Month: December 2016

When you’re in Paris
You just need to stop and say
“Hey, I’m in Paris!”

feral roving packs
of drunken naughty santas
on the prowl today

The other day I wrote in a post that no matter who you are, there are fewer people older than you every day. Juozas Baltusnikas commented, correctly, that this would not be true for the world’s oldest human.

This observation can, in fact, be generalized. There is a small group of people, all over the age of 100, for whom my statement is not true.

More formally, there is some age X such that if you are under that age, then at least one person older than you will die every day. Conversely, if you are above the age of X, then at least one day will go by when nobody older than you will die.

It is interesting to ask the question: “Approximately what is the size S of the set of people who are age X or greater?” I wonder what sorts of analysis tools you would use to approach such a question.

Other related questions are also interesting. For example, approximately what is the value of X? Do the values of S and X fluctuate significantly over time, or do they hold very steady?

Also, does it matter how many people are in the world? For example, if the world population varies from 2 billion people to 20 billion people, will the value of S change by a lot, or will it remain pretty much the same?

When people think about the Gutenberg bible, their first association is usually with the general idea of movable type, although movable type actually dates back to eleventh century China. Many (although not all) scholars believe that Gutenberg’s was the first European press to use cast metal alloy fonts, a key technology for the mass production of books, which led to a great increase in literacy throughout Europe.

Yet ironically, Gutenberg’s bible cost far less per copy than hand written manuscripts, it was not actually a mass market product, but more of a high end luxury item. Even so, its eventual impact on mass publication is undeniable.

Recently I’ve been thinking of the Valve/HTC Vive as the modern equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible. It is definitely a high end item. After all, when you add in the PC it costs around $2000, and it generally requires a dedicated room.

Contrast this with mobile VR, which just needs a smartphone. And that’s a big deal, because there are already 2.1 billion smartphones in the world, and that number is growing rapidly.

Of course mobile VR is not yet “room scale”. Phone based VR products like GearVR and Google Daydream still track only your orientation. If you physically move your head, they don’t know about it, so actual walking and head movement can’t be part of the experience.

But a high quality room scale experience in the VIVE is aspirational. It shows people what mobile VR could look like in the next few years.

When that happens, this sort of more powerful VR immersion will move from the high end to the phone in your pocket. And then VR will get its equivalent of the mass market paperback.

But first it needed its Gutenberg bible.

I was having a conversation with a friend last night, and the subject of age came up. And I found myself saying, apropros of pretty much nothing, that every day there are fewer people older than me.

I hadn’t really ever thought about this before, and neither had my friend. So we pondered it for a bit. No matter who you are, from the moment you are born there is one thing that is certainly true: Every day, there are fewer people who are older than you.

Generally speaking, we assume that the converse is also true: Every day, there are more people who are younger than you. And this is a great thing, because young people are the future.

But even that is not certain. Hypothetically speaking, the U.S. might one day elect a president so heavy handed and inexperienced that he accidentally goads, say, the People’s Republic of China into a conflict that escalates into nuclear war. Not that that would ever happen.

But independently of all that, there is one thing you can be sure of: No matter who you are, or where you are, or how old you are, every day there are fewer people who are older than you.

It’s kind of nice to know that there is at least one thing we all have in common. 🙂

I’ve been posting one post a day to this blog, every day, since January 1 2008. The fact that I have been doing that seems kind of crazy when I stop and think about it.

On the other hand, it also seems perfectly normal. After all, anything that you do every day will eventually come to seem normal.

But one thing I’ve realized, something I don’t think I would have guessed when I started writing this blog, is it has also given each and every day during these past nine years a unique identity. Whenever I go back and read any of these posts, I find myself transported right back to that day, and I remember what was going on at that point in my life, the thoughts I was thinking, what I was happy about or struggling with.

So in a way this project has functioned for me as a kind of magical portal into my own life. Without quite meaning too, it seems that I invented a sort of time machine.

The New York Times and other news organizations have been using a certain term to refer to a very scary group of people in this country. The term seems cute, inoffensive, almost adorable, like a group of people who get together at their local library on Saturdays to form a community support group.

But the Times also went through the effort of precisely defining the meaning of this term: “A racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces an ideology of white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist.”

So why use a euphemism, when the meaning itself is right there? For example, can’t we just state the obvious, that Donald Trump has appointed, as his chief strategist, one of the thought leaders of a racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces an ideology of white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist?

And is there something wrong with simply noting that Donald Trump has become the hero and figurehead of a racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces an ideology of white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist?

Or has stating the simple and obvious now become unpatriotic? Are we so scared of the truth that we need to hide behind euphemisms, like scared little children?

I got my undergrad degree in theoretical mathematics. Then right after graduation I went to work for a computer graphics company. Eventually I got my Ph.D. in computer science.

The other day a colleague asked me whether that math degree had been useful in my career. It was a thoughtful question, and it deserved a thoughtful answer.

I told him that the process of learning to program and mastering the principles of computer science, was, by analogy, like learning to play the piano. It was an enormously important set of skills. Having all those skills and concepts under my belt has very much helped me in my career.

But by the same analogy, learning math was like learning to understand music itself. Computer science merely gave me the tools needed to execute my vision of what could be possible with computer graphics. Mathematics taught me how to understand and think about that vision itself.

When I am boiling something on the stove for, say, ten minutes, sometimes I will make the mistake of looking at the clock. As I am sure you know, when you wait for something by looking at the clock, each minute seems to a very long time.

I also find time going more slowly when I am in a contemplative or meditative mood, except in this case the sensation is more pleasurable. In contrast, when I am deep into programming something, also a pleasurable activity, the time just flies by. Those same ten minutes on the clock can feel like very little time at all.

All of this is consistent with Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind and similar theories. The part of my brain that is engaged when I am staring at a clock or meditating about something is very different from the part that is engaged when I am explicitly performing a task. I suspect that if one were to do a PET scan of my brain activity at those various moments, very different regions would be lighting up.

In a few years we will very likely have the option to wear augmented reality glasses that give us all sorts of information about the world around us, and we will simply take this power for granted. One thing we might be able to do with those Smart Glasses is to train a machine learning algorithm to give us a customized sense of our own particular “subjective time”. This measurement will vary quite a bit based on various factors, including our current activity, objects in our field of view, and gaze direction.

I wonder whether having this information explicitly available will cause us to make different choices. Will we opt for activities that make time race by, or will we instead become drawn to more contemplative modes of being. Such meditative activities might slow down our subjective clock, and therefore in some sense allow us to live a longer life.

Just about every time I give a talk about the possibilities of virtual reality, somebody asks me whether I think there is a danger that VR will replace reality. And I always tell them that I don’t worry about that, because all historical precedent shows otherwise.

Each time a new medium comes out, people worry that it will “replace reality”. I suspect that this perception is really a consequence of the newness of the medium, which leads people to mischaracterize it.

In its time, each new medium for distributing content was worried over, as a potential “reality killer”. Books, photography, audio recording, cinema and television are just some examples.

More recently, the rise of the high speed internet has coincided with a dramatic increase in long distance air travel. When people know more about a place in the world, they are more likely to take the effort to visit it in person.

Referring to historical precedent isn’t always convincing. After all, a person who grew up in today’s world has no real connection with the advent of books or cinema, and today’s undergrads were born into a world where the Web already existed.

But today a student once again asked me the question about whether VR would replace reality, and this time I managed to phrase my answer in a more relevent way, by placing it in the context of popular music. “Album sales,” I said, “don’t kill concert sales.”