Because the future has just started
Today is the birthday of Zeppo Marx. I am celebrating it here partly because Zeppo just never seems to get proper credit for his contribution to the Marx Brothers.
It’s one of those unfortunate situations. Here are four talented guys working as a group, and one just does not get the same credit for his contributions that he should.
By the way, today is also George Harrison’s birthday. Mere coincidence? Or is that the sound of the Universe laughing at us?
I’ve been playing with the upside down text that I wrote about the other day. Here was the very first sentence I wrote:
What sorts of sentences can you make?
I have gotten into the habit of looking at the Wikipedia each morning to see the list of people they consider to be notable. So I get to silently celebrate a lot of birthdays.
I also find myself noting, in particular, who is the oldest notable person still living. And I often then check out their page on Wikipedia, where I usually find an interesting story.
Today that person is Hans Herrmann, the race car driver. If I was looking for an interesting story, I was not disappointed. His exploits and adventures from his racing days make for great reading.
The man is long retired, but still with us at 95. And like everyone in this category, if you really wanted to, you could probably talk to him first hand about his fascinating life.
I was looking at license plates on cars today. Somehow it randomly occurred to me that it would be cool to encode a message upside down in a license plate.
The plate would read like an ordinary jumble of letters and digits. Until, that is, you turned it upside down, and then a secret message would appear.
There are only certain letters and digits that this works for. I think I now have the complete list.
In the chart below, the first line is the character you would use, and the second line is how that character would read when the message is flipped upside down.
The matches aren’t all perfect, but then they don’t need to be. The message just needs to be readable:
I was teaching my class this evening and going through all sorts of advanced techniques. I was feeling pretty good about showing the students all of these arcane secrets of the craft.
Then a student asked me a question about a much more basic technique. And I realized that in my enthusiasm I had skipped right over it.
It’s important to remember that you can’t always jump right to the advanced stuff. Sometimes you need to go back to the ABCs.
I like the fact that today’s date is a palindrome all around the world. Some people write it as Feb 20 and others as 20 Feb.
So in some places today is 0220 and in other places it’s 2002. But either way it reads the same way forward and backward.
Here’s a little puzzle: Which days of the year are palindromes around the world?
My post yesterday touched glancingly on some dark topics. Today’s post is a kind of response to myself, with a little twist of SciFi.
Presumably, at some point research in artificial intelligence is going to go beyond its current mimicry stage. In one scenario, researchers will start to get a handle on deep modeling of human cognition and eventually sentience.
If that occurs, it might be possible to create a kind of psychic clone of yourself. It would be you in every way, except in a computer rather than in a biological brain.
The big existential question then is “Who exactly is that?” The computer will most likely say “Yep, it’s still me. I’m right here, inside this machine.”
But the biological version of you might not agree. You might not view this particular continued existence of your “self” as a solution to your own desire to continue to exist, but rather as a replacement.
This dilemma will continue as long as your biological self is still around. Ironically, the moment the “real” you goes away, the dilemma goes away as well.
The “you” that is in the computer will happily affirm that you are still here, and that you are doing just fine. You might even find it amusing that for a brief time there were two of you in existence.
And you will have all of eternity to appreciate the joke.
I was having dinner this evening with my cousin. He and I are nearly the same age, and we have always been close.
At one point he pointed out that many of the people whom he and I revered when we were little kids are now dying off. I imagine he might have been thinking about Raquel Welch, but I didn’t ask.
And that got me thinking about all of those amazing and talented people we had first encountered when they were still young adults, bursting with promise. But time is what it is, and time does what it does.
Of course, once I started thinking about time, another thought occurred to me, a somewhat darker thought. But I didn’t mention it. Instead I changed the subject to movies — a very safe topic, because movies are timeless.
We are living in yet another time before a fundamental shift in how ordinary people interact with computers. The last time that happened was 2007, when the iPhone came out. Another was 1993, when lots of people first started using the Web.
In another decade or two, everybody will be used to simply telling their computer what they want to get done, and the computer will do it. You’ll be able to tell your computer to create an original song that blends together The Beatles’ “Yesterday” and Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud”. And that will be a song that you created.
You will be able to tell your computer to write a play based on some new ideas that you’ve dreamt up, and then to conjure up a performance of that play, complete with blocking and appropriate props and lighting. And that will be a play and a performance that you created.
Young people in that future time will understand intellectually what it was like back in the old days, but they won’t really have the emotional sense of it. It will seem amazing to them that we needed to struggle through so much toil to create a new work of art, rather than simply using modern tools.
And try as we might, we won’t really be able to explain it to them.
This week I created a one-page summary of a research proposal to share with my collaborators, so they could share it with industry partners. After I managed to get all the words right, with very helpful suggestions from my colleagues, I thought I was done.
But then I went to print it, and realized that I had issues with the line spacing, margins, and general visual balance. The words were right, but the whole thing didn’t look exactly right.
I ended up spending a lot more time this morning iterating on the format of that one page until it looked perfect. Which in retrospect seems like time very well spent.