Author: admin

I was having lunch with some friends yesterday, and the conversation came around to young people. There seemed to be general agreement around the table that today’s younger generation are falling short of expectations. I didn’t have anything to contribute to this topic, so I just listened.

One person explained that kids today are not taught how to think for themselves. Another expressed disappointment with their seeming disengagement with important events on the world political stage. A general worry was expressed about the decline of Western civilization.

This went on for a while, at which point somebody said “Are we really being fair?”

“Of course you are,” I said. “Otherwise, why would people have been saying the exact same thing for at least three thousand years?”

Walking along the massive Roman walls that still (partly) encircle old York, I was struck by the way a Christian town, complete with cathedral, grew inside those magnificent walls from a vanished empire.

As I walked along the parapet, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d seen something like this before — not the literal thing itself, but the general idea.

And then, I had it.

This was very much what it felt like the first time I visited Mumbai and saw Victoria Terminus train station. That magnificent edifice has since been rechristened Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, but no mere name change can hide the pure, beautifully ostentatious high Victorian style of the place.

Today, of course, countless Indian citizens pass through the space and walk beneath its high vaulting ceiling. The Raj is long gone, and with it the hegemony of foreign overlords from England, but the aggressively 19th century British architecture remains.

I wonder how many other such places there are in the world — magnificent monuments to a vanished empire, now part of the every day scenery to another culture.

And part of me cannot help but wonder: Which of those mysteriously evocative relics will one day be all that remains of our own American empire?

There is something amazing about being in York (where I am today) and standing in front of the statue of the Emperor Constantine.

In the year AD 306 Constantine was, at York, declared emperor of the Roman Empire. It’s sort of odd to stand here, in these latter times, and reflect upon such an august history.

The idea of one individual reigning over the entire known world is very foreign to our modern view of things. And so I admit to a certain romance, an unloosing of possibilities, in revisiting this particular ancient history.

I would love to have met this man, this conqueror of worlds. And if I had met him, what would I have said? Maybe just this: “Why is Istanbul not Constantinople?” 🙂

I’ve noticed that research into mixed reality — the attempt to bring digital objects fully into our physical world — falls into two essentially disparate camps: Making use of physical objects that move in real time, and creating objects with 3D printers.

Today’s 3D printers can create incredibly intricate 3D forms, but for technical reasons are extremely slow. It can take hours for such a printer to produce an object of any significant size. In contrast, there are wonderful, if much coarser, interactive displays like inFORM by Hiroshi Ishii and his students at MIT, which can temporarily take on different shapes in real time. Such devices are still very expensive, but that will change.

One day these two threads of research will merge, and then we will have the ability to create intricate and dynamically moving shapes of any shape or size, shapes that we can interact with directly. In fact, this is an explicit long term goal of Hiroshi Ishii’s research.

It’s fun to think about what that world will be like, and what we will be able to do when it arrives. The possibilities may be limited only by our imagination.

There is an old Curiosity Shop in St. Andrews. This has been my second visit to St. Andrews, and I was happy to see this little shop again, as it was perhaps my fondest memory of my previous visit. The shop has very few things of value — mostly the little knick knacks and personal things of lives past — smoking pipes, salt and pepper shakers, lamps, cups and saucers, little musical instruments of every stripe, books, toys, wall hangings, framed photographs, and who knows what.

Coming from the U.S., where the contents of such shops generally go back only decades, I am fascinated by its equivalent in an older culture. A shop like this is a kind of magical portal into past lives. Tucked somewhere in a corner I might discover some item or other from a previous century, nothing much in its own day, but now a thing of archaeological wonder.

Grand castles and cathedrals are wonderful too, but if you’re looking for a time machine, nothing beats an old curiosity shop.

Spending time in a village with buildings that have been around for six hundred years, I am of course charmed by the storybook quality of everything. These old stone walls and cobblestone streets feel like something out of a fairy tale, and one cannot help but be swept up in the magic of it all.

But somewhere in the back of my mind I am wondering — in another six hundred years what will people make of the buildings from my own time, buildings that today are considered modern? Will future generations walk around in such places and feel that they have entered a storybook?

Or perhaps all of our modern buildings will be gone by then, swept away by the merciless sands of time. In contrast, I suspect this sturdy old village will still be around. Future generations will wander through its cobblestone streets marveling at the quaintness and charm of twelve hundred year old buildings made of stone.

