Author: admin

A while back I started noticing something interesting and odd about songs. Songs that are completely different from each other can start out in exactly the same way.

I think we don’t usually notice such things because we are generally looking for the larger meaning of a song. Particulars of melody are received by us as merely part of a larger emotional story that the song is telling.

For example, think of the title song from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls and John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane. It would be hard to think of two songs that are more different in genre and in underlying emotional message.

Yet the first five notes of the melody of these two songs are identical (modulo transposition). They both start out 1-2-4-3-1 (do re fa me do) in the major diatonic scale.

With a little thought, you can probably think of other pairs of songs that share this property of identical opening melodies. I wonder whether there is a word for this phenomenon.

I’m open to suggestions.

Just saw the new Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and I don’t see what people are so upset about. It’s a perfectly entertaining, inoffensive space opera with all the right ingredients.

It has breathtaking special effects, non-stop thrills, chills and excitement, adorable little ready-to-buy robots, insanely over the top cackling villains, and a hardy band of intrepid young heroes fighting together to save the Galaxy.

There is also, of course, a crazily dysfunctional love story right gob smack in the middle of it all, as in your face as a giant alien squid dropped from the sky onto New York City. What more could a moviegoer want?

In short, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is totally a popcorn movie, but if somebody really forced me to analyze it for deeper meaning, I would start with Rey as Dorothy. From there it’s pretty obvious who is the Lion and who is the Tin Man.

It took me a little longer to figure out who the Scarecrow is, but I finally realized it’s Kilo Ren. Dorothy liked all her friends, but she and the Scarecrow always had a very special relationship.

I am definitely going to see it again.

This evening we watched Jumanji — the 2017 version. I had seen it before, and it was great fun watching it again. It’s one of those movies that holds up very well under repeat viewings.

The entire time, part of my mind was thinking about the fact that we were watching a movie about people being transported into a fully immersive make-believe world. This is a trope that comes up quite often in cinema. We’ve seen it in Mary Poppins, TRON, The Matrix and many other films besides.

There will come a point when cinema itself will become completely immersive. Rather than watching stories on a flat screen, future audience members will find themselves transported into a story world that appears to be all around them.

When that happens, I wonder what people will make of old films that used the concept of immersion as a kind of fantasy. Will people be able to appreciate that fantasy of the future, after it has become their every day reality?

I guess it’s a bit like young people of today watching the classic Star Trek TV show. When first Captain Kirk first talking into that futuristic communicator, it seemed wondrous and amazing.

Now everyone has one of those gadgets in their pocket, and it’s no big deal. I guess that’s what happens when fantasy becomes an every day reality.

In days of the future in virtual worlds
We’ll have time both to talk and to think

But what shall we do, should we ever decide
That we want to go out for a drink?

      It sounds nice, but alas
      If we can’t see our glass

      All too soon, so I fear,
      We would all spill our beer

      Then perhaps, I suppose
      Get it all on our clothes

      And the outcome, I guess
      Would be one giant mess

I feel this dilemma should not ruin our day
Or give us much trouble or pause

The answer, both simple and elegant, is
To do all our drinking through straws

The technology we currently use for our shared VR metaroom doesn’t let us know when people are blinking. So when we look at each other as avatars, we need to add our own procedural blinking. That helps a lot to make the avatars of other people look more natural.

Yesterday I implemented a mirroring capability, so that people in our metaroom can see their own avatar, as in a mirror reflection. Interestinglly, I realized that I should not have the mirror reflections blink, because when you look in a mirror in real life, you never ever see yourself blinking.

In fact, one subliminal clue as to “Is this me, or is this somebody else?” is whether the person you are looking at is blinking. If they are blinking, then they are somebody else. If they are not blinking, then you are looking at yourself in a mirror.

Mirror reflections have been around forever. So it’s odd to realize that before the advent of movies in the late 19th century, no human being in all of history had ever seen himself or herself blink.

It’s fascinating to me the way people enjoy experiences that make them work. Many people love a good crossword or jigsaw puzzle.

