Month: April 2011

I was having a conversation with a fellow educator today — a professor of computer science at another university — about the integration of computer games into the computer science curriculum. He was telling me that a number of fellow profs in his department are skeptical that computer games really belongs in a C.S. curriculum.

Yet the more we talked about it, the more we both realized that computer games are, in fact, the ultimate context for learning. Not only do they provide motivation and concrete direction for such diverse computer science topics as procedural animation, geometric modeling, photorealistic rendering, parallel and distributed processing, databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, client/server architectures, 3D audio synthesis, language understanding and scaleable simulation, but they provide so much more.

In areas outside of computer science, computer games provide a way in to the study of non-linear narrative, ludology, lighting design, camera movement and editing, set design, performance and body language, graphic design, interactive and non-linear musical composition, education and assessment, and a growing host of fascinating cultural, anthropological, philosophical, political and ethical studies that are emerging because of the development and growing importance of non-linear, interactive and social media.

In fact, one could argue that computer games are the closest thing we have to a universal core academic focus, in their ability to bring together diverse threads of intellectual inquiry.

Today on a visit to Microsoft, our hosts took us on a tour of Seattle. One highlight was a stop at the very first Starbucks store. Unlike the strangely plastic artificial homeyness of typical Starbucks venues — which all look a bit like what aliens might put together to simulate an air of coziness after having studied our species from a distance of ten light years — this store really does have a genuinely old fashioned feel to it.

It has the kind of worn down deep grained old wood counters that you can’t replicate in a chain store, and rows of shelves on the walls that aren’t trying to make any impression at all, which is exactly why they do. The real thing is so much more charming than the fake precisely because it isn’t trying to be charming.

After I had left the store, my Microsoft hosts asked me what I had thought of the place. Reaching for the appropriate analogy, I think I stumbled the right image. I told them that it was a bit like holding in one’s hands the very first release of MS-DOS. 🙂

Thinking recently about Shakespeare’s dark masterpiece Macbeth, it occurred to me that Lady Macbeth is given short shrift. She is clearly the most intriguing of all the characters, with Macbeth himself being little more than her puppet, when all is said and done. After she exits the stage he is pretty much lost, his inevitable downfall not the heroic one of a Lear or an Othello, but that of an essentially small man who is really not much of anything without the powerful woman who had fanned the winds of ambition into his sails.

Yet the lady herself never quite gets her due. Why not create a work from her perspective — a feminist reimagining of the Scottish play? In my version, Lady Macbeth would emerge triumphant — rather than be consigned to the madness that seems to be the lot of so many passionate women in our patriarchal world (witness Bertha Rochester, Ophelia, Sylvia Plath, so many others).

Needless to say, such a bold reimagining should to be in the form of a musical. The story provides so many rich possibilities for emotional expression through music and rhyme (example: “Had I been born son not daughter / I would now be Thane of Cawdor”).

So there you have it. “Lady Macbeth, the Musical”. Coming soon, to a theatre near you.

This evening I saw a talk by Scott Kim, puzzle maker extraordinaire. Like Vi Hart, he thinks mathematics in terms of its inherent beauty, the way a composer thinks of music, or a poet thinks of the written word.

Near the end of an extremely entertaining and enlightening talk, he said that in educating our kids, we should think not in terms of dressing it up to try to make it entertaining, but in terms of revealing its beauty. Just as we develop our love of music through a literature of musical works, he encouraged teaching math the way one would teach any other category of art: Through its literature — a literature of mathematics.

It occurred to me that this phrase would be a very useful one to bring into discussions within the University. Most of the University community does not even realize that there is a literature of mathematics. Perhaps it’s time to change that.

There is an old New York joke that goes like this: A tourist walks up to a New Yorker and asks “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The New Yorker answers “Practice, practice, practice.”

As it happens, this was one of the favorite jokes of a friend of mine back in college. Actually, he seemed to know every joke ever told or written. The man was a veritable encyclopedia of humor — the cornier the better.

