Author: admin

Dumbledore: An inspiring teacher. In the end it is revealed that he has always been in love with Grindelwald.

Brundledoor: An unsettling creature. In the end it is revealed that he is part Telepod hatchway.

Mumblecore: An independent feature. In the end it is revealed that there is no ending, because we ran out of money.

If someone told me
I’d need to write a haiku
I’m not sure I could

I was having a conversation last night with an old friend of my mom’s. He was telling me how much more difficult it has become to drive as he has been getting older, because of challenges with his vision.

It’s not that he has any trouble seeing the road. Not at all. It’s more that he needs to wear glasses for near vision — first bifocals and now trifocals — so that he can focus on both the road and the dashboard.

I was very sympathetic. Driving is already difficult enough. It’s even more difficult when you need to tilt your head in just the right way so that you can clearly see both the world outside and the speedometer on your dash.

I told him that they ought to make an overlay for the dashboard that changes its focus — so that you can see everything on your dash clearly using your distance vision. Not corrective lenses for the driver, but rather corrective lenses for the car.

After all, why should you need to wear glasses, when it would all work so much better if your car wore glasses instead?

This morning I was curious to see whether there was such a thing as an “Erdős-Bacon number” — the sum of one’s Erdős number and one’s Bacon number. Sure enough, there is a Wikipedia page about it.

I would have assumed that I don’t have an Erdős–Bacon number, since I’ve never appeared in a Hollywood film, and therefore don’t have a Bacon number. But apparently the rules are relaxed for Erdős–Bacon numbers, to include any shared role in a film. For example, Ken Goldberg is said to qualify in the “Bacon” part of an Erdős–Bacon number because he was a co-writer of a documentary in which an actor appeared who also worked with Kevin Bacon on another film.

So by that definition I have an Erdős–Bacon number of five: I’ve co-authored with Jack Schwartz, who has co-authored with Donald Newman, who co-authored with Paul Erdős. And I share a film credit with Jeff Bridges, who also appeared on a different film with Kevin Bacon.

According to the Wikipedia, the only person in history with a lower Erdős–Bacon number than mine is Carl Sagan, and I’m ok with that.

Although I am probably not going to turn down any offers to work on a film with Kevin Bacon. 🙂

I was at a party this evening with some people who have no connection at all with the work that our lab is doing in “future reality”. But of course, like everyone, they are acutely aware of the changes in everyday life wrought by the recent succession of information technologies, from the Web to Google to Facebook to SmartPhones to Twitter and beyond.

We found ourselves engaging in what I have come to think of as “the great debate”: Are these advances in information technology merely iterations in a state of being that will always be pretty much the same — humans having social interactions with other humans — or will there come a time when some sort of “cultural singularity” occurs?

When having such conversations, I am fond of telling people that two hundred years ago, in Jane Austen’s time, the idea that you could converse with a person who is somewhere else on the planet would have seemed like black magic. Now, of course, the telephone has been in existence for so long that we have trouble realizing how truly remarkable it is.

But what about two hundred years in the future? When we no longer need to perform a conscious act to look something up on-line — when merely the thought of a topic will flood information from the Cloud directly into our brain — will that fundamentally change how we think, and therefore the fabric of our social reality?

Or will we stay pretty much the same as we’ve always been, and wonder what all the fuss was about? After all, it may very well turn out that my great great great grand nephew, using futuristic brain implant technology in the year 2215, will mostly choose to download cat videos.

The seasons do not know us. We are far beneath their majestic existence.

We scurry about, living our self-important little human lives, believing ourselves to be the center of the Universe. But the seasons do not care.

Summer turns, ever so gracefully, into Autumn. The air changes, and so changes the world. Everything in nature braces itself for winter.

We may believe that the seasons belong to us, because we have given them names. But the reality is far stranger and more wonderful.

For the seasons are like gods. The are vast, and they fill the Earth with their beauty.

I don’t know about you, but I am very much enjoying the wondrous sight of impetuous Theros gracefully giving way to the regal reign of Phthinoporon.

When you’re trying to explain to a student a subject you know very well, there can be an enormous temptation to start out with “It’s easy. You just…” You must resist this temptation.

The problem is that for you, if it’s a subject that you know inside out, everything feels this way. After all, you can’t even remember a time when this stuff wasn’t easy.

So you start giving what you think will be a simple explanation. Except that part way through, you realize that it’s only simple because there’s something else that’s also simple, which you’ll need to explain first.

And then you realize that that simple thing relies on two other very simple things. And so on.

It’s not that any part of the explanation is complicated. It’s more that when you know something like the back of your hand, you forget just how many different steps you’ve gone through to attain that level of knowledge.

This may be one of the trickier things about teaching: The better you know something, the harder it is for you to remember that it’s not really easy at all, for somebody who doesn’t already know it.

Today was not, technically speaking, the first day of class. My semester started last week, but I was in Dublin, so I needed to give my introductory lecture remotely.

But today was the first real class, the one where we dove in deep and explored the wonderful connection between mathematics and imagery, inventing on the fly to spin equations into animations.

There is something completely joyous about computer graphics, with its unique flavor of rational thought impelled by a search for beauty. There are few other endeavors that encompass so many different ways of thinking, all at the same time.

Learning this field is a privilege, a kind of sacred knowledge. It feels wonderful to pass that knowledge on to a new generation of fellow seekers.

Here’s something that is obvious intellectually, but that nobody ever seems to understand emotionally: Human experience is never objective. It is always calibrated to some norm.

For example, people who love rock and roll often think that classical music lovers are crazy, because they only listen to weird quiet music without a beat. To a rock’n’roller, classical music sounds like nothing is happening.

And of course the obverse is true as well. To a lover of classical music, rock sounds boring. There is little chromatic structure, loads of repetition, and not nearly enough dynamic range.

What’s interesting here is that each is thinking that the other is missing everything that is essential. The confusion is mutual.

This happens in so many spheres of life. Religious people believe that atheists are missing out on everything that is spiritually essential, and atheists believe the same about religious people.

Meat eaters believe that vegans are living in an aesthetically impoverished world, reasoning that a vegan diet is a strict subset of an omnivorous one. Yet vegans know, from experience, that there are vast empires of flavor which the meat eater does not even know about.

The way our tastes are calibrated strongly influences our view of the universe. Even if we know better on an intellectual level, our emotions give us the false impression that everyone else’s experience of the world is a sadly impoverished subset of our own.

She was in a state of distress. It was true that the One was gathering information, but he was using methods that were slow, and very strange to her. She could feel the contours of his mind as he absorbed this new knowledge, his mind that was growing more powerful with every passing day.

Yet the days were running out. She knew there would soon be decisions to make, although she did not yet know what they were. The more information he had now, the better it would be.

But another being had intruded on his studies, and this meant trouble. The other being would return soon, and would bring others. Fortunately she could sense that the information needed was in the mind of this other being.

She must help the One prepare for their next encounter. There was little time.