I personally wait all week for the New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle, because that’s the one that makes me work the most. The more difficult they make my life, the better I like it.

Why is this so? Why do some people love fiendishly difficult video games, while others love the challenge of mastering Liszt’s Campanella?

I think it comes down to a fundamental survival trait: We are drawn to activities that increase our skills or abilities.

Were that not the case, our primordial ancestors would have spent their entire lives just lazing around doing as little as possible. But if that were the case, our species would never have managed to survive, and you wouldn’t be reading this blog post.

So here’s a takeaway: If you want people to love your creation, then create something that requires them to put in some effort. It seems that what we like is what makes us work.

In recent posts I have been discussing the possibilities of creating virtual worlds that people can physically enter together. It would be as though there were a parallel universe, right next to this one, that you and your friends could step into and explore.

One of the interesting things about this sort of proposition is that there are very few limits. Unlike a theme park, such as world has no physical costs of construction or maintenance.

This means that over time, as we develop the right tools, such worlds might become extremely inexpensive to create. And that, in turn, means that we soon may see a day when anybody at all can create a custom world to their specifications, to visit and enjoy with their friends.

Which leads to the obvious question: If you had the power to create any world you wish, what world would you create?

As we were discussing our plans for the future at our lab yesterday, one very practical question came up. What I like about this question is that it helps to simplify and frame our goals, in a sort of pass/fail way.

In short, the question is this: What would it take for two people who are sitting physically across each other in a meeting, to both put on VR headsets and continue that in-person meeting in an alternate reality?

Note that a number of questions immediately arise in response to the above question. For example, would it be necessary for us to see each others’ facial expressions?

Or could there be benefits to moving into that alternate world that are so compelling that we wouldn’t miss that? Suppose, for example, we were so focused on the super power of whatever we could see and hear and do together that we are willing to forego some of the qualities of direct sensory experience.

There is a sort of analogy to the telephone. Well over a century ago, people were so happy to be able to communicate at a distance, that they had no trouble foregoing the power of being able to their conversant.

It’s hard to predict what shared super powers would be so compelling that we would be willing to forego seeing the literal face of a person with whom we are physically face to face. On the other hand, we are now used to super powers that only a generation ago would have been very difficult to explain.

Imagine, for example, trying to explain the usefulness of Google search to nearly anyone in 1992. It would be a rare individual indeed who would even have understood what you were talking about.

Today, as the very last meeting in 2019 of our Future Reality Lab, we held a brainstorming session. I led the group in front of a large whiteboard, and people tossed out ideas.

The goal was to figure out what our direction and focus should be in 2020. The goal was to work at a high level, rather than worrying the details.

I told them “Don’t think of this as something you do over coffee. Think of this as something you do over beer.” Although I suppose, having said that, I probably should have served beer. 🙂

My job was largely to keep things on a level of “yes, and” rather than “yet, but”. We didn’t consider any ideas to be bad ideas — they all went up on the whiteboard.

Yet everyone could tell when somebody came up with an idea that was particularly good. You could feel the energy in the room rising at those moments.

I decided to mentally bookmark those particular ideas to myself, so we could go back to them later, rather than calling them out on the whiteboard. After all, we didn’t want it to be a competition. You never know what is going to be the next great idea.

So now we have lots of raw material to work with. The hard part is going to be putting them into action.

Oh well. As a friend of mine once said about good ideas: “Conception is always easier than delivery.”

Today is the 353th day of the year. Which means that it is a palindrome — writing the digits forward is the same as writing them backward.

It would probably be relatively easy to count up the number of days in the year that are palindromes. And a good computer programmer might be able to write a program to answer the question faster than most people could count it up manually. Consider these as exercises for the reader. 🙂

This leads to a more general question: For any given number (in this case 365), how many palindromes are there in the numbers counting up to that number?

And that leads to other questions. For example, how quickly do palindrome numbers increase? Is the palindrome number of 1000 ten times larger than the palindrome number of 100?

These may seem like crazy questions. But you never know with math. Every once in a while, asking seemingly crazy mathematical questions leads to the discovery of something surprising and wonderful about the nature of the Universe.