Ken's Blog

In general, I find that the younger people are, the more likely they are to be in the habit of scrolling through social media streams. It’s a form of connecting with one’s culture and peers that feels distinctly different from the analogous forms of connection used by earlier generations.

When we all have those mixed reality glasses, I wonder what the future of social media streaming will be like. Will people on the street, the subway, coffee shops, park benches, spend their time staring off into space, tuning out everything around them to connect with their larger culture? And if so, will our current notions of physical connectedness start to break down.

Or will those future notions of physical connectedness merely change, and evolve to become something that we could no longer recognize. Maybe to something even richer than what is possible today, yet as incomprehensible to us as TikTok would be to anyone living a century ago.

Now that I have recorded in one place all of what the Wikipedia community considers the significant events in history, the question comes up of how to update the list. I suppose I could scrape all those Wikipedia pages again, but history actually only advances one day at a time.

On some days, new historical events are added, but on most days they are not. So I suppose I could have a manual or automatic daily process of checking to see whether any new events were added for today — the current day of the current year.

If so, I just update that one day in my database and regenerate the list. If not, then there is nothing to do.

But one thing I don’t know is whether Wikipedia ever deletes an historical event. Does the list just keep getting ever longer, or is it ever pruned?

I’m not even sure I would know how to find out.

It took me a few days of fiddling around with shell scripts and node.js, but I finally managed to wrestle Wikipedia’s syntax to the ground. I now have a chronologically ordered list, all in one place, of every historical event that the Wikipedia community considers to be significant enough to mention.

The list preserves all of the links to the original Wikipedia articles. You can check it out HERE.

Now the real fun begins. Anybody can use what I created as a resource just by viewing source and copying that from their browser.

The question is, how do you go through it, filter it, visualize it, etc., to suit your purposes? Personally, I am interested in creating landscapes of history that I can interact with in VR.

VR provides an opportunity to make a kind of immersive memory palace out of history. There are all sorts of unanswered questions about how best to organize such a memory palace.

But that’s why it’s fun.

There are certain movies or plays or TV shows that you end up knowing by heart. For any particular line of dialogue, you already know what they are going to say.

When that happens, you start to see a lot more of the inherent structure that went into the writing. You can see, for example, how a seemingly throwaway line in an earlier scene sets up an entire confrontation or transition in a later scene.

So in a sense there are two distinct ways of experiencing movies or plays or TV shows. One is to come to them with a spirit of surprise and discovery. The other is to approach them with a spirit of analysis.

In the latter case, you can actually learn quite a bit about the art of writing. And hopefully, one day you can take what you’ve learned and create new works that provide lessons for others.

I’ve noticed a pattern that persists through everything I do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s teaching, research, drawing a picture or organizing my apartment.

The only effective way to get anything done is to proceed in a “coarse to fine” manner. If you want to be effective, you need to rough things out before you dive into the details.

This might seem reasonable, but it can be hard to do in practice. The reason is that working on those details can be loads of fun.

So there is a temptation to go there right away, because it feels so good. But the problem is that if you start out working on those glorious details, you might very well need get to a point where you need to throw out everything you’ve already done.

Alas, if any given task doesn’t suit your larger project, you might find yourself going in circles. No matter how much fun it is.

I’ve decided to take seriously this project of reordering Wikipedia history. Mostly it has led me to node.js.

Using node.js, I think I can write a fairly simple program that does most of it for me. Then, once I have the entire history stream in proper chronological order, it will be fun to start using it for various things.

Maybe I will make it available as a resource so that people can try to do their own searches and visualizations over it. Fun for all!

Many mornings I start my day by going to the Wikipedia and learning about what important things happened in this day in history — at least according to the Wikipedia community. Usually I follow at least one link to learn more about some intriguing historical event.

This morning I realized, going through today’s historical events, how it has all been diced up and scrambled to suit the format. From the perspective of history itself, the grouping into days of the year is completely arbitrary.

I am thinking I might write an app that gathers all 366 entries and puts them into proper chronological order. That would allow different kinds of exploration of what happened throughout history — at least according to the Wikipedia community.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” — E.M. Forster, Howards End

When those lines by Forster were first published in 1910, they had deep resonance. Today, alas, “Only Connect” is a phrase that evokes disappointment.

What a difference a century makes.

Having watched lots of theater recently, I am becoming more aware about the interesting relationship between good theater and likability. In particular, the need for characters to be somewhat unlikable.

One of the things that draws us to good characters in good theater is the question of the ways in which we don’t like them, and why. We can sympathize with them, but the whole enterprise fails if we just think of them as swell people.

This is because the driving engine of good theater is the underlying question: “What is wrong with this person?” The audience is being asked to do the work of figuring out the nature of the trauma that each dynamic character is working through.

There needs to be a convincing portrayal of sickness before there can be wellness. There needs to be a mystery so solve, an injury to heal.

In short, we need to understand why we are being asked to go on this journey. If we find ourselves, in just the right way, not liking the characters up on stage, then we might very well be in for a great evening of theater.

On this day of the year 1446, the king of Korea invented a new alphabet. It is an alphabet that is used today by millions of people.

King Sejong the Great was dissatisfied that only a small percentage of his subjects were literate. So he invented an alphabet that would be accessible to all.

Of course this was all frowned upon by the elite literary class of the day. But it initiated a societal transformation by creating new educational and therefore economic opportunities for ordinary Koreans.

What I find most remarkable is the scholarly consensus that the king did not commission someone to create this alphabet for him. Rather, he personally created it himself.

Can you imagine any modern ruler doing something like that? It truly is unique as far as I can tell in the annals of history.