Author: admin

I spent the day today at the annual end-of-year symposium of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. All three of the Lab’s successive directors – Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin – were there, and they are all good friends of mine. Ben Shneiderman founded the lab in 1983. He is one of the fathers of the field of HCI research, and is a font of wisdom on many subjects. Ben Bederson, with whom I’ve been friends since he was in grad school, took over the lab directorship in 2000. Allison, who is married to Ben Bederson, became the lab’s director in 2006. I actually know Allison the longest of the three. I have had lots of time to talk with all three of them in the last twenty four hours, which has been great fun.

The wonderful thing about the HCIL, as Allison pointed out today, is that it puts the “human” first. Much of computer science research seems to forget that there are such things as humans. Instead it seems to be a quest for a kind of abstract algorithmic purity, as though computer science were merely a branch of mathematics. The HCIL people have been way ahead of the curve in recognizing that the real power of computers comes when we find ways to interweave that power with the complementary power of the human mind. Computation is indeed enormously powerful, but computation that augments human thought is downright transformative. And to achieve that, you’ve got to understand human thought.

This is rather tricky for many academics, because it requires bridging the large gap in scientific subcultures between computer science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. It’s very hard to get academic recognition when any given reviewer of your manuscript is not going to understand half of what you are saying. To me the people at HCIL are visionary because they recognized, a full quarter of a century ago – long before it was fashionable – the need to reconcile these two parts of the problem.

And they are still at it. Only now the world is starting to catch up.

I spent several hours today on a train – several blissful hours. I am struck by how different trains are from other modes of transportation. There is something soothing and meditative about train travel. The ride is smooth and graceful, there is plenty of room for each passenger, and you can get up and walk around if you like. If you’re hungry, just wander over to the diner car, and pick up a snack or a meal.

 

It’s as though trains are an alternate vision of the world, one where things have gone right. None of the huge carbon footprint of automobile and air travel, no going through security with your shoes off or needing to deal with road rage. Just a lovely Victorian idea of getting from one place to another, suitably updated for our twenty first century world.

One thing that always strikes me about the Europeans, as compared to us Americans, is how much they really appreciate the magic and beauty of train travel. To go from Paris to Marseilles in the TGV is to discover a nation that, at least in this one regard, genuinely likes itself. Our own AMTRAK, on the other hand, lives somewhat the life of an orphan, needing to get by on borrowed track, disparaged by those in power, Harry Potter and Cinderella rolled into one.

Perhaps, with the high price of oil, this might now change – after so many decades of neglect, our nation might once again embrace its locomotive self. I’m going to try not to get my hopes up, lest I be disappointed. But I can dream, can’t I?

I was surprised that people thought I was describing something exceptional in yesterday’s post. In fact I was merely reporting something completely unexceptional, something that happens every day here. Of course people jumped in to help that old man. New Yorkers are very practical people: If there’s a problem we can solve, we generally prefer just to solve it.

For example, if there is a parent with a baby carriage at the bottom of the subway steps, someone will immediately offer to pick up one end and help carry it to the top. Afterward the volunteer is more than likely to forget that s/he even did it. That’s just the way things work in this city.

My friend Jon pointed out to me today that the misconception that New Yorkers are indifferent might come from the fact that (with so many people in such a small space) people here have a very good B.S. filter. You just know, in much less than a second, when somebody is about to come on to you and pretend they need a handout. You can feel the sense of practice in their pitch, even before they open their mouth.

But a legitimate problem, like this ninety-something year old man needing to get from point A to point B, is a whole different thing. People are actually relieved to be able to do something to help make this town a more manageable place.

I am aware that there are places in the world where jumping in to help an old man get somewhere he needs to go is considered remarkable. But New York City isn’t one of them.

Recently, on the subway, a little old man walked into our crowded rush hour subway car. He must have been in his nineties, and he was walking very slowly, leaning on his cane and balancing carefully with each step. I stood up to give him my seat. He thanked me in a thick Russian Jewish accent, the kind you don’t hear so much anymore, and then asked me how far it was to Grand Central Station.

I explained to him that it was three stops. I continued to stand by, hovering over him worriedly, wondering how he was going to make it out the door at Grand Central during rush hour without getting knocked over. As we pulled into 33rd Street I told him it was the next stop after this one. He slowly and carefully pulled himself up out of his seat, so he’d have plenty of time to make his move, and I helped him up, holding him firmly by one arm to steady him until he was fully on his feet.

As it happened, a woman got on at 33rd Street, a large black woman probably in her mid forties. She saw this little old man standing there precariously with his cane, and she told him, somewhat concerned, that he shouldn’t get up so soon, he should wait until it was closer to his stop. I told her that I was looking out for him. She said “Oh, are you with him?” And I replied “No, I’m just looking out for him.” We smiled at each other, and she moved on into the car.

