Author: admin

I was showing a friend around New York City today, and we passed a shoe store named Shoegasm. She told me that she couldn’t believe there was a store with that name.

I had never heard of this store before, but that didn’t stop me from spontaneously weighing in on the subject. “You know,” I told her, “it’s not a good idea to visit this store too often.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because,” I explained, “they charge you for every time you come.”

A colleague and I were discussing programming examples that we give to our beginning students, to get them motivated. Of course you want to provide a first example that is reasonably simple, so that students can quickly get to that “aha” moment. But you don’t want it to be too simple.

Suppose, for example, you are teaching computer graphics, and your first example is drawing a square. You show them a little computer program that’s just a few lines long and say “see, here is all you need to do to draw a square!”

Ideally you have provided an example program that not only draws a square, but can also be modified in various ways to draw a rectangle, etc.

But then suppose some student asks: “What if I want to rotate my square by 10 degrees?” Too often the answer is: “Then you need to forget everything I just showed you. To make a square that can rotate, you’ll need something more complicated.”

That’s a failure mode. It means that the first program you showed them was too simple. You worked so hard to provide an accessible example, that you ended up with one that could not be generalized.

I’m not saying that providing an example for students that is simple yet generalizable is easy. It is not. But it’s worth striving for, because the generalizable example is much more interesting and enlightening for them than the simplest possible example.

I love travel, but
It seems Dorothy was right.
There’s no place like home.

I am having a very nice time watching Gotham on Netflix. As you may know, it’s the “prequel” to Batman — a tale of what transpired in the fictional city of Gotham in the years from when young Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed to when he grew into the eponymous superhero.

For me, by far the most compelling character is The Penguin. Every time Oswald Cobblepot comes on screen, his gradual transformation into Gotham’s weirdest supervillain grips me the same way Heath Ledger’s Joker gripped you when you first saw The Dark Knight.

For it is the Penguin who holds the key to the underlying dynamic of the Batman saga. Bruce Wayne may have experienced tragedy, but he is still brilliant, handsome, fabulously privileged, and psychically whole. Oswald Cobblepot is none of those things.

He is, in point of fact, that guy, the loser, the unmanly man, the nebbish who will never get the girl. Popular culture has known him by many names — William Collins, Julius Kelp, Barney Fife, Arnold Horshack and Screech Powers are just a few among many.

But Oswald Cobblepot is different, because he is the doppelgänger of Bruce Wayne. Wayne is consumed with rage at the murder of his parents, but because he is a heroic figure, he uses that rage to launch a righteous crusade to rescue Gotham itself.

Yet Cobblepot is consumed with a kind of rage that Bruce Wayne could never even begin to understand: The rage of the loser, the man who is merely ridiculous, who is sexually irrelevant, who can never be the hero.

This is a far fiercer and more dangerous kind of anger than the one that drives Batman, for it is pure existential fury. Spiritually, he is the bastard spawn of J. Alfred Prufrock and Pirate Jenny, and what could be more dangerous than that?

We may find The Penguin repulsive, but we understand the rage that fuels his power, and we cannot turn our eyes away.

We are all familiar with the concept of a “human to machine interaction”. Every time you operate a household appliance, such as a microwave oven or a washing machine, you are interacting with a machine.

But then there are other things we do that involve machines which we generally think of as “human to human” interactions. For example, talking on the telephone.

Why this is the case is not much of a mystery. The phone is, indeed, a kind of machine. Yet it successfully manages to avoid dominating our attention, thereby allowing us to focus on the other person in the conversation.

It seems to me that the nature of the machine is not what decides whether we are talking about “human to machine” or “human to human” interaction. Rather, the task itself is the deciding factor.

If I am serenading you on my guitar, while looking soulfully in your eyes, then my use of the guitar is part of a process of human to human interaction.

On the other hand, if I am sitting alone in my room, playing my guitar in order to work out a new song that I am writing, that is an example of human to machine interaction. When I am composing, as opposed to performing, my focus is on the instrument.

This generalizes to other technologies. If I am using this keyboard to write a novel, then I am in a compositional mode, which means that my use of the computer is an example of human to machine interaction. On the other hand, if you and I are having a real-time text chat, then this same computer becomes a tool for human to human interaction.

As with many things, there is no black and white here. “Pure composition” and “pure performance” are merely the opposite extremes of a continuous scale. Our use of tools will often fall somewhere between these two extremes.

Right now I am using this computer to type a daily blog post, an act which is some mixture of composition and performance. Which means I that am interacting both with this computer and with you.

There has been an enormous amount of conversation among some very smart people about the impending age of Ultron. Or shall I say Skynet. Or shall I say Colossus.

I don’t see any real evidence that robots have achieved sentience. I do see evidence that computers are becoming progressively better at mimicry. The best cutting edge chatbots now let you spend several minutes in the company of software, under the illusion that you might be talking to another human, before you realize it’s just software.

But what does any of that have to do with actual human intelligence? The ability to create puppets that mimic human behavior has nothing to do with the far deeper problem of what might actually be going on in our own minds.

It’s as though people are looking at a still life of fruit, and saying “Wow, that looks a lot like fruit!” And then they try to eat the fruit.

Am I missing something?

