Author: admin

I’ve just started watching “The Gilmore Girls”. Yes, I know, this is something that people were excited about fourteen years ago, and that hasn’t even been on the air for the past seven years. You might very well ask where I’ve been all that time.

The answer is, I really don’t know. It seems I’m out of sync. Not having a television (for me it’s all Netflix) I pretty much missed the original phenomenon, except as heresay. Then last night, being curious, I clicked on it. And was instantly smitten.

Most TV shows are pretty badly written, so it was a revelation to see something so consistently well penned. It has carefully wrought relationships, truly witty banter, honestly earned irony (as opposed to cheap snark), and genuinely multi-dimensional characters, who also happen to actually be literate and well read.

Although I was mildly taken aback when Lorelai, in the third episode, referred to a male massage therapist as a “masseuse”. I hope it was an isolated lapse.

Other than that, I am completely in awe. Amy Sherman-Palladino, where have you been all my life? And where are you now?

Well, actually, I know where she is now. Resting up after her latest series “Bunheads”, which starred Sutton Foster, so I’m sure it was also wonderful. Alas, it is not on Netflix. 🙁

Nobody wants to be a muggle.

This is ironic, since every single person who has ever read “Harry Potter” is, in fact, a muggle. And in a way that’s the entire point. Fantasy is a way for us to project ourselves into another place that is somehow better than where we are. It is the very implausibility of the fantasy that is its draw. If we could really jump into a painting, fall down a rabbit hole or step through a wardrobe to get there, it might lose its appeal.

Yet some us have the experience, every day, of not being muggles — those who create things by programming computers. I realize that this may not make a lot of sense to non-programmers reading this, but hopefully you’ll get the gist of it.

Most people who use computers think of them as mysterious things that you can only access through user interfaces. Whether you are using Word, GarageBand, Facebook or Illustrator, you are pretty much limited to pushing buttons, swiping screens, or maybe fiddling with a slider or two. Sometimes you also get to type in words and draw stuff.

But to somebody who programs, a computer is a completely protean device. You can use it to do anything. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. It is your magic carpet into a world of infinite possibility.

If you’ve read “Harry Potter”, you might recognize in those books how you felt when you first realized that programming is a path to limitless freedom and possibility. When you wrote your first real program, you were probably feeling pretty much the same way Harry felt when he first picked up his wand and cast a spell.

The difference, of course, is that when it comes to being able to program, nobody really needs to be a muggle.

Sometime last month I wrote here about Nico. Well, actually, I wrote about a play about Nico. Seeing that play got me wandering around on YouTube to hear the real thing.

Since then, I have no idea how many times I’ve clicked on Nico’s version of Jackson Browne’s song These Days. I keep coming back to it, and I never tire of giving it yet another listen. Her performance has a strange and powerful grip on me.

Which is really weird, because she sings off-key, with a very heavy accent, in a not very good tone, and with absolutely no vibrato or vocal technique at all, in the usual sense of the word.

But none of that seems to matter. This haunting rendition, backed by Browne himself on guitar, seems to get to the very heart of the song, reaching a place entirely beyond music in the conventional sense.

This performance of this song seems to me a precise evocation of a particular feeling that we all have, but that we almost never admit to. The feeling that life, love and connection, control over our own destiny, have all somehow become unmoored, and that we are adrift.

But also that we continue to have that one thing — the thing nobody else can ever completely understand — our own inner identity, however screwed up that may be. And that this sense of self will somehow see us through.

Somehow, miraculously, Jackson Browne had the insight to write this song when he was just sixteen years old. And in the hands of Nico, with her strange and relentless way of asserting a pure force of identity, it becomes a masterpiece.

I’ve written before here about the delightful — if too little remembered — BBC series “The Champions”, which aired for one season in 1968-69. What set this supernatural spy show apart from all others was that the heroes all shared the same superpowers. So instead of each character’s superpower becoming a cheap short-hand for his or her personality, the show developed its character arcs the old fashioned way — through personality and relationships.

