Author: admin

In 2017 it’s pretty obvious when someone isn’t paying attention to the person they are with, due to some on-line distraction. You see this all the time: somebody in a restaurant is staring at their phone, while their companion across the dinner table either looks on in dismay, or else gives up and takes out their own phone.

But if wearables take off, then this overt social signaling of inattention will no longer be available. People will look right at you, while secretly scrolling through Facebook, or reading their email, or just checking out the latest funny cat pics.

In response, their conversational companions might develop a new sort of defensive strategy, which might be called “conversational pinging”. Rather than just talking, and assuming one’s companion is paying attention because they are looking right at you, we might evolve techniques to periodically “ping” our conversant, to make sure he is really paying attention.

This isn’t something we generally need to do now, because when in 2017 when someone is looking right at us, they literally cannot be checking their Facebook page. But once wearables start to take over, all bets will be off, and pinging strategies will start to evolve and grow more sophisticated.

Such pings might consist of mentioning a surprising name or topic that is sure to elicit a reaction — unless the other person is not paying attention. Or deliberately slipping a bad joke into the conversation, and acting as though you just said something funny. If the person laughs anyway, you can be pretty sure it means they weren’t really paying attention.

Or else it means they have a really bad sense of humor. In which case you probably shouldn’t keep talking to them anyway.

This evening a friend took me to see Uncle Bonsai, an edgily funny deconstructionist alt-folk group that has been playing, recording and touring on and off for more than thirty five years.

At one point during the between-song banter, guitarist Andrew Ratshin started to wax rhapsodic about Wonderama, a kids’ TV show that reached its peak of popularity about half a century ago. Gazing misty eyed into the middle distance, he said “The show was never the same after Sonny Fox left.” **

He then turned to the audience and asked “How many people remember Sonny Fox?” A surprisingly large number of hands shot in the air.

At which point somebody from the audience shouted “Bob McAllister was better!” A hush fell over the crowd, and there was a moment of eerie silence.

Ratshin’s bandmate Arni Adler then turned to fix the heretic with an icy stare of disdain and disbelief. “After the show,” she said, “we’re taking this outside.”

** Sonny Fox left the show in 1967

Generally speaking, people are pretty good at keeping our lab’s kitchen clean. They wash their own dishes, put food away in the fridge, throw out their garbage after meals.

But people aren’t always perfect, and sometimes somebody leaves some paper plates on the table, or an unwashed mug ends up sitting in the sink. This makes nobody happy.

The other morning I came in to find some napkins and paper plates on the table. On top of them was a big handwritten paper sign. It said: “It’s rude to leave your stuff lying around.”

I could understand the frustration of the person who found the napkins and paper plates lying on the table. And I could see how they would want to send a clear message to the perpetrator.

But I also could see what this whole scene might look like from the perspective of an outside visitor to our lab. “Who are these people?” she might ask herself. “Are they engaged in some sort of ongoing domestic war? Do they even like each other?”

I did what I usually do when I see stuff lying around. I picked it all up off the table and I threw it in the trash — including the handwritten paper sign.

For me this is a typical response. When I see the occasional unwashed dish or mug in the lab sink, I just wash it and put it in the drying rack.

There is a part of me that wonders whether I am being an enabler, whether maybe there is a better path. But if that “better path” is to shame people, I’d prefer to stick to the path I’m on.

After all, as a faculty member it’s part of my job to invite visitors to our lab, so I always need to see what our lab looks like from the perspective of those visitors. And when you look at it that way, the occasional dirty mug in the sink is a lot more acceptable than evidence of shaming.

Have you ever gone through an entire day, and then realized, only toward the end of the day, that all day long a particular song had been running through your head? That happened to me today.

The funny thing is that it has happened to me lots of times before. And I generally don’t realize, until the end of the day, that I have been playing the same song in my head for hours on end.

I suspect that this may be a widespread phenomenon. And I also suspect that it’s a sort of “pearl in the oyster” sort of thing.

In other words, somebody says a random phrase, or you have a particular experience, which gets a bit of remembered song lyric into your head. You don’t really take note of that initial experience, but your brain latches on to that moment, like the grain of sand in an oyster, and builds upon it.

Before you know it, the song is playing in your head. Except you don’t realize, until much later in the day, that you’ve been playing, on an endless loop, that song in your head.

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I took the entire day off. I stayed home, did all of the New York Times crossword puzzles (between Saturday and Sunday there are a lot of puzzles), binged on Netflix, raided the fridge, binged on Netflix some more, and just generally goofed off.

Toward the evening I wandered into the lab and worked for a few hours. I didn’t really get much done, but I sort of got clear in my head what I really wanted to get done.

Then I went home, fell asleep by 11pm, woke up early this morning, and headed back to the lab. By 8am I was at work, and I ended up having one of the most productive days I’ve had in years.

