Author: admin

Doing the daily New York Times Spelling Bee has really attuned me to the arbitrary nature of word existence. There are so many reasonable combinations of letters that sound like they should be words, but aren’t.

Why is cloop not a word, or grithing? Wouldn’t it be great to have your very own pet spreech, or to go for a brisk early morning pelunk?

Maybe, in some parallel universe, all of these words exist. It’s cool to imagine such a place.

I wonder if there is a word for that?

Today’s Widget Wednesday is an experiment in rapid prototyping.

This afternoon I gave myself a little coding challenge: Could I implement a program for drawing colorful animated kaleidoscopes in under 30 minutes?

I also set some basic ground rules. Notably, I didn’t let myself use any code written by anybody else, other than what’s already provided by the standard Javascript 2d Canvas interface.

What I ended up with isn’t very fancy, but I kind of like it. You can play with it here.

Today I was talking with someone I’ve known for a while. I had always known him to be an intelligent person, interested in people and ideas.

I happened to mention that I was going to see a theater production of Jane Eyre. He gave me a blank look, because, it seems, he had never heard of Jane Eyre.

He said the name reminded him of the name of a character in Game of Thrones, and he went on for a bit about how many times he had binged Game of Thrones. In that moment I felt a yawning gulf between us.

And just last week I was talking to a young playwright — a very good one. He was telling me that he had an idea for a play that would be told successively from the varying points of view of different characters.

I said, “Oh, like Rashomon!” It turned out that he had never heard of Rashomon.

I found myself wondering whether the classics are simply fading from our collective consciousness. Perhaps they are now thought of as culturally irrelevant.

Yet the classics contain so many wonderful ideas, ways of thinking about and expressing things, and deep insights into the human condition. That’s why they are classics.

I found myself wondering what to say to the young playwright. Should I just let it go?

Reader, I harried him.

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in titles of some literary works. Sometimes the title tells the whole story.

I’m not talking about cheap examples like “Snakes on a Plane” (and really, what else do you need to know about that movie?). I mean titles that tell the tale in a more stealth way.

My favorites are the titles that seem at first to merely be descriptive phrases. But when you look more closely, they are actually complete sentences.

I was most of the way through one of my favorite novels — Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows End” — when the author revealed that the title was not just the name of a place, but also a complete English sentence.

And that sentence explained key themes of the novel. I was delighted by that.

Similarly, it wasn’t until after I saw the recent film “Free Guy” that I fully understood the title. I had thought it was merely a catchy phrase. It’s actually an accurate synopsis of the movie, in one terse yet brilliant sentence.

I wonder how many other examples are out there of titles that turn out, when you look more closely, to have an alternate meaning that sums up the theme of the work.

This evening I went to see live theater. It was a great original play, with a brilliant cast.

Don’t get me wrong, I love movies as much as anybody. But every once in a while something reminds me – there really is nothing like the theater.

I spent the last week working on a simple animated drawing program. I originally wrote it as a stand-along program. You can see that version of it in my “Widget Wednesdays” post from several days ago.

Yesterday I modified the program so that it can be inserted into other programs as a kind of add-on. Then today I incorporated it into another software project.

So now I can play with it in various ways, and combine it with other stuff. It’s a great feeling to be able to do that.

This kind of reminds me of one time when I was a kid and my toy plastic dinosaurs had all become scattered. Then one day I finally managed to find them all and gather them together.

Once they were all in the same place at the same time I could once again take them on adventures and tell their stories. And what could be better than that?

It has been two years to the day since we entered the age of Zoom. On March 12th, 2020 I used Zoom for the first time ever, to teach a class. And it seems that we have been living and the world ever since.

Now I think nothing of having face to face conversations multiple times a week with colleagues who live in China. I don’t think I would have thought about as a thing before then.

The world has changed. It’s going to stay changed.

I’ve told this story before, but I realize that it is an important part of my origin story, and so worth pondering from multiple perspectives. When I was in Kindergarten I had a crush on a beautiful girl in my class. To my delight, the teacher sat us right next to each other.

But one day in that same class we got a new student, a girl who was a problem child. She would often have fits of temper, and if you were sitting next to her, she would steal your scissors.

At some point the teacher moved my seat next to hers. When I asked why, the teacher explained that it had to be me.

It seems that I was the only kid in the class who was nice to the troubled student, and who never got into fights with her. I guess, with the wisdom of hindsight, that this was a great compliment.

But I’m still sad that I didn’t get to sit next to that other girl.

Sometime this past week somebody asked me if I could help to make some simple animations for a project. I took that as a challenge to implement a “simplest possible” animated sketching program.

The basic idea in my head was that if an animated drawing program is a poem, this would be a haiku. I was hoping to provide something so simple to use that people might use it casually during conversation, the way they use a whiteboard.

A few days later, here is what I’ve got so far. It doesn’t have lots of fancy features, but that’s sort of the point.

I’ve been wondering about some of the legal edges of U.S. Trademark law. For example, can I start a video chat company called Mooz?

Would I get into trouble if I had a search engine company called Elgoog? What about a computer company called Elppa?

An on-line retailer called Nozama? Or a ride-share company called Rebu?

Would I be breaking any actual laws? Or would it all be kosher, because most people couldn’t possibly mistake the one for the other?

It would be good to know. Besides, I kind of like the name Mooz. 🙂