Ken’s Blog

In a recent post I talked about how I built a bridge between two code worlds. In particular, I created a parallel set of software libraries, so that the same content I created for my Chalktalk presentation system can also be put on the Web, in the form of interactive diagrams for on-line documents.

As it happens, last year I ported my Responsive Face Java applet into Javascript so I could show it in Chalktalk. I decided to use this as a test case.

I’ve now managed to get the responsive face working as a Javascript interactive diagram, along with basic interactive controls. I still need to put in the full set of controls, but at this point it’s ready enough that it’s interesting to play with.

If you want to try it out, click on the image below.

Looking back from a future era, it is often easy to see those moments of inflection when popular culture evolved. These were the moments where an event occurred that ushered in a new sensibility.

A few such events that come to mind are the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927 or Citizen Kane in 1941 or Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 or Psycho in 1960 or Star Wars in 1977 or Rapper’s Delight in 1979 or Doom in 1993. I am sure you can add to this list.

I just watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It does so many innovative things with narrative, and rethinks how to visually tell a story in so many fundamental ways, that at some point I stopped trying to keep track and just leaned back to enjoy the ride.

Of course we can’t really know for sure what will happen in the future. But I suspect that there is a good chance this film will be seen as one of those inflection points in popular culture.

People in some technical professions use plain language — short words that sound like regular English. People in other highly technical professions do just the opposite.

For example, civil engineers and plumbers use short English words to describe things. Words like “span” and “load”, “valve”, “pressure” and “pipe”.

The language of doctors is quite different. Their words tend to be much longer and in latin. Finger is “phelange”, forward is “anterior”, down the middle is “sagittal”.

It’s as though there are working class technical fields and upper class technical fields. Plumbers and engineers are working class — it’s all just about getting the job done. Doctors are upper class — it’s still about getting the job done, but it’s also about something else, something more rarefied.

In computer science we tend to use simple English words when plying our craft, like “heap”, “stack”, “array”, “float” and “return”. I guess that makes us a working class technical field.

Happy 2019!

2018 has been a strange year, at least from my perspective. Our Future Reality Lab at NYU has been doing spectacular work. Showing our shared virtual reality immersive cinema experience CAVE to about 2000 people at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference in Vancouver was a real delight.

The positive cultural ripples from that event continue to radiate outward. This may be the beginning of a new medium for shared experiences on a mass scale. If so, this medium will likely evolve its own visual language, just as the visual language for cinema itself evolved away from that of live theater. It will be fun to be there for that. 🙂

In contrast, the national and world stage this last year has been dominated by a different kind of shared virtual reality, one dominated by some sort of unhinged performance artist. Reading about you-know-who in the news has felt like watching late career Andy Kaufman staging a performance of Ubu Roi while in full Tony Clifton mode.

Maybe this is the year that virtual reality, in all its varieties, has finally overtaken the real thing.

You can come down with a cold, but never with a hot
What is it that cold has, that hot hasn’t got?

People ask you for a light, but never for a dark
Why does one feel right and the other miss the mark?

People party to get high, they don’t party get low
Does anybody know a good reason this is so?

We sometimes go to war, yet we never go to peace
It all seems so confusing, my questions just increase!

Now my little song is over, but it never could be under
What does it all mean? It really makes me wonder.

There is a charming scene in the 1949 MGM movie Neptune’s Daughter in which Betty Garrett’s character wants Red Skelton’s character to stay over, and he makes a show of resisting, before happily agreeing in the end to stay. It’s a delightfully playful exchange between two characters who clearly adore each other, and it’s all done to the now classic Frank Loesser song Baby It’s Cold Outside, which had its cinematic premiere in this film.

There’s one moment where Red Skelton, trying to find a graceful excuse to say yes, looks at his glass and says “Say, what’s in this drink?” In recent cultural discussions, some people have used that line of dialog to claim a connection between this scene of mutual seduction and Bill Cosby’s infamous use of date rape drugs.

