Author: admin

I spent some time today working with a colleague on a programming project that involved hardware. Which is a lot more frustrating than a purely software project.

With software you know what you are getting. Either you have a bug in your code or you don’t.

But with hardware there are so many things that are out of your control. Is this cable working? Do I have a faulty board? Is the download rate too fast for the embedded CPU chip?

It can take forever to figure out why something isn’t working properly. Fortunately, by trial and error we managed to solve a ten minute problem in just a little under two hours.

Which isn’t so bad, all things considered. As Robert Towne might have said: Forget about it Jake, it’s a hardware problem.

It’s 2032. You and I are walking to a restaurant together in Manhattan. Mobile Google Maps is on our eyeglasses, which means we are seeing it in the world, on the sides of buildings, on street signs, wherever is a convenient place for both of us to look.

Because we don’t need to look at our phones to see the route, we can continue focusing on our conversation with one another, without worrying that we will take a wrong turn. This is fundamentally different from the experience of mobile Google Maps today, which requires you to pay at least some attention to your phone app.

When we get to the restaurant, there is no menu or QR code, or any other artifact from the past. We both see the array of food choices laid out for us on the table. We use speech and hand gestures in natural ways to customize our choices.

By the time we order, the food we ordered is already on the table, just the way we like it. We just can’t eat it yet.

A few minutes later, our food has arrived. It looks just the same as it did before, only now we can eat it. Which is nice. 🙂

Now that I realize how fast my new computer is, I’m eager to try extending the visualization of fractals into 3D. In fact, I’d like to move it into virtual reality.

I’m not going to be able to use a stand-along VR headset like the Quest for this. I’ll need to do the computation on my computer, and just view it on a VR headset.

It will be cool to wander around within a space-filling fractal. An entire world of infinite detail!

I just got a fancy new 2021 MacBook Pro, the one with the Apple M1 chip. And it is fast. Really, really fast.

I was curious to see just how fast it is, so I did what any self-respecting computer nerd would do. I implemented a visualization of the Mandelbrot set.

I have a special connection to the Mandelbrot set. When Benoit Mandelbrot was preparing to re-issue his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature, he visited MAGI to check out our Celco film recorder. He knew about us because we had used one of those to capture our CGI for TRON.

Amazingly, the people I worked with sent me — the most junior mathematician at MAGI — to go out to lunch with him. Needless to say, it was thrilling to have a conversation with the great man. I had recently implemented the Noise function, and was using it to generate fractals, so we had a lot to talk about.

The core operation in my current implementation does 100 iterations of Z=Z²+C at each pixel, with a user interface that lets you zoom in 1000-fold by clicking (you click again to zoom back out).

My new computer easily handles that. In fact, this computer is so fast that when I tried 1000 iterations per pixel, it still ran at full frame rates.

Which is amazing because the first time I ever tried implementing the Mandelbrot set, it took about an hour a frame. The mind boggles.

There are so many astonishing places in the Mandelbrot set, and it would be a shame to find one but then lose it forever. So at the top of the screen I display where you are. If you go back later to that location, the same beautiful details will be waiting for you.

I couldn’t decide what color scheme to use. Part of me wanted to go with a “fire” motif, and the other with an “ice” theme. So I decided to split the difference.

You can see what I mean if you run it, which you can do here.

About forty years ago a new phrase entered the lexicon of football fans. Because of a single moment in an NFL game between the Cowboys and the 49ers, aficionados of the game still talk about “The Catch”.

If you’re a football fan, nobody needs to explain to you what “The Catch” refers to. You already know.

Now I think a new phrase is entering our popular lexicon — “The Slap”. When you say “The Slap”, everybody knows exactly what you are talking about.

And there’s a good chance that people will still know about it in another forty years.

I posted those song lyrics yesterday because they were rolling around in my head. The lyrics to Beatles songs often roll around in my head. It’s astonishing to me what a close emotional connection I have with their song lyrics.

Most people I know have a particular musical influence that connects to them powerfully. For me it’s definitely the Beatles, the music I grew up with. I know all the lyrics to all the Beatles songs, and there’s a part of me that is (unfairly) astonished when I find that somebody doesn’t realize that a song was written by Lennon and McCartney.

In fact, that moment in the movie “Yesterday” where the main character can’t remember the lyrics to Eleanor Rigby never sat well with me. I understand that it was useful for driving the plot forward, but there is no way that somebody who is such a fanboy would not know those lyrics backwards and forwards.

Who knows how long I’ve loved you
You know I love you still
Will I wait a lonely lifetime
If you want me to I will.

If you need to know more, check back here tomorrow.

These last few days I’ve been working on a jury review panel for a technical conference. I quickly lost count of how many submissions had the word “Metaverse” in the title.

In many cases, the submission didn’t even use VR. I think the authors just threw the word into the title because they figured reviewers would like it. But the committee was definitely not amused by seeing this word constantly tossed around like salad.

At some point, I got so frustrated with yet another gratuitous use of the word, that I finally said “They keep talking about the Metaverse, but I can’t see what any of this has to do with Neal Stephenson.”

At least that got a laugh from the other committee members.

There are some colleagues I’ve been working with for the last year or so. We’ve all been meeting on Zoom once every two weeks, and sometimes more often.

You could say we’ve gotten to know each other, and have built a kind of rapport. But my entire experience of them has been on-line.

Until today.

We had an in-person meeting for the first time since the start of our collaboration. And that was the moment when we realized — really realized — that we had never been in the same room together.

And I was struck, all over again, about how there is just something so delightful about being in the same physical space. It’s not a rational thing, it’s something you feel at a deep level.

The world might be moving toward blended reality, but I don’t think we will ever quite erase the difference between meeting on-line and being together in person. And I think that’s a good thing.

The little widget I showed yesterday lets you explore the lives of around 900 movie actors. You can scroll down to find any of those actors, but you can’t see them all at once.

That’s ok if you just want to roam around and explore. But what if you were dealing with time-critical data? Perhaps a medical emergency, or a terrorist threat?

In that case, every second would count. You would definitely not want to find yourself scrolling down a database while the seconds ticked away.

I’m wondering whether we could reduce that access time by putting the whole thing into Virtual Reality. What if you found yourself in what felt like a physical room, and you could just take a step this way or that way to access data?

Maybe you’d be able to get to any one of those 900 or so names in a single motion. Which means you could perform complex searches and cross-correlations on that data really fast.

And if it really mattered — if lives depended on it — that could make all the difference.