Month: May 2011

Today my friend Alec showed me this picture:

The image is just so brilliant in its perfection — these young Buddhist monks looking at the virtual world they hold in their hands. One notices upon their faces an expression of total serenity, of peaceful acceptance of this new reality.

It is a new world my friends, a world you and I will never truly understand, however hard we try. For it is their world — it belongs to these young children who breathe these pixels as freely as the air, who understand this reshaped reality, this parallel universe, for it is the world into which they were born.

You and I may stare at its wonders, as one stares through a glass darkly lit by visions of things yet to be. But for those being born into it, even as we speak, it is not a glass but a doorway — a doorway that leads to the only home they know.

It’s becoming ever more clear to me that the transitional technology to fully immersive human-centered augmented reality (a world I described in previous posts as “eccescopic”) will most be the SmartPhone.

In particular, some form of good 3D video capture is going to go on the back of SmartPhones. It might be a variant on the structured-light technology in Microsoft’s Kinect, or it might just be two-camera stereo combined with very good algorithms for extracting distance from stereo pairs.

When this happens, SmartPhones will start to become more like the Nintendo 3DS — through our SmartPhones we will start to see virtual objects in the world around us. This will create a pressure for a new generation of SmartPhone that has an autostereoscopic display that continually adjusts for your viewing position and distance as you hold your phone.

A parallel development will take place with our tablets. At some point those little phones in our pockets and slates in our hands will become windows into a shared augmented world. Application builders will come to take this capability for granted, at which point that parallel world will rapidly become an ever richer and more interesting place.

At some point this parallel world will become so compelling that wearables will kick in. WIthin a few years SmartPhones, having finished their job as a transitional technology, will simply disappear, and our cyber-enhanced world will be something we see and hear all around us, with our own eyes and ears.

To us, this world will simply be reality. To go about one’s day without the ability to see, hear and interact with this reality may eventually come to seem as odd and eccentric as going to town buck naked.

Yesterday my sister told me that the favorite word of my niece, who has just turned one year old, is “uh oh”. OK, technically that’s two words, but I don’t think my niece cares about such distinctions yet.

I asked my sister whether my niece liked the word because it had only vowels (consonants can be a little tricky at that age). My sister said, no, in her experience, what little kids seem to like is the idea of “uh oh”. That precise concept amuses them greatly.

As I thought about this, I realized that “uh oh” is, in fact, the basis of all literature: The Montegues and Capulets don’t get along — “uh oh”. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy find each other incredibly annoying — “uh oh”. King Lear is starting to lose it — “uh oh”. Anakin has gone over to the dark side — “uh oh”. Rachel is a Replicant — “uh oh”. The Cat in the Hat is making a mess — “uh oh”. Gregor Samsa is having a very bad morning — “uh oh”.

Without the “uh oh” there would be no literature as we know it. Most novels, plays and movies could not exist. The more I thought about my niece’s favorite word, the more clearly I realized that the pleasure of “uh oh” is something very deep within us, not so much a product of growing up in a culture where people tell stories, but rather the built-in biological precondition for story itself.

I loved the comments on yesterday’s post. Anton’s solution to the puzzle was very creative. My only caveat is that it might be hard for someone looking at that shape to realize that it is suggesting a puzzle about squares, since the shape isn’t built from squares, but rather from shapes with a width:height ratio of 4:3.

My own solution is based on the observation that you can always fold up a corner of a shape made up of squares, thereby removing a square while preserving the length of the perimeter:

Applying this idea iteratively to the puzzle of finding a shape with the same perimeter as a square, but half the area of that square, I found the following solution:

Although to make things more fun (and prettier) in posing the puzzle, I would present the shape rotated 45^o, so it would look more like this:

The puzzle Alec discussed in his comment — to find a shape with the same perimeter as a circle, but half the area of that circle — has a solution very different from the one he proposes, reminiscent of my recent Yin Yang post. Actually, it has an infinite number of solutions, of which these are the first two in a series:

Today I saw the below shape in a design on a T-shirt. It happened that at the time I was in the middle of a conversation with somebody who shares my interest in teaching math. So I said to him “that would make an interesting math problem”.

It turns out that the moment I said those words, he thought of the same math problem I was thinking of. Apparently, just saying the word “math problem” and showing this picture was sufficient to define a particular associated math problem. In this case, the problem we both thought of was:

Find a shape whose area is 3/4 the area of a square and whose perimeter is the same as the perimeter of the square.

Notice that this is more or less the same as saying “find a shape whose area is three and whose perimeter is eight”. When I rephrased it that wasy in my head, I thought of another solution:

In the above picture, I put in the dashed lines just to make it clear what’s going on — the shape is a box three times wider than it is high. Interestingly, if we had started with this shape, I doubt either of us would have come up with that particular math problem. Apparently the first shape suggests the math problem, but the second shape does not — probably because it would suggest too many math problems, and therefore no one problem in particular.

Maybe shapes can be classified by the math problem (if any) that they suggest. Many shapes work as solutions to math problems, but I suspect that far fewer work as suggesters of one particular problem.

I leave you with the following riddle: What shape, if any, effectively suggests the following math problem:

Find a shape whose area is 1/2 the area of a square and whose perimeter is the same as the perimeter of the square.

Yesterday I saw a talk by Scott Ross, who has for many careers helped bring a number of major Hollywood special-effects films to the screen, including two “Back to the Future” films, “Die Hart 2”, “Ghost”, “Strange Days” and “Fight Club”. But in this talk I was alarmed by some conclusions he reached.

