Author: admin

When the Web first came out in 1993, very few people could have predicted Google, Facebook, YouTube or Wikipedia. The Web’s radically different means of distribution of information changed not only the answers to how we communicate, but the very questions.

Similarly, when the SmartPhone arrived in 2007, very few people could have predicted Lyft or Airbnb, Instagram or SnapChat. The SmartPhone changed digital usage patterns so radically, obsoleted so many long held assumptions about information scarcity, that the very economy itself was transformed.

Soon, when the wearables become ubiquitous in about four years from now, something analogous will transpire. But this change won’t just transform our information world — it will transform our physical world.

Once we have been freed from the tyranny of the screen, our digitally augmented interactions with that physical world will change radically. After we have stopped peering into display screens, we will once again focus our attention on our actual surroundings. The Internet of Things will have begun in earnest.

Pretty much everything around us will become robotically actuated, somewhat the way automobiles are already becoming robots. We will take it for granted that furniture will arrange itself at our bidding, that the lights and sound in our houses will adjust dynamically.

Our children will look back with amusement on those bygone days when their parents needed to leave the living room, go into the kitchen, and open a refrigerator door, just to have a beer — in that long ago time before unobtrusive robots carried such objects around for us.

After all, our children will be living in an age when such things are no longer even thought about. It will all seem so obvious to them: You don’t go to the beer — the beer comes to you.

Today at our lab we were comparing the performance of the Samsung S8 phone to the Galaxy Note 4. As it happens, my first SmartPhone was a Galaxy Note 4.

I only got it because it worked with the newly emerging GearVR, and in the second half of 2014 I wanted our lab to do untethered shared virtual reality. Back then, sticking OptiTrack motion capture marker on GearVRs was the easiest way.

Now, three years later, we are still using the GearVR for this, except now the OptiTracks have been replaced by Vive trackers (only available in the last few months), which are a lot less expensive than OptiTracks. Of course we’ve upgraded to the latest model SmartPhone — the S8.

The S8 is vastly faster than the Note 4 was. Which means everything works a lot better — graphics rendering, character movement, position tracking — all of the qualities that make for a good and immersive shared VR experience.

Today I was trying to convey to my students just how quickly all of this technology is advancing, thanks to good old Moore’s Law. “You know how a year is around seven dog years?” I said.

The students nodded. They all knew about that.

“Well,” I explained, “a dog year is basically around seven computer years. Which means that a year is around forty nine computer years.”

“In other words,” I continued, trying to put it into terms that would resonate with computer science students, “a dog year is the square root of a computer year.”

During World War II, the collaboreurs in the Vichy government held positions of power, while members of the French Resistance were hunted down. Yet after the war, the situation reversed. If you had participated in the Vichy government in any way, the best path to salvaging your reputation lay in convincing people that you had secretly belonged to the Resistance.

I see a rough parallel emerging in America today. People who are currently collaborating in the process of callously dismantling so much that is beautiful and kind and noble about this country will one day claim that they had actually been part of the resistance. They will quite likely protest that they were resisting from the inside.

Yet there are a few individuals fortunate enough to have indisputable evidence — right now — that they remained patriots through these dark times. Those individuals will be able to prove that they stayed true to our nation’s ideals, and had had the presence of mind to understand what the American flag really stands for when our nation is at its best.

Currently there is one certain way that such patriotic individual Americans can be identified, because (conveniently enough) they are being identified by name. Yesterday Stephen Curry became one of those individuals.

I was talking to an old friend this evening who, like me, teaches at New York University. We were comparing notes about the incredible energy and enthusiasm among our students.

She was telling me how disheartening it is to see that people who are somewhat older don’t seem to have that energy and fire. It really does seem to be a trait of the young.

I told her that it was exactly this quality of younger people that makes me love teaching. But somehow that didn’t seem like a complete answer. Why, I wondered to myself, do younger people have this quality?

And then I had it. “When you are young,” I told my friend, “you understand that everything is new.” She agreed completely.

After we said goodnight, I kept thinking about our conversation. The challenge, I found myself thinking, is to maintain that understanding as one gets older — the ability to see that everything is new.

Supposed you were given the opportunity, through some metaphysical event, to have dinner with William Shakespeare. Would you?

I know many people who would say, without even needing to think about it, “Hell yes!” After all, a conversation with the greatest writer in the history of the English language is a sort of dream come true.

But what if Shakespeare, the actual person, were to end up deviating dramatically from Shakespeare the written presence? What if he should turn out to be boorish — or even worse, boring?

Would you rather know this, or would you regret having discovered such an uncomfortable truth? Would you end up wishing that your dreams of greatness had remained forever unsullied?

I don’t think there is any right or wrong answer to this question. Yet I suspect that how you choose to answer this question might say a lot about your particular view of reality.