This leads to all sorts of interesting questions. If Betty Garrett’s character had succeeded in knocking out Red Skelton’s character with drugs, would that then have allowed her to have her sexual way with him? It seems to me that a man passed out unconscious on her bed wouldn’t have been much fun at all.

So how could a suggestion of date rape possibly have been the filmmakers’ intention here? Am I missing something?

There is a point in the original production of the musical A Chorus Line where a character sings “If Troy Donahue can be a movie star, then I can be a movie star.” At another point in the musical the same character sings this line a little differently: “If George Hamilton can be a movie star, then I can be a movie star.”

In both cases the rhythm of the name is essential to the lyric. So how do you find names with a particular rhythm?

There are tools on-line for finding words by meaning or by rhyme. But as far as I can tell, there are no Web tools out there to help find words or names by their rhythm.

It turns out that this rhythm is not all that common. In a list of the hundred most famous people, it shows up exactly zero times.

But just thinking about it a bit, I was able to come up with a fairly substantial list of hyper-famous people whose names would have worked with the rhythm of that song lyric: Anne Hathaway, Art Garfunkel, Cab Calloway, Drew Barrymore, Duke Ellington, Faye Dunaway, Fran Lebowitz, Fran Tarkenton, George Hamilton, George Harrison, George Steinbrenner, George Washington, Jack Nicholson, James Madison, Jim Morrison, John Carpenter, John Kerouac, John Lasseter, John Malkovich, John Mellencamp, Jon Anderson, Jon Oliver, Karl Lagerfeld, Mark Zuckerberg, Pat Benatar, Phil Donahue, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Roy Orbison, Sam Worthington, Sean Connery, Shel Silverstein, Ted Kennedy, Troy Donahue, Van Morrison and Wes Anderson.

There are also lots of people with this name rhythm who are hyper-famous if you happen to be in the right literary / political / sports / cinema / etc. sub-world. A few examples are: Bob Balaban, Bob Kaliban, Booth Tarkington, Dag Hammarskjold, John Anderson, John Connolly, Joy Adamson, Ken Lonergan, Pam Oliver, Ralph Bellamy, Ralph Richardson, Ron Oliver and Thor Heyerdahl.

There are even fictional people with this name rhythm, such as Deuce Bigelow, Jack Skellington, John Anderton, Nick Carraway, Sky Masterson and Tom Bombadil.

There tend to be more men than women on these particular lists. I suspect the fact that men are more apt to have a single-syllable first name contributes to this disparity.

Suppose you wanted to find lots of names with a particular rhythm. How would you go about it? Maybe there should be an App for that.

Back in August 2013, when Oracle decided to kill Java Applets (thereby wiping out many years of work I had done building cool interactive animated diagrams for the Web), I pivoted to Javascript and WebGL. In the Fall semester of 2013 I built lots of interactive diagrams in Javascript for my computer graphics course notes on the Web.

Then in early 2014 I started working on Chalktalk, and abandoned those lovely early Javascript experiments. Alas, no more cool interactive diagrams for my on-line course notes.

This past week I revisited those experiments from 2013, and started to rework them so that they would also work in Chalktalk. Today I finally completed the bridge between the two.

I can now use the identical code for both an interactive diagram embedded in a Web page document (ie: on-line course notes) and an animated sketch performed in Chalktalk. For those of you who are computer programmers, I do this by providing two very different support libraries that just happen to share the same API.

This means I will be able to use Chalktalk’s capability to be a “magic whiteboard” for the live storytelling part of teaching computer graphics, and then put exactly the same code on the Web for the interactive course notes, so that students can explore those examples for themselves when they review the notes on-line.

I feel really good about this. Now I just need to get it all working in volumetric video…

Today at my annual medical checkup, I told my doctor that my number one rule for what research areas to work on is very simple: I only work on things that my six year old self would have thought were cool.

He responded wistfully that he wished he could follow that rule in his own work. Then he paused and thought for a moment, and said “Come to think of it, when I was six I wanted to be a doctor.”

In my post today for our Future Reality Lab daily blog, I described how I recently discovered a new research window. Reading over that post, I see that I am indeed following my own rule.

But don’t take my word for it, judge for yourself.