Ken's Blog

As we start on any new project, I find myself writing two very different types of documents. One is for people with technical expertise. The other is for everyone else.

For example, if you are going to apply for a patent on something, you need to use very technical and specialized language. If you don’t, it will get rejected by the patent examiner.

The same thing goes for a paper for a technical conference. The people reviewing your paper have no patience for fuzzy language. They want to see exactly how you are doing what you are claim to accomplish.

But consequently, what you write for those audiences is nearly indecipherable to most people. You are employing highly arcane language, which in many cases includes commonly used English words that have an entirely different meaning in this context.

But also you need to explain to the world why you are doing the project, and what it will mean if you succeed. At that point you are essentially talking to millions of people.

What is weird is that in both cases you are talking about exactly the same thing. Only one is the view from inside the box, while the other is what the same thing looks like from outside the box.

One Friday afternoon when I was ten years old, just about to turn eleven, our teacher, Mrs. Lund, assigned us the first chapter of The Once and Future King to read over the weekend. That’s the cute and child-friendly chapter where Merlin teaches important values to young Wart (the future King Arthur) by temporarily turning him into different animals.

I liked it so much that I kept reading. And reading, and reading. At night I would read it under the covers by flashlight, so my mom wouldn’t know I was missing sleep.

By Monday morning, when I got to school bleary eyed, I had read all 632 pages of the paperback edition of T.H. White’s masterpiece. I had been through the life and death of King Arthur, the founding of the Round Table, the quest for the Holy Grail, the evil power grab of Morgan le Fay, the shocking betrayal of Arthur by Lancelot and Guinevere, the breathtaking rise and tragic fall of a beautiful dream.

But there was nobody to talk with about it. The class discussion that morning was just a nice chat about young Wart getting turned into various little animals, and the lessons he learned along the way.

It was my first “big book”, an experience that opened up a whole new world for me. It gave me the confidence to pick up and read long and challenging books, and changed how I looked at everything.

In a way, it’s my origin story.

There are moments when a new technology causes a paradigm shift. In each such case, the introduction of one innovation has resulted in many millions of people experiencing reality differently.

Some of my favorite such moments in recent times were the introduction of, respectively, trains, paperback books, cars+roads, indoor plumbing, electricity as a utility, cinema, airplanes, radio, television, air conditioning, the Web and SmartPhones.

Then of course there are all the medical advances which have extended human life dramatically. That constitutes an entire category by itself.

I wonder what the next big paradigm-shifting technology will be.

As I write this, I am looking at one of those hi res screens with scenes captured from flying drones of beautiful places in the world. You know, beaches, mountains, tropical islands, that kind of thing.

And I find myself looking forward to the time when virtual reality will be good enough to provide a “click to enter” option. You see a place you like, and you click, and presto! you are there.

Is that asking too much?

When we write down any sentence, we feel as though we are decreasing entropy in the universe, because we are constructing something that has order, structure and meaning. But we need to do this while obeying the laws of physics.

Which means that when you look at the process of “person writing a sentence” as a holistic system, you will probably find that entropy was increased by that single act of thoughtful creation. This entropy increase generally comes about in ways we don’t think about, like moving, sweating, typing, or the heat given off by our brains.

So ironically, the more order we try to create in the universe through our well intentioned systems of thought, the faster we are actually causing the universe to wind down and eventually die. This is one of the odd peculiarities of being a thinking physical being.

But I wouldn’t sweat about it.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Or what’s a metaphor?

Many of you have been there. Your computer program has a bug, which for weeks you have been searching for.

You keep making improvements to your program, adding features, making things prettier. But still that bug persists. And you know you can’t really release the code until you find it.

Then one day, you manage to fix it. The clouds part, sunshine streams in. Somewhere a choir is singing.

Just this morning I fixed such a bug. A terrible, tenacious, head banging scourge of a bug.

But now the bug has been vanquished. It is no more, and I am free.

Until, that is, the next bug shows up.

A huge economic shift is coming. Post-pandemic, things will not go back to the way they were pre-pandemic.

Companies are downsizing their plans for new office construction. The assumption now is that people will spend more of their week working from home.

Commercial property won’t go away, but the home will take on a more prominent role as an integral part of the workplace.

New kinds of services will arise to cater to the growing market that this will create. For example, health and wellness while working in the home will gain in prominence, as millions of new customers show up for that market.

To take just one category of such a market, “aging at home” will start to be tied to the work economy in a fundamental way. Older people will consequently find it easier to enter a newly configured workforce.

These will all be great changes, if they are done properly.

Sometimes life becomes overwhelming. At those times you need to remember that this life is probably only your first time through.

Next time you will most likely do better.

Why do people find flowers beautiful, and why do we like their aroma? If you look at these questions from an evolutionary perspective, it is hard to identify a specific chain of cause and effect.

What would be the evolutionary advantage to flowers for people to find them beautiful and fragrant? Conversely, what would be the evolutionary advantage to our species to perceive flowers in this way?

Unquestionably, we humans love to look at flowers and we love to smell them. We cultivate them, surround ourselves with them, and give them as gifts to the ones we love — entirely because of these qualities that please us so very much.

Is there some non-obvious evolutionary adaptation at work here? Surely somebody must have studied this question before.