Month: May 2024

Today in history, exactly 446 years ago, construction began on Pont Neuf in Paris, France, when King Henry III laid its first cornerstone. I have an odd history with this bridge.

The first time I went to Paris, I made a point of walking all the bridges. Some of the bridges seemed relatively new, but it was obvious that Pont Neuf was a very old bridge — clearly older than all the others.

I made some assumptions based on the French I had learned in school. I assumed, given its name, that at the time of its construction Pont Neuf was the ninth bridge over the Seine.

Of course I wondered what had happened to the other eight bridges. And the entire idea of Pont Neuf being the ninth bridge seemed ironic to me, since it was now quite evidently the oldest bridge in Paris.

Eventually I took the time to do the proper research, and I realized that I had not even begun to understand the irony of the situation. From the French, as it was spoken in 1578, “Pont Neuf” actually translates to “New Bridge”.

One thought that came to my mind about today’s verdict is that in order to become a U.S. Citizen you need not to have been convicted of a felony.

So if enough voters remain fanatically devoted to their Befehlshaber, we may end up with a situation where a convicted criminal presides over a system of government that excludes convicted criminals from its citizenry.

Is that irony? Or does it just mean that our nation has completely lost our way?

Now that climate change — in the form of major hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters — has reached the point where it is regularly killing significant numbers of Americans, I suspect that weather modification is going to go through a resurgence. The technology has been around for decades in various forms, but the priority has not been there to make it a focus of large scale spending as part of capital infrastructure.

Just as we have large systems in place to prevent disastrous natural forest fires — mainly by strategically artificially setting artificial fires — we will start to do large scale interventions on weather systems. At some point, as the technology improves, we might even begin to systematically change the temperature of various regions.

I envision a day when someone might visit a city, breathe in the fresh air, and say “I am so glad they turned on the air conditioning.”

One of the central utopian tenets of Star Trek is the development of a universal translator. A technology that instantly and seamlessly translates between spoken languages is clearly good for peace and understanding between peoples.

Last night I attended a dinner between people who did not share a common language, but who were highly motivated to communicate with one another. Everyone took out their smartphones and started typing and speaking into them, attempting to create sentences which conveyed their intended meaning.

The process was not smooth. There are subtleties of meaning and emotional nuance which are well beyond a machine’s ability to understand or express.

While observing this process, part of my mind was imagining a “realistic Star Trek”, where universal translation does not go smoothly, and opportunities for misunderstanding lurk around every corner.

I realize that would not satisfy Star Trek’s prime directive to portray a utopian future. But it sure would lead to some interesting dramatic situations.

If you had the ability to do perfect life logging, would you? In particular, if there were a technology that allowed you to create a holographic 3D movie of you day, from beginning to end, down to the smallest detail, do you think that would be a good thing or a bad thing?

I can see how this would be convenient. You could jot down notes and immediately discard them. You could go back even years later and see whether you took care of any given task on any given day. You could properly monitor your exercise and diet, or really anything else of interest to you.

There are so many useful possibilities here. Assuming, of course, that the technology exists to support all this.

But putting aside the technical hurdles, I wonder how we would deal with the privacy issues. It’s one thing to take a selfie with your phone, it is quite another to have every aspect of your existence existing somewhere as a detailed digital record.

I suspect that in a world where such extreme life logging had become widely adopted, people might need to be a much stronger layer of personal and verifiable data security. And even then, I’m not convinced that this would all be a good thing.

As I am reading through Jimmy Webb’s brilliant book Tunesmith, I am learning all sorts of wisdom — not just about writing songs, but about so many social constructs around songs that I never before thought about.

For example, he points out that composers for the soundtracks of Hollywood movies long ago invented a musical shorthand for Indigenous people in the Americas. Such people were invariably introduced, whether in dramas or comedies, by musical sequences consisting of base notes moving together in parallel open fifths.

Meanwhile, he points out, the same composers developed a different shorthand for people from East Asia — sequences consisting of treble notes moving together in parallel open fourths¹. By now I am sure you have heard both of these motifs many times.

What’s interesting — and disturbing — here is that these two remarkably similar musical motifs really have little to do with the actual people being caricatured. They are musical shorthands invented by White people to immediately evoke a cartoon version of “the exotic other” for an audience of White people.

Why is such a similar pattern used in both of these instances? Do parallel open intervals possess some intrinsic quality which to White folks suggests “Exotic other people who are not like us”?

1) Thanks to DB Porter.

The acronym XR used to refer to “Extended Reality”. But more recently I see that it is referring to “Cross Reality”. The general idea, as I understand it, is that Cross Reality is an overarching term that describes all of the possible ways to “cross” things that are virtual (like computer graphics) together with things that are real (like physical objects and other people).

So the term Cross Reality, or XR, is meant to encompass Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). I can see how it is useful to have a single term to talk about the entire larger topic.

On the other hand, the word “cross” itself has multiple meanings, which can lead to some confusion. Part of me sees the term “Cross Reality” and just thinks “The Gods are angry.”

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”

      — Bob Dylan, 1965

When you travel around the world, you can’t help but notice that many cultures have a unique language of abstract visual patterns. These patterns show up on pottery, fabrics, walls and many other surfaces.

Korea, China, Indonesia, Japan, various parts of India, different indigenous nations in the Americas — each has a distinct visual language, with its own mathematical underpinning. There are sometimes connections and influences between the patterns of one culture and another, but each culture’s family of patterns is unique and instantly identifiable.

I wonder whether there is a universal visual language of such patterns. Perhaps some unifying mathematical framework could tie them together, describing each unique cultural variation within the context of a single unifying theory.

I realized only this week that one of my favorite songs of all time, Paul Simon’s America, contains no rhymes at all. If you don’t believe me, you can listen for yourself.

I’ve been listening to this song for most of my life, and yet I have never noticed that before. It seems like an odd thing to never have noticed.

I wonder what other great songs contain absolutely no rhymes (even internal rhymes). Given my experience with America, I don’t think that I’m the best person to come up with a good list.