Author: admin

What if the Star Trek replicator and transporter existed in real life? I don’t mean in the 23rd Century, but right now.

It seems to me that these technologies would be used very differently from the way they are used on the show. For one thing, many people would undoubtedly create infinite wealth for themselves.

This would immediately erase a large part of our current economic model, and replace it with something extremely different. The good news is that hunger would wiped out in one fell swoop.

Far more intriguing and troubling is the likelihood that many people would also opt to make clones of themselves. The very possibility of such a thing raises all sorts of deep and troubling ethical issues.

For example, if there are 10 of me, what rights to each of us have? Which of us, if any, is actually “me” — in any legal, moral or ethical sense?

It is interesting that these thorny ethical and existential questions do not dominate the Star Trek universe, even though these things are all quite attainable in that universe. Maybe the people on Star Trek are just better than we are.

We tend not to spend any time, on most days, thinking about questions of life and death.

And yet, those are the most important questions.

Maybe that is why we don’t spend more time thinking about them.

I’ve been trying to create a user interface that is very easy to use. And as I work on it, I keep running into the same problem.

The easiest way to make something easy to use is to limit the user’s choices. If you only give people simple options, then everything is clear and easy to learn, and in fact pretty much self-evident.

But once you start empowering the user, it’s nearly impossible to keep things simple. Which is a shame.

For example, it’s easy to give people one representative object (say, a chair or a dog). But it’s hard to give them an easy way to have fine control over exactly what chair or dog they will get.

Which isn’t to say that easy/simple is better or more complex/powerful is better. They are both good.

I think the solution is to know your customer. You need to understand what they really want to do, and why they want to do it.

Sometimes people need a fighter jet, and sometimes they just need a bicycle. And if what you really need is a bicycle, you’re not going to be happy with even the best fighter jet in the world.

When ground is lost, and hope is tossed,
And fate inscribed in pen
As seas may roil, our blood, full boil,
Bemoans the fate of men
We dine on fear, for now we hear
That faint satanic laugh
When light grows dim, we offer him
The sacrificial calf
But for God’s sake, know when to make
That leap up to the moon
Do not despair, I’ll see you there
When all the world’s in tune

May was such a long and difficult month for me that today seems like a miracle. At long last June!

From an objective standpoint, time is completely linear. Every day has exactly 24 hours, and the arrow of time proceeds at a perfectly steady pace.

Yet there are times, depending on what is happening in your life, when everything seems to slow down to a crawl. And for some terribly unfair reason, those times generally turn out to be the worst times.

Well, here we are at a fresh brand new month, an opportunity for things to start looking up and being wonderful. But just my luck, if that happens, the whole month will probably go by way too fast.

To make a life and death decision
You need to work with some precision
Not a thing for every day
By which I really mean to say
The kind of energy required
Can make you very very tired
My advice (with some elisions):
Don’t make life and death decisions

I like to write my own research software from the ground up. From a practical perspective, this can seem a little silly.

After all, there are very affordable software packages that embody thousands of person-years of work. A good game engine like Unity or UnReal can save you lots of time.

But if I want to explore interactive ray tracing, for example, I will lean toward implementing my own GPU ray tracer from scratch. Which means I need to do a lot more work.

Yet from a research perspective, this DIY approach has lots of advantages. You can only learn so much about cars by driving even the best car in the world.

But if you drive a car that you built yourself, you will learn a heck of a lot about cars. Even if your car doesn’t go quite as fast, and even if the ride is sometimes bumpy.

Continuing the thought from yesterday, suppose you could, even for a few minutes, inhabit the mind of another person? What would that be like?

Our intuition, and most popular science fiction, tells us that it would be like cutting to another camera in a movie. We would just suddenly be within that person’s body, rather than our own.

But what if the truth is stranger? Each of us has developed countless neural pathways throughout our lives for interpreting reality, mainly in our early formative years. Those pathways, and the way they support cognition, are bound to be very gnarly and particular.

Being inside the mind of another person might very well be like being deposited in an alien landscape. Nothing is familiar, and nothing makes sense. Everything we thought we knew about vision, memory, reasoning, would no longer work as expected.

Even the simplest act or process or recall might be difficult, like operating heavy machinery without training. Things might end up getting knocked down, and it might not be pretty.

Throughout our lives we are presented with the consensual illusion that we all inhabit the same cognitive world, because we can discuss that world with each other and reason about it together. But it doesn’t follow that we are actually thinking and perceiving things in the same way.

If we were to somehow relocate our consciousness to the brain and body of another person, we might be very surprised at what that feels like. And maybe not at all pleased.

As I walk down the street in NYC and take in the energy of all of the people walking past, I am struck by the fact that inside the mind of every person I see is an entire universe. Each such universe is vast and unfathomable in its depth and mystery.

There are billions of such parallel universes here on Earth. The sheer scale of it all is wondrous and astonishing, and it fills me with awe.

Today is Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday. For those of you who were wondering, yes, the man is still alive.

Few have had a greater impact on our modern era than Kissinger. The second half of the 20th century would arguably have been very different without his towering political influence.

But his particular brand of realpolitik has not been popular with everyone. It can be argued that political solutions which lead to the deaths of countless innocent people are not ideal.

I think Tom Lehrer said it best, when asked why he had stopped writing satirical political songs: ‘When Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize, satire died.’