Ken’s Blog

I was preparing breakfast this morning and noticed the way I was multitasking. Since I had prepared these dishes many times before, I knew exactly how long everything takes.

So as I put one thing on the stove, I would turn something over in the toaster, and then the next moment reach for something else in the refrigerator. It was a kind of synchronized dance, with all of the moves choreographed not by design but by experience and intuition.

I realize that this systems thinking is an aspect of software engineering that is difficult to teach. A student can understand all the principles, but without knowing the weight of things, those principles are difficult to apply efficiently in practice.

How much does it cost to add a new module, to allocate such and such objects, to iterate versus recurse? On top of that, there are multiple kinds of costs. Some costs come in the form of greater time and effort in programming, whereas others are penalties paid in run-time performance.

Systems thinking applies to everything, whether shopping for groceries, cooking a meal, fixing a car, writing a computer program or designing and building a house. In order to do really something well, you need to have put in the time to have working knowledge at your fingertips.

Beginners are at a distinct disadvantage when experience is everything.

Some years ago I was walking around lower Manhattan with a companion. The topic got to contemporary popular cultural references.

I said that you could probably figure out someone’s age within a few years by which pop cultural references they recognized, and which they did not. There is, after all, a certain range of dates during which certain movies, TV shows and commercials appear, after which most vanish into the mists of time.

Except in the memories of those who witnessed them.

A case in point, I said, is the acronym “LSMFT”. Unless you are a culture nerd, you would need to be older than us to know what that means. My companion just looked at me blankly, with no sign of recognition.

At that moment, an older man who had been walking behind us spoke up, and proudly announced what “LSMFT” stands for. In a way, he was elegantly proving my point.

I suspect that anyone under about 75 years of age, unless they are very unusual, will not recognize this acronym, whereas any American over about 75 will know exactly what it means.

I’m curious — is there anyone out there in the younger demographic who already knows what LSMFT means, without Googling it?

Today our research group watched a video of Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 Sketchpad system. Afterward we had a long discussion about it, and about how much things have or have not changed in the last 57 years.

It is surprising that we have not gone collectively further since then in creating procedural interfaces. This suggests that it is an inherently hard problem, in which simple cases (like the ones that were tackled in Sketchpad) are low hanging fruit, and more complex cases become exponentially more difficult.

But now that we are entering an age in which virtual and mixed reality are going to be more widely adopted, this might shift. The greater affordsmces of immersive media could be a game changer.

Guess we will see!

I am working on a computer graphics project now that will be seen by perhaps half a dozen people. It’s largely a labor of love, and I derive great joy from working on it.

I’ve been noticing that I put exactly the same amount of deep care and devotion to good design into this project that I put into things I create that will be experienced by millions of people. The best way I can describe the motivation for this is that it would simply seem wrong to cut corners.

From an economic perspective, this makes no sense. Why put as much care into something that will be experienced by only a few people as I put into things that will be experienced by millions of people?

Which leads me to the following conclusion: There is something wrong with trying to apply an economic model to everything.

The idea of a dogwhistle is that it is so high pitched that only a dog can hear it. When applied to politics, it generally refers to a message tailored to a narrow constituency that most people outside that constituency might not notice.

But sometimes a dogwhistle is pitched so low that everyone can hear it. Then that happens, things get decidedly weird.

Last night, at the presidential debate, our president pitched a dogwhistle so low it was essentially in the basement. He suggested to far right white-supremacists, in a very obvious way, that they should be ready to disrupt the election process by means of physical violence.

Never thought I would see something like that my lifetime.

Many socially shared VR platforms do a very bad job of reflecting the ethnicity of participants. This is not so surprising. Avatar technology is still in a relatively primitive state, whereas actual people are very complex.

But that has gotten me thinking. If we do eventually get to the point where the sort of reality envisioned in Snow Crash becomes the norm, then questions surrounding ethnicity might become different.

Your literal appearance might matter less than your tribal identity. Ethnicity will be less about ill conceived responses to superficial genetical traits, and more about shared heritage and culture.

If that happens, I wonder what that will mean for social, cultural and economic interaction between people with different ethnic identities. I hope, among other things, that it will level the playing field.

Like many people, since the start of the pandemic I have been spending a lot more time in the kitchen. I’ve learned more about the art of cooking in the last half year than I can even begin to describe.

One of the more valuable lessons has been the importance of a well designed cooking space, with ready access to tools. You want your counter tops, cooking utensils, spice rack, stoves and oven, dishes, refrigerator, and pantry to all be within easy reach.

Everything is about flow. While you’re working on one thing, it’s important to know how that the other thing you started is doing, and whether it needs to be tended to.

I think about this when I think about future tasks we might do in shared virtual reality. VR is fairly new, but kitchen design has been going on for many centuries.

Perhaps we can apply some of the wisdom of kitchens to the design and workflow of our future shared VR spaces. I would not be surprised if we were to find that the two have a lot in common.

One of the salient features of the run-up to a major American election is the proliferation of political signage. Pretty much everywhere you go, somebody is relentlessly advertising for their favorite candidate.

Which is why I found it refreshing today to see a political advertisement of a different sort. It was clearly a reference to our upcoming presidential race, but one could infer that fact only from context.

Here is what the sign said:

Any
Fully Functioning
ADULT

2020

In my experience, interactive narrative mostly has not worked. The results tend to fall uncomfortably into an uncanny valley between game and story.

The problem seems to center on the question of agency. Players of games have agency — they can affect the outcome. In contrast, readers and audiences of linear narratives have no agency.

As soon as you give your audience any agency, things quickly become far more gamelike and less like being told a story.

But I am wondering whether that will continue to hold true in an immersive medium such as virtual reality. Or will VR offer a way out of this?

Will a completely immersive world allow for audience choices while enabling the audience to feel that they are being told a compelling narrative rather than playing a game?

I think we will know the answer when somebody creates a truly successful example of an interactive immersive narrative in VR. I am looking forward to that!

Why are my Fridays so busy?
Today has me all in a tizzy
I’ve been stressed to the max
But now I’ll chillax
And drink something soothing and fizzy