Ken's Blog

I recently watched a theatrical version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas. Carol”. One particular moment jumped out at me.

The Ghost of Christmas past is showing Ebenezer Scrooge scenes from Scrooge’s own personal history. Events are taking place all around them, as though real.

At some point, Scrooge tries to talk with somebody in the scene around them. The next moment the ghost tells him “These are but shadows of the things that have been. They have no consciousness of us.”

What this tells me is that, in essence, Dickens came up with the idea of movies by 1847, long before Edison. It wasn’t a technological enablement, but it was a mature conceptual understanding of the power of a medium that did not yet exist.

James Webb was a key figure in the exploration of our outer Universe. In the 1960s, when he was the head of NASA, he played as large a role as anyone in helping humans to explore the outer reaches of our reality.

How fitting that the new telescope launched today, the most powerful in human history, is named for him.

Jimmy Webb is a key figure in our exploration of our inner Universe. Since the 1960s, when he started he phenomenal career as one of our greatest songwriters, he has played as large a role as anyone in helping humans to explore the inner reaches of our reality.

So in honor of the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope, here are some salient words from Jimmy Webb:

See her how she flies
Golden sails across the sky
Close enough to touch
But careful if you try
Though she looks as warm as gold
The moon’s a harsh mistress
The moon can be so cold
Once the sun did shine
Lord, it felt so fine
The moon a phantom rose
Through the mountains and the pines
And then the darkness fell
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
It’s so hard to love her well
I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I, I tripped and I missed my star
God, I fell and I fell alone, I fell alone
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone
The moon’s a harsh mistress
She’s hard to call your own

Only one day left to launch. When the launch is complete, our collective eyes will be open to seeing the Universe in a whole new way.

I am so excited!

I was very sad to read of the passing of Joan Didion. She is long been one of my cultural heroes, and I know that I am far from alone in this opinion.

I am sure that I have not read all of her nonfiction, so today I bought the five book comprehensive collection of her essays: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

I look forward to it. Great reading by a warm fire for the winter holidays.

In 1992, Batman Returns was the hot summer movie. Everybody wanted to see Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1989 blockbuster smash.

It was also the first time I saw a URL splashed across a billboard in public. Right under a giant poster for the film, I saw “http://www.batmanreturns.com”.

What was odd was that this a full year before even most geeky people were using a Web browser (the Mosaic browser, to be precise). So the ad was an entirely conceptual play — a nod to the idea of the Web, before there actually was a Web that the public could readily access.

I wonder whether that will start to happen with newer forms of public interfaces. With all the recent talk about implementing Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse, we don’t quite yet have the equivalent of Mosaic for VR — an easily accessible place where anyone can go for free, with no strings attached, to explore a rapidly growing world of community-built information.

Maybe we will know that place has arrived when major movies start advertising in it. And maybe that will start to happen about a year before you can actually go there.

We went to a funeral earlier this week of a person who had died of Covid. Half the people there were not wearing masks.

I wish I could say that this was irony, but frankly, it just seems like stupidity. Needless to say, we did not linger.

And I wish I could say I was making this up. Sadly, I am not.

Are people just plain crazy? I am really starting to wonder.

Many years ago, when I first read Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct (highly recommended), I learned that natural language is imprecise for a very good reason. As language evolved it gave us an evolutionary advantage as a species.

We evolved spoken language primarily to build networks of trust with our fellow humans, and that’s a kind of super power. Before we know whether we can trust somebody, we are able to speak to them in imprecise ways, so that our meaning and intention is able to remain fuzzy.

This gives us plausible deniability. And that lets us back away from interpersonal connections gracefully as needed.

So it may seem at first as though natural language, as opposed to, say, a language used for computer programming, is bad at conveying exact meanings. But in fact it’s quite the opposite: Natural language is excellent at precisely adjusting intentional imprecision.

I wonder whether it would be useful to design a computer programming language that is focused specifically on this kind of intentional fuzziness. As artificial intelligence takes on more and more human-related tasks, that might be a fruitful direction for language design research.

Today I sing the praises of road trips.

In a way it’s very simple. You get into a car, load up on gas, pack some food for the journey. Then, like Paul Simon said, look for America.

Or, depending on where you live, you look for whatever part of the world happens to be in driving distance.

Pretty much anywhere you go, there are all sorts of small towns and interesting places that you’ve never heard of. And every one of them has its own story to tell.

In the immortal words of Fred Ebb: What good is sitting alone in your room?

When I was an undergrad in college, one of the guys in our dorm had only a right arm. His left arm was missing from just below the shoulder.

There was a shared kitchen on the ground floor of the dorm, where students could make their own meals. One morning in the kitchen he and I got to talking.

At some point he mentioned that he played in the University orchestra.

“What instrument,” I asked, “do you play?”

For just the briefest of moments a look of exasperation flickered across his face.

He recovered quickly. Then he answered “The trumpet”.

When you binge on multiple sitcoms you start to notice patterns. One of the patterns I’ve picked up on is what I call the “MCRR readiness” arc. The entire premise of a show can be seen in how it treats this arc.

“The Big Bang Theory” is all about this arc. The main characters start out hopelessly unable to sustain a meaningful committed romantic relationship (MCRR). Then one by one they progress to readiness.

“Seinfeld” is the exact opposite. Everything about the show circles around the fact that none of these people is ever going to be ready for an MCRR. In a sense, that very dysfunction is their comedic narcissistic superpower.

“Frazier” is poised perfectly at the midpoint between these two premises. Yes, the protagonists are capable of progressing toward an MCRR. But getting past their own enormous and (delightfully funny) narcissism is going to make it very difficult going.