Author: admin

Three Coins in the Fountainhead

Three young women travel to Rome to find romance, but only one of them is found worthy of true love, from an objectivist perspective.

Typhoid Mary Poppins

A magical nanny visits a dysfunctional family in London and employs her unique brand of lifestyle to improve the family’s dynamic, before inadvertently killing them all through a disease that would have been completely avoidable with proper hygiene.

A Clockwork Orange is the New Black

In a dystopian future, Alex and his Droogs find themselves unprepared for life in a woman’s prison.

A Hard Days Night of the Living Dead

Four lovable and musically gifted young lads from Liverpool turn into flesh eating zombies, infecting everyone they meet and changing the world forever.

The Rules of the Game of Thrones

A glimpse into bourgeois life in France at the onset of World War II, as the rich and their poor servants meet up at a French chateau, and then kill each other.

Before Midnight Express

Nine years after Jesse and Celine first met, they encounter each other again, before being caught smuggling drugs and thrown into a Turkish prison for the next nine years.

An American in Paris Texas

Gene Kelly plays a romantic soul, looking for love while trying to figure out how to dance to the twanging laconic music of Ry Cooder. Special appearance by Harry Dean Stanton.

When I am lecturing and I discuss possible future interfaces in which people use glasses or contact lenses or perhaps eye implants to see virtualized versions of reality, I often get variants on the following question: Isn’t this all taking us away from reality?

My standard answer is that we already live in virtual reality. Every communication technology ever invented is a form of virtual reality. It’s just that after a while we become used to any given artificial mode of communication, and then we relabel it as reality.

But I think there is a more specific principle at work here: “Natural” is not really about the absence of technological intervention, or even about how much or how little technology is involved.

Rather, there is only sensible question to ask about how “natural” a technology is: How well does it fit our current state of human biological evolution?

Humans have evolved over millions of years toward a particular kind of brain and a particular kind of body. This biological evolution, which occurs over extremely long periods of time, has essentially been at a fixed point throughout the entire history of human civilization (an extremely tiny span of time in evolutionary terms).

So we are pretty much stuck with these brains and these bodies. Of course we can perform technological interventions to make them operate differently. For example, written language is a technology that allows humans to transfer knowledge to other humans who will not even be born until centuries later. This remarkable technology works only because it is consistent with the capabilities of our human biological brains — which are essentially the same brains that the Cro Magnon possessed 35,000 years ago.

Similarly, automobiles and musical instruments are designed to be operated by human brains and bodies. We don’t need to change our biological self to play the instrument or to drive the car (nor could we). Rather, we design the car or the piano to work with our existing brains and bodies.

It is not our brains or bodies themselves that evolve over time, but rather the technologies that we create to work with them. So I would argue that a “natural” interface is one that works well with this current biological fixed point in the evolution of our species, and therefore can be gracefully and widely adapted by our species.

It makes no difference how “weird” a technology might have seemed in earlier times. At some point in the past, before their invention, a car or a telephone might have seemed completely alien to the humans of that earlier era.

And so, if it turns out that humans some day end up using computerized lens implants, and that such a technology meshes well with our biological nature, then that will be a natural technology. Whether that technology would have been seen as natural by a previous generation is ultimately irrelevant.

After having worked out a numerical expression for 2016 yesterday from the digits 1…9 just by intuition, and then seeing Paul’s very cool count-down version, I decided, true to one of my recent posts in these pages, to write a program.

The required code turned out to be surprisingly small. The below Javascript program computes 1…9 arithmetic expressions for the years 2000 through 2030, in all cases that use at most a + – or * between the digits.

for (year = 2000 ; year <= 2030 ; year++)
for (N = 1 << 16 ; N ; N--) {
   s = '1';
   for (i = 2 ; i <= 9 ; i++)
      s += (n = N >> 2*i-4 & 3) ? (n<2 ? '+' : n<3 ? '-' : '*') + i : i; 
   if (year == eval(s))
      console.log(year + ' ' + s);
}

A small variation in this program would generate all the "count-down" versions. Interestingly, it turns out that there are just about twice as many count-up solutions as count-down solutions.

Doing this exercise made me realize that what I really want is a programming language that would let me describe such patterns very simply, and then ask questions like: "Which of those patterns adds to 2016?"

Happy 2016!!!

