Ken’s Blog

In a rare move, I took some days off this past week. It was a revelation.

Not only did I have a wonderful time, but I also — to my great surprise — came up with a lot of new ideas for research. Although I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

After all, when you stop filling your head with day to day problems, your mind becomes more free. New ideas that pop into your head are embraced, rather than dismissed as a distraction.

This raises a question for people who do research. I wonder what would be the ideal ratio R of days spent “doing research” to days spent “taking a break from doing research”.

If the goal is to maximize the number of good research ideas, then wouldn’t it then make sense to spend less time just trying to get things done? If the ratio R is 2 to 1, that would mean two days working for every one day not working.

That sounds plausible, but wouldn’t it be funny if it turns out we have it all wrong? Maybe the optimum value for R will turn out to be something more like ½.

There are numerous examples throughout history of somebody creating something we end up labeling as “art”, which were never intended to be experienced by other people. One canonical example of this is the diary of Anne Frank.

Another famous example is found in the many manuscripts of Franz Kafka, most of which he instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn upon Kafka’s death. Fortunately for us, Brod did not burn anything.

Which leaves us with a question: If somebody never intends a work — be it painting, sculpture, poem, song, novel or something else — to be experienced by others, is it still art?

Or does art require that most basic contract between creator and audience: That there be an intended audience?

My own take is that we need a different word for such works. The word “art” doesn’t not quite encompass the antisocial provenance of such creations, because the creation of art is fundamentally an act of intentional communication.

But what would be a good word?

Well, tonight I finally got to the end of Murder on the Orient Express. Such an amazing movie.

And sure enough, it ended exactly the same way it ended the first time I saw it.

I wonder whether movies will always do that. Or will there come a day when a movie can have a different ending every time you watch it?

With all of the new digital technologies coming down the pike, you never know.

When I was six years old, and my brother Mark was eight, our family was staying in a summer cottage up in Mountaindale New York. One afternoon our mom handed us each an empty Maxwell House coffee can, and our dad took us out into the woods where wild blueberries grew.

We were each supposed to fill our coffee can with blueberries. Which was not so difficult a task, since blueberries grew wild and plentiful in those woods.

At the end of the afternoon my brother’s coffee can was filled to the brim with fresh juicy blueberries. My can was pretty much empty.

That evening our mother took all of the blueberries and made a blueberry pie. My brother enjoyed it very much. Alas, I had a tummy ache, and didn’t feel hungry at all.

I think there’s a lesson in here somewhere.

This evening I started watching Murder on the Orient Express on Amazon Prime. I am a big fan of director Sidney Lumet, so this was an extra special treat.

The old saying is really true: They don’t make movies like they used to. This is a classic Hollywood film in the grand style, combining a vast and sweeping canvas with an unerring attention to the finest detail.

Albert Finney’s performance is, all by itself, a priceless cinematic treasure. And the other performances aren’t too shabby either. Just seeing Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman and Vanessa Redgrave playing a scene together is worth the price of admission.

Alas, the film is more than two hours long, and today has been a long day. So tomorrow I shall watch the rest: Murder on the Orient Express, part 2.

Psst: Don’t tell me how it ends. 😉

Let’s back down half a dimension from yesterday’s post and talk about 3.5D. What, you may well ask, is 3.5D? Actually it’s a term I made up, but it refers to something very specific.

This evening I went out to the movies to see one of the big science fiction flicks currently on offer. It was filled with great computer graphics, and thrilling action scenes.

I had made the deliberate choice to see it in 2D, even though I could have seen it in 3D. The reason? 3D in movies, the way that term is currently defined, is highly problematic.

In real life, when you are sitting across a table from somebody you’re talking to, and you move your head — even a little — the entire room behind your conversant appears to move. This is simply motion parallax: When you move your head from side to side, nearby things appear to shift by a greater amount than far away things.

But in a 3D movie nearby and far away things move together when you move your head. In fact, they always move together.

In my case, this takes me clear out of the movie. All I can think about in such moments are the deficiencies of today’s stereo 3D movies, and those thoughts take away from my enjoyment of the film.

In contrast, the collective VR technique our lab is developing for immersive cinema solves this problem. Just as in real life, when you move your head from side to side, near things appear to shift more than far away things do.

I call that 3.5D. And I’m sticking with the name until somebody comes up with a better name.

I am working on a technical paper that describes a technique I once came up with for rotating objects in four dimensions. And I want my explanation to be really clear.

I don’t just mean clear to mathematicians. I mean clear to anybody who might be interested in the question of how you might rotate things in four dimensions.

So I need to find a way to describe what I did that doesn’t just rely on lots of mathematical formulas. The description needs to make visual sense. But how do you create an explanation that is visually clear if the “visual” in this sense is four dimensional?

I’m probably going to need to figure out some really good analogies to lower dimensions — to something that can happen in just two or three dimensions. And I think that approach should work.

But isn’t it funny that this should be so difficult? Sometimes it’s harder to come up with a clear explanation of something you did than it was to do it in the first place.

I’ve been having some rather intense dreams lately, in which I imagine entire worlds filled with people. As I wander through a surreal office building, or carnival, or social gathering, I look at all of the people around me, and I wonder where they come from.

Clearly they came from my mind, but why the high level of detail? Do they each have individual personalities, back stories, goals and desires? Do they have persistence?

Sometimes I will have a recurring dream, in which I find myself back at a dream place that I have visited on previous nights. Are the people I meet there the same people as before, or are they merely a form of procedural texture, generated by my mind in that moment to flesh out a desired feeling of place and time?

It would be intriguing to think that there is a cast of characters waiting in the wings, poised to inhabit these dreams. Perhaps when I am not in slumberland they spend their down time hanging out in each others’ company.

They gossip and flirt and prepare for future performances. And the next time I see them, perhaps in a dream cafe or island, as I wander in silence through these shadowy crowds, I remain unaware of the rich world that has continued on its way while I have been absent and awake.

I realize DC Comics can no longer publish the original Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel as Captain Marvel, because Marvel Comics now holds the trademark to the title “Captain Marvel”.

And so, alas, when Billy Batson says “Shazam!” he now turns into Shazam, not Captain Marvel. But wouldn’t it be cool if they bent the rule, just once?

Imagine if DC’s Captain Marvel teamed up with Marvel’s Captain Marvel. Together they could save the Universe in ways hithertofore undreamt of.

I think it would be marvelous.

Every one of us inhabits two universes. There is the universe we share with everyone else, the one we refer to as “objective reality”.

Then there is that other universe, the one inside our own mind. This rather vast second universe is filled with its own miracles, its secret passageways and cabinets of wonder.

Somehow we each manage to negotiate this double reality. To most of the world we reveal only a small portion of our inner universe, one which fits within the limited framework of culturally acknowledged understanding.

But to those we are close to, the ones we truly trust, we reveal far more. A deep relationship between two people is a window into each others’ miracles, their secret passageways and cabinets of wonder.