Author: admin

I’ve been doing the New York Times Spelling Bee. It’s a daily puzzle and it’s lots of fun.

Sometimes I manage to find all possible words. But that’s only on a good day.

The rules are always the same, but each day they change the configuration of letters. The result is that some days are fairly easy, and others are killer hard.

Based on the initial configuration of letters, every day has a particular maximum possible score. Which leads my mind to the following different puzzle:

Given the rules of Spelling Bee, what configuration of letters would produce the highest possible score?

It seems to me that this might be a challenging problem. My inclination would be to write a computer program to search through likely solutions.

But a likely solution is not a proof. A really interesting open challenge might be to prove that a particular configuration of letters produces the maximum possible score.

And that problem might be hard.

I love github. This wonderful version control software is a mainstay of our lab’s research. Basically, it lets us all work together on large software projects without getting in each others’ way.

When you use github you can branch off and work on your own stuff, and then merge your changes back into the main project, usually without any issues between you and all the other people who are doing the same thing.

But github requires a certain amount of setup. And sometimes my project is just too small for that, and I want to kind of fly under the radar.

For that I fall back on the simple DIY version control that I’ve been using forever. For very simple and small projects — the kind that take only a few days from soup to nuts — I have a practice of copying the entire project over every time I make significant progress.

So I end up with a whole sequence of copies of the same project, each a little more advanced than the one before it. This has the advantage that I can easily visit earlier versions, and even grab snippets of code from them to use in the latest version, all without missing a step.

This wouldn’t work at all if I were collaborating on something large with other people. But for those little skunkworks projects, it’s awesome.

I’ve been doing a general apartment cleaning, as I do periodically. If you’ve been through it, you know what it’s like.

You throw out lots and lots of things, and keep fewer things. I think it’s healthy for us to perform this ritual every once in a while. We change, and our stuff needs to change as well, in order to continue to be our stuff, rather than the stuff of some former version of us.

It can be tempting to focus on all of these objects that are suddenly no longer around. But that would be the wrong place to focus.

It’s not what you throw away that’s important. It’s what you keep.

There has been a lot of talk in recent times about human interaction moving into a kind of 3D cartoon on-line world. Sort of a combination of Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

But I’m not so sure that this is really what people want. We humans are in love with faces. Not imitations of faces, but the real thing.

We love movies, theater, TV shows. We hang out in restaurants and shopping malls and coffee shops. We love activities that involve looking at actual human faces.

Sure we also love cartoons, but they aren’t as central to our emotional well being. People love Toy Story, but they are obsessed with the worlds of Harry Potter and Star Wars.

When we seek out entertainment, actors with real faces seem to speak to us in some special primal way. And in these pandemic times, we generally don’t reach for the many available on-line cartoon worlds to connect with the people we care about.

Instead we use video chats like Zoom and Skype. We don’t want to see simulations of the people who are dear to us — we want to see the real thing.

There is a good chance that this will always be the case, because it has been baked into our brains through millennia of human evolution. We are emotionally hardwired to seek out real face to face communication, and I suspect we always will be.

At our NYU Future Reality Lab we’ve been working for a long time on a Web based VR project. Because it’s Web based, it also works on old fashioned computers with screens and keyboards.

Meanwhile, one thing that has radically changed in the last two years is that everybody talks through video chat — in particular Zoom. As you know, this is sadly due to the tragic COVID pandemic.

Recently I added a video chat capability to our lab’s VR software. It doesn’t work on VR headsets, but it’s just great on old fashioned computers with screens and keyboards.

Now I use it for all of my Zoom calls. Two years ago that would not have meant anything, but today — because the world has changed — it means everything.

Instead of static Zoom backgrounds, I have live computer graphics all around me in Zoom meetings. I can bring up interactive demos in conversations with colleagues.

Most of the underlying software was written with headset-based virtual reality in mind. But it turns out that it’s also just perfect for face-to-face online conversations.

The craziest part? None of this would not even be a thing, if it weren’t for this terrible pandemic.

I have long been fascinated by creatures that are made out of magical materials. A being that can change shape at well, that is made of some sort of elemental stuff, is just incredibly appealing.

There are many examples in literature of such beings. Dracula, of course, could change his shape in many ways. The T-1000 from Terminator 2 is a more recent example.

Then there is Slimer from Ghostbusters, and of course the various iterations of Flubber, from Fred MacMurray to Robin Williams. Not to mention Gumby, who in Art Clokey’s wondrous animations could get out of any scrape by morphing at will.

Through the years I’ve played around with various techniques to create such characters. Last year I did a series of experiments, highly influenced by Flubber, to try to capture the behavior of an infinitely morphable character made of some sort of magical substance.

You can see a snapshot of some of those experiments here.

I am often amazed by my own Web and email activity. I suspect that this is a widely shared condition.

I will often think “Oh, I just visited that Web page a little while ago, or I just saw that email a few minutes back.” And then I will look and it will turn out that I’ve been to 30 different sites and have fielded 20 other emails since then.

When I stop and think about it, I remember all that activity. But the weird thing is that I don’t notice it at all while it is happening.

I guess this counts as “expert knowledge”. When you do something often enough, over a long enough period of time, it starts to become an unconscious act.

A positive way to look at it is that this is our brain’s way of protecting us. If we were truly aware of just how much incoming stuff we need to field in a given hour, we might go nuts.

And it’s also nice to know that we are all experts at something. 🙂

To sum up: What is happening in Ukraine is horrific and tragic, but I think we should all be on guard to the possibility that it is even worse. My worry is that this invasion looks very much like the result of a prearranged back-room deal.

All Xi Jinping needs to do now is make vague disapproving noises, while letting events unfold. Whatever the outcome, his country will come out ahead.

If the invasion succeeds, two things happen: (1) A 21st century precedent is established for a large autocratic country annexing, by military force, a smaller neighboring democracy. (2) Russia, being economically isolated, will have only one large customer left to purchase its reserves of natural gas.

If the invasion fails, Russia will still be economically isolated, and also very weakened. To remain economically viable, it will have little choice but to turn to the only big friend it will still have.

Either way, China wins. But if the invasion succeeds, then Taiwan is in a perilous position.

And that doesn’t just mean immense human tragedy. Because of Taiwan’s position as a global supplier of high-tech components, it will also cause enormous economic disruption throughout the West.

So for many reasons, let’s hope Putin fails. But in any case, my greatest fear is that he is, in the end, no more than someone else’s useful idiot.

So what is happening now is that the autocrat presiding over a failing economy, wanting to secure his grip on his country, is doing a classic “Wag the Dog”. And in the process causing immense human suffering and loss of life, while aiming to destroy a democratic nation.

But Putin must have thought through what will happen when Europe no longer buys his country’s natural gas. Who will he sell to? The answer is pretty clear, and I am frightened by the thought that this may have all been worked out beforehand.

Who most stands to gain from establishing a precedent of a large autocratic country getting away with invading a smaller democracy next door? Who most stands to gain from wresting economic power from the NATO countries?

It’s pretty clear that Vladimir Putin thinks of a certain orange haired con man as a useful idiot. For four years, our U.S. president presided over the weakening of NATO, the hero worship of brutal autocrats, a clear distain for friendly democracies, and the enabling of the engine of Russian disinformation.

But what if there is more to the story? What if Putin himself is merely a useful idiot? If so, the terrible tragedy unfolding in Ukraine might be just the beginning of something even more tragic.

More tomorrow.