Ken's Blog

There are things I like about typing, and things I like about dictating text. The latter has recently become far easier and more accurate, thanks to Google.

Ideally I would like to be able to seamlessly blend together the two modes. Each has complementary advantages, and the right combination of the two could be incredibly productive.

I haven’t seen anybody make a combined system of typing + dictation work truly well. From what I have seen, you are left to simply choose either one or the other — the two modalities don’t really know about each other in a way that lets them work well together.

There is an opportunity here. And after we get it working well for natural language text, let’s see if we can extend it to programming languages.

There once was only one kind of reality, before the invention of things like books, telephones, movies, etc. But now we are used to reality being experienced in many different ways.

There is a relatively new concept now, called blended reality, in which you mix together direct perception through your own eyes and ears with perception of the world around you mediated by computer. One relatively primitive example of this is an augmented reality app on your smartphone.

More sophisticated examples are coming down the pike, as fully functional smart glasses start to enter the consumer space in a few years. And that is going to make blended reality a lot more interesting.

Just as there used to be only one way to talk to somebody and one way to read something, but now there are many ways to do both, our collective perception of reality is going to undergo an interesting set of upheavals.

I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to whatever comes next.

Today is the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web.

How cool is that?

Dealing recently with some unexpected bad news, I became newly curious about the phrase “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Most people these days know it as a quote from John Lennon. He sings it at one point in his song Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) on the Double Fantasy album.

Lennon actually got it from Readers Digest, which in 1957 attributed the quote to the cartoonist Allen Saunders, in the slightly different form “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” But other than that one mention in Readers Digest, there is no record that Saunders actually said this.

The pithiest version I know of this wise thought goes back to the original Yiddish: “Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht.” Roughly translated, it means “Man plans, God laughs.”

I like the original version best.

Today was the day of the year when champagne was invented.

If you consider all of the possible universes A where champagne was invented, and all of the possible universes B where champagne was not invented, you couldn’t do a champagne celebration of that august event in any of the A universes from within any of the B universes, because there would be no champagne to celebrate with.

I could even draw you a Venn diagram illustrating all of this. But that’s only because we live in a universe where, on this day of the year, John Venn was born.

It is odd for the world to be in this strange state of not knowing which way things will go. We might end up beating the delta variant, and in the fall the world will continue once again to open up.

Or we might retreat fully back into quarantine, as seems to be starting to happen at the moment. A dispiriting world of masks, of social distancing, of needing to stay away from both strangers and friends.

I am finding the uncertainty to be very unnerving. I am sure you do too.

Now that there is a new current fastest human in the world, thanks to the recent Olympic performance in the 100m by Lamont Marcell Jacobs, the question comes up: How fast could a person possibly be, in theory, running on his or her own two feet?

The world record set by Usain Bolt in 2009, running the 100m in 9.58 seconds, still stands. So Bolt still keeps the record as the fastest human in recorded history.

I wonder whether there is some way of working out, from fundamental physics and biomechanics, what is the theoretical upper limit on human running speed. Somebody somewhere must have worked on this.

Some people say that the last 5% of a project takes 95% of the work. I’m not sure I completely agree, but I am starting to see the point.

We’ve been working for months (in some ways, for years) to build toward a demo that we will show in about a week at the Siggraph conference. The work has gone through many phases.

But this last phase is different. It’s the polishing part, the part when we make final choices, when we time things out.

This is when we need to make the hard decisions about what to leave on the cutting room floor. No matter how much work we had put into things.

As Chekhov sort of said, creation is easy. Editing is hard.

I just got a new computer to replace the one I have been using for the last four years. It’s amazing how much faster it is.

This is in line with my personal version of Moore’s law: A computer year is to a dog year as a dog year is to a human year.

Imagine if Moore’s law worked for people. Suppose every few years we could trade in our brain for a faster one. I wonder what that version of the human condition would be like.

Alas, I guess we will never know. In this universe at least, my brain seems, if anything, to be getting slower with time.

We tend to think of pop songs as having discreet productions. There is the original song by the original artist, and then there are various covers by bands through the years.

Each one represents a certain set of discrete choices. Millions of people could listen to any one of those versions, but those are the only choices you have.

It seems to me that given recent advances in an artificial intelligence, we could tease apart those choices and allow people to create their own personal productions.

Maybe this song by some new band should have a little bit of a mix in of a favorite old band of yours. Or maybe you could mix different genres together and create something original for you or your friends.

Why shouldn’t pop song production become a personal choice, given the technological means to make it so?