Author: admin

Today I wanted to get to the NYU web site. Even though I’m physically sitting here in a lab inside NYU, the fastest way to do this was still to go to Google and type the three letters “nyu” into the search window.

I was already confident that the first hit would be NYU’s homepage, which is the URL I wanted. And that was indeed the URL I got.

What I didn’t expect was that the graphic off to the right of the results screen would look so familiar. Superimposed on a little map of our Washington Square campus was a picture of the NYU Torch.

Except it wasn’t the official NYU Torch — the symbol of New York University. Rather, it was a procedural texture that I had made many years ago, and had more or less forgotten about. I had made the torch image just for fun, my own particular “procedural noise” take on NYU’s logo. Here is what my original looked like (the original image is actually much higher resolution):

The image above is actually a single procedural texture that takes pixel coords (x,y) as its input, and converts each pixel to a color (making liberal use of my noise function). There is an illusion of 3D and metallic reflection in the handle, but it’s only an illusion. The whole thing is just a 2D procedural texture.

Apparently this image has been passed around through the years and repurposed in various ways. The image that showed up in my search for “nyu” had various other graphics superimposed on it:

That particular image, when I clicked on it, led me to some blog page in the Village Voice. I found another at some on-line magazine somewhere, and I suspect that by now they are scattered randomly all over the Web.

I wonder how many sites my little torch has traveled to by now.

Today I was at an NYU facilities meeting at which somebody pointed out that in addition to a recycling bin, it would be useful for a new lab to have a place to throw technotrash.

It took about five seconds for my mind to register completely that he was referring to the detritus of our cyber world — old monitors, discarded motherboards, burnt out disk drives and the like. It makes perfect sense to refer to such stuff as “technotrash”. In fact, I can’t really think of a better word for it.

But during those first five seconds my mind flashed on Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow in “Reversal of Fortune”. And, by extension, as Scar in “The Lion King”, which is essentially the same role, only with more neck hair.

In other words, the first thing that came to mind was the transmutation from “Technotrash” to “Eurotrash”.

During those five seconds, I found myself doing a mental inventory of all sorts of interesting ways that a thing can be the “trash” version of something else: Robotrash, infotrash, machismotrash, flamencotrash, politicotrash, even espressotrash. The list goes on.

But “technotrash” just seemed so specific and evocative, and one image in particular came crisply into focus: Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker in “The Social Network”.

Complex numbers are incredibly useful. Alas, as we’ve said before in these pages, because they are called “complex numbers”, people get scared away. To make things even worse, in the standard terminology, going from a “real” number to a complex number requires adding an “imaginary” number.

Clearly complex numbers need a better press agent.

On the other hand, this odd terminology is very useful in other spheres of discourse. Say, for example, a psychologist is explaining the Id, Ego and Superego to someone who has never even heard of Freud. Or a Catholic priest is describing the Holy Trinity to an atheist. Or a string theorist is explaining the ten dimensions of spacetime to a non-scientist.

In each case, the two conversants have very different ideas of what is Real. The speaker believes he is expanding the listener’s mind by describing something Complex. Alas, all the listener may hear is something that sounds Imaginary.

Yesterday I was a the Rubin Museum in NYC with a friend, looking at a beautiful exhibition of Buddhist art. At some point a tour guide was discussing with a group of tourists the issue of the two Dalai Lamas.

For those who don’t know, China does not agree with the current Dalai Lama’s choice of Panchen Lama (the high priest who will help select the next Dalai Lama). So they have selected a different Panchen Lama, which means there are two: One who is recognized and seen as holy by Tibetan Buddhists, and one who is considered politically acceptable by the atheist Chinese government.

Perhaps the reasoning is that only an atheist government has the objectivity required to correctly identify the next earthly reincarnation of the Bodhisattva. Maybe we’ve been doing things all wrong in the West — we should have gotten Richard Dawkins to choose the next Pope.

Be that as it may, my very first thought upon hearing this conversation was that it reminded me of the intellectual property strategies of the Walt Disney Company. For most of its history, Disney has pursued a brilliant approach to I.P. hegemony: Do not even try to crush rival beloved stories out of existence. Rather, absorb them (with copyrightable changes), so that the original versions will quietly fall away.

This has been accomplished, with commendable success, in the cases of Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and countless other classic tales of childhood wonder. For example, when most children in the U.S. visualize Winnie the Pooh and his friends, they don’t see the E. H. Shepard illustrations that accompanied “The House at Pooh Corner” — the see the Disney versions, which have their own copyright. And try doing a Google image search on “Tarzan”.

But even Disney can’t hold an enchanted candle to the can-do spirit of the leaders of the People’s Republic. It’s one thing to gain control of a stuffed bear, an ape man or a glass slipper. It’s quite another to do the same with the immortal embodiment of the collective faith and spiritual hope of millions.

I think old Walt would have been impressed.

Recent conversations with friends have created a kind of game: Pick a city in the world, and then try to capture the character of that city by imagining it as a person. What is that person like? How would you describe them.

Here is my own answer for two of my favorite cities:

Paris is a beautiful and somewhat mysterious woman. You find yourself drawn to her, although you know she is trouble, and you know you will regret your decision to spend time in her company. Yet once you have fallen under her spell, what choice do you have?

