Author: admin

Today I spent a lot of time at the shore just looking out over the water. It was a lovely day, and that simple act put me in a perfectly calm and meditative mood.

What is it about bodies of water that causes them to have such a powerful effect on us? There must be some evolutionary connection, some reason for this phenomenon.

I can’t quite figure it out. Maybe you can.

Of course, as soon as I posed yesterday’s Tune Typing program, I started thinking about ways to improve it. For example, right now there is no way to go back and edit a melody once you’ve played it — although one thing you can do is keep playing during playback to layer on more notes.

I’m thinking that in editing mode I will use the left/right arrow keys to move between notes, and the up/down arrow keys to modify the pitch of a note. That way I still keep the keyboard free to add and delete notes. And I suppose I should use the mouse to shift the position of a note, since that calls for a continuous adjustment.

And then there is the question of output. I should add the ability to print a score once you’re done creating it. And so far we haven’t even discussed a base clef.

On the other hand, there is something about a program being very simple, and just doing one thing really well. A sort of Zen of coding.

Today I needed to take a break from proposal writing, and various other academic chores. So I decided to make something just for the fun of it.

Oftentimes I want to play a melody that’s running around in my head, but I don’t have a musical keyboard handy, especially when traveling. So today I wrote a little Javascript program that lets me use my computer keyboard to type melodies.

There is nothing particularly novel about it. It’s really more of a craft project, a labor of love.

But it’s free and it runs on the Web. So if you’ve got melodies running around in your head that you need to get out, you might find it useful.

You can play with it here.

There are movies, plays and works of art that I wish I had never seen, books that I wish I had never read, places that I wish I had never visited, and music that I wish I had never heard, so that I could experience them again for the first time. For all of these things, I will never again have that initial heady experience of discovery and wonder.

If only there were a forgetting pill that could make you selectively forget a particular memory. We can erase files on our computers with ease. Yet we are unable to do the same with our own memories.

I wonder how the world would change if somebody were to invent a forgetting pill. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to simply release it out into the world. The inventors would likely want to do experiments to determine whether the net effect of selective forgetting was positive or negative.

Then again, maybe this has already happened. Perhaps in a research lab somewhere, an intrepid team has solved this very problem, and produced the perfect forgetting pill.

They may even have done controlled tests to see how such a thing would affect peoples’ lives. And maybe they didn’t like what they found.

So the entire team just did the safe and responsible thing. They took the pill and forgot all about it.

Very interesting article in the New York Times that advocates using ChatGPT in the classroom. Starting with the clearly true premise that the Genie is already out of the bottle, the author challenges us to try to imagine how we can educate better by incorporating the capabilities of ChatGPT (and its even more capable successors yet to come) into education.

I completely agree with this point of view, partly because we have no choice. About half a century ago, when affordable digital calculators came out, we lessened our collective focus on teaching the mechanics of arithmetic. And that, in turn, freed up precious classroom time to focus on teaching higher level mathematical concepts.

There are many similar examples that illustrate the same principle. Access to more powerful tools does not inherently destroy creative thinking. On the contrary, it can accelerate it.

For example, I no longer need to go to the library to look things up, because now I can access Google → Wikipedia → primary sources without leaving my desk. That change has allowed me to be more creative and productive in my professional life.

So now the real fun begins. Taking as a premise that ChatBots will be freely available to everyone, in ever more powerful incarnations, how do we rethink education to be even better?

The young minds in future generations will have far more knowledge at their fingertips than we had when we were kids. We should focus on harnessing that power to promote creativity and critical thinking.

There was a big todo back in the 1980s in response to classic black and white films being re-issued in colorized versions. Noted filmmakers and film critics came out against the process as a violation of artistic integrity, and there were even lawsuits over it.

Yet many people, having been raised on color films, preferred the colorized versions of older movies. And nowadays colorization is often applied to old documentary footage. In that case, the argument that colorization would violate artistic integrity is weaker.

The way A.I. is progressing, old films may eventually be re-issued with much more radical changes. Many young people find the pace of older movies to be slow, and one can easily imagine A.I. re-edits that impart a more modern pace to classic old movies.

Future generations might very well grow up seeing modernized versions of classic films. When that starts to happen, I wonder whether there will be an outcry from critics and filmmakers.

In 1997 J.K. Rowling, in her first Harry Potter novel, introduced us to a fictional universe in which people can wave at you from newspaper photos, maps can show you where people are at the moment, and various other fantastical possibilities. A quarter of a century later, we take many of those very same things for granted in our everyday real lives.

Suppose you wanted to invent a magical fictional universe today, and you only wanted to include “impossible” things that will actually become everyday reality in another twenty five years. What would you include?

I had an interesting experience recently while riding in the front passenger seat of a car. We had just stopped at a traffic light, and the driver needed to check something on a phone.

I was instructed to keep watching the light, and to say something when it turned green. In that moment, it occurred to me how convenient it would be to always have somebody with you to pay attention to things when you can’t.

Sometime in the coming years, a driver who is all alone will be able to give the same instruction to an A.I. assistant. The A.I. will, as instructed, dutifully watch traffic lights, and speak up when the light changes.

This kind of capability has all sorts of implications for many everyday situations. How many times have you not been able to do something, because in that moment you weredoing something else?

At some point we will all have our own A.I. assistant with high functioning virtual eyes and ears, to help us effortlessly multitask out here in the physical world. The interface for this will most likely be plain old conversational speech and gesture.

I am not sure whether this is a good thing.

Generally speaking, we accept the artificial conventions of familiar media. We don’t even think about them much.

A play has a group of people up on stage pretending they don’t see us. A novel is really just a string of words printed on a succession of pages.

In the latter case we can’t even see or hear the characters. And yet they can seem very real to us, because we accept the artificial conventions of the medium.

Similarly, cinema posits that it is perfectly reasonable to watch giant faces moving about on a flat screen, as well as sudden changes in point of view, and to call that reality. We learn the visual language of film when we are children, and from then on we simply accept it without question.

All of these media work because they tap into something within the way our brains already work. All humans have a biologically determined commonality in the ways that we perceive and think about reality.

Every successful medium taps into that common biological heritage. Sometimes a medium does so in ways that we might not think would work (for example, printed words on paper) if that medium did not already exist.

I don’t think we have reached that point yet with immersive media, such as virtual reality. We are still in a stage of experimentation, much as early filmmakers experimented with having trains rush at audiences, and making objects on the screen magically appear and disappear.

When immersive media become mature, it will be because we have collectively figured out how to match their capabilities to the way that our brains and senses really work. That will take time, but the end result will be worth it.

I’ve been having a correspondence with a friend about media. In particular, we’ve been discussing cinema as a medium.

Everyone who is alive today has grown up with movies. So it’s very likely that you don’t know anybody who first encountered a movie when they were already an adult.

Which means that we take the language of cinema for granted. We talk about movies being “realistic” as though we are discussing something that happened out here in the real world.

But out here in the real world, we are stuck in our physical bodies. The language of montage — constructing visual narratives via the instantaneous juxtaposition of different viewpoints — isn’t something we could ever experience in reality.

Yet we generally don’t think about the extreme artificiality of the visual language of movies because we grew up with it. We all know the language intimately, and we’ve known it since we were little kids.

More tomorrow.