Ken's Blog

I’ve learned that there are certain social shortcuts on Zoom that work really well. If you make sure use them, then everything goes smoothly. If you don’t, you can run into trouble.

One of those shortcuts involves carefully dancing around the truth. I will illustrate with a helpful example:

Acceptable way to end a Zoom call: “Sorry, I’ve got to jump off now to go to another meeting.”

Unacceptable way to end a Zoom call: “Sorry, this meeting is getting really long and boring, and I have a life.”

Your mileage may vary.

I’ve finally gotten around to watching Psych, years after it went off the air. Well ok, bingeing.

It’s an incredibly funny show. And in nearly every episode, somebody is brutally murdered. That should be a contradiction, right?

I mean, how can a show be laugh out loud funny, when it consistently portrays so much violence and tragedy? And yet it all works — completely and very entertainingly.

As Jules Feiffer said in his screenplay for Popeye, we find this out, we find out everything.

Sometimes I just wonder about stuff. And sometimes the way I work on the answer is by writing a computer program.

In this case I was curious about the relationship between how fast particles move around in a fluid, and how far each particle really travels. With all of those particles bouncing around like crazy, every particle must quickly end up far away from where it started, right?

The actual answer surprised me. You can look at my little simulation here.

This week I needed to do various complicated things at the post office involving sending official forms to our US government. When the post office employee manning the line found that out, she pulled me out of the line and said to come with her.

She set us up at a table, and said “I’m going to boss you around a bit. Is that okay?” I happily replied “Yes, that is just fine.”

She then proceeded to help me with great attention to detail. In several places she caught crucial details I had missed. Had we not corrected those details, the forms would have been sent right back to me unprocessed, which would have been extremely unfortunate.

This was a fairly typical experience for me at the post office. These people work tirelessly for us, and I have had uniformly positive experiences with them. They never try to be overly friendly, but they are invariably helpful and professional, and they make sure to get all the details right.

Say what you want about government, I love the post office!

Today I went to the store to buy something, and paid with my credit card. Instead of inserting my card into the slot, I used the newer “Tap and Go” feature.

Tap and Go is much more convenient, and I am still happily surprised at how well it works. I shared that thought with the guy behind the counter.

“Yes,” he replied, “We are going to get to the point where you just need to look at the machine.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The problem is that it will be looking back.”

He laughed, but maybe a little nervously.

At this point in history, there is live theater and there are movies. Nobody would mistake the one for the other.

Movies offer unlimited special effects, but the thing about theater is that it is happening right now. You and the performers share a live intersubjective experience, one that can never again be exactly replicated.

But what if — given reasonable assumptions about where technology is going — we could one day add more elements of cinema into live theater? Suppose everyone in the audience were given a pair of glasses that would allow any magical effect to be added?

A performer on stage could appear to be twenty feet tall. Impossible flying creatures could wander through the aisles. The appearance of the set could change all around the audience, in the blink of an eye. The possibilities would be limitless.

It would still be live theater. If you took off your glasses you would still see actors performing — you just wouldn’t see the added effects.

Would this lead to some sort of new hybrid form? Or, at the end of the day, would it still be theater?

Just saw Company again, and appreciating all over again how different Sondheim is from anybody else. There is really no point of comparison.

When you think, in general, of musical theater, you think of broad strokes of the creative pen, crowd-pleasing numbers, singing, dancing, an old fashioned tug-at-the-heartstrings show.

But when you think of Sondheim, you think of something else entirely. The really hard problems of being an adult, the fractured hearts of humans that make relationships so challenging and yet so worthwhile. It’s a completely different beast.

If we had never had Sondheim, we wouldn’t have believed he was possible. How infinitely beautiful and astonishing is that?

I’ve started reading David Chalmers’ new book Reality+: virtual words and the problems of philosophy. Among other things, Chalmers asks the question of whether our reality is just a simulation. And if it is, would we have any way of knowing?

But maybe I am just a simulation of me reading this book. Or perhaps I am a simulation of me reading a simulation of this book.

I’m ok with the first part of that, but that last part is where I get stuck. Is there any difference, really, between a book and a simulation of that book? Aren’t they, essentially, exactly the same thing?

I understand that we can remain uncertain that we ourselves are “real” in some metaphysical sense. But our books are absolutely real, as informational entities, no matter what metaphysical interpretation one has of reality itself.

When it comes to a book, it’s turtles all the way down.

I’ve been studying my musical “programming lesson” from yesterday’s post, and trying see it with a fresh pair of eyes. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to look at that code if you had never before seen JavaScript.

I notice that some of the programming constructs are unnecessarily mysterious. That is, they do something simple, but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at them.

For example, look at these two lines of code:

      for (i = 0 ; i <= 7 ; i++)
         play(1/4, i);

All the first line does is count upwards: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Which is a pretty simple operation. But that would not be at all obvious to somebody who had never before seen JavaScript.

The problem, I think, is that a language like JavaScript is designed to be very flexible, so that experts can do all sorts of advanced things with it. Which is great if you are an expert, but not so great if you are a beginner.

Breaking that first line down into its component parts:

  i = 0   says “Start by setting the value of variable i to zero.”
  i <= 7 says “Keep looping while i is not more than seven.”
  i++       says “Each time through the loop, increment the value of i.”

Once you understand that, it’s not so bad. But getting past that is a lot to ask of somebody who is just beginning to learn programming.

I love the flexibility of JavaScript. But I wish there were a way to learn it that didn’t create so many barriers to entry for the beginner.

This one is brand new. I wrote it yesterday.

Here’s the story. The other day I got a call from my nephew, who is 14 years old and in the 9th grade. He wants to learn how to program computers.

I asked him what he is into these days, and he said music. So I put together a little on-line program where you use programming to compose music.

It’s still just a sketch — not yet ready for prime time. For one thing, I haven’t yet added a way to save your work.

But it’s definitely ready to play with. I’m curious whether my nephew will end up using it to learn about programming.

Here it is.