So it seemed like karma itself one fine Spring afternoon as a group of us were walking around in midtown Manhattan, and a man in a very nice three piece suit walked up to us, and asked, in all seriousness and polite as could be, “Excuse me, can you please tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”

As if with one mind, we all turned to our friend. We understood, through some deeply shared tribal instinct, that the honor rightfully belonged to him. For this was truly his moment, the culmination of years of preparation, of careful study and devotion before the sacred alter of bad jokes.

He started to answer — you could tell he wanted to make it sound casual. And then, his mouth twisting into an odd shape, he began to giggle. The more he tried to control it, the worse the giggling became. He tried to talk through the giggling fit, but couldn’t quite get it under control. The helpless giggling evolved into a belly laugh, as the man in the suit looked on in complete incomprehension.

Finally, realizing that through sheer misfortune he had walked in on a group of madmen, the man in the suit turned on his heels and walked quickly away down the street.

As our friend’s giggles subsided, we all looked to him in sadness. It had been a once in a lifetime opportunity, and now it was gone.

Sometimes life can be so cruel.

Having recently re-watched “Mary Poppins”, my head is still filled with the many fantastical visions from that film, from the lovely scene of the nannies being blown away with the wind like so many dandelion seeds, to the haunting melody of “Feed the Birds”, to the delightful sight of Mary and her charges walking confidently up a stairway made of smoke.

When I was a child, the centerpiece of the film had been the sequence where Mary, Bert and the kids jump into a painting and enter a magical animated world — the part of the movie that my family always refers to as “Dick Van Dyke dancing with penguins”. It’s the point in the film where the animated tradition of Disney and the live action characters become most fully wed to create a cohesive vision.

It occurs to me now that what I was seeing on screen will soon become a reality for many of us. What was merely fantasy in 1964 will, in the next few years, become an accepted part of our world. Interaction technologies that are already beginning to emerge will soon allow children everywhere to dance with those animated penguins, in the comfort of their own living rooms.

As delightful as this will be, there is a potential downside. Future generations may have trouble understanding “Mary Poppins”. When they see people on-screen cavorting around in make-believe worlds, they may simply say “What’s the big deal? I do that all the time!”

I spent the day today at an all-day research symposium. Many great conversations, but one conversation in particular got me thinking.

We all know in retrospect that Shakespeare has lasted while many of his contemporaries have not. Likewise we know that the work of Goethe, Austin, Archimedes, DaVinci, Mozart, and an entire pantheon of geniuses has remained relevant down through the ages, even as the work of their contemporaries has faded to oblivion.

Among recent voices, we may strongly suspect that the work of The Beatles, Will Wright or David Foster Wallace might last through the centuries, while the work of, say, Madonna may not. But we can’t be sure.

Moreover, it would seem that this is impossible to know. Yet that might not be the case.

After all, we have all of history to sift through, when looking for patterns that lead to sustained cultural longevity. Perhaps there is a quality in Mozart’s music, as compared with his contemporaries, or a quality that distinguished Shakespeare from other playwrights of his day — other than “he was a genius” — that we can spot, if we sift through the massive data available to us from down through the centuries.

It would be interesting to take such studies seriously as a science — a science of forensic predictive cultural longevity. And in the course of looking for such patterns, of developing a systematic way of looking at these things, perhaps we might gain insight into the creative process itself.

I’ve just discovered that certain friends who had previously been posting comments on this blog have found themselves locked out. I haven’t even been getting emails saying “comment pending”. Rather, the voracious and overeager spam filter Akismet, which I recently began to use, knocks them out even before I would get an email letting me know anything had happened.

I had been wondering why it has been so peaceful and quiet here in blog-land. Here I have sat, floating atop my lotus, posting away in eerie cybernetic silence, while marveling at the strange and haunting stillness that has surrounded me of late.

And all the time it was just that pesky spam filter destroying my friends’ comments, stuffing up my ears with cotton, stifling the free voice of the citizen reader, cutting me off from those who love me and would help me be the very best blogger I can be.