Since every supernatural ensemble since then has opted for the more obvious but less interesting route of “I have this particular superpower and therefore this is who I am”, (think: XMen, Heroes, The Incredibles, The Avengers, Alphas, the list goes on and on), I had despaired of anybody creating another series of superheroes who shared equal powers, and were therefore simply normal to each other.

Which is why I was looking forward to watching “The Tomorrow People”, a new American show that shares this fundamental idea (although it differs in many ways from the 1973 British children’s show on which it is loosely based). Alas, TTP is missing all of the subtlety of The Champions. And the wit. And the humor. And the irony. Except of course for the asian guy, who gets to say funny things from time to time, as a kind of consolation prize for the fact that there is no chance in hell he will get the girl (this being American television).

Everything is overdone, with characters displaying superpowers so spectacular that the show’s fundamental conceit — that humanity has not yet noticed them (because otherwise we would try to kill them) — is unbelievable to be point of being laughable. What is worse, the greatest superpower of all is the weirdly bland and uniform hyper-attractiveness of the boring young cast.

As I see it, if there really were such a rival race of super-beings among us, all of whom were somehow managing to hide in plain sight even though they keep lifting heavy objects with their minds and teleporting from place to place with flashy visual effects, there would still be a way we could hunt them down:

Just look for a group of really boring twenty-somethings who are all pretending to be in high school, and who all have eerily regular features, perfectly chiseled physiques, dangerously sharp cheekbones, and absolutely no sense of humor.

Then kill them.

On the other hand, if we did this, we might just end up wiping out significant portions of the population of Los Angeles. Which maybe wouldn’t be so bad, because then nobody could make more shows like this.

Because I am getting on a flight today that will span many time zones, and I know I will need to deal with jet lag afterward, I spent a happy hour this morning reading all about Flat Earth theories. After all, if the world were not round like a ball, but rather “round like a plate” (as Imogene Coca once explained on “It’s About Time”), I wouldn’t need to worry about jet lag.

Once you start delving into Zetetic theories of our planet, you can read for hours. Not only is the Flat Earth Society alive and well, but it has all sorts of precedents that I found startling. For example, as late as 1605, it was universally accepted in Imperial China that the earth was flat, a belief dispelled only through the introduction, by Jesuits, of Western techniques of astronomy.

And reading this stuff reminds you of all sorts of things that you kind of knew, but hadn’t paid enough attention to. For example, although Pythagoras was saying as early as the 6th Century BC that the Earth is a sphere, it was the publication the Almagest by Ptolemy nearly seven centuries later that finally settled the issue for the ancient Greeks.

Maybe I will get over my jet lag by trying to read that.

It seems pretty clear that one reason vampires are so popular in our culture is that they represent a fantasy that you can be young and beautiful and live forever.

It’s interesting how this acts as a sort of counter-weight to religion. Many organized religions tell us that yes, you need to grow old and die, but it’s ok, because afterward, you are going to move on to a better life in a realm beyond.

Religions also put a lot of effort into helping bind families together, through shared rituals, traditions and beliefs. This promotes another kind of immortality: I might die, but I will pass on a piece of my identity to my children, which they will pass on in turn to theirs.

But the vampire fantasy goes for the whole enchilada: I will literally be here forever, and I’m going to look great and have a fabulous time.

Of course there is a down side, and you can see this down side as a tension between the lure of the vampire and the dictates of prevailing religion. For one thing, they are, in a way, dead. They are also evil, selfish, and an abomination before God (as Catholic priests in vampire movies so often put it). And they don’t tan well.

It’s interesting to me that there are far fewer examples in popular culture of the immortal who is not dead.

So we have examples, but they are few and far between, and the gender balance is atrocious. There’s Gregory Widen’s Connor MacLead, Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long, Jerome Bixby’s John Oldman, a handful of characters by Roger Zelazny, and not all that much more.