Ross was discussing the charmingly quirky Korean 2006 horror/family-dramedy “The Host”, analyzing it from a financial perspective. First he pointed out that the film cost $11M to make ($3M going to out-source the monster effects), while it earned $89M in global box office — a reasonable example of a commercially successful movie.

Then he pointed out that only $2M of the film’s box office was from the U.S. From this statistic, he drew the conclusion that the filmmakers had erred — that they should not have released the film in Korean, but rather should have hired a writer to transpose it to English, and make it more culturally relevant to a U.S. audience. If they had done this, he claimed, they would have made a lot more money.

Now, I know that Ross has had a long and successful career in feature films, and nobody can take that away from him. Yet here he was, making a statement that was so wrongheaded, I thought at first that he was trying to make some kind of ironic joke. Sadly, he wasn’t.

If you actually watch this film (I had caught its initial U.S. release), you realize that its success was due to a unique blending of a very Korean-specific charming domestic family drama with a story that involved a 100 foot long fearsome mutant sea creature gobbling people up for lunch, while those family members fight for their lives.

The reason the film works is that these two stories — a tender and gently humorous tale of an eccentric yet loving family and, well, a monster movie — are balanced and played off each other with great finesse. And there are just too many things about the way the film achieves this balance that are culture-specific, for it to be culturally translatable.

I’ll give just one example of many: One of the central conceits of the film, one of reasons in fact that it works so well, is that the threat is real — any of these people can get eaten by the monster, and over the course of the movie a number of them do, even the occasional plucky and adorable youngster. Within its cultural context, this actually strengthens the family drama (you’d have to watch the movie to see how and why).

Imagine, in an American special effects film, a monster actually killing off an adorable child that the audience has been rooting for and has bonded with. You’d be laughed out of Hollywood just for suggesting such a taboo idea.

For this and for many other reasons, you could not retune “The Host” for an American audience. Rather, you’d need to make a fundamentally different film. You could give your film the same title, and even the same monster, but you’d have to gut the very core ideas that made the original film so appealing in its original cultural context.

Shorn of the delicate magic of the original writing, your film would not make anything like $89M at the box office — more likely it would make less than $1M. Audiences know when they are being snookered.

The fact that this concept is not understood by someone of Ross’s long experience in film is appalling. No wonder there aren’t more great films coming out of Hollywood.

My post yesterday was actually a sonnet in iambic pentameter, with an ABBACDDCEFFEGG rhyme scheme. I didn’t format it as a poem, because I was trying to get into the mindset of someone for whom this was everyday speech.

I wonder whether it would be possible for us mere humans — not a hypothetical super-genius race — to learn to improvise such things in real-time. I’m imagining a recreational activity in which a group of pleasantly fanatical people get together periodically, agreeing to speak to each other only in iambic pentameter.

After enough practice and some time, words might start to blossom into rhyme. A community could form around pursuing it.

Oops, I fear I already am doing it!

I find that I am filled with fascination at the prospect of a world where daily speech was always rhymed and metered, so that each new thought came out like poetry. A nation capable of thinking in these ways might well evolve a culture more creative, with everyone an artist.

If each native always had a lovely turn of phrase, would their population even know it? Would people feel like artists all the time? Just because your words come out in rhyme doesn’t mean you think you are a poet. And not to put too fine a point upon it, what if speech all came out as a sonnet?

Yesterday I wrote about a race
That speaks in rhyming couplets all the time
But then, they might have many forms of rhyme
To satisfy their need for rhythmic order
For X points out that couplets may well border
On dullness rather more than spoken grace.

Her comment focused mainly on the use
Of enjambment as a way to keep the flow
Of thought between one’s verses, even though
I’ve often found, when all is said and done,
Like our fine and fickle friend, the lowly pun,
Enjamb-ed verse is subject to abuse.

I agree that terms français, peut etre latin,
Can make a phrase sound ever so bravura.
And given the occasional caesura
The plainest little thought becomes exotic.
But isn’t such a goal a bit quixotic?
I know I’m just a poor boy from Manhattan,

So who am I to say? It’s really fine
If some might want to break up all their phrasing
In two, although I find it quite amazing
We need a word from way across the ocean,
“Enjambment”, to express a simple notion.
Why can’t we simply say “a run-on line”?

Continuing the theme from yesterday…

In “Idiocracy”, when Luke Wilson, with his IQ of 100 (which in the future makes him a genius) speaks in fully formed sentences, the local populace finds it completely bizarre — in fact they laugh at him, finding him effete. I’ve been thinking about how one might convey the equivalent encounter, should people from an alternate reality where the average IQ is 200+ enter a society where the average IQ is 100.

We’re talking about a race of people who could do the NY Times Saturday crossword puzzle in their heads, or glance at stock market listings and then find it obvious where to invest. So it would make sense that their cultural norm of speech would incorporate linguistic challenges that they would find easy, but which would require much effort on our part to keep up with.

Here’s one possibility: Our visitors, in their native dialect, always speak in perfectly formed iambic pentameter rhyming couplets. Of course when such people encounter us, with our barbarically chaotic speech patterns, they could learn to mimic our grammar, but they would undoubtedly find such speech as distasteful as the grunting of an early human.

Such visitors, on first arriving, might attempt to speak to us in their native dialect. The result might be something like this:

Native:		“Welcome to Burger King. How can I help you?”
Visitor:		“I thank you for your courtesy today. What food is here that we can take away?”
Native:		“Come again?”
Visitor:		“Certainly we’ll come again quite soon. But can’t we order now, it’s nearly noon?”

Things aren’t likely to go well for this visitor. In fact, you can well imagine our bemused native getting a serious case of the giggles.