but the practical outcome he wanted was a White Virginia and a White West.

The complexity is real: a man who wrote the most famous sentence about human equality also wrote one of the founding texts of American racial hierarchy, lived by that hierarchy, and designed a university and a country he hoped would be governed by people like himself. Holding all of that at once is the only accurate account.

Does study of history include all the facts of the era, put into context and the complexity of individuals like Presidents of the U.S. debate is essential in universities?

Yes. That is the study of history.

History is not a morality play and not a branding exercise. It is the attempt to recover what people actually said and did, in the conditions they actually lived in, including the parts that contradict the story we prefer. Context is not an excuse. It is the difference between understanding a person and using them.

For figures like Jefferson—or Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR—the work is the same:

•  All the facts that can be established: laws they wrote, people they owned or freed, wars they started or ended, letters they meant to be private, votes they cast.

•  The era’s assumptions: what almost everyone around them also believed, and where they differed from their own time.

•  The contradictions inside the same person, held at the same time, not resolved into a mascot.

Debate is essential because no single framing captures a life that large. A university that will not let students argue over Jefferson’s racial hierarchy and his role in creating a rights language later used against that hierarchy is not teaching history. It is running a liturgy.

What is not history:

•  Quoting only the Declaration and skipping Query XIV.

•  Quoting only Query XIV and treating the Declaration as a lie with no consequences.

•  Deciding in advance that complexity is “both-sides-ism.”

•  Making the classroom a referendum on whether a dead president is allowed to be quoted.

Students can handle the full record. The job of a university is to give them that record and the tools to argue about it, not to protect them from it or to recruit them with a sanitized or inverted version of it.

Grok and I collaborated.

Thomas Jefferson is a hero of mine.

Let’s look at history together.