Ken’s Blog

A recurring thing in science fiction, and in some non-fiction circles, is that one day we will be able to upload ourselves to the Cloud, and maybe live forever. This notion has been explored many times, The Matrix and Upload being two well-known examples.

But I think that the reality of recent chatbots such as ChatGPT has helped to wake people up from this wishful thinking. We are starting to realize that artificial intelligence, as intriguing as it might be, is not us.

A.I. is a completely separate thing, in its way as distinct from us as the octopus. Over time, as these A.I. engines gain proficiency, we will use them more and more. But we will not become them.

At the end of the day we are creatures of flesh, not of ones and zeroes. It is both our glory and our tragedy that we cannot escape the inevitable. Yet that ticking clock is exactly what spurs us to think more deeply, and to try to make sense of our existence by creating art.

Like the man said, the dread of something after death — the undiscovered country (from whose bourn no traveller returns) — puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Recently I’ve been working more than usual with hardware components. One thing about hardware is that absolutely everything must be working properly.

If your Arduino board isn’t connected in exactly the right way to your IMU chip, then nothing happens. It doesn’t just fail a little — it fails completely.

Software isn’t like that. With software it’s much easier to build in back-ups and failsafe mechanisms.

Something might indeed go wrong, but you can detect it and recover from it. Often you can do this without affecting the people who use your program.

Of course you can build failsafe mechanisms into hardware. And for some applications, such as medical or aerospace, that is necessary.

But it’s a lot more expensive and difficult to do that well in hardware than it is to do in software. Maybe that’s one reason I work mostly with software. 🙂

You can’t really have art without elision. I think this is true in all media and in all genres.

The well-chosen edit in a movie, the shift from verse to chorus in a song, the blackout between scenes in a play. All of these things ask us to do the work of filling in.

When we are required to provide what is missing, then we pay attention, and our imagination becomes engaged. Whether it is the gap between panels in a graphic novel, the unseen off-screen murder in a thriller, or just a brief wordless glance between two potential lovers on stage, the part of the story that is withheld from us can be the greatest tool of storytelling.

Like the old jingle says: “It’s the nothing that makes us something / It’s what we miss that hits the mark / It’s what left out that leaves us in / It’s the light shining over the dark.”

I know you’re not supposed to like watching movies on airplanes. In-flight movies are really a consolation prize for being cooped up for several hours in a too-small seat inside a crowded tin can.

The screen is small, and the conditions are sub-optimal. And yet, I find that I really love it.

Sometimes I will watch the same movie that I saw on a big screen in a movie theater, one I didn’t particularly like the first time around. Yet when I see it in the little seat-back screen in front of me, the movie seems much better.

I think it has something to do with intimacy and focus. I am tuning out everything else about the uncomfortable experience of flying, so I become completely immersed in the movie, even more than I would in a movie theater.

When I watch an in-flight movie, I feel more connected with the movie watching experience. In this setting, I find that I am better at noticing and appreciating the choices the filmmaker has made, and that makes me like the movie even more.

Am I the only one who has this experience?

Every year, millions of people in the U.S. go through the anxiety of filing their taxes. Many people wait until the very last minute, mainly to avoid dealing with it.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that taxes were completely automatic. What if the laws were set up so that the entire process happened completely behind the scenes.

In that alternate reality, your taxes would just be automatically withheld, sent on their way to pay for all those nice things that we take for granted — like roads, airports, schools and fire departments — and that would be it. Nobody would even think about taxes.

I am sure there are good arguments against such a thing. But then again, maybe in the long run we would all be happier.

There are some people I think of only when I am cooking certain dishes. There are other people I think of only as I am passing through certain doorways.

In many cases, these are people I have not seen or interacted with for years. Yet there they are, showing up in the most unexpected places.

It’s curious how people lodge themselves in your head. Some memories have a habit of curling themselves up in a corner of your brain, and waiting for just the right event or location to awaken.

I wonder whether this is a common phenomenon. Am I, even now, lodged far away in somebody else’s brain, a sense memory waiting for just the right moment to return?

People of a certain age grew up watching The Brady Bunch on TV. For that generation, the visual sequence that opens the show is iconic.

The cast appears in a 3×3 grid, with everybody taking turns looking at each other in up, down, left, right and diagonal directions. Everyone watching knew that they couldn’t actually see each other, and that they were filmed separately, but everyone loved the concept and the visual.

Zoom looks kind of like that, with everyone’s video face appearing in little square boxes. But it doesn’t have that cross-window eye contact.

As we emerge from the pandemic, many millions of people have gotten used to the visual iconography of Zoom. I wonder whether a new form of visual storytelling will eventually emerge from all this, one which combines the visual ideas of Zoom meetings with the visual ideas of that Brady Bunch opening.

April 15 seems to be a particularly unlucky day of the year. On this day in history, Abraham Lincoln died after being shot in the back of the head, and the RMS Titanic sank into the North Atlantic, killing most people on board.

Also, a massive fire seriously damaged the cathedral at Notre-Dame, and two bombs were set off at the Boston Marathon, killing or injuring hundreds of people.

Various other tragic events also happened on April 15 that haven’t even made this list. On top of all that, if you live in the U.S., today your taxes are due.

I, for one, am looking forward to April 16.

Suppose you were tasked with identifying one definitive song from your list of favorite songwriter or songwriting team. First you’d really need to define what you mean by “definitive”.

A definition that appeals to me focuses on the song’s impact. How deeply did a song influence the culture? Did it change the very way we think about music? In the event of a tie, consider which song first comes to everyone’s mind when thinking of that songwriter or songwriting team.

Given this definition, some choices are easy. For Nirvana, it would be “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. For Irving Berlin, it would be “White Christmas”.

But other cases are trickier. What is Paul McCartney’s definitive song? Or Joni Mitchell, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carole King, Robert and Richard Sherman, Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan or Ellie Greenwich?

There were bugs in the first version I tried to release of my little collaborative art project built on top of Croquet. But I am starting to better understand Croquet better, so I was hopeful that this time it might work properly.

So I tried it again today — a program on the Web that allows people to collaborate to form an evolving picture, by clicking to set or clear pixels. Alas, it still did not work properly. Sigh. Eventually I hope to get it right.