And as they wander these streets, those people may very well be thinking to themselves — in another twelve hundred years, what will people make of the buildings from my own time?

Here at the UIST conference I saw two talks today that both illustrated the same principle, in very different ways.

One was a talk about gaze tracking (sort of). It turns out to be very difficult for a computer to tell where a person is looking (which is frustrating, because this happens to be something our human brains do very well). There have been many approaches to the problem, most involving expensive and/or invasive hardware.

This paper started by redefining the problem to a simpler one: Is a person looking into the camera or not? It turns out that this much simpler question is quite solvable, with no special hardware required. The solution they showed even works with old photos or movies. And it happens to be good enough for a huge percentage of the applications for which you might think “gaze tracking” is needed.

The other paper showed a way to track someone’s hand position, using three simple and inexpensive photosensors instead of a fancy and expensive video camera. It can’t track as well as a camera. For example, you don’t get individual fingers and other finer details. But it turns out that those niceties are often not needed.

So here we have two ingenious papers, both illustrating the same principle: If you don’t know how to solve a hard problem, then solve an easier (but really useful) one.

Here in St. Andrews I had a very funny conversation with a colleague. I don’t know how much you know about haggis (you could look it up), but it’s the quintessential example of a food where you really really don’t want to know where it comes from.

I mentioned to my colleague that three years ago, when I first visited Dundee, a friend had taken me to a restaurant where they served vegan haggis. My colleague was astonished by this revelation.

Getting into the spirit of things, he asked me “Which part of the plant do they use, exactly.”

Warming up to the theme, I replied “You really don’t want to know.”

Then I pretended to hesitate, out of a sense of delicacy. “Actually, it’s the part of the plant that, well you know…” and here I feigned an embarrassed silence, a delicate understanding that to say any more would require me to cross a line of discretion that must not be crossed.

We both laughed, and then I had a thought.

“You know,” I said to him. “The way that we just had a fake conversation, because we were talking about plants?”

He nodded.

“Well,” I continued, “the way that it would have been real if we weren’t talking about plants. That’s why I’m vegan.”

He totally got it.

Walking around St. Andrews today, I saw all sorts of beautiful sights, almost too many to take in at once. I love the energy of a university built from a centuries old history and tradition, yet offering up to the minute research and education.

Strolling along Market Street I saw a small sign on the door of a beautiful old stone building: “Fluid Gravity Engineering and Applied Electromagnetics.” It was wonderful to see a sign like that a mere five minutes walk from the ruins of a thirteenth century cathedral.

I found myself wondering exactly what they studied in a place like that. What sort of innovations would deserve such an evocative appellation? I knew I could look it up on the internet, but it was much more fun to imagine.

I formed an image in my mind of a young scientist in a lab coat running excitedly out of the research laboratory. As everyone turns to look at him, he holds an odd looking electromagnet triumphantly aloft in one hand.

“It works!” the young man exclaims, as he flips on the switch, and promptly floats gently to the ceiling.

Just because your city is already filled with beautiful buildings hundreds of years old does not mean you can stop building. Populations grow and shift, technological needs change, and sooner or later you need to build. But how do you build new buildings in a way that respects and works with the old ones?

Walking around Edinburgh I saw two fundamentally different approaches to this problem. One was to create what might be called “neoclassical Scottish” architecture. These are buildings that were clearly built in the late 20th or early 21st century, and belong to the modern era, but that somehow reflect ideas from the older buildings around them. Perhaps a choice of stone color, or a general shape and form, or window placement, or a roof that hints of architectural details in the ancient rooftops around it.

The other approach is to go completely modern — glass edifices so different from the ancient structures around them that they seem to be from a different world (which, in a sense, they are). These are invariably built in a plain and unadorned style. We’re not talking about Frank Gehry here, or anything even remotely suggesting a lipstick case. Just straightforward glass boxes accented by simple dark frames.

I am not a particular fan of modern architecture. Yet I found the latter approach quite pleasing, whereas the former was rather monstrous in its effect. The glass boxes come across mainly as unassuming backdrops for the beauty of the ancient structures around them — backdrops that make no attempt to compete.

In contrast, the neoclassical approach creates a sort of frankenbuilding, something that does not have any of the rough beauty and integrity of the ancient buildings around it. These buildings bear roughly the same relationship to their forebears as a typical Hollywood RomCom bears to “Pride and Prejudice”.

There’s a lesson here, and I suspect it generalizes to all sorts of situations.