A few moments later, still smiling, she turned back toward me and said “I’ll fight you for him.” I laughed and said “Well, we can share, right?” Just then the subway pulled into Grand Central. The woman and I both watched with trepidation as the little old man slowly made his way out of the subway car and onto the platform. While the doors were still open, I saw him ask a young woman in her twenties how to get to the main concourse of Grand Central.

I’m pretty sure the young woman had been planning on boarding our subway car. But instead, sizing up the situation, she said to the old man “I’ll take you there.” As the subway doors closed, I could see her start to walk with him toward the stairs leading up and out of the subway, as he slowly and carefully made his way to the next part of his journey.

Have you ever had a dream, which you completely forget about until suddenly it pops into your head much later? Well, I had an experience like that today: I was visiting my parents, sitting at their kitchen table (I mean in real life – we haven’t gotten to the dream yet) when suddenly I realized that last night I’d had a vivid and somewhat disturbing dream.

In the dream I was answering the phone, and a familiar voice – a man’s voice – said “Guess who?” I actually manage to guess – it was the voice of my former therapist. By the way, for those of you who don’t know, in New York City it seems that everybody has a therapist. I did have one for a while, but I stopped a number of years ago – I wasn’t really getting very much out of it. Although I could be in denial about that – how would I know, right?

Anyway, in the dream my former therapist (who in the dream has moved to California, which is where he is calling from) explains to me that my psychiatric chart was sent to him, and based on his assessment of it, he’s going to need to prescribe medication for my mental condition.

I remember feeling very disappointed in the dream that I needed drugs to have normal mental functioning. Disappointed in myself, as though I had failed one of life’s important tests. In my real life I’ve never been on any such drugs, and yet it never occurred to me in the dream to question his decision.

Of course later, sitting at my parents kitchen table when the dream popped back into my head, my first thought was how absurd the whole thing was – of course I wouldn’t have just accepted such a diagnosis. But that’s the difference between reality and dream reality, isn’t it?

My main take-away from this experience is the following question: Is there a different person there in our heads, the one who is dreaming the dreams? I mean, clearly the reactions, decisions, and possibly the values of the dream self are quite at variance from those of the waking self. Is there an identifiable person – a different and specific person – within our head when we dream? Or do we just float along, rudderless, without measureable personality of any kind, a leaf on the wind?

Any opinions?

Yesterday I went to a miniature puppet show in Brooklyn. Well, actually, eight miniature puppet shows in Brooklyn, at the Toy Theatre Festival at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. One of the pieces was truly spectular, several were well characterized by the phrase “oh, get over yourself already”, and the rest were somewhere inbetween: Interesting, not necessarily successful on their own terms, but containing some exciting ideas to mull over.

I realized after seeing all this puppetry, so soon after having seen Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, that I want to write a puppet opera. It’s really the only rational response, isn’t it?

During several performances I found myself sitting next to a young Vietnamese woman. We struck up a conversation, and afterward ended up taking the same subway back to Manhattan. Ikuko makes little zines, and she gave me one. Each zine is made by folding an ordinary piece of 8.5 &#215 11 paper into the shape of a little booklet with eight pages. You can print anything on the zine just by printing onto that one sheet – pictures, story, poetry. Ikuko’s zine was a self-illustrated story-poem that was really lovely.

The moment she gave it to me, I was suddenly struck by the anti-capitalist slant of these little zines, and the fact that this quality renders them virtually invisible. Generally speaking, anything in our society that does not make money for somebody is off-limits to mainstream media. The Soviet Union had Tass and Pravda, which operated under strict marching orders from the Soviet party, and we have CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, The New York Times, TIME and NewsWeek, and so on, which are governed by rule of what might be called the “American Politburo”: If it’s not likely to make money for anybody, it is generally not mentioned.

So anything like the little gathering I went to last week to make puppets, no matter how many millions of people might end up engaging in such an activity, is generally off-limits to American new organizations. After all, there isn’t really any way for somebody to make milllions of dollars from people sitting around making puppets out of spare socks.

Which is a shame, because making and giving away little paper zines is an act of pure joy: You just design them, print them, fold them, and give them to your friends. Anybody can get in the game – no need for capital investment, just flair and imagination. Of course if you know to look for them, the Web is filled with such things – but you have to know to look.

What would it take for a society to publicly celebrate such acts of individual creation through its broadcast media? I find myself wondering whether the idea of broadcast mass media and individual not-for-profit inventiveness are fundamentally incompatible. Could the former ever really celebrate the latter, or would that be a contradiction in terms?

