Author: admin

One of the funny things about University research is that not all the “research” we do is research. Some of it would more properly be referred to as “production”.

Pure research can tend to be difficult to explain to people. It concerns itself with pushing the envelope in a particular area that is important, but directly understood by only a few people.

And those people are often not the people in two key groups: (1) the people who can provide the funds to continue the research, and (2) the people who have the wherewithal to bring your work to a larger world where it can be useful to millions of people.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose you are working on a modification to a car engine that will make cars run faster with less fuel. You can show people detailed diagrams and simulations that demonstrate your achievement. But that doesn’t really get across the importance of your achievement.

But what if, on the other hand, you put your modification into an actual car. You then drive the car across the country in record time, using very little fuel. Now people are paying attention.

So it is often worth taking the time to build productions on top of your research. And you might very well learn interesting things in the process. Also, it can be fun to drive a car that you built yourself.

I have been trying to imagine what teaching will be like in the future. I am starting with the premise that I can do everything that I used to do when teaching in person, together with everything that I can now do over Zoom.

So it’s sort of a combination of super-powers. On the one hand, there is the super-power of true physical presence. This includes, among other things, eye contact, body language, the comraderie of physical gathering and the ability to “read a room”.

On the other hand, there is the super-power of being able to present an entire world, as well as scribble on and program that world, right before your students’ eyes. When you get the hang of it, Zoom can be a very powerful tool for doing that.

I’m assuming that some time in the next five years or so, the technology will have matured to the point where I can seamlessly combine together those two sorts of super-powers. I am looking forward to that.

After the pandemic is over, we will no longer need to hold our meetings over Zoom. But meanwhile, people are getting better at using Zoom, and the app itself is continually improving and adding new features.

In addition, competing platforms are showing up, trying different ways for people connect on-line. Now that there is a huge audience for such things, these apps are finding sweet-spots in user preferences that in more normal times might not have been on anyone’s radar.

So by the time the pandemic is over, the landscape for meetings might look very different. People will probably choose to meet on-line in situations where, a year or so ago, they would have chosen to meet in person.

We might be entering a permanent rearrangement of “in person” versus “on line” for both business and social interactions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. For one thing, I suspect we will be burning a lot less fuel for travel on trains, planes and automobiles.

Somehow I had never before read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I am now making up for lost time.

I am not just reading it. I find myself rereading chapters multiple times, in awe of the vast offering of wit and wisdom on every page.

One of the things I find delightful about this book is that it operates entirely in negative space. Every opinion voiced in the book is exactly the opposite of the message you are meant to take away.

It turns out that in the hands of a master, this is a very effective rhetorical strategy indeed. We are presented with strongly held beliefs, and allowed to work out for ourselves why we disagree with those beliefs.

A caution is in order here: If you read this book you may find yourself seriously questioning some of your long held opinions about reality.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The word “immersive” is gradually entering the lexicon, in reference to new computer mediated forms of experience. Most people don’t think about it yet, just as most people didn’t think about the nascent field of cinema in the late 1890s.

Consequently, this is a very exciting time for research into the field of immersive media. The important aesthetic questions are yet to be answered, or perhaps even asked.

In another decade or two, things will have settled down, and the nature of synthetically produced immersive experience will probably be a well understood area. Which means the next decade or so is going to be a lot of fun.

Every time I look up into the starry night sky, I see the constellation Orion. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, it is always the very first constellation I see. This has been true since I was a little child, and my dad first pointed out to me the constellations, one beautiful summer night in the Catskill mountains.

I realized as I got older that this is something that I can say I have shared with people all over the world for as long as the human race has existed. Every time I look up at Orion now I think of my connection with all of humanity, and I realize how fortunate we are to be able to share such a beautiful universe with one another.

I often find that a favorite song is rolling around in my head. I may be going on a walk, and realize “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is playing on repeat in my mind. It also happens with “The Rainbow Connection”, so my mind must have a thing for rainbows.

But what about those times when a melody is playing on repeat in your head that doesn’t correlate to any song you’ve ever heard. Have you just composed that song?

What is the authorship for original earworms? Can we take credit for having composed something original?

Or does it only count as a “composition” if we manage to transcribe our inner melody to the piano and guitar? Do we need to publish it somehow?

Maybe this should be the rule: Our original earworm becomes “music”, in the traditional sense, the very first time we play it for another human being.

Very often something in life blocks you. You feel stuck, morose, out of sorts. You may ask why the Universe is conspiring against you.

But then, perhaps due to some action on your part, or maybe just happenstance, you find yourself no longer blocked. The clouds part and sunshine pours through.

When that happens, I find it important not to just take it all for granted, to simply think “What a lucky fellow I am!” In fact, that is the best time — when you are no longer feeling off-balance — to take stock, to think about how you might arrange things better in the future.

Use the good times to make better times. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it really works.

I really like the following observation by Wordsworth of poetry:

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

I think this is true of all forms of creativity. When I am in an emotionally overwrought state, I find it impossible to create. In effect, all of the circuits are jammed by emotions that are too powerful to channel in any useful way.

But my memories of such moments are pure gold, creatively speaking. I can endlessly mine my recollection of those highly emotional moments, and use them to infuse art.

I wonder whether this is a general state of the human condition. Is the general story behind the soaring melody of an aria, or a painting that renders us speechless with its transcendent beauty?

I can imagine somebody surfing the Web and wondering something like “How old is the oldest person still alive who is mentioned in the Wikipedia as having a birthday today?” It’s easy enough to look that up. In fact, you could do that right now.

But then you might want to ask “How old is the oldest person still alive born on any day of the year?” In fact, you might want to look for trends. Are there months of the year where those people are systematically older? Or perhaps days of the week?

It seems to me that there should be an easy way to ask those kinds of questions about data. I might be able to look it up manually, but that would quickly become tedious. And for many perfectly reasonable questions, it would be impossible.

I could write a computer program to mine the data fields of Wikipedia for the answers, but doing that requires a lot of specialized skills. Most people don’t have those skills, and are probably not all that motivated to attain them.

I wonder whether there would be a way to allow the general public to explore such questions about data, without being required to earn a degree in computer science. Maybe such a tool exists, and I just haven’t heard of it.

If you do know of such a thing, please let me know!