I used to use a very ambitious approach to computer algorithms that create structure. If I wanted to, for example, construct a level surface from volumetric data, I would carefully build a coherent structure as the algorithm ran, maintaining order at every step.

This would generally require some pretty gnarly code, with lots of dynamic data pointers and intricate logic in the inner loop. In a way it was all quite beautiful, but also fragile and difficult to maintain. A single ill considered change to the code could bring the whole delicate structure crashing down.

I notice that these days I take a different approach, which might be called mess/cleanup. I run a first pass without worrying too much about structure. In that pass I record just enough info along the way so that I can do the rest in a second pass.

That second pass is where I build all the actual structure, using the info I’d recorded earlier. The result ends up being the same, but the process is very different.

Doing it this way, I find that my code is much smaller and more compact, and a lot easier to read. There are fewer errors, and debugging is a piece of cake.

So it seems that a little messiness is a useful thing when you’re writing tricky algorithms. Not too much of a mess, but just enough.

As I began to teach my graduate class this evening, I remarked that it had been a very long day, and that I had only managed to get through it without complete burn-out because I had taken time to do some programming.

Many of the students laughed, so I thought it would be useful to explain. So many things in the course of your day are beyond your control, I said, including incoming emails, looming deadlines, and other people’s behavior at meetings, to mention just a few.

But when you program, that’s just between you and yourself. It’s a world that you yourself create, and that you can steer into any direction you want.

One of the students objected on very reasonable grounds. “What about bugs you can’t catch?” he asked.

I explained that I’m talking about programming you do to help you relax. Nothing outrageously complex, no giant code base or tricky mathematical algorithm that you don’t completely understand.

Rather, I relax by picking a programming task that is manageable, something challenging enough to be interesting, but easily doable within an afternoon. Comfort coding, if you will.

Once the students understood what I was talking about, they agreed. Everyone does it within their own domain. The chef who makes a simple dish to relax, the songwriter who tosses off a little ditty between sets, we all have our own version of comfort coding.

When I think of a future where cars are self-driving, the vision my mind conjures up is of interchangeable pods that pick you up whenever you need a ride, and then drop you off at your destination. Essentially it will be like Lyft, but with robot drivers. Or in other words, an extremely granular form of public transportation.

As I watched the traffic weaving through Manhattan this weekend, I started wondering how traffic flow would work in that future world. Would we still have a form of turn-taking roughly equivalent to what is done now with traffic lights?

I remember visiting Mumbai a number of years ago, and being amazed at how traffic worked there. In most parts of the city there were no traffic lights. At intersections cars would just weave through each other, east/west traffic seamlessly flowing through north/south traffic.

Through all of this pedestrians would cross the street and cars would simply steer around them. To my Western eyes it all looked incredibly dangerous, but the entire time I was there I never saw a traffic accident.

Given the fact that self-driving cars will actually form a single cybernetic network, that is simply communicating with itself, it seems to me that the Mumbai method might work very well. If this sort of traffic pattern can be sustained by a sea of human drivers, each needing to guess what the other will do, surely a single self-communicating computer network can do the same — and probably much better.

This weekend in NYC was home to the Jump Into VR Fest. The schedule was filled with presentations and panels all about virtual reality, and of course there was a generous sampling of the product on hand.

This weekend in NYC was also home to the Brooklyn Antequarian Book Fair. The schedule was filled with presentations and panels all about old books, and of course there was a generous sampling of the product on hand.

I love the fact that these two events were in this city at the same time. And I found myself wondering how many people would be interested in going to both. How many people care passionately about old books and also about virtual reality?

Then I remembered that I was pretty much missing both festivals because my colleagues and I are hard at work on following our passion: We are constructing a virtual reality experience, based upon a book that was published in 1865.

I’m a man without convictions. — Boy George

Maybe it’s there is a good side to the fact that our president is more or less random. He doesn’t follow any accepted idea of right or wrong. Instead, he aligns himself with whatever side seems to be following the prevailing winds of power in the political moment.

Recently he has made a point of supporting the Dreamers, and therefore has aligned himself with the Democrats. This is not really a stretch for a political player with no actual convictions.

After all, the Dreamers stand accused of committing the “crime” of being little children when their parents came to America illegally. So here we have a generation of educated, hard working young people with flawless legal records, completely devoted to the American dream.

They are “criminals” in essentially the same way that you are a criminal if you are a six year old child riding in the back of the car that your father drives to rob a bank. You’ve really got to be a hard-ass to blame these young people for stuff that happened when they were little kids.

The fascinating thing about our president is that he totally gets this. He has a powerful sense of self-preservation. And therefore he understands that if he were to align himself with the creepy right-wing fanatics on this issue, the entire world would stand appalled that the President of the United States did not stand up for law abiding hard working young people who, by the way, are contributing to our economy.

Our president doesn’t have much of a sense of right or wrong, in the usual definition of those terms. But he sure does seem to have a feeling for not being on the losing side.