New York is an alpha male — brash, handsome, and full of arrogant charm. He wears a beautiful suit of a particularly fine cut, yet beneath the classy veneer he is something of a brute. And that’s part of the attraction. Your mother warned you not to fall for guys like this. But when you met him, you stopped listening.

Does anyone have analogous descriptions for other cities?

“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” — Samuel Johnson

If you are an academic, the summer is a golden time. That is when you get to do all of the fun research that you have just spent a year wishing you could have time for. That stretch from around mid-May to the end of August is your time to pull out the stops and go for it.

Then again, summer is also the time when academics are most free to travel — our best chance to visit other labs, attend conferences, and work with colleagues in other parts of the world.

Which means, in my case, that I can spend only a fraction of the summer here at our lab, with my own grad students, going all out to build on the ideas we’ve been discussing all year. As the days fly by, I try to make each one count. Each successive evening marks one day less day that we can all be in the lab together.

The funny thing is, that very scarcity creates a kind of abundance. Because we know these days together are numbered, everybody pitches in and makes every hour count. In just the last week we’ve gotten more done as a group than we had in the several months preceding.

So I understand a bit of what Samuel Johnson meant. Fortunately, unlike Mr. Johnson’s doomed friend Dr. Dodd, we will have more fortnights in our future.

Today is the 143rd day of the year.

When I look at the number 143, my mind immediately converts it to 11×13 (which you can see right away if you write 143 as 130 + 13). And then my mind starts to wonder “what fun things can I do with this?”

Which brings me back to a math epiphany I had when I was twelve years old. It was the first time I’d ever gotten a chance to program a computer, and our teacher said we could write a program to do whatever we wanted.

Being a typical American kid, the first thing I thought of was to find a fraction B/A that was really close to π.

So I wrote a program that tried all values of A up to a thousand. For each of those, my program tried all values for B that were about three times bigger than A. Then I checked to see how near B/A was to π.

To my great surprise, one fraction was vastly more accurate than all the others: 355/113. This fraction gets amazingly close to π — to around one part in four million.

What made this especially cool was how easy it was to remember. I just needed to write “113355”, then chop in the middle to get the A and B for my fraction.

I found out later that this marvelous approximation to π was first discovered in China, by Tsu Ch’ung-Chih, around 1600 years ago. Unlike me, he managed to find it without a computer.

“A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

— Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Criticism

This morning I showed up at a doctor’s office for an appointment to have some minor surgery — nothing serious or worrisome. But the conversation with the receptionist was interesting.

“I’m here for my 9am surgery,” I said, telling her my name and the name of my doctor.

The look on the receptionist’s face was somewhere between concern and alarm. “For surgery?” she asked.

Oh no, I thought. Ten minutes until my operation and I’ve gone to the wrong building. We stared at each other in mutual dismay.

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll look you up in the computer.”

There was a worried pause while she clicked on a few things.

“Oh,” she said, “You’re scheduled for an office procedure at 9am. Have a seat.”

I was left to ponder this odd little encounter. The receptionist had seemed genuinely confused. Was I naive to assume that when a doctor cuts into you with a knife, it’s always called “surgery”?

Let’s try turning it around: If the receptionist — who was, in fact, extremely kind and helpful — had also been more experienced, would she have understood immediately what was going on?

Perhaps we were both suffering from “a little bit of learning”, as so neatly described by Alexander Pope.

By the way, Pope’s poem references the sacred spring in Pieria, in ancient Macedonia. Maybe somebody who is both artist and scientist could be called a “Pierian”. You could look it up. 🙂

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying J.J. Abrams’ “reboot” of Star Trek. A friend and I just saw the second film over the weekend. It was a rollicking, schmaltzy, action packed space opera in the grand tradition, shamelessly pandering to the faithful. We loved it.

The entire premise of this reboot — placing familiar characters in an alternate universe — is deliciously ripe with possibilities. But these things must be handled delicately, or you hurt the spell (to quote one of my favorite movie characters).

There are definite constraints that must be respected. These constraints are neither physical nor technological — they are constraints of character. There is a certain mix of friendships, rivalries, conflicts and familial ties that constitute the core reality of any fiercely loved fictional place, be it Tara or Tardis, Pemberley or Sunnydale, Shire or Diagon Alley.

You can mess with plot and possibility all you want, and audiences will go there with you. But if you screw up the essential relationships, then no matter how blithely you throw around words like “alternate” or “reboot”, those audiences will turn on you in an instant.

I am happy to report that J.J. Abrams and company do not screw it up.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments on yesterday’s post. As you may have suspected, my argument yesterday was a bit of a red herring. After all, living in Manhattan, I can see quite plainly that the non-drivers all around me do not, as a rule, become helpless alcoholics.

On the other hand, every Friday and Saturday evening, MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village is inundated by young women and men from nearby car cultures. They arrive by bus and by train, and they drink. And drink, and drink, and drink some more. There seems to be an entire “tourist” industry built around getting alcohol into these young out of town weekend visitors as fast as possible. At the end of the evening, they stagger back to their bus or train, and hopefully end up safely at home.

So I wonder — perhaps we here in Manhattan don’t tend to drink excessively precisely because it is all so easy. There is no air of forbidden fruit surrounding the consumption of alcohol. It’s always there, with no particular penalty for having that third drink. So we just don’t bother having that third drink.

Rob’s comment about legalizing marijuana resonates in more ways than one. After all, if a vice is legal and easily available, then there is no psychological — or theatrical — benefit to running out and abusing it.