I tackled bugs in my software that I had been sure would be forever unsolvable. And they fell apart like tissue paper, transformed into clean working code before my eyes, because I finally had the clarity of mind to approach them from a fresh viewpoint. I dove into project reports and research descriptions that I had been procrastinating over and avoiding. And they turned out to be easy to write — fun, in fact!

I am quite certain that the events of these two days were strongly linked. The choice to deliberately take an entire day off was probably the most productive decision I could have made.

So now the creepy reality show idiot has decided to go out of his way to create a two-tiered system of healthcare. The poor, the infirm — many of the very people who voted for him, expecting something much better than they got — are the victims here.

Most people who have money, power, privilege, will be just fine. In other words, everyone he knows.

But if you aren’t the “right sort” of American — if you were not born to privilege and power, if you’re a working class citizen struggling to get by — then you won’t be covered for maternity leave, or for pre-existing conditions, or for mental health issues, or if you sustain a serious injury.

The message is extremely clear and unambiguous: If you are not a person of privilege in this country, then you are now considered a lesser human being. Your life simply isn’t important, and nobody really cares if you or your family get sick or die.

I wonder how many of the people who voted for this moron realize what he is doing to them and their children?

Friday the thirteenth
And nothing bad has happened.
Should I be worried?

In theater, the direction toward the audience is called “the fourth wall”. Most of the time, the characters on stage are not aware that we are there, watching them. Only in experimental theater and works inspired by Vaudeville do they actually look out across the footlights and acknowledge our presence.

In cinema it is rare indeed for a character to breach the fourth wall. The only person I can think of in cinema history who was able to do it well was Groucho Marx. Bugs Bunny had an easy time of it as well, but he had the superpower of being a toon.

Every time a fictional character acknowledges us, the “magic circle” of storytelling is weakened. Without this magic circle firmly in place, the entire trust relationship underlying our willing suspension of disbelief is prone to collapse.

One trick that is sometimes used in cinema is to erect an inner fourth wall. This was done rather famously in The Ring. When a nightmarish figure crawls out of a TV screen within the movie we are watching, we vicariously share the horror of a character in the story. as he experiences the unexpected collapse of the safe distance between “media” and “reality”.

As we move to more immersive media, such as virtual reality, I wonder how that will change our relationship with the fourth wall. Imagine, for example, some future where VR experience, within which we are watching a movie of The Ring. Within the movie, we see a nightmarish figure crawl out of a TV set, and we witness the mounting horror of the unfortunate character who was watching that TV set.

But then we see that same nightmarish figure crawling out of the screen that we are watching, and start to head our way. I wonder what we will think.

Journalism changes with evolving means of distribution. We have gone from the Town Crier to Newspapers to Web-based news to alerts on your phone.

With each evolution in the means of distribution, our patterns of news consumption change. This in turn changes how news is distributed.

Currently, if you get a news alert, you need to stop whatever conversation you are having in order to read and digest it. But just because delivery of news is like that now, doesn’t mean that delivery of news will need to be like that in the future.

Once wearables become ubiquitous, you and I will no longer find it necessary to interrupt our conversation in order to look at or listen to a news item. All of the information we want will appear to be floating in the air in front of us.

And that in turn will lead to interesting changes in how that news is delivered. News will no longer be packaged to be consumed during the times when we are alone, but will rather become intended source material for us to consume during our face to face conversations.

We will become used to maintaining the richness of eye contact, facial expression, body language and gesture, while also having the news of the world filter into our discussions with each other as we speak. Consequently, that news will become more granular.

At the same time, news providers will begin to provide unobtrusive means for us to navigate the news together, without interrupting our conversation. As we discuss a news feed with each other, we will continually be making cooperating decisions about how to explore that news feed together.

This will become a new kind of skill, a facility for cooperative conversational navigation of the news, which will become so ubiquitous that people won’t even realize they are doing it. Sort of like the ability to read is today — a skill that is near-universal in many parts of the world, which would seem completely astonishing to a person from a pre-literate society.

Today I wanted to suggest a direction to some students for a research project. It’s such a simple plan, I thought to myself.

So I gathered them into our conference room, and described the project, jotting down notes on the wall-sized whiteboard as a went. There was this piece and that to implement, and these people to work with, and that production schedule, because some things need to happen before others.

Soon I needed to move to another part of the whiteboard to start a new section of the description, because there was a part of the project I hadn’t thought about explaining. Then that part of the whiteboard filled up as well.

By the time I was done, my simple plan was filling a large portion of the wall-sized whiteboard. There were a lot of moving parts, and ways that they needed to fit together.

It had all seemed so simple when it was still all in my head. I guess in the real world, no plan is that simple.