I’ve been having a back and forth recently with somebody on the subject of free will. It’s a tricky and extremely deep topic, and nothing I say here is likely to make a fundamental contribution to that topic, free will or not.

Yet I am intrigued by the peripheral questions that pop up around this discussion. For example, even if you posit that we each possess individual free will, and then you look closely at the various decisions we make over the course of a day, a year, a lifetime, it’s pretty clear most of the choices we make in our lives are not really examples of free will.

Rather, those “choices” are usually determined by the forcing functions of culture, psychology, biology and circumstance. If there is true free will, it’s going to be found in the small interstices between those forcing functions.

This pattern reminds me a bit of discussions around DNA. Genetically, we are all 99.9% the same. The entire difference between your DNA and mine comes down to only about one tenth of one percent of our total respective genetic coding, no matter who we are.

So to be “human” is to be extremely similar to all other humans. It’s just that we, as the humans in question, are exquisitely attuned to those tiny differences. We forget that we are all nearly identical in the scheme of things, and therefore we focus on the subtle ways that we are different.

In fact, the stuff of our darkest fears often comes down to the spectre of genetic variation outside the norm, like the tragically mutating hero of David Cronenberg’s “The Fly”, or the horrifying creature in John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Both are vividly gruesome nightmares, right out of Freud’s theory of the uncanny.

Maybe there is something similar at work with free will. Yes, 99.9% of what we say and do is culturally, psychologically or biologically determined. Yet within the tiny bit of remaining wiggle room is where we might find the creation of art, novels, poetry, wondrous new technologies.

But to step too far out of that small range of variation is to begin to drift away from the social contract that connects us. If you wander too far from the tribal campfire, you might enter a place of madness and wild violence, a place where you begin to lose your essential humanity.

So maybe “free will” is a misnomer. Nothing is really free. What we call free will is necessarily limited by our own conscience, by our fundamental need to remain connected to our fellow humans. And maybe that’s a very good thing.

I first read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat while traveling around Europe in my younger days. It had a profound effect on me for several reasons.

For one thing, I became aware for the first time how fragile is this thing called reality, this thing we take for granted. Our brains are constantly creating the reality we perceive. It’s a very active and complex process, and a lot of things can go wrong.

Oliver Sacks, who died today, was the first person who truly made me see what wondrous and astonishing creatures we really are.

For another thing, he showed me a different way of thinking about science. Rather than a cold, clinical “search for facts”, he showed that it can be a compassionate, human centered enterprise, suffused at its core with ethical values and respect for the humanity and dignity of others.

Through the years, this was my go-to book for giving to students and young people. Every once in a while, I would meet one of these people, perhaps ten or twelve years later, and they would invariably tell me what a profound effect the book had had on their own life.

Much later, I had the pleasure and privilege of becoming friends with Dr. Sacks. In person he turned out to be just as warm and insightful as I had imagined.

But in addition, for all his unfailing graciousness, he was surprisingly unsentimental. He did not seem to suffer fools or egotists gladly, and he was quite willing to speak his mind when he saw hypocrisy.

I’ve always thought that in a truly fair world, a few exceptional people should get a free pass, a “get out of jail free” card that lets them live forever, continuing to bless our world with their genius and insight.

I put William Shakespeare on this list, and maybe Jane Austen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and a few others. Oliver Sacks is definitely on it.

Sometime in the last year or so, New York’s Grand Central Station lost its one and only book store. I didn’t think much of this at the time, because when I use public transportation out of the city, I generally go from Penn Station or the Port Authority.

But yesterday I saw that the two book stores at Port Authority (both owned by the same people), had gone out of business. Their entrances were boarded up, with signs telling the names of the stores that would soon be opening in their place.

At first I took this as a very dark omen. “Alas,” I said to myself, “Americans no longer read!” We are all so focused on movies, TV shows, computer games and social networking, that reading is becoming a vanishing art.

But on reflection, I’m not so sure. Reading isn’t going away, and commuters are still reading on the go. It’s just that reading is increasingly being done on other media. The electronic economy of literature is push aside the atoms-based one, as eReaders, iPads, and SmartPhones replace paper and ink.

After all, it costs a lot to rent a store at the New York Port Authority. As physical books become progressively less dominant as the reading platform of choice, selling physical books to commuters becomes a less viable value proposition. This year just happens to be the year when the economies of this transition have reached a crucial tipping point.

For a while now, the writing has been on the wall. Or, should I say, on the screen.

This morning I was having trouble remembering a sequence of days of the week, so I tried substituting an octave of musical notes (Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do). My theory was that, unlike days of the week, I generally find it easy to remember musical chords, since they are associated with particular sounds.

Since I grew up playing the piano, I thought of the white keys, where an octave of the major diatonic scale is CDEFGABC. So I tried using C for Sunday, D for Monday, all the way up to B for Saturday.

But that just didn’t feel right. And it took me a while to figure out why.

Then I realized that practically speaking, my week starts on Monday, not Sunday. So, for example, if a meeting or class is scheduled for three times a week, it’s going to be Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A meeting or class held twice a week is liable to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Suddenly it all clicked into place: The major chord CEG for Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the minor third interval DF for Tuesday and Thursday, with A for Saturday or B for Sunday added to make a sixth or seventh chord.

When I think of a sequence of days in this way, it becomes easy to remember it, as a chord or a melody — the music of my week.