Ken’s Blog

The core idea of Christmas is very beautiful: Jesus taught that each of us, no matter how humble, is possessed of divine Grace. By giving gifts we are reminded not to put ourselves above others, for there is divine Grace within every human being.

Yet that’s not how it ends up playing out. In a modern consumer economy, everything becomes an impetus to spend money. The promotion of such behavior is, in fact, the core wealth-generating engine of a consumer centered capitalist economy.

So when you watch a movie about Christmas, the gifts that Santa brings end up being commercial goods, rather than made by hand. These run to things like board games, dolls, ice skates, Nerf guns, game consoles — items made of plastic and metal, produced on a massive scale in a factory somewhere.

A key word in that last sentence is “somewhere”. The relentless U.S. consumer economy can no longer be supported by domestic manufacturing. The things we buy — and give to others for Christmas — are now made in parts of the world where the minimum wage is the equivalent of between $2.00 to $2.50 per hour.

Ironically, our yearly expression of generosity exploits people who work for slave wages. It’s not that we are bad people, but rather that this inequity is by now baked deeply into the very structure of our economic system.

If any of this bothers you, and you are wondering whether there is a better way next Christmas to honor the divine Grace of others, there are alternatives. You could give a gift of cookies that you baked yourself, or something you painted or knitted or quilted or perhaps crafted out of clay, or a poem or a song that you wrote.

There are so many gifts you could give which come from your true self. You would be honoring the divine Grace in human life everywhere, without being a de facto participant in a vast cycle of exploitation.

Just don’t expect to see too many people on TV or in movies doing likewise. That kind of generosity is not considered good economic policy.

When I was a child I was a big fan of The Beatles. I knew all their song lyrics by heart — I still do.

I also loved the writing of Katherine Mansfield. When I read her 1920 short story Miss Brill, I was struck by how similar it was to ideas within the song Penny Lane.

In particular, when Paul McCartney writes “and though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway,” he is essentially summing up the entire story arc of Miss Brill in a single line. This isn’t completely surprising, when you consider that when McCartney was a boy in Liverpool, he would very likely have been introduced to the work of Mansfield.

In any case, this would certainly not have been the only time he snuck literary references into his lyrics. To take just one example, McCartney’s lyrics for Maxwell’s Silver Hammer open with a clear shout-out to one of his literary heroes, the absurdist late nineteenth century writer Alfred Jarry.

What is curious to me is that nobody seems to ever have noticed the reference to Miss Brill within Penny Lane. I’ve scoured the Web — supposedly the container of all random human knowledge — and there appears to be no mention of it.

Like the song says — very strange.

I’ve noticed recently that hearing a formerly innocuous common verb now has the power to send people reeling in involuntary disgust. If a bridge player says, for example, “my heart *****s your diamond” or a scientist says “this principle is *****ed by that principle,” people are now prone to grimacing, as if in a sudden spasm of unbearable pain, at the mere sound of the word in question.

Alas, this formerly useful word has now become associated with a certain intellectually and emotionally challenged individual in political office. How strange that a person can be in a position to rain unspeakable destruction upon our world, while lacking the ability to, say, read and understand a letter of resignation written by his own Secretary of Defense.

I feel especially bad for bridge players, who cannot avoid the now tainted word. I myself have started to carefully avoid it, because of the look of agonized horror I see upon people’s faces the moment they hear the sound of it.

Instead, I find myself reaching for some other word, even if the resultant meaning is less exact. After all, common decency *****s grammatical precision.

One good thing about this whole “retreat” business at the end of a semester is the freedom to simply get work done.

Today there are just three of us in the lab. We are all taking the opportunity to quietly work at our computers.

To some people it might seem odd that anyone would come into work on a Saturday when they don’t need to. On the other hand, it’s different if you really love your work. Getting to spend a whole day doing what you love, without any interruption, is a true luxury.

After all, at the end of the day (metaphorically speaking), all we really have in this life is time. The freedom to spend that time however we wish to is a priceless gift.

There is something a bit poignant about hanging around in a University research lab after the semester is over, and classes are done. One by one people depart. Many go home to their respective families, others fly off to visit friends.

