Ken’s Blog

In yesterday’s post I talked about how I memorized the 50 United States in alphabetical order. At the time I didn’t know that I was using a method to remember them all.

But today I realized that I get through them without missing any by employing a mnemonic. It’s not a very sophisticated mnenonic. I just impose enough structure so that I don’t end up missing any of the 50 states.

In my head I see a table that looks like this:

A A A A C	C C D F G	H I I I I	K K L M M	M M M M M	M N N N N	N N N N O	O O P R S	S T T U V	V W W W W

 
The letters are the initials of the 50 states. The first five states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas and California — are in the first column, and so on, all the way to Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming in the last column.

I see this table in my head when I go through the states in order. I remember the states in groups of five, and it works like a charm.

The funny thing is that I didn’t do any of this on purpose. The table just showed up by itself when I set about memorizing the 50 states in alphabetical order.

So I guess you could call it an accidental mnemonic. I wonder how often something like that happens.

Last night I had trouble sleeping, so I decided to memorize the 50 United States in alphabetical order. It was something I had always meant to do, and there is no time like the present.

It was challenging yet refreshing to do this without resorting to the internet. It’s a kind of game you can play while just lying in bed.

It took me a while to remember them all, but keeping them in alphabetical order in my head definitely helped. I knew, at least, that when they added up to fifty, they were all there.

Now that can recite the state names in alphabetcal order, I want to learn for sure where they are on the map. For that I may need to cheat and look at the internet. Or maybe — crazy thought — in a book.

I have been thinking about how systems work together in non obvious ways. When you trace how two or more systems work together, you start to see patterns.

To take just one example among many, consider fresh food in your house. What allows you to have fresh food at home?

At least two different systems work together to make this happen. Either one alone would not be sufficient.

The electrical grid makes it possible for you to have a refrigerator. To you it’s very simple. You just plug in your fridge and voila!

But behind the scenes there is a complex system of distribution and delivery, developed and refined over many decades.

But that is not sufficient. The food needs to get to your house. Which it does, of course, by car or truck.

Seems simple enough. But behind that car or truck is an incredibly complex system of roads, highways, gas stations, oil fields, and a million little details that make personal transportation possible.

The next time you take a fresh container of milk out of your fridge, you might give a moment of thanks for technological systems that work together.

In the future we’ll put on our glasses
And enter a land of delight
A place filled with magical robots
That work for us all day and night
We are in for a magical future
Of that much we all can agree
Yet I think that the most useful robots
Will be robots that we’ll never see

I have the iPad Pro, and the fancy Apple Pencil. It’s a very impressive platform, if a little expensive. I’ve also got all sorts of cool drawing software that makes great use of that platform.

But I still use an old fashioned pencil. Specifically, I use inexpensive disposable mechanical #2 pencils from BIC. You can get them on-line in packs of 40 for about $13.

I find that I can draw better with a pencil than with any computer-based platform so far devised. There is just something about the analog physicality of it that affords me greater control.

I wonder whether we will ever get to the point where I will stop using real pencils, the way most people long ago stopped using a mechanical typewriter. I am certainly not opposed to making the transition. I just want something that feels as good to draw with as my trusty disposable BIC pencils. 🙂

When you and I meet in a coffee shop to chat over a cup of coffee, I think of you as “here”. But if you pick up the phone and call me, I think of you as “there”.

A Zoom call falls into the latter category. Everyone else on the call is “there”. The difference between someone being “here” and someone being “there” is very profound and intuitive.

Will technology ever advance for the point where someone who is far away feels like they are “here”? That question, in a nutshell, describes much of the research that my colleagues and I are working on.

When we get there, I will definitely let you know here. 🙂

Today we had a Zoom meeting to talk about a research proposal to replace things like Zoom meetings with something better. I really want there to be something better, and am eager to work on that, but in order to make that happen we need, ironically, to have Zoom meetings.

I guess it’s kind of like working on the invention of the typewriter by writing down your ideas with a quill pen. A quill pen is far from perfect, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

I have been working on a large proposal. There are many pieces to it, and it can be hard to keep track of everything.

So I’ve been boiling down the call for proposal into a set of connected keywords. Each keyword represents a phrase that connects to the rest of the proposal.

By keeping things short, I am able to keep all the pieces of the proposal in my head at the same time. And that lets me work everything through.

It’s funny, with all the digital tools we have available now, I end up relying on an old mnemonic trick that long predates the computer age. Maybe that’s just as well.

When you walk a dog, you notice that they don’t live in the same reality that we do. You might be walking along the street, enjoying a nice sunny day, while your dog is frantically pulling at its leash, trying to reach some spot in the grass to get a good sniff.

The dog is completely fascinated by all sorts of scents that we humans cannot perceive. To a dog, your boring little neighborhood is a sort of museum of aromas, with one fascinating exhibit after another.

I imagine that every time a new dog moves into the neighborhood, it deposits an entirely new set of olfactory delights that are endlessly fascinating to the other canines. To your dog, it’s as though the local museum is hosting the work of a great artist, and it wants to get on line for tickets.

Alas, most dogs quickly realize a terribly sad fact: We humans have no appreciation for the art of their species.

Traditionally it takes a lot of work to craft things. This is well known by hobbyists who weave quilts, assemble miniature ships or carve figurines.

But we are soon going to be entering an era in which we can simply move our hands in the air to create the objects we want. The object we create will appear fully dimensional.

We will be able to walk around such a creation and look at it from all angles. At the press of a button a 3D printer will be able to then give us that object as something tangible in the physical world.

What effect will this have on crafting? Will the field transform as the number of people who craft things goes up exponentionally, just as the invention of personal cameras transformed photography and turned it into a hobby for the masses?

Will crafting end up splitting into two distinct art forms — one that uses strictly traditional methods and the other embracing new technologies? Or will these various techniques simply be embraced and merge together with older forms of creation?

Time will tell.