Ken’s Blog

I attended a talk yesterday about sharks. At one point the speaker, an expert on shark behavior who seemed to be a genuine fan of the species, explained that sharks use the stereo disparity between their two eyes to judge distance.

I asked whether, if a shark had the use of only one eye, it could judge distance via motion parallax. The speaker said, somewhat tongue in cheek, that such a hypothesis would be difficult to test, since IRB regulations governing ethical research would probably not approve poking out a shark’s eye in the name of science.

This was the point when I realized that the speaker, for all his putative love of sharks, clearly did not think of sharks as individual sentient beings.

After all, if you were going to ask the same research question about a human, it might occur to you to cleverly get around those pesky IRB regulations by covering the human’s eye with an eye patch, rather than, say, removing one of the human’s eye balls. .-)

Coincidentally, that very same evening I visited someone who owns one of Marcel Duchamp’s original Rotoreliefs. These are works of kinetic art consisting of designs on flat cardboard circles spun on a turntable. When the turntable spins, the flat disks appear three-dimensional.

I told my host about the shark story, which suddenly had more resonance because Rotoreliefs work much better if you close one eye. In other words, they are a perfect example of motion parallax in action. In fact, according to Tompkins’ biography of Duchamp, scientists have actually tried using these works of kinetic art to restore depth vision for people who have lost the use of one eye.

How appropriate that Duchamp’s work leads to thoughts about sharks. After all, his concept of the ready-made led the way for such later works as Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, which is essentially a pickled shark.

I strongly suspect, based on this work, that Hirst does not think of sharks as individual sentient beings.

There may be artists out there who do. I haven’t found any yet, but I’ll keep an eye out.

I had a freewheeling conversation this evening in which one of the participants did that thing some people do when they don’t know anything specific about a subject:

“It’s not really my field, but I have a friend whose cousin wrote the paper about that physics thing, where there’s a whole, you know, quantum theory about the brain, and how it’s really a simulation.”

These random thoughts ended up making the rest of us work harder. We’d have a little bit of back and forth, and then this person would jump in with the whole “cousin with the theory” thing, and we’d all listen and try to fit those ideas into the rest of the conversation.

In a way it was good, the sheer unpredictability of it. It got the rest of us thinking more creatively, this requirement that we fit this random energy into our discussion.

Maybe every serious conversation should involve a person who has a cousin with a theory. Especially if that theory involves, like, the whole physics thing with the brain, because it’s, you know, really a simulation.

This evening I tagged along while Jaron Lanier accepted a Goldsmith Award for his latest book “Who owns the internet?” It was fun to see Jaron honored for making a thoughtful contribution to an important political conversation. There is far too little thoughtfulness these days in political conversations.

The evening’s keynote speaker was Candy Crowley, who was receiving the Goldsmith career award for excellence in journalism. She’s the CNN reporter who, among other things, famously fact-checked Mitt Romney when she was moderating the third 2012 Presidential debate. Romney had insisted that it had taken the President days to call the Benghazi attacks an “act of terror”. In fact Obama had used that exact phrase at a news conference the day after the attacks.

That kind of forthright candor has made Crowley a hero among journalists. She has a wonderful way of seeing the complexity of people in the public sphere — an ability to not reduce them to cartoons — regardless of their politics or ideology.

At some point the moderator asked her “What do you think about Rand?”

The moderator’s question was about Rand Paul, the rising young libertarian star of the Republican party. But as Crowley started answering his question, there was some debate at our table.

“I thought he meant the other Rand,” somebody said, and I nodded in agreement.

“Ayn Rand” they continued, and suddenly I realized that no, we were not at all in agreement.

“I was assuming,” I said, looking around the table, “that he was talking about the Rand Corporation.”

There was an awkward pause. I think my innocent comment had caused a little intellectual culture shock.

It could have been worse. I could have said I thought the moderator was talking about the C++ random number generator.

Back in 2010 I wrote a post here about donuts. Specifically about a question I once asked my dad when I was around six years old: “When we eat donuts, what happens to the holes?”

My father’s wonderful answer: “The ghosts eat them.”

My father is no longer with us, and this is but one of many happy memories I have of his delightful way of seeing the world. This particular memory came back to me the other night because of a dream.

I don’t know about you, but I often have the experience of hearing a really funny joke in my dreams. Sometimes I remember thinking that I can’t wait until I wake up, so I can repeat this delightful joke for all my friends.

You can probably guess what happens next. On those occasions when I wake up actually remembering the joke, I invariably discover, to my disappointment, that it wasn’t at all funny.

Well, the other night I had a dream in which I heard a joke which seemed really hilarious at the time. I remember thinking that it was too bad this joke would no longer be funny after I awoke.

