Ken's Blog

There are some days that are so crazy busy, so wall to wall, so jam packed with back-to-back meetings and things to get done, that you don’t have time to breathe.

For me, today has been one of those days.

Must remember to breathe…

Tolkien once said:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost

I never really understood what that meant.

But now I do.

In the fantasy miniseries Locke and Key, one of the magical keys is the “anywhere key”. To use it, you just think about where you want to go. Then you use the key in any door. When you walk through the door, you are at your destination.

This is, quite evidently, exactly what the Star Trek transporter does. Except one is billed as magic, and the other as technology.

For the purposes of storytelling, I suspect there are many crossovers of this nature between the realms of fantasy and sci-fi (human flight, invisibility, omniscient knowledge, telepathy, immortality, etc). Clearly something is going on here, probably involving our desire for wish fulfilment in the stories we create and receive.

I wonder whether anyone has ever cataloged this phenomenon in any sort of systematic way.

Math used to be very neat
Until it became incomplete
  Then the world grew unfinished
  When proof was diminished
And truth beat a hasty retreat

Now everything is in fluction
Ever since Gödel’s fateful deduction
  Black and white have turned gray
  And we have, you might say,
Some great Weapons of Math Destruction

I’ve started pulling more and more of my own research into my teaching. Rather than teaching just the “standard” computer graphics curriculum, I’m starting to add some of my own stuff to what I show the students.

For example, I have my own algorithms for procedural character animation, for making creatures walk, interact with their world, convey mood and personality. A lot of it is unpublished, but all of it is fun.

I figure as long as it’s me teaching, why not give them something they can’t get anywhere else? And the students really seem to appreciate that.

In class when I start coding in Javascript and twenty minutes later there’s a character walking around on the screen, I think it feels like magic to them. But the important thing is that it’s magic that they can learn to do. That’s the motivational hook right there.

Also, creating things with code brings me joy, which the students pick up on. Creative joy is infectious. And that makes for a better educational experience all around.

Let’s say you are walking down an urban street late at night. There is nobody else around.

A car pulls up and several people get out of it. One or more of them may be carrying a gun.

They demand that you hand over your belongings. Of course you do, because you really have no choice.

Now imagine it is several years into the future. You and everyone you know are wearing smart-glasses.

You use your glasses for all of the things you might now do with your phone or a card in your wallet, including shopping for groceries, entering a secure office building, paying your subway fare, and getting directions from Google Maps.

But unlike your phone, those glasses will be recording everything you see, all the time. So the moment those people approach you, their faces are already entering a database, and being matched to a list of possible identities.

In the future nobody is going to be crazy enough to try to rob you. On balance, this may be good.

Of course, there are real downsides to everyone having the power to record everything around them. But that’s a topic for another day.

why is it that autumn leaves
  against the autumn sky
appear to be most lovely when
  they’re just about to die?
i really don’t know what to think
  i don’t know what to say
is there some hidden lesson here
  for us to take away?

Every once in a while it occurs to me that noses are very strange. We all have these odd fleshy triangular things sticking out of our faces.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time I pretty much take noses for granted. Except for every once in a while when I don’t.

And then I notice what an odd thing is a nose. Your nose protrudes straight out of the very center of your face, like a tent in the middle of a campsite.

Most other primates evolved to have tastefully inset nostrils, which do not at all disturb the contours of their features. But we humans, for whatever reason, went a different way.

Even our popular culture assumes that fictional characters all have noses. Unless, that is, you are a robot or an alien. Then apparently it’s ok not to have a protruding proboscis.

On the other hand, the only fictional person I can think of off-hand who doesn’t have a nose is He Who Must Not Be Named. And that can’t be good.

So I guess it’s just fine that we have noses.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that people encountered each other socially by presenting themselves as avatars of their choice. Suppose further that this mode of interaction were to achieve mass acceptance, so that everyone you know was visible primarily as their chosen avatar.

What would happen, over time, to the appearances of those avatars? Would they be wildly different from one another, reflecting the incredible visual diversity of the human condition?

Or would they converge to some idealized norm? Would everyone end up choosing an appearance oddly reminiscent of some famous actor, model or pop musician?

I hope for the former. Alas, I fear we will more likely end up with the latter.

A large company is currently pushing the use of synthetic avatars for shared on-line worlds, rather than featuring the literal physical appearance of people.

I suppose I could be worried that they think people will buy into this “fake version of me”. But am more than reassured by my confidence that it will never catch on, except for playing games.

When there is anything at all at stake to negotiate in the real world, including relationships (especially relationships), people want to see each other as their true selves, so that they can read every subtle nuance of each others’ facial expression and body language. If you try to fake any of it with artificial intelligence, for the sake of technical convenience, you are just going to annoy people.

In Snow Crash, Juanita knew better. That’s why Neal Stephenson made sure to tell us that it was her facial expression software which led to the financial success of Black Sun.