Ken's Blog

I wonder whether it is a coincidence that so many interesting markers of technological advancement happened on Valentine’s Day.

On Valentine’s Day in 1876, Elisha Gray filed for a patent on his invention of the telephone. So did another guy.

On Valentine’s Day in 1899, the United States officially switched over to voting by machine. Things haven’t been the same since.

On Valentine’s Day in 1924, IBM was born.

On Valentine’s Day in 1990, the Voyager I spacecraft made history by taking a photo of our little planet from very very far away.

On Valentine’s Day in 2000, one of our earth spacecrafts started orbiting an asteroid for the first time ever.

On Valentine’s Day in 2005, a certain popular video sharing website was launched. I’ll let you guess.

In a recent post I showed a simulation of particles. Andy commented that with a few modifications, my simulation could be turned into a really interesting game.

That got me thinking about the general idea of “gamification”. I suspect all sorts of things can be turned into games. In fact, I suspect that you can you turn anything into a game.

Take any random category: movies, flowers, opera, real estate, poetry, piano lessons, spelling, luggage. It really doesn’t matter — you can start with any topic.

With a little imagination, whatever you are interested in can be turned into a game. And if it’s good game, people will play it, and will learn something that they didn’t know before.

That can’t be a bad thing.

This morning I wrote some code to show a colleague an example of a programming feature. The goal was to make it easier for my colleague to follow up.

Which means that my goal was to make sure the example was as simple as possible. It had to tell the right story, but no more than that.

And that calls for a kind of discipline. It’s sort of like the programming equivalent of a haiku.

Sometimes I get it really right, manage to strip off all the fat, and end up with the perfectly minimal yet expressive example. When that happens, it feels oddly satisfying.

Like writing a perfect haiku.

My mother tells me that when I was 3 years old there used to be a problem in our apartment. The ceiling in the bathroom was often wet and she couldn’t figure out why.

One day she was in the bathroom, I was there with her, and she wondered out loud “Why is the ceiling in the bathroom always so wet?” Apparently, according to her, I said “I show you mommy,” and I walked up to the sink.

I turned on the tap and I put my finger under the nozzle so that the water was directed upward. It sprayed all over the ceiling.

I have no memory whatsoever of this incident. However I did grow up to be a scientist.

More and more often, I find myself quoting the great sadly departed Ricky Nelson in my head:

“Well it’s alright now,
I’ve learned my lesson well.
You see, you can’t please everyone,
So you’ve got to please yourself.”

Sometimes it’s nice just to stop whatever you are doing and take a moment for reflection. Which leads me to today’s Widget Wednesday.

When I teach computer graphics, I usually start with ray tracing. Some people think of it as an advanced topic, but I find that it really helps students to understand how things work.

It’s kind of like if you were teaching architecture, and you started the course by saying “Let’s build a simple house”. At the end of that project, the reasons for everything would be a lot more clear.

Sometimes I like to use the same tools that I’m using for teaching to make something for myself, just for fun. Today’s widget is something I made while teaching ray tracing to students.

Ray tracing is very good for making reflecting surfaces, so I focused on that. I also incorporated my noise function in the various reflections, to make the scene prettier.

You can see the result here.

Just because a “more advanced” communication technology comes out, doesn’t mean we should always use it. What often ends up happening instead is that it takes is place beside existing technologies.

One obvious example is theater and cinema. I love movies, but I still go to the theater. Another is books. Ebooks and on-line documents are incredibly convenient, but there is still nothing like curling up with an old fashioned book made of paper and ink.

I think something similar is going to happen with the spectrum between writing letters, writing emails, video chats, and whatever will be coming after Zoom. In another ten years we are going to be able to “beam into” each other’s physical space. It will feel less like video chat and more like the Jedi Council.

But there will be many occasions when people will choose not to use the latest and greatest form of immersive interaction. Depending on who you are meeting with and why, you might decide instead to opt for a video chat.

Or you might just get on a phone call or send an email. Or, if you want to say something important to somebody you really care about, you could choose to sit down, pick up a pen and write an old fashioned letter.

If you lived in a future house that looked and felt like a palace so long as you kept wearing your SmartGlasses, would you prefer to keep the glasses on or take them off?

I wonder, if we did a poll, how many people would choose the blue pill and how many would choose the red pill.

When I am working together with people on-line, there is a kind of efficiency we can achieve that is different from in-person efficiency. For example, if we are all working togther on developing a software package, on-line tools let us work in parallel in very nice ways.

In person the process tends to be different. We are (rightly) focusing mainly on each other, rather than on our screens. So we are communicating better as people, but we aren’t quite tracking each others’ work with the same focus.

I wonder whether there might be a way to get the best of both worlds. Perhaps some sort of collaborative software tools that privilege both the power of being together in person and the efficiency of being “plugged in” to our respective views of a shared software project.

This might be one of those situations that would benefit from future higher quality augmented reality.

When the Web started being used by millions of people nearly 30 years ago, pundits predicted that new forms of communication like video chat would kill the travel industry.

After all, why bother going through all of the time, trouble and expense of getting on an airplane, when you can “visit” anyplace or anyone without leaving the comfort of your home?

But that is not what happened. Quite the opposite in fact. As our collective use of the internet rose, long distance travel rose right along with it.

It seems that as it became easier to connect with distant people and places, there was a corresponding increase in everyone’s motivation to visit those people and places.

In the next few years, video chat services such as Zoom might gradually become replaced by something that feels a lot more like being there — perhaps something akin to the Star Wars Jedi Council.

When that happens, what will be the effect on long distance travel? I predict that the pattern will repeat: Our human connection to distant friends will only increase, and long distance travel will increase as well.