Month: April 2025

Sometimes, what is needed is stillness, and quiet, and a space between things.

I am one of those people who often goes to the Wikipedia to find out what notable people were born on the current day of the year. It’s amazing how much you can learn if you just pick an interesting person and go to their Wikipedia page.

Once there, you might start to follow the links, and before you know it you’re way down the rabbit hole. It’s usually a very satisfying journey.

I know that there are people who have exactly the opposite habit. They turn to the Wikipedia to find out what notable people have died on the current day of the year.

The Wikipedia is very accommodating, whatever your tastes. For any given day of the year it lists both the notable people who were born on that day and the notable people who died on that day.

It seems to me that this might be a defining psychological trait. Are you a person who is more curious about what lives were started, or a person who is more curious about what lives were ended?

In either case, I wonder what that says about you.

Recently I have come to appreciate the New York Times for a surprising reason. Yes, it’s the newspaper of record, and yes their reporters work very hard (sometimes against great odds) to uncover the real story.

But there’s something else — something that I used to take for granted. It’s the fact that the New York Times does not care that I am reading it.

There was a time when that would have seemed like an odd statement indeed. When you pick up a newspaper, the newspaper doesn’t change just because you’re reading it.

But newer forms of media, like my Google feed, are obviously watching me as I am reading. When they see that I have read about something, they immediately present me with similar things to read.

Which to me seems backwards, because the last thing I would want to do after I have read about something is to read about the same thing again. To me that’s the definition of boring.

I would much rather use my time exploring something new. Call me old fashioned.

So I really appreciate that the New York Times is indifferent to my reading habits. Whatever I choose to read or not read, the contents of the paper stay the same.

It’s as though they actually believe in an objective idea of truth. Now isn’t that something?

Somebody said out to me today that the Cybertruck “looks like it belongs to a landing party of space Nazis.” To me that seems like a pretty accurate description.

And it also explains several things. For example, why would Elon Musk make an ostentatious show of doing Nazi salutes in public, when his favorite president is claiming to be trying to stamp out antisemitism?

At first I thought Musk was just trying to align with our president’s true beliefs. After all, we’re talking about a president who hangs out with the virulent antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and who is also working about as hard as he can to make black history disappear.

But then the comment today about the Cybertruck, and it all fell into place. Musk does not make Nazi salutes in public because he’s an antisemite, or a white supremacist, or a neo-Nazi. He may be all of those things, but that’s not why he is doing it.

He is doing it to sell cars. Clearly he’s trying to promote the Cybertruck — a car that looks like it belongs to a landing party of space Nazis.

What better way to sell such a car than to get people thinking about space Nazis? And what better way to get people thinking about space Nazis than to actually be one?

We spend our entire lives experiencing a particular form of asymmetry. That asymmetry is so baked into our experience that we don’t even think about it.

From the moment you are born, and throughout your life, you have been seeing (and hearing and feeling) the world around you differently from everyone else, because you are seeing through your eyes, while they are seeing through their eyes. Then at some point in early childhood you make the mental leap to accepting that we are all sharing a common reality.

But that is not your actual sensory experience — it is an intellectual construction that you have formed out of your experience. Let’s take some simple examples.

If I hold up an apple, you and I will agree that we are both seeing the same apple. Yet we are literally seeing two different things. You are seeing one side of an apple, and I am seeing the opposite side.

None of this matters all that much in reality. After all, the construct of shared reality that we each place over our respective perceptions serves us quite well.

But it might indeed start to matter once we all begin to wear augmented reality glasses. At that point, your perception and my perception of shared physical reality might start to deviate a lot more.

You and I could be in the same room, both believing that we are having a shared experience, but we might be wrong. Your glasses and my glasses might actually be showing us quite different things.

I suspect that we will need to develop new social conventions to deal with this shift in the relationship between reality and perception. Hopefully we will all end up seeing eye to eye.

April 25 is an illustrious day in the history of science. On this day in 1953, Watson and Crick, building partly on the work of Rosalind Franklin and others, published the paper that described the double helix structure of DNA.

The very next year, on April 25, 1954, the first practical solar cell was publicly demonstrated.

Then on April 25, 1961, Robert Noyce was granted a patent for inventing the integrated circuit. Without that, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Finally, on April 25 1983, humanity reached physically beyond our solar system for the first time, when the NASA space probe Pioneer 10 traveled beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Unfortunately, if the current policies of our Federal executive branch had been in place, all of these scientific advances might have been illegal. I suspect that they all sound suspiciously “woke”.

Does a songbird know that its song is beautiful?

I needed to make a structural diagram for a research proposal that some colleagues and I are submitting tomorrow. And I ended up creating it by writing a program in Javascript.

This strikes me as somewhat odd, because after all these many years, there are lots of professional programs out there to help you make structural diagrams. Yet with all of that effort by so many smart people, I still find it to be easier to get the diagram I want by writing a computer program.

Part of me wonders whether this will ever change. Will A.I. eventually get to the point where I can just tell it what I want to see, and it will produce the diagram of my dreams?

But there’s another part of me that says that this will never happen. There are just too many little aesthetic tweaks that I want control over, in order to tell exactly the visual story that I want to tell.

And having something that is “sort of” right would just drive me crazy. So I suspect that I will always stick to making diagrams the old fashioned way: Using my trusty vi editor to create a new empty text file, and writing a computer program.

I read today that the CEO of Tesla is stepping away from his Washington DC activities, because the company’s stock has dropped 71% in the last few months.

I can understand that. If the stock drops by the same amount in the next few months, then it will be at negative 42%.

And then he will officially be the poorest man in the world.

I was talking with some colleagues today about the possibilities of combining wearable blended reality with artificial intelligence. I mentioned how convenient it is, when I’m writing an email on my phone, that my AI email assistant realizes when I’m writing the same sequence of words several times and offers to complete the thought.

One of my colleagues pointed out that this feature is not foolproof. And if errors occur out in the real world, rather than on a screen, the consequences could be larger.

Suddenly a scene popped into my head: Two future military commanders are discussing their midday battle plan. Noticing the time, one commander says “time for lunch.” But his helpful AI assistant hears “time for launch.”

Unfortunately, out in the real world there is no “undo” key.