Well, not that much when compared with vampires. Our culture is lousy with vampires.

Why is this so? I suspect one reason might be that the living immortal does not provide a compelling counterpoint to prevailing religion, no built in pretext for a battle between good and evil. There is no cost exacted for cheating death, and no ticket to eternal damnation included in the price tag of immortality.

There is something beautifully simple about being at the beach. It is an experience of joyous sensation for all the senses.

The sky above, the feel of the Sun on your skin and of the sand beneath your feet, of the gentle breeze off the ocean. The water, once you go in, is refreshingly cool and salty to the taste.

People go into the water and play with abandon. Young and old alike — everyone is five years old. We become our natural selves, unselfconscious, running and laughing, uncomplicated creatures of pure delight.

It would be wonderful if we could be more like that when we are away from the beach.

Last night a number of us went down to the beach and watched the total eclipse of the Moon.

We are usually so frantic, so busy, so distracted in our everyday lives. We make our mental lists, race to and fro, and think of where we should be rather than where we are.

But the Moon is in another realm of existence altogether.

To watch the shadow of the Earth, slowly and with great majesty, pass across the face of the Moon, is to glimpse the clockwork of the Universe, to bear witness to the slow and regal dance of the Spheres.

Lying on a sandy beach, and watching this magnificent show as it gradually unfolded, I was transported out of the day to day, and into a world of pure spirit.

The student innovation contest today at the UIST conference included many ingenious submissions. There were discerning desk drawers, dancing dracaena, disco dishwashers and many other diverse delights.

But my experience of the event was perhaps a little skewed by the fact that none of the snacks provided by the conference were anything I — or any of the other vegans present — would eat. So I ended up gravitating toward two projects in particular.

One of those projects was a modified toaster that could print custom patterns on a slice of bread, under computer control. The device could spell out messages, create images of cartoon characters, or print pretty much anything else you’d like to see on your breakfast toast.

The best part was that the students provided a handy jar of peanut butter. After you were done printing your custom slice of toast, you could spread peanut butter on it and walk away with a yummy snack. It was quite delicious.

The next project I visited used the kind of xyz stage you’d normally see in a 3D printer, repurposed to act as a jelly printer. Navigating as though playing a video game, you could steer a jelly-depositing “print head” over a slice of toast, painting on a pattern of your choice.

When you were all done with your jelly covered masterpiece, you could take the slice with you. I can happily report that it was very yummy. Between that and the previous demo, I ended up being happily fed.

Now if only those two groups of students could join forces, I’m sure they would take over the world.

Mark Bolas gave a brilliant and very provocative opening keynote today at the UIST 2014 conference. He posited that we may all end up in virtual reality in the long run, because, as the technology advances, VR will eventually subsume the capabilities of literal reality, and will eventually allow us to move far beyond it.

Obviously this is a high controversial statement. People who have spent their entire lives in relatively unmediated physical reality might be understandably unnerved by the prospect of such a radical shift in the perceptual paradigm. I’m pretty sure he was saying it precisely to be provocative — to get people talking and debating about the many issues surrounding such a possible future.

Mark is certainly qualified to fling down that particular gauntlet. Over the last several decades he has done far more than anyone else to advance the field of virtual reality, and he doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Yet even if we posit, for the sake of argument, that his prediction is correct, there remains an interesting question: As we start to shift the apparent reality around us, freed from the constraints of the real world, what other constraints will still remain, imposed by our own brains?

There are many sorts of things that seem baked in to our otherwise highly protean human brain. For example, it is well established now that our brains have built in rules that constrain the possible grammars of natural languages.

It is also well known that human babies, quite soon after birth, will seek out two dots that are side by side, but will ignore two dots one above the other. This suggests an innate instinct to seek out a mother’s eyes.

How many other such constraints are built into our human brains? These constraints, whatever they may be, will create hard limits around the reality we may collectively experience in any shared future — even one that reality is entirely virtual.