Ken's Blog

Somebody said out to me today that the Cybertruck “looks like it belongs to a landing party of space Nazis.” To me that seems like a pretty accurate description.

And it also explains several things. For example, why would Elon Musk make an ostentatious show of doing Nazi salutes in public, when his favorite president is claiming to be trying to stamp out antisemitism?

At first I thought Musk was just trying to align with our president’s true beliefs. After all, we’re talking about a president who hangs out with the virulent antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and who is also working about as hard as he can to make black history disappear.

But then the comment today about the Cybertruck, and it all fell into place. Musk does not make Nazi salutes in public because he’s an antisemite, or a white supremacist, or a neo-Nazi. He may be all of those things, but that’s not why he is doing it.

He is doing it to sell cars. Clearly he’s trying to promote the Cybertruck — a car that looks like it belongs to a landing party of space Nazis.

What better way to sell such a car than to get people thinking about space Nazis? And what better way to get people thinking about space Nazis than to actually be one?

We spend our entire lives experiencing a particular form of asymmetry. That asymmetry is so baked into our experience that we don’t even think about it.

From the moment you are born, and throughout your life, you have been seeing (and hearing and feeling) the world around you differently from everyone else, because you are seeing through your eyes, while they are seeing through their eyes. Then at some point in early childhood you make the mental leap to accepting that we are all sharing a common reality.

But that is not your actual sensory experience — it is an intellectual construction that you have formed out of your experience. Let’s take some simple examples.

If I hold up an apple, you and I will agree that we are both seeing the same apple. Yet we are literally seeing two different things. You are seeing one side of an apple, and I am seeing the opposite side.

None of this matters all that much in reality. After all, the construct of shared reality that we each place over our respective perceptions serves us quite well.

But it might indeed start to matter once we all begin to wear augmented reality glasses. At that point, your perception and my perception of shared physical reality might start to deviate a lot more.

You and I could be in the same room, both believing that we are having a shared experience, but we might be wrong. Your glasses and my glasses might actually be showing us quite different things.

I suspect that we will need to develop new social conventions to deal with this shift in the relationship between reality and perception. Hopefully we will all end up seeing eye to eye.

April 25 is an illustrious day in the history of science. On this day in 1953, Watson and Crick, building partly on the work of Rosalind Franklin and others, published the paper that described the double helix structure of DNA.

The very next year, on April 25, 1954, the first practical solar cell was publicly demonstrated.

Then on April 25, 1961, Robert Noyce was granted a patent for inventing the integrated circuit. Without that, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Finally, on April 25 1983, humanity reached physically beyond our solar system for the first time, when the NASA space probe Pioneer 10 traveled beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Unfortunately, if the current policies of our Federal executive branch had been in place, all of these scientific advances might have been illegal. I suspect that they all sound suspiciously “woke”.

Does a songbird know that its song is beautiful?

I needed to make a structural diagram for a research proposal that some colleagues and I are submitting tomorrow. And I ended up creating it by writing a program in Javascript.

This strikes me as somewhat odd, because after all these many years, there are lots of professional programs out there to help you make structural diagrams. Yet with all of that effort by so many smart people, I still find it to be easier to get the diagram I want by writing a computer program.

Part of me wonders whether this will ever change. Will A.I. eventually get to the point where I can just tell it what I want to see, and it will produce the diagram of my dreams?

But there’s another part of me that says that this will never happen. There are just too many little aesthetic tweaks that I want control over, in order to tell exactly the visual story that I want to tell.

And having something that is “sort of” right would just drive me crazy. So I suspect that I will always stick to making diagrams the old fashioned way: Using my trusty vi editor to create a new empty text file, and writing a computer program.

I read today that the CEO of Tesla is stepping away from his Washington DC activities, because the company’s stock has dropped 71% in the last few months.

I can understand that. If the stock drops by the same amount in the next few months, then it will be at negative 42%.

And then he will officially be the poorest man in the world.

I was talking with some colleagues today about the possibilities of combining wearable blended reality with artificial intelligence. I mentioned how convenient it is, when I’m writing an email on my phone, that my AI email assistant realizes when I’m writing the same sequence of words several times and offers to complete the thought.

One of my colleagues pointed out that this feature is not foolproof. And if errors occur out in the real world, rather than on a screen, the consequences could be larger.

Suddenly a scene popped into my head: Two future military commanders are discussing their midday battle plan. Noticing the time, one commander says “time for lunch.” But his helpful AI assistant hears “time for launch.”

Unfortunately, out in the real world there is no “undo” key.

In these first months I have been trying to make sense of the actions of the incoming U.S. administration. Surely there must be some pattern.

Today I think I finally have it. The key insight came from this latest announcement that the U.S. State Department would be reorganized. The most important changes are (1) eliminate any operations that might help Africa, and (2) cease any operations that might promote democracy, support human rights or assist refugees.

Essentially, the administration has been asking the question “What actually makes America great?” And whenever they identify anything that might even be perceived as making America great, they then systematically work to get rid of it.

So what we are seeing here is apparently an elaborate form of absurdist performance art: The incoming president runs for office on the slogan “Make America Great Again”, then as soon as he comes into office, he does everything he can to destroy anything that might be great about America.

So there you have it. We are witnessing the future of America, and it isn’t great.

I know it sounds counterintuitive. But sometimes, after a flurry of activity, you just need to take a day to do as little as possible.

Sometimes what you really need is to rest and recharge your batteries. And then doing nothing at all can be the most productive thing.

I understand that a lot of people don’t like flying on airplanes. Flights are a hastle to get to and from, they often involve physical discomfort, and they can take a lot of time, depending on how far you are going.

But I love them. And the reason is I get a ton of work done on airplanes. Nobody interrupts me, and nobody can call me or email me.

Well, maybe they are emailing me, but as long as I am on that flight, I am blissfully unaware of it. I get some of my best work done during flights, because they are one of the rare occasions when I can be guaranteed to be alone with my own thoughts.

When nobody interrupts you and you have several hours just to write down whatever comes into your head, it’s amazing what you can discover. Looking at the ideas that have popped up in this way, I sometimes find myself asking, “Now where did that come from?”

I guess you could say it was just in the air.