Ken's Blog

I have been having some meetings recently in-person with everybody wearing a mask. I have also been having other meetings over Zoom with nobody wearing a mask.

And I’ve been trying to figure out the following question: Which one of these has the greater level of presence?

Or, to put it more the way it feels: Which one has the smaller level of non-presence?

Today is the birthday of Robert M Persig, who sadly died in 2017. He would have been 93 today. His classic book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has had an enormous effect on my life and career.

Since childhood, I had always been trying to reconcile the two sides of my passion, the rational and the romantic. I loved art and literature, but I also loved the austere and rigorous beauty of mathematics.These seem to be irreconcilable opposites.

Persig talks about this dichotomy directly in his book, and leads us toward a way that they can be reconciled. I found and embraced the resonance of his philosophy within my work in computer graphics.

It is a field that requires rigor and precision both in creating the underlying mathematical models and the discipline of programming computers. Yet its goal is to create beauty, sometimes transcendent romantic beauty.

Many years ago his book helped to set me on a wonderful path, which I have happily traveled ever since. For that I will be eternally grateful.

Various things that we think of as being physical are gradually going virtual. Recorded music went virtual a number of years ago.

Many stores are gradually going virtual. Amazon has been leading the charge, and I suspect things will go a lot further. We are so used to ordering things on-line that we may soon forget we ever did anything else.

But what is next? Restaurants? Organized sports? Parties?

Your guess is as good as mine.

If someone said to you that you could have the power to read the minds of other people, would you take them up on it?

I sure as hell wouldn’t.

I am now meeting in person, for the first time, some people with whom I have been meeting over Zoom for the last year or so. And in some cases, I have been surprised.

For one thing, people are not always the height I thought they would be. Some are taller, and some shorter. Sometimes by a lot.

I am wondering now how much my unconscious awareness of height may have influenced how I think about people in the past. In a year when people have been “heightless”, it has become clear how unimportant those sorts of things are.

I wonder, as the world move more and more to meeting on-line — even post-pandemic — whether those sorts of miscellaneous physical traits will simply fade into irrelevancy. As they should.

I just put onto the bookshelf in my office the old Encyclopedia Britannica from my childhood. My mom moved out of her house, and I asked if I could have them.

The set is older than I am, and it contains all sorts of great historical facts about countries that no longer exist, and cutting edge technologies from long ago that nobody thinks about anymore.

I realize that much of the knowledge in these volumes is available on the Web, with interactive illustrations, proper hyperlinking and automatic updates. But it’s just not the same.

Picking up and opening one of these books gives me a delicious and visceral sense of history that I can’t get from looking at a computer screen. Besides, I suspect that much of the information about long-gone people, places and things is not really available on-line.

It is a treasure, and I treasure it.

You can probably see a theme developing between yesterday’s post and today’s post. It’s probably because the semester is starting, and there is suddenly a greater need to deal with people and organizations.

In any organization there are people who think they are helping, but aren’t. And you can’t do all that much about it, because you can’t change people.

I was having a conversation about this just today with a colleague. We agreed that the best you can do is to just keep getting your work done, and not let yourself become distracted by other peoples’ Sturm und Drang.

You’ve got your own goals, and you generally know what you need to do to achieve them. What you really need to do is remember to stay on the path to those goals, and not let the winds from other storms knock you off that path.

I know that’s easier said than done, but saying it out loud kind of helps. 🙂

We are all capable of acting in a way that others consider ridiculous. Sometimes we just lose it, or sometimes we have a view of reality that is, to put it politely, severely warped.

But every once in a while I encountered somebody whose reality is so outrageously off of the reasonable consensus that I am not even upset. I just look on in astonishment and say my own version of “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Today I took a flight for the first time in quite a while. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

Wearing a mask the entire time was less of a burden than I had imagined. All of the passengers were well behaved and polite.

Maybe this pandemic has convinced people to be better versions of themselves. But at a very high price.

Computer software is fairly easy when you are creating a simple example. But when you try to scale things up, everything changes.

The sad truth is that software simply does not scale up easily. Something that is very easy to demonstrate may be fiendishly difficult to execute at scale.

This translates into the cost of human effort in interesting ways. For example, I can create a compelling demo of a principle in a single day.

But if somebody were to see that idea and say “let’s make a commercial product to be used by millions of people”, the effort might take a team of five people a year or two. Depending on the product, it might even take a team of twenty people working for three to five years.

Fortunately for me, my job is mainly to make those compelling first demos. Bullet dodged. 🙂