As the post-semester week progresses, the usual bustle of activity is gradually replaced by an eerie silence. This place starts to feel less like a lab and more like a very high-tech sort of spiritual retreat.

A few of us will still be around in the next week or so, and we who remain will have each other for company. A small yet hardy band of hackers.

Suppose you could see into the future? That would be wonderful, or it could be dreadful.

After all, perfect foresight would completely remove free will. Your subjective experience of life would be that of a puppet dangling on a string. No matter what you do, you know the outcome has already been determined.

Even worse, you might run into some serious paradoxes the moment you tried to change that future. In the worst case, by creating an unresolvable paradox you might cause your own subjective timeline to simply cease to exist.

But what if you could see into the future with some degree of probability? For example, suppose that half of the time your future vision becomes reality, and half of the time it doesn’t.

This is a very different proposition. You could, for example, always win at games of chance, since you will have the ability to unfairly adjust your bet at any pick of a card or roll of the dice.

Given the above, what would be the optimal such probability of correctness for a person possessed with this particular superpower? Is it indeed 50%? Is there some rational way to figure this out?

You can invent whatever you like. But if you don’t spin it into a story, hardly anybody will understand why it is significant.

As humans, we are hardwired to think in terms of narratives. Tell us a story, and we know what’s going on. But confuse us with mere facts, and we simply tune out.

I’ve come to realize that in order to bring our Lab’s research to the outside world in a way that will truly have impact, we need to tell a story. Not the story of how our stuff works, but the story of why it will matter.

So yes, peer review journals are important. You definitely want your professional colleagues to verify that what you are doing is solid research, and result of honest science.

But also, you need to tell everybody else why what you are doing matters — including that vast majority of people who don’t care how cool your algorithm is. What they care about is what effect your innovation will have on them and on the people they love.

And to get that information across, you need to know how to communicate what you’ve done in the form of a story. Some researchers might think that this is an unfair burden, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable.

In the last year or so, Google’s Speech to Text has gotten really good. There was a time not too long ago when it was terrible, so this is a wonderful and welcome change.

Yet converting speech to text, even when done perfectly, inevitably loses something. Even if the text you end up with is a faithful transcription of your words, it fails to capture your tone and intonation.

I wonder whether there could be a visual representation of computer-transcribed speech that somehow adds back this missing information. Perhaps the visual representation of this affective information would be some combination of text color, word spacing, font size and style, background shade, or other characteristics.

I suppose we could just intermix appropriate emojis at various places within the transcribed text, but that seems somehow unsatisfying. It would be so much more interesting if the text itself could give the sense that it is coming alive with emotion.

My blog post today for the Future Reality Lab doesn’t exactly answer any questions. Rather, it raises a particularly thorny question about conducting research into the future.

I’m not actually sure there is any good answer to the question of how to conduct research into future reality. Yet it seems to me that it would be useful to develop some overarching principles, a kind of context-independent guide to “researching things that haven’t happened yet.”

I don’t dare hope that we could ever come up with any truly reliable guide to this kind of research. But I would like to think that we could develop a set of sound principles.

I guess this would come under the heading of “Future Reality research research.” Oh well — I never meta-discipline I didn’t like. 😉

When I was a kid we knew about stars in the world of popular entertainment who had peaked long before we were born. I knew a whole lot about Rudolph Valentino, Rudy Vallee, Mae West, Ida Lupino, Fred Waring, Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald, Victor Borge, Harold Arlen, Josephine Baker and Mary Pickford, to name just a few.

That hunger to learn about the roots and evolution of popular culture seems to be missing from nearly everyone I speak to who are now in their early to mid twenties. Historical memory has apparently become shorter, and the OGs of our current popular culture trends have mysteriously become invisible.

To take one example, very few people in their twenties that I speak to seem to who know who Lenny Bruce was. A few of them recognize him as a character lurking around the fringes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but that’s about it.

This despite that fact that George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, David Chapelle, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman and many others are living in the construction of modern comedy that Bruce built. And he built it against enormous societal resistance, at unimaginable cost to himself.

I could give many similar examples. We appear to be living in a time when people are simply not interested in tracing back the historical roots of their own popular culture. I wonder whether this is just a phase we are going through, or whether it indicates a fundamental shift in the nature of popular culture itself.