Author: admin

I am devastated by the loss of Syd Mead.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of him? I suppose I could insert pictures into this post. I could educate you, explain why our society’s visual imaginings of the future have been largely the work of one man.

But we live in the age of Google, of internet search. You are perfectly capable of learning about Syd Mead for yourself.

If you are one of those people who thinks seriously about the future, or about the possible outcomes of technological progress, then you will have encountered his work many times. You may even realize how pervasive his influence has been.

I suppose I could use this post as an instruction manual, but I won’t. Now that Mr. Mead has completed his time here, now that they have come to take him back, please go forth and discover his work for yourself.

And celebrate how much his visual genius has influenced the world you live in, and has imparted wings to your own imagination.

Just saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. I loved it!

Even more, I realized I was watching what might be the most radically feminist film I have ever seen coming out of mainstream Hollywood. I’ll explain.

The cast consisted mostly of beautiful actresses. Yet unlike just about any Hollywood film you have ever seen, there was not a single shot that objectified or sexualized any of those actresses. The traditional “male gaze” was simply absent.

But Gerwig’s film goes even further than that. Within this story that is being told from a female perspective, the camera makes a point, at every possible moment, of gleefully objectifying the attractive leading men in the cast.

That, my friends, is a brilliant act of subversively radical feminism. And to their credit, Gerwig and her producers managed to drop it down right smack in the middle of our obliviously patriarchal culture.

Happy 9*8+7+654*3-21

🙂

The ending of the year’s at hand
A time of great division
I think what we all need right now
Is 2020 vision

The entire world is torn, it seems,
By hatred and derision
I truly hope next year will bring
Some 2020 vision

I know the future can’t be known
With meaningful precision
But we can cope if we just hope
For 2020 vision

Happy New Year everyone!

Today, in my blog post for our Future Reality Lab at NYU, I talked about a childhood experience that deeply influenced the research that I am working on now.

It involved a certain cartoon with a penguin and a walrus, and a really fabulous invention, which as a child I referred to affectionately as the 3dbb. I would tell you more, but you might as well read about it here.

There is a tendency for communication technologies to move from the world around us into our bodies. This is a consequence of Moore’s Law, which states that computer technology becomes exponentially more powerful over time.

Ideally we would have all of the communication technologies we want at our fingertips. After all, given the choice, we generally prefer to communicate with other humans wherever and whenever we want.

And so at different moments in history we have seen all such technologies make the leap from “you need to be in this physical place” to “you can be wherever you want”. This has held true for every such technology, from printed books to audio communication to moving pictures and beyond.

At this moment in history, it is very useful to think about this principle, for one simple reason: The same principle will always continue to hold true in the future.

Think, for example, of any mode of communication which today requires you to be at a particular physical place. There will come a time when you will be able to engage in that same form of communication wherever you happen to be.

For any given communication technology, we don’t know exactly when that transition will happen. But we know for sure that at some point it will.

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