Ah, modern technology. So powerful, yet so fickle. Our faithful little electronic servants, who defeat us at every turn.

It is now commonly known that the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to make typing slower (because early mechanical typewriters were prone to jamming). What is not generally acknowledged is that this seemingly contradictory approach to design is not the exception, but the rule.

First, let’s be honest about ourselves — about humans. We are magnificent. These astounding brains, coupled with these eyes, ears, hands, language, sense of proprioception, facial expressiveness (I could go on), creates an astonishingly rich package. There is something almost dizzyingly wonderful about the ways that humans communicate with each other, using our minds to control our muscles and interpret our perceptions with a degree of subtlety and effortlessness that we too often take for granted.

Yet as engineers, we are limited. We cannot create anything as wonderful as ourselves, and so we compromise. Our vehicles lack the supreme holonomic grace, balance and flexibility of our own natural movement, so to compensate we make them fast. Our networks of computers are incapable of true thought, reason or judgement, so we compensate by giving them vast powers to sift through data and find patterns by brute force.

We tend not to notice the limitations of our own tools, because our fantastically protean brains and bodies adapt to any tool so quickly that we often overlook the tool’s limitation. Take, for example, the standard Graphical User Interface — buttons, sliders, icons, pull-down menus, all those things you control with mouse or touch screen.

Like the QWERTY keyboard before it, the GUI is, quite literally, designed to cripple us. It deliberately makes us slow, inefficient, clumsy, awkward. You probably think I’m being facetious, but I’m not. After all, from the point of view of any major software company designing interface tools for office workers, the last thing you want is an optimal interface.

No, you want to slow people down, to force them to do exactly one thing at a time. While a software user is pressing a button or changing a slider, they cannot do anything else. This is a very useful design quality in extremely large software systems targeted for purchase by financial institutions and other major corporate clients employing thousands of office workers. The more you can control and restrict the possible things a user can do at once, the more reliably you can guarantee a measurable and repeatable level of productivity.

Apple and its competitors are currently playing an analogous game in the arena of multitouch tablets. As we all learn the pinch gesture, the two finger swipe, the tap and drag, we gradually come to believe that this is what good tactile expression is. But of course exactly the opposite is true. We are in fact being trained to think of a crippling level of inexpressiveness as acceptable.

To realize this is true, think of all the expressiveness and subtlety that your hands and fingers are actually capable of, when playing a guitar or violin, when sculpting in clay, even when simply turning the pages of a book. We are being taught that to access the world of software and shared information, we must abandon all of that power within our own bodies and minds.

The only recent interface I’ve seen that bucks this trend is Microsoft’s Kinect. Of the crop of human/computer interface products out there, only Kinect seems to have the potential, over time, to evolve in a way that does justice to the vast power of human expressiveness.

And so I am encouraged that one day soon we will get over our foolishness. We will embrace our birthright, and design computational interfaces that make full use of gesture, touch, hearing, vision, facial expression, body language, line of sight, proprioception, rhythm, balance, language, and the many other things we use to communicate with each other.

And then things will start to get interesting.

The president of Venezuela may be to blame for the lack of intelligent life on the planet Earth, said President Blyzto Glaxxpod of planet Mars, on Tuesday.

“I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been any actual civilization on Earth, but maybe this human Hugo Chavez arrived there, socialism arrived and finished off the planet,” Glaxxpod said in speech to mark World Ammonia Day.

Glaxxpod, who also holds socialism responsible for many of the red planet’s own problems, warned that ammonia supplies on Mars were drying up.

“Careful! Here on planet Mars where hundreds of years ago or less there were great canals, now there are deserts. Where there were nitric seas, there are deserts,” Glaxxpod said, sipping from a glass of ammonia.

He went on to decry the robot spies Earth recently landed on Mars, adding that the Earth’s attacks on its own Moon were about green cheese reserves.