Category: Uncategorized

When I use Google Docs, I often find myself wondering “What did this line of text say before it was changed?” But there is no easy way to answer that question.

Ideally I would like to point to any given word, phrase, sentence or paragraph, and quickly get a history of just that portion of the text. What was the sequence of changes that produced this particular sentence? When was it last changed? Who changed it?

It would very useful to have a “local change search” feature, which would give me that kind of local history of changes to a document. All the information needed to implement such a thing may very well already be contained in Google Doc’s Version history.

Alas, as an end user, you only have access to Version history for the entire document. There are no tools available to you to forensically examine selected portions of successive versions of that history.

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement local change search. I’m sure a lot of people would find it useful.

Sondheim is to musical theater as Shakespeare is to drama.

In each case, the talent is so singular, that there isn’t even anyone else in their respective fields to make a comparison with.

In each case, if they had never existed, we would never have considered the works of art that they have given us to be possible.

Today I looked at the contents of a backup disk that I hadn’t looked at for years. And it turned out to be a treasure trove.

I found all sorts of software experiments that I had done a long time ago, that I had quite forgotten about. I tried running them, and they still worked!

Now I need to decide whether I want to revisit any of that work, and integrate it into what I am working on now. Or have my interests moved on too much for that to happen?

It’s an odd feeling, as though I am being given an invitation to collaborate. Except in this case, the person inviting me to collaborate is my younger self.

A colleague emailed me today asking whether I could send him a copy of some text he had contributed to a grant proposal that hadn’t gotten funded. It seems that he had been using Outlook to search for it, with no success.

Eventually he emailed me that he’d managed to find it himself, and he added “Outlook needs a much better search function.”

I replied, tongue in cheek, that maybe we can write a grant proposal to improve Outlook‘s search function.

He then suggested that we can just say we are using AI, and we will raise $36M sight unseen.

Sadly, he might very well be right.

Some who wander actually are lost.

Today I looked at a map and saw Ellenville NY. And my immediate thought was “That’s where Donald Hollinger was from!”

So I looked it up on the Web to see who has talked about that. And I found that there are zero searchable references to the fact that Donald Hollinger came from Ellenville NY.

I wonder whether Ellenville is aware that its most illustrious fictional native son is being snubbed by the World Wide Web. Frankly, I wonder whether Ellenville is even still aware of Donald Hollinger.

This episode has made me think. And what I am thinking is that there are probably vast stores of knowledge in our collective human brains that are not found anywhere on the Web.

Maybe that’s good.

Years ago somebody told me about the 1,10,100 rule of innovation. And so far, everything I have seen has confirmed that it is true.

It goes something like this: Let’s say that it takes about 1 unit of effort to create a working demo of your new idea.

If you want to know what it will cost in time and effort to turn that working demo into a beta version of a commercial product, multiply by 10. Now, at that point you don’t have an actual marketable product — you just have a beta version.

However, unlike that first demo, what you have will actually look like a product. In the software world, that means it will have a proper user interface, it will work with various file formats, it will have that all important “undo” function, it will run on all the right hardware platforms, and it will be in the form of an app that can actually be distributed to users, with the proper security protocols built in.

But what if you want to actually make money from your idea? Well then you need to multiply your time and effort by another factor of 10. Because now you will need to have removed all the bugs and put in place a system for periodic updates, you’ll need to do marketing, outreach and accounting, you will need a proper structure to manage and house your staff, a good implementation of data security, and probably some layer of IP protection as well.

Which is one reason that I spend my time doing academic research. My cost multiplier is always 1.

I was saddened by the very recent deaths of Willie Mays, Anouk Aimée and Françoise Hardy. These were all people who had enriched the lives of millions.

Yet in all of those cases I also felt a certain sense of philosophical resignation. Each of them had made their greatest impact on the world more than half a century ago, and we all know that nobody gets to live forever.

But hearing today about Donald Sutherland was different. From The Dirty Dozen to The Hunger Games, and everything in between — and there was a lot in between! — he continued to surprise and delight us decade after decade.

Unlike many others of his generation, he never slowed down. In the last two years alone he lent his unique and powerful gifts to several TV shows, movies and mini-series.

And you never knew what to expect next, but you knew that whatever Donald Sutherland was in would be worth watching, just to watch him. The man’s range was fantastic, whether he was playing comedy or drama or downright evil, and the sheer sense of intelligent fun that he brought to each role was unmatched.

Deep down, part of me believed that he was actually going to live forever — if only to delight us with the next surprising and wonderful performance.

Juneteenth has long been celebrated as marking the vote by the U.S. Congress to prohibit slavery on June 19, 1862, as well as the enforcement of that law in Texas on June 19, 1865.

Just three years ago, shortly after he was sworn into office, President Biden made it an official federal holiday. Yet another thing I like about him.

But a related event also happened on June 19, which gets much less publicity. Exactly 60 years ago today — on June 19, 1964 — the U.S. Senate finally approved the Civil Rights Act, after a long and bitter 83 day filibuster by senators from southern states.

To give you a sense of the mood back then, here is a quote from Richard Russell, one of the U.S. Senators leading the filibuster:

“We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would tend to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our [Southern] states.”

And that was a cool century after the events of 1862-1865! Alas, some battles are never completely won, but need to be fought again in every generation. To quote William Faulkner:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

If you’re a U.S. Citizen, you might want to think about that when you vote this coming November.

So much of our communication these days depends on knowing that anything we read can be immediately followed up with a Google search. And this has fundamentally changed the ways that we communicate.

For example, when I wrote my post yesterday about Ted Nelson, I knew that you could immediately do a search to see who his mom was. Otherwise, I would not have written that particular post in that particular way.

You could even quickly learn about the rather large Easter Egg inherent in that post’s title. Again, just a quick search away.

Interestingly enough, Ted Nelson himself is the reason that we even think this way. By communicating through reference, rather than needing to spell everything out, we are literally enacting the concepts that he created.

And those concepts have changed the nature of our world, because we now largely communicate through reference, knowing that anything we refer to is just a Google search away. And this is only the beginning.

After SmartPhones are replaced by XR eyewear, and given the appropriate software layer of LDM AI, those searches will be happening continually with no effort on our part.

I wonder what everyday communication will be like then. I am sure that Ted would be very interested to know as well.