Some of you have been asking for an explanation. The following diagram should help to clarify things:

The words upon the door looked ancient. They were in fact far more ancient than they appeared, for their author had long since turned to dust. The seekers understood that they were looking at a puzzle, and that they could not pass until they had worked out the key:

As night descends, the subtle decree
The tide once forged from fragrant desire
Resplendent jewel, thrust from the fire
Beckons to yonder perilous sea
His uncouth dominion, his freighted expanse,
When the wise be foolish, no sacred vow
Could lay across that wrinkled brow
The wage of fortune’s circumstance
Forged in shadows of rising dread
Engraved upon a pomegranate seed
The tenets of mercy, the scripture of need
And so fortune’s fool is paid instead

    If truth ye seek, not knowing why
    Search the dark and glowing eye

Today I saw Iron Man and then, right after that, Death Note. The former is a big-budget Hollywood film made from a superhero comic book. This is so common these days as to be a cliche – Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Iron Man. The list goes on and on. I’m half expecting to see a Hollywood superhero film about Renderman. Oh wait, that’s The Incredibles. OK, never mind.

Yes, Iron Man was very well done and even well acted (any film with Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges in lead roles is going to be well acted). But it followed certain extremely exacting rules for such films that limited its appeal. Foremost among these rules is that it must be thuddingly obvious to the audience who the bad guy is, long before anybody in the movie does.

In fact, there is a clause in the director’s contract that states that after the bad guy has shown up on screen, if even one second of film passes through the projector before the entire audience has figured out both who he is and the nature of his fiendish plan, then the film’s producers are entitled to take the director out back and shoot him dead with a single bullet to the head. In Hollywood this is called a “mercy killing”. Fortunately, no director of such a film has ever been so brave or foolhardy as to try to respect the audience’s intelligence, so the situation has never come up.

There is a quality about well made comics, a kind of delightful fragmentation of time that is rarely captured on the big screen – mainly involving the implicit storytelling that goes on between the panels, which both Will Eiisner and Scott McCloud have both discussed quite wonderfully. This is not at all the same as montage in filmmaking, because in a comic book (or graphic novel if you want your work to be reviewed in The New York Times) the reader sees multiple panels simultaneously, and so different kinds of rhythm and resonance are possible.

There is another medium that is just beginning to loom in cultural importance – the medium of computer games. In spite of its mostly impressive computer graphic effects, Iron Man has absolutely nothing to do with computer games. The movie tells the audience to sit back and relax, while the by-the-numbers plot goes through its thudding paces – occasionally pausing just long enough to smash the audience upon the head with a massive sledge hammer labeled “This is what is going to happen next.”

In contrast, the second film I saw today, although adopted from a series of comic books (Japanese Manga actually), is very much a child of the age of computer games. The source comic books – the Death Note series is wildly popular in Japan – are structured like an ongoing computer game. Ostensibly it is a supernatural thriller about a young man who kills people under the influence of an otherworldly demon, but its formal structure is something else entirely.

As the film begins, a series of rules is laid out, and then some characters proceed to test those rules, pushing the rules to their limit, while other characters try to work out the rules and respond strategically. The screenplay invites the audience in on this game, and gives it plenty of opporunities to try to figure out what’s going on, who is bluffing whom, and what might be coming next. Like a good game, the rules are clear, the challenges progress in difficulty, and the audience is drawn into an entire way of thinking and problem solving.

The thing that struck me is how Death Note trusts its audience, and never plays down to them. The mostly teenage audience members around me were completely into this; it was obvious they were all having a great time. Perhaps we are seing something new: nonlinear interactive media starting to change the nature of storytelling.

I was fascinated to see, in Bern’s long and very philosophical comment about Eros, that every example she gave framed life connections between people against the background of death. From Harold and Maude to Portrait of Jennie, and of course our dear wonderful Randy Pausch in real life, every example she gave (and they were very good examples!) suggested that the ways we become emotionally connected to each other, and create meaning in each other’s lives, is intimately tied up with the knowledge that death is waiting somewhere nearby.

I completely agree. I used to ask myself what kinds of creatures we humans would be, were we able to live forever. Eventually I realized that the question is practically meaningless, in the sense that any such creatures, even should they exist, would not be recognizably human. As much as we generally hate death, are horrified by it, and the way it takes away those we love the most (and eventually takes us as well), we actually define our lives by death’s shadow.

We constantly make use of this shadow, in a million little ways. The stages of our lives, from childhood to adolescence to the successive stages of adulthood, have very little meaning as steady states of being – they are literally defined by their flow from one to the other. Childhood discoveries, getting your first grown-up tooth, discovering what it feels like to fall in love, going to college and finding out what you are really good at, seeking out a life partner – just about anything you can think of in your life that has any emotional power or resonance – is defined by change and by our intuitive understanding of the impermanence of all experience.

In a sense, life is a fractal: This moment in time only has meaning by virtue of being nestled in a particular minute of an hour within a day, and so on, out to the month, year and lifetime. If a minute were taken “out of time”, it would become unmoored from that nested set of chinese boxes that individuals and cultures build from the raw material of time’s arrow.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate the fact that I’m going to die one day. But I am also acutely aware that this very brain with which I am thinking such thoughts would contain no system of values that I could recognize, would not be able to discern any light or meaningful joy, without that shadow behind it, framing and defining the edges of that joy.

For without that shadow to frame the light, how would we ever be able to understand just how precious, how infinitely precious, are the moments we have with those that we love?