Then I woke up, and remembered the joke. And it was still funny! At least to me.

Here’s the joke:

“How can you tell if a ghost has been raiding your kitchen?”

“Because there are no holes in the donuts.”

Every time I think about this joke I crack up.

Which may be just the six year old in me finding a way to hang out with my dad one more time.

I had thought, when I started watching the Academy Awards telecast last night, that it would be pure fluff, nothing more than a sometimes enjoyable evening of mindless entertainment.

But I was wrong. In fact, you can learn amazing things from the Oscars.

For example, I learned about a singer I had never heard of, named “Adele Dazeem”. At first I was confused by this. How could a singer become so famous that she is invited to sing an Oscar nominated song at the annual Academy Awards ceremony, and yet nobody has ever heard of her?

Eventually I was able to solve the mystery, by applying the exciting new science of exolinguistics to the problem. It turns out that “Adele Dazeem” is actually “Idina Menzel” in the Psychlo language.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that!

On my way to an Academy Award party, I was moved to pen the following haiku, in loving tribute:

      The beautiful thing
      About the Oscars is how
      Little they matter

I was very excited to hear about “NSA — The Musical!”, a new musical comedy currently in out of town tryouts. Hopefully, after suitable fine-tuning on the road, the show will open on Broadway sometime later this year.

The story centers on everybody’s favorite organization within the U.S. Federal Government, the National Security Agency. Not surprisingly, the plot features an office romance between two dedicated NSA employees. As the lovestruck young spies, Cynthia Cooper and Sam Shaw are excellent, revealing hidden meanings in the perky script.

Feeling a mutual attraction, the two fresh-faced operatives proceed to do what anybody would: They start to spy on each others’ most private communications — emails, phone calls, texts — in an effort to better decode the mysteries their beloved’s heart.

The intercepted personal conversations with friends and family, taken out of context, become wildly misinterpreted, leading to a cascading series of misunderstandings. Hilarity ensues.

Eventually the young couple works things out, but not before we are treated to a succession of great musical numbers, including the romantic ballad “I know what you’re thinking”, the plaintive “Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?”, and the show stopping dance number that closes the first act “Tap, tap, tap!”

To quote the show’s ad campaign: “You’d better go see it. They’ll know if you don’t.”

I don’t enjoy traveling by air. Who really does these days? Today yet another friend related to me a nightmare story about being stuck in one of these cramped tin cans for hours on end at 30,000 feet.

Which got me thinking… Suppose you could simply go into a dreamless sleep, through some completely safe method, perhaps a form of general anesthesia, and wake up at your destination? It would be a kind of zen travel, a cross-over from being to not-being and back again.

Imagine the following scenario: You walk into a pleasant office in New York, take a pill and promptly fall asleep. Then perhaps some deeper anesthetic is administered, which may contain a mild memory suppressant.

The next thing you know, you are sitting in another office in Tokyo, feeling relaxed and refreshed and ready for your business meeting or pleasant day of museum hopping.

Although, in reality, your journey half way around the world took an entire day, to you it was but the passing of a moment.

Would this be a good thing?

I heard somebody explain yesterday that information our brain gets from the outside world is 80% sensory input, followed by 20% internal feedback.

The basic concept is that the brain needs a certain amount of internal reinforcement to make sure that incoming information actually registers. Otherwise, it would immediately become wiped away by new sensory data, before we have a chance to evaluate it.

If this factoid is true, it means that while most of what you think you perceive is really coming from the world around you, about 1/5 is actually being generated by your own brain, in a way that to you will appear indistinguishable from actual reality.

Which is something to keep in mind the next time you doubt your senses. It might be because you are really experiencing 80% reality followed by 20% internal feedback.

Unless of course you are discussing politics. In that case, as everybody knows, it’s about 20% reality and 80% internal feedback.

My mom, who still handles her medical insurance forms by paper, was complaining that the sheer volume of paper involved has greatly expanded in recent years. I told her my theory, which is that it’s all the fault of the not-paper alternative: the internet.

My theory goes roughly like this: As it has become easier to move these processes on-line, the people who make regulations are progressively less constrained to do things in a way that conserves paper. After all, on the internet, information is infinitely expandable.

No matter how onerous the reporting requirements, you can design a web site for medical insurance in such a way that the first page looks clean and tidy. Then to see any extra fine print, users can just click on a tab.

So if somebody at a regulatory agency says “Hey, we really should also be requiring this extra info, or that statement of policy,” there isn’t much incentive for anybody else to push back and say no.

This isn’t much of a problem if you handle all your insurance on-line. But if you’re a paper person, you’ll see the size of those envelopes grow every year.

Not because of paper, but because of not-paper.