Author: admin

Eighth Street, last shoe store,
Going out of business sale.
End of an era.

It’s amazing to think that the Space Age is 60 years old today, this being the 60th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik 1. Although it seems that nobody is thinking that much about outer space anymore, other than in science fiction movies and TV shows.

We seem to have shifted our gaze inward toward computer simulated possibilities, rather than outward toward the possibilities of the Universe itself. I’m not sure that this is a good thing.

This week we will be publicly premiering a theater piece in which the actors appear as digital avatars. It’s all live performance, with actors and audience members in the same room and in their actual positions. But everything is seen digitally.

Looking at this one way, each actor is a puppeteering digital puppet, which just happens to be the same size and in the same location as the actor herself. Looked at another way, the actor is simply wearing an elaborate digital costume.

So it seems that performance in VR raises some interesting definitional questions. For example, what is the boundary between puppetry and costume?

This is certainly not an entirely new question. After all, when Sweetums first showed up in Jim Henson’s The Frog Prince in 1971, many children were undoubtedly asking themselves the same question: Is that a puppet like Kermit, or is that a guy in a costume like the Cowardly Lion?

Virtual Reality theater ups the game a bit, because the “costume” in question can take on surreal qualities. Take for example, a VR performer dressed up in a digital ostrich costume. Unlike such a costume in the physical world, in VR the character’s knees can bend backwards.

Maybe there is no good answer here. We might need to come up with a different vocabulary to discuss the relatively new realm of VR theater.

Today a tragic mass murder in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile so many Americans are enduring terrible suffering in Puerto Rico.

Meanwhile our State Department is being slapped down for the “transgression” of trying to avoid war with North Korea — an avoidable war that would certainly cause the horrific deaths of a vast number of innocent people.

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile…

Meanwhile.

I am overwhelmed with sorrow.

October comes awake to weave its spell of ancient darkness on the morn
The eldritch sounds of autumn whisper soft as rumors of a wildling born
All about the forest creatures listen for a melody enthralling
We shall sing the ancient songs, for now at last October has come calling

Cast your spell about the scarlet oak, encircle thrice and thrice again
Spirits gathered here have come from far beyond the simple dreams of men
Dance within the hidden place and laugh to see the sacred tower falling
Remember well the ancient songs, for now at last October has come calling

Yesterday Stephan’s comment made a valid point about the sense in which mathematical notation is one dimensional. I think the disagreement, if there is one, is about which semantic level to focus on.

There are statements that are certainly true, yet not at all useful in particular contexts. For example, it is certainly true that humans are made of atoms, but that fact doesn’t provide very much insight about why Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy.

Similarly, I think the statement “all mathematical statements can e expressed as a one dimensional string,” while certainly true, is not useful in most contexts. Clearly it is useful at the meta-level, where Gödel’s incompleteness theorem resides.

But when you are using mathematical notation to communicate some concept or relationship to a fellow human being, you are rarely operating on that meta-level. In such cases, which by far the great majority of cases, you want to maximize for readability and clarity of thought, and your math notation should ideally express how multiple dimensions of ideas interact with each other.

After all, it is certainly true that if I send you a digital photograph of my cat, the transmitted data can be represented by a one dimensional array of pixel values. And as Stephan points out, such a representation is perfectly adequate for performing a Fourier Transform, digital convolution, or various other mathematical operations.

Yet if we insist on keeping things at that level of interpretation, you may never realize that you are looking at a picture of my cat.

I was talking today with a student about mathematics. The student was interested in new ways of using gesture to create mathematical notation.

Since I am interested in augmented reality, I suggested that perhaps we can try to move mathematical notation off of the flat page, and into three dimensions.

The student protested that mathematical notation is actually one dimensional. I could see where he was coming from. After all, everything you can write down in math can be expressed as a single text string — which is indeed one dimensional.

I disagreed, and as an example, I wrote the following formula on the whiteboard:

x2 + y2
r2

“You see?” I said. “Sure this can be expressed as a single text string, but that doesn’t capture what we mean. When we look at this expression, we see something two dimensional: We read the addition on top horizontally, while the relationship between the numerator and the denominator of the division is expressed vertically.”

Then I took a closer look at the expression I had just written. “Wait a second,” I said, “this is actually three dimensional. Each superscripted ‘2’ is really orthogonal to everything else. By making that text smaller and shifted up and to the right, we are essentially conveying the existence of an operation (raising to the power of 2) that is orthogonal to both the addition and the division.”

It dawned on me that when we write in mathematical notation, we are actually packing a lot of dimensions onto that flat page. For example, subscripts represent yet another dimension, orthogonal to all the others. Suddenly, the idea of writing mathematical expressions in three dimensional space seemed a whole lot more interesting.

I spent much of yesterday talking to people at the MIT Media Lab, and then much of today talking to people at the Bose Corporation. In both places, we spend most of our time talking about possibilities for the future.

Of course those possibilities are not all roses and sunlight. After all, as our access to ever advancing technologies increases, there is a concomitant increase in opportunities for invasions of privacy, identity theft, and other social ills we might not yet even have words for.

As with all technological advancements, with great power comes great responsibility (thank you, uncle Ben). With that idea firmly in mind, while we did discuss the very real potential pitfalls of advancing communication technology, our conversations mostly steered toward the positive.

People are marvelous and terrible creatures. We humans have so much potential for either good or evil, and things can go very wrong. Yet I find myself siding with that great observer of human nature, Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Continuing from yesterday — with many thanks to a extremely zealous reader…

The larger problem with Trump’s politically motivated travel ban is not that it denies individuality. The larger problem is that his ludicrous version of “policy” is taking the place of the serious work of screening for very real terrorists.

My message to Trump supporters who enjoy pretending that their Reality Show star hero playing to his base is engaged in some sort of actual policy: Try not to wallow overly long in your own deceptive feeling of self importance or, worse, self defined rationality.

Banning the populations of entire countries, which is completely irrelevant to the very real and serious problem of national security, while refusing to engage in the difficult work of screening for truly dangerous individuals, is simply irresponsible.

Distracting everybody with a sideshow while not screening for the actual people who have declared, usually while holding severed heads, that they want to destroy America or some other country is a textbook definition of suicide. Demanding that others join you in the mass suicide is called mass murder.

What does it mean to ban travel to our country from entire nations, regardless of individual identity? It means, at core, that there are no individuals. There is no scholar, there is no artist, there is no musician or scientist.

The greatest gift you have as a human being is the ability to tell yourself that your individual life matters, that you have something unique to give, that you are more than simply a tiny dot in a random swarm. Yet it is now the policy of the United States that none of that is true.

Your belief that you are an individual is, apparently, an illusion. There is no promising musician, no aspiring scientist, no brilliant architect, no graceful athlete or brave political dissident. There is only the Puerto Rican, the Somalian, the Jew.

Whoever you may have thought you were, we now know that you are not an individual, you are merely a faceless and undifferentiated member of a tribe. The world will no longer make the mistake of conferring upon you the dignity of individuality.

Or at least, as of yesterday, that is the official policy of the United States of America.