Because the future has just started
(innocent)
you, before you knew
what you wish you did not know,
now that you know it
(jellyfish)
such a beautiful
bright colorful way to stop
enjoying the sea
(kindness)
what we notice most
when we don’t get it, and least
when we don’t give it
(love)
the thing we want most
is the thing, strangely enough,
we least understand
(mine)
the saddest of words,
bringer of wars, destroyer.
see also: yours, ours
(experience)
what teaches us to
recognize our mistakes the
next time we make them
(fun)
it is what you have
when you’re not thinking at all
about what you have
(god)
a way to avoid
responsibility for
choosing to be good
(human)
our name for any
living creature in which we
recognize ourselves
(chance)
what you make happen
when you’re not aware you are
making things happen
(desire)
wanting it even
more, precisely because you
don’t want to want it
you, beholding it,
created it: this thing that
got stuck in your eye
a path from worries
about college to worries
about collagen
I was designing a logo the other day. The process involved writing a small computer program, while putting a number of variables into it to control things like line thickness, spacing, proportions between the various elements, and so forth.
Once I did that, tuning the parameters involved a mix of two kinds of thinking: (1) What looks good to me, and (2) what message am I trying to tell to others? In this case, I was going for a particular balance between formal and casual, homespun and elegant, harmonious and striking.
At the end of such a process, there is, traditionally, a single result, which everyone will see. But now that I’ve been working on sharable virtual realities, I’m wondering whether a single result is too limiting.
Maybe a logo — or any other designed object — should ideally look different to everyone, morphing itself somewhat in response to the tastes of each beholder. After all, the communication of any design — or any message for that matter — is an interaction between two participants: The sender of the message and the receiver of that message.
If my intention is to convey to you a message with a certain degree of warmth or sophistication, of casual friendliness or lighthearted seduction, why shouldn’t the system that conveys my message take your tastes and preferences into account?
Perhaps, in a virtualized world where we can each see our own custom view of the objects around us, there should be at least two stages of design: (1) The decisions made by the object’s creator, expressing an aesthetic intention, and (2) the decisions made by a software agent tuned to each observer, which renders that designed object in a way best suited to that observer.
Now that I’ve started playing with the Gear VR, I’m beginning to accept that virtual reality does not need to follow any of the conventional rules of physical reality. Some of our most fundamental assumptions about the world can be suspended, including gravity, bilateral symmetry and even euclidean geometry.
We can enter worlds together that have nearly nothing to do with these bodies of ours, with their pairs of arms and legs, their torsos, their heads perched atop little bendable necks.
We can become anything we want, limited only by what our thoughts can conceive. As we take up this challenge, wandering ever further from the restrictive bounds of natural physiology, just where might the imagination of the human mind end up taking us?
Yesterday Sally cleverly observed that 2015 is a palindrome in binary. Which got me wondering whether there could be any years that are palindromes in both binary and decimal.
So I wrote a little javascript program to search for them. After several hours of crunching, my computer found 36 such years, from the year one through the year 75015151057, which in binary is:
The most recent year on the list was 717 AD, and the next one won’t be until 7447 AD, so don’t hold your breath.
Are there infinitely many such years, or is there a largest one? Somebody would need to come up with a mathematical proof, but I can make a guess just from looking at the numbers.
As I look down the list, the number of digits is increasing at a pretty constant rate. That’s what mathematicians call a logarithmic distribution. If that pattern continues, then the sequence will go on forever.
If that’s true, then no matter how far out in the future you go, there will always be another year that is a palindrome in both base two and base ten. Although you probably won’t be able to get to most of them without a Tardis.
Happy 2015!!!
A year is an odd little stretch of time. To the Universe — that is, to any part of the Universe other than we humans — it is pretty meaningless. Just a bit of time that starts at some particular moment and ends at some other particular moment about thirty one million seconds later.
But we measure our lives by those funny little stretches of time. We really can’t help it. Like the scorpion says in The Crying Game, it’s in our nature.
For me this has been a year of unexpected changes, both large and small. As usual, the big events were not the whole show. Many things have changed gradually, the kind of change that can be so difficult to see while it is happening.
And that is why having so obvious marker as a year can be useful. We can stand on the high cliff of a December 31 (which is high only because we choose to name it so), and look back on that previous peak from twelve months before.
When we do this, what may have become lost in the more obvious and mundane moments can, all at once, jump out at us, and we see, with renewed clarity, the progress of our own lives.