Memories, like leaves
From a calendar, float by
And then drift away

There is much talk these days about the future of Virtual/Augmented Reality being a lightweight pair of glasses that will just be part of our everyday lives. I have been guilty of such talk myself. 🙂

Of course, even people who work on Virtual Reality still think about tangible objects in the physical world. For example, when I visited Facebook / Oculus recently with some colleagues, we were each given, as a souvenir, a cool drinking glass with the Oculus logo etched into it.

As it happens, one of the other people in our group couldn’t attend. Our host, seeing how much I liked those drinking glasses, gave the extra one to me.

So I ended up flying back to NY with two of these in my carry-on backpack. I can attest that they are very well made, and make an excellent matched set. I find myself using them every day. Below you can see them as they are today in my real life kitchen.

This means I may very well be the first person in history to visit Facebook and walk out with a fully-functional pair of Oculus glasses.

Today I got an idea for a new variant on an old game: Edible chess.

The basic idea is that each chess piece would be made of something yummy, like chocolate. The pawns would just be ordinary chocolate, the knights and bishops something fancier, maybe with almond or truffle filling, and the rooks fancier still, with the really good stuff reserved for the kings and queens.

The only rule would be that when you take a piece, you need to eat it. I don’t think kids would mind playing by those rules.

Needless to say, there should be a variant for older players, with the almond, fruit or truffle filling replaced by something a little more intoxicating. I, for one, would not mind getting a set for the holidays with a theme of Islay single malt Scotch.

I was having dinner with my mom last night, and our conversation came around to the question of topics for which opinions are particularly sensitive. Such hot button topics include somebody’s lover, somebody’s child, and somebody’s religion.

If you and your friend are discussing such a topic, their opinion is not really open for debate, even if you think it is. If the subject comes up and you find yourself tempted to disagree, it is probably best to just change the subject.

This all reminded my mother of an old Yiddish saying. It doesn’t sound nearly as cool in English (for one thing, it no longer rhymes). But I think the meaning remains intqct:

“When two people are sharing a pillow, don’t get between them.”

One of the questions you ask yourself when you do anything that involves programming computers, is when to write a computer program, and when to just do things manually.

Suppose, for example, you need to put a list of names in alphabetical order. If there are only five names, it’s easiest just to move them around in your text editor. But if there are a million names, you definitely want to use a sorting program. Somewhere between those numbers there is a crossover point.

For tasks as common as sorting, you usually don’t need to do any coding — somebody has most likely done that for you. But there are many cases where nobody has written a program for you. And then you have a choice to make.

How do you decide when a situation calls for writing a computer program? I used to think this was a question that called for cool headed and dispassionate logic.

But now I realize that there is usually another factor to consider: Programming is fun! Even if it takes longer to do something by writing a program, I might decide to write a program anyway. After all, something can take longer, yet still make the day go faster.

On the other hand, it might be interesting to come up with a real solution to the question of when to solve a problem with code, as opposed to brute force. I think I might just have an algorithm…

Herbert Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” in 1864, after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Darwin himself is often mistakenly cited as the author of this iconic phrase, which I suppose is an example of one sort of Darwinian principle at work.

As I was walking down the street today, engaged in the awkward and clumsy task of using my cell phone to find an open bank in my neighborhood, I was acutely aware of the sort of weird dance I was doing. On the one hand I needed to look down at the virtual world on my phone, so I could see what branches were open, and how to get to them. On the other hand, I needed to make sure, back here in the physical world, that I wasn’t about to walk into another pedestrian.

Pretty soon this sort of interaction will be replaced by a different one: Questions like “How do I walk to the nearest open bank branch?” will become less awkward, because you will just see the optimal direction to walk. It will be floating in front of you, visually integrated with your physical reality.

You won’t be in danger of walking into another pedestrian because other pedestrians will stay safely in your line of sight, where they belong. But this will lead to some interesting design questions, which will be addressed by apps on your phone.

Those apps will start to compete for the space in front of our eyes. Each app will have its own visual solution to the question of how to show us where to walk, without being too intrusive or confusing, or requiring too much of our attention or cognition.

I suspect that eventually one visual paradigm will win, pushing out the others, just as the clean uncluttered look of the Google search page once pushed out the many competing search interface paradigms in the first decade of the Web.

And I also suspect that the winning design will simply be the one that satisfies the Darwinian condition of being the least “in your face”. It will be a case of survival of the least annoying.