Month: March 2021

As you scurry, helter skelter
Take some time for rest and shelter
Outside pressures never cease
But inside you need inner peace
Take an hour every day
Just to look inside and say
“This is me, I am here.
If nothing else, that much is clear.”
Always keep your inner view
That’s how you know you are you

I know that it’s a cliché to say “Karma is a boomerang.” On first hearing, it sounds so very fuzzy and far too simple to be meaningful.

Yet there is power in simply giving things away. And that is especially true when you are doing cutting edge technological research.

People often worry that if they simply give something away for free, then they will miss out on a chance to make money. But in many cases — particularly in technological research — the world does not even yet know that what you are doing could be valuable.

Because you are thinking differently from everyone else, you are often years ahead of whatever potential “market” there may be. For one thing, the surrounding infrastructure required for there to even be a market for what you are doing may not yet exist.

But if you give something away for free, people will start to play with it. They will discover interesting uses for it that you probably wouldn’t have thought of. It will become part of new conversations that otherwise may never have taken place.

At that point, you will have been the person who gave this to the world, which gives you an enormous amount of credibility. Eventually the world will indeed catch up to your idea, and somebody with lots of power and money will throw millions of dollars at it.

Entire teams will then be working on it, trying to build that market before their competitors do. And if you are the person who gave that idea away, way back before there was a market for it, those teams will want to work with you.

So there’s nothing fuzzy about it. In fact it’s a very practical idea: Karma is a boomerang.

If you had the option of being able to walk into the movie of your choice, would you do it? On the surface this seems like a very appealing notion.

After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to wander through Oz, or Tatooine, or Hogwarts, or the Shire? For many people these would be childhood fantasies come to life.

Yet part of the appeal of these fictional worlds is that we can keep them at a comfortable distance. We ourselves never need to encounter an Orc or a Dementor.

The perils of such worlds are, to us, merely literary devices. They have been designed to give us vicarious thrills at a safe remove.

Perhaps it is good, on the balance, that we cannot literally actually enter into the world of our favorite movie. The safety and comfort of a proscenium may very well be a necessary part of the experience.

Music visualizers have a long and illustrious history, but we tend to think of them as things we see on screens, not in our daily lives. But that may change in a few years.

When extended reality becomes the norm, will music begin to take on more of a visual component? At that point, it will be technologically possible to see melodies and harmonies floating in the air between us, as ever changing three dimensional objects

Will that change the way we think about music? Will it signal the rise of a new art form?

I am looking forward to finding out!

It was rumored today Apple glasses
Will soon be for sale to the masses
    When our students all wear them
    We will need to prepare them
For some new holographical classes

Now that WandaVision is done, whatever will we all do for great television? It raised the bar so high, I fear nothing else will seem all that compelling now.

It’s like when you have the rare opportunity to eat really great chocolate. It’s wonderful, and you are happy you did it, but it ruins you.

All of the chocolate you eat afterward seems second rate. Chocolate that you used to enjoy now tastes like ashes in your mouth.

But you do not regret. You never regret.

Great chocolate is like WandaVision. It needs to be experienced and savored, and then remembered with all due reference and appreciation.

We learn a lot about a person by looking at their eyes. There is so much subtlety of emotion in the space just around the eyes.

There are seven distinct groups of muscles in the area around the eyes. And even very slight and subtle uses of those muscles can convey a tremendous amount of meaning — whether intended or not.

When somebody is wearing sunglasses, much of that information is hidden. We simply can’t “read” people as well when they are sporting shades.

In the future, extended reality eyewear will likely become commonplace, and it will likely look a lot like sunglasses. Which means that for much of the time, we won’t be able to read people’s faces as well to catch subtleties of emotion and intent.

I wonder whether taking off your XR glasses will end up become a sort of social signal of emotional intimacy. Perhaps you will only show your actual eyes to people you trust, and the ability to hide your naked eyes from strangers will become a fundamental right of privacy, perhaps enshrined into law.

When I am on a particularly boring Zoom meeting, sometimes I multitask. I mute my microphone so that nobody can hear the telltale typing, and I get other stuff done.

Admit it, you’ve done the same thing. Some meetings just have a way too high time to interest ratio, and we all need to get stuff done.

In the future, when people are wearing extended reality glasses, I wonder whether this trend will continue. A person at the front of a meeting might see a sea of ostensibly interested faces, looking up attentively.

But in actuality, many of those people will zoning out by looking at the display built into their eyeglasses. Maybe they will be programming, or surfing YouTube videos, or shopping on-line. There won’t really be any way to know.

This is probably not a good thing. The alienation of people looking at their phones at least comes with a certain amount of social signaling. We can tell when someone is surfing their SmartPhone rather than paying attention in a meeting.

But when the screens move into our eyeglasses, that will no longer be the case. We may not have any idea who in the room is mentally present, and who is — for all practical purposes — somewhere else.

Last week in my class I showed the students how to implement some fairly mathematical algorithms. The funny thing about algorithms is that you need to get them exactly right. One false move and the algorithm breaks.

So my live coding had a certain quality of being a high wire act. Everything had to be exactly correct in order for me to “teach by coding”.

But this week, even though I was live coding, I was doing it to build up an animated figure. This wasn’t so much math as it was art — even though I was still using the medium of computer programming.

The tone of the class was much lighter. I could play around, try different things, take suggestions from the class. There was a lot more room for us to explore and experiment.

There is no real answer to the question of which is better — the two experiences are incredibly different, even though they are using the same language of coding.

But I can tell you there is one big difference: After the “making art by coding” class is over, I feel much less anxiety. 🙂

One of the useful things about science fiction is that it creates a vehicle for presenting demos from the future to a broad audience. This matters because there are always restrictions on what we can build in any given year, yet we still want to be able to talk sensibly about the future.

In the case of computers, we have Moore’s Law, which suggests that computer capability grows exponentially over time. So we may not be able to achieve something in any given year, but we can predict with rough accuracy what we will be able to achieve a decade hence.

This principal can be applied to create plausible demos from the future. For example, Moore’s Law tells us that computer capability grows by roughly a factor of 100 in a decade.

If we were to take what we now know about machine learning, computer vision, computer graphics and other technologies used to support computer enabled human communication and multiply the speed of every component by 100, we could start designing a prototype for what a personal communication device might look like in 2031.

One of the best ways to deliver a sense of the capabilities of such a prototype into the public consciousness is through the medium of science fiction. Sounds to me like a fun project!