Ken's Blog

There was a time in TV history when genius detectives needed to possess some quirk or defect. In one show our hero was in a wheelchair. In another he was blind.

Yet another show had a genius detective notable for being overweight, another for being well past retirement age. A more recent example was Monk, who was seriously OCD.

I am imagining an executive memo at the studio seeking ideas for quirky genius detectives, looking for that next hit show.

Some of these ideas would be accepted without hesitation, others met with indignation, perhaps in need of correction. I imagine, for example, that the idea for Dexter — a very effective sleuth who happened to be a sociopath — might have been met with some resistance.

You might say it was a case of defective effective detective directive selective corrective invective.

Today is the first Friday in June, and you know what that means. Yes, it’s National Doughnut Day!

Which brings me back to one of my earliest memories of wrestling with a philosophical conundrum. It was a time when I was a little kid, and my dad bought us donuts.

I remember staring at the donut, and trying to figure something out. “Dad,” I asked, “when you eat a donut, what happens to the hole?”

“Don’t worry,” he explained. “the ghosts eat them.”

I found that to be an excellent answer. Ever since then, I feel good every time I eat a donut, because I’m also feeding a ghost.

So you can understand why National Doughnut Day is my very favorite holey day.

I am simultaneously working on a proposal to the National Science Foundation and a paper for a forthcoming ACM publication on the topic of Interactions in Extended Reality. Both of these focus on questions about how we can shape the future of augmented and virtual reality, and how we can design interactions within that future.

There is a lot of overlap between the two endeavors, although they are different in many ways. For one thing, a proposal talks about what we plan to do, whereas a paper about the future talks about what everybody might plan to do.

But in both cases I am finding it really helpful to look back through this blog, and see what I had to say about the future on various days. In a way, it’s a sort of conversation with myself.

Which is weird, but also kind of fun. Especially whenever I find that I don’t agree with me.

Yesterday I started with that little moving square program that I showed last week, and just started randomly playing with it. I wanted to add something that had a kind of autonomous behavior.

So I changed the square to a round dot, which you can still control. And then I added a thousand other dots around it, which respond to your presence. Kind of like you’re surrounded by a crowd.

But you don’t really feel like you are surrounded unless people are staring at you. So I added eyes to the other little dots. And then, to make sure all those dots felt alive, I made their eyes blink.

The result is kind of cool, if a little paranoid. You can play with it here.

Recently I took part in an episode for WIRED magazine, called Wired: Five Levels, where five people (a child, a high school student, a college student, a grad student and an expert) are asked to discuss the same science topic. This particular episode was about fractals, and I was the designated “expert” level interviewee.

I found the entire experience to be very inspiring. In fact, being asked on that shoot was what inspired me to implement that little Mandelbrot fractal explorer I posted some weeks ago.

I think they did a great job putting it all together. You can check out the episode here.

This morning I was somewhere where a random playlist of 1980s pop songs was playing. At one point The Bangles’ hit Manic Monday came on.

“Did you know,” I said to the person I was with, “that this song was written by Prince?”

“I can definitely hear that,” she said.

A few minutes later the next random pop song started. It was “1999” sung by the Purple One himself.

We just looked at each other. There was no reason even to say anything.

It was like we were hearing the same song again. Only with different lyrics and a more Princely arrangement.

I wonder what were the odds of those two songs coming up back to back? It felt like a good cosmic joke.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by the M4 Sherman, more commonly known as the Sherman Tank. That powerhouse military tank, topped off by a 75mm gun on a fully rotating turret, was used very effectively by the U.S. in World War II.

Those things were pretty much invulnerable, and were awesome if your goal was to ride into town and utterly destroy everything in sight. In a Sherman Tank, you could knock down or blow out entire buildings without missing a beat.

But I don’t think I would want one in my local neighborhood. A Sherman Tank would tear up the road, roll over and destroy cars, knock down traffic lights, and pretty much make any place unlivable.

And if some enthusiastic tank owner ever decided to shoot off a round or two, you might find your entire house reduced to rubble. Hopefully you and your kids would be lucky enough not to be home at the time, because otherwise you would all be dead.

Basically, if there is a Sherman Tank in your neighborhood, you are constantly under siege. You have essentially been reduced to being a helpless prisoner in a war zone — not a great quality of life.

Recently the NRA met in Texas, and various famous people got up and essentially claimed that there is no difference between a car and a Sherman Tank. Conveniently, nobody talked about Aaron Salter.

If I understand their reasoning correctly, I have a suggestion for the next NRA slogan: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a Sherman Tank is a good guy with a Honda Civic.”

Bingeing the long awaited new season of Stranger Things today. It’s even better than I had remembered!

And the great retro references are not quite about nostalgia, because it’s not so much that I miss the ’80s. It’s more that it’s so much nicer to see the ’80s happen to other people. 🙂

If all our speech was formed in verse
Would that be better or much worse?
People might be more reflective
And try to be a bit selective
If what they said just had to rhyme
In every statement all the time
But would that really help us think
Or merely drive us all to drink?

Since today is the anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it’s a good day to talk about a conversation I had with my brother recently. We are both Beatles fans, and I recently purchased a book, on his recommendation, which dives into detail about the music theory underlying the Beatles’ songs.

He and I agreed that if all hell broke loose in the world, that book, together with the complete Shakespeare and the Bible, would be good ones to grab from the bookshelves. Which of course hearkens back to H.G. Wells’ famous riddle.

At the end of The Time Machine, George grabs three books to bring forward with him in time for the benefit of the Eloi. His colleagues are left wondering which books he chose, and we never find out.

1895 was a bit too early for the Beatles of course. But if the story were taking place today, that book could very well be in the main character’s personal library.

So there you have it. If you want to kick-start a civilization, one option is to choose the three B’s: The Bible, The Bard and The Beatles.