Author: admin

Does a songbird know that its song is beautiful?

I needed to make a structural diagram for a research proposal that some colleagues and I are submitting tomorrow. And I ended up creating it by writing a program in Javascript.

This strikes me as somewhat odd, because after all these many years, there are lots of professional programs out there to help you make structural diagrams. Yet with all of that effort by so many smart people, I still find it to be easier to get the diagram I want by writing a computer program.

Part of me wonders whether this will ever change. Will A.I. eventually get to the point where I can just tell it what I want to see, and it will produce the diagram of my dreams?

But there’s another part of me that says that this will never happen. There are just too many little aesthetic tweaks that I want control over, in order to tell exactly the visual story that I want to tell.

And having something that is “sort of” right would just drive me crazy. So I suspect that I will always stick to making diagrams the old fashioned way: Using my trusty vi editor to create a new empty text file, and writing a computer program.

I read today that the CEO of Tesla is stepping away from his Washington DC activities, because the company’s stock has dropped 71% in the last few months.

I can understand that. If the stock drops by the same amount in the next few months, then it will be at negative 42%.

And then he will officially be the poorest man in the world.

I was talking with some colleagues today about the possibilities of combining wearable blended reality with artificial intelligence. I mentioned how convenient it is, when I’m writing an email on my phone, that my AI email assistant realizes when I’m writing the same sequence of words several times and offers to complete the thought.

One of my colleagues pointed out that this feature is not foolproof. And if errors occur out in the real world, rather than on a screen, the consequences could be larger.

Suddenly a scene popped into my head: Two future military commanders are discussing their midday battle plan. Noticing the time, one commander says “time for lunch.” But his helpful AI assistant hears “time for launch.”

Unfortunately, out in the real world there is no “undo” key.

In these first months I have been trying to make sense of the actions of the incoming U.S. administration. Surely there must be some pattern.

Today I think I finally have it. The key insight came from this latest announcement that the U.S. State Department would be reorganized. The most important changes are (1) eliminate any operations that might help Africa, and (2) cease any operations that might promote democracy, support human rights or assist refugees.

Essentially, the administration has been asking the question “What actually makes America great?” And whenever they identify anything that might even be perceived as making America great, they then systematically work to get rid of it.

So what we are seeing here is apparently an elaborate form of absurdist performance art: The incoming president runs for office on the slogan “Make America Great Again”, then as soon as he comes into office, he does everything he can to destroy anything that might be great about America.

So there you have it. We are witnessing the future of America, and it isn’t great.

I know it sounds counterintuitive. But sometimes, after a flurry of activity, you just need to take a day to do as little as possible.

Sometimes what you really need is to rest and recharge your batteries. And then doing nothing at all can be the most productive thing.

I understand that a lot of people don’t like flying on airplanes. Flights are a hastle to get to and from, they often involve physical discomfort, and they can take a lot of time, depending on how far you are going.

But I love them. And the reason is I get a ton of work done on airplanes. Nobody interrupts me, and nobody can call me or email me.

Well, maybe they are emailing me, but as long as I am on that flight, I am blissfully unaware of it. I get some of my best work done during flights, because they are one of the rare occasions when I can be guaranteed to be alone with my own thoughts.

When nobody interrupts you and you have several hours just to write down whatever comes into your head, it’s amazing what you can discover. Looking at the ideas that have popped up in this way, I sometimes find myself asking, “Now where did that come from?”

I guess you could say it was just in the air.

Will our relationship with words become fundamentally different when we are all able to see them floating in the air between us? AI and XR glasses will help us visualize and organize even our casual conversations, if that is what we want.

At that point the relationship between words and objects might change, because we will be able to see and add visual labels to the things around us. That is something we will do without needing to give it even a moment’s thought.

Acts of visualization which now require preparation and staging, will take on some of the qualities of spoken language. Creating visual representations of your ideas can then be fluid, immediate, in the moment.

Children will grow up in a world thus transformed. Will their idea of language be different from ours in some fundamental way?

Today I tried to implement a sophisticated and elaborate method of sending data back and forth efficiently between my computer and my XR headset. I was very proud of it, and spent a few hours fine-tuning it.

To my disappointment, I couldn’t quite get it to work properly. There were always artifacts in the data. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to track them down.

So I just tossed the whole thing out, and spent just a few minutes implementing something much simpler and less sophisticated. The simple approach worked like a charm, and I’m going to keep using it.

There is a lesson here.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about the intricate relationship with two dimensional and three dimensional things in our daily life. We seem to spend much of our time transitioning between these two modes of reality.

We walk through three dimensional rooms to our TV or computer, where we then interact with a 2D view of whatever we are interested in. But often the content on those screens represents something three dimensional, a 3D world much like the one we just walked through.

Yet in that screen-bound 3D world we see people reading books, looking through papers, watching screens, and otherwise focusing their attention on 2D things. And so it goes, an infinite succession of nesting dolls.

I guess this all makes sense. We inhabit these three dimensional bodies, and yet all we see with our eyes at any moment is essentially a 2D view of the world. So of course we intertwine these two types of realities on such a fundamental level that we hardly even notice that we are doing it.