Ken's Blog

I’ve started reading about mindfulness and am thinking of trying out mindful meditation. I have a number of friends and colleagues who do it, and they all speak very highly of the practice.

As I understand it, the goal is to develop a certain kind of mental state in one’s daily life of being relaxed yet alert and present in the moment (good), as opposed to either zoned out or emotionally reactive (bad).

I know that I am pretty consistently in that kind of good state when I am teaching or giving talks. I wasn’t always — it’s something I gradually learned over the course of years.

I also know that I haven’t always been consistently in the good state in other situations. Sometimes, when things get stressful, my emotional state can be very inconsistent indeed. And that is definitely not good.

I suspect that mindfulness meditation is like any other exercise: You gradually build up certain muscles and skills over time, until eventually what had once seemed difficult gradually becomes easy, and eventually becomes second nature.

Seems like something worth trying.

It’s the first Monday of a new month, so my mind turns to the thought of new beginnings. How much are new beginnings really possible?

When you wake up each morning, you have the opportunity to make many decisions. You might even be able to set your entire life in a new direction.

Yet like Buckaroo Banzai once said, no matter where you go, there you are. So whatever path you choose, you need to take yourself along with you.

Which means that any real change is not going to be in your surroundings, but in yourself. In principle, this means change should be easy.

After all, if you want to change yourself, you don’t need to rely on others. And yet, it can be a lot harder to look inward than to look outward.

Like nobody ever said ever, a journey of a single step begins with a thousand miles.

So what do you do in the face of the sort of blind prejudice that just casually blames the victim of that prejudice? Do you try to engage?

I am assuming you know the ugly history of Oklahoma, and what happened to the people who had been living there for many centuries. In any case, it’s quite easy to learn the terrible truth on the internet.

I could have spoken about all that, but I suspect the person I was talking to was separated from such thoughts by a lifetime of assumptions and ingrained attitudes. Even now, with lots of time to think back on it, I can’t think of anything I could have said that would have made a bit of difference.

But I am open to suggestions.

The conversation I was alluding to in my previous post took place the day before yesterday, and went something like this. I was having a very nice conversation with this woman, and she asked me where I was from.

I said “New York City”, and we talked about that for a bit. Then I asked her where she was from.

She said she was born in Philadelphia. “Oh,” I replied, “I have a number of friends who are from Philly”.

“But then,” she continued, “my parents moved to Oklahoma. A lot of our relatives stayed in Philadelphia. So I didn’t see them that often.”

“They didn’t want to visit us in Oklahoma,” she said. “They were afraid they would get scalped by wild Indians.”

At this point in the conversation, I think she saw that there was now an odd look on my face. She hastened to clarify, so I would understand.

“This was,” she explained, “back in the seventies.”

More tomorrow.

I had a very odd conversation yesterday with somebody from Oklahoma. The conversation took a very strange and disturbing turn, and I am still processing.

I am going to need to think about this some more. Maybe tomorrow I will have something to say.

Every once in a while, real life comes by and punches you in the nose to get your attention.

I hate when that happens.

We did a project last year for a narrative experienced in shared VR, which needed a written script. We spent a lot of time working on the script before we did any real production.

As we were doing this, an interesting question came up: Should we treat this like a film script or like a theater script? As you may know, the formatting conventions are very different for a script for a play and a script for a movie. That’s not entirely surprising, since the two media have very different requirements.

On some level, what we are doing is like a movie, because every thing is animated. You are essentially looking at a screen, although the screen is sort of all around you. And there are lots of opportunities for special effects that are possible in a movie but not on stage.

On the other hand, on a formal level, the audience is experiencing something much closer to traditional theater. We have no changes in point of view, no close-ups, none of the use of montage that is central to cinema.

I don’t know whether there is a good answer to this question. Maybe we will just try it different ways for different productions, and see what works better.

Millions of people are at home with their kids these days, during this pandemic. The kids can’t go to school, the parents need to work from home (if they are still employed), and the entire family needs to make do.

A lot of people have been writing about families sheltering at home and their relationship to screens. How much screen time should kids have? What is the line between school and play, the balance between hanging out with friends and roaming the internet?

Does the internet help or hurt? How does it relate to parents and kids sharing quality time together without everyone going crazy?

Suppose we lived in the future world that Vernor Vinge describes in Rainbows End. In the morning everyone pops in their contact lenses, and sees an augmented reality seamlessly integrated with their physical surroundings.

In such a world we might not be talking about screen time. In a sense, there would be no screens, since the real and the virtual would just be seamlessly woven together.

How would this change the dynamic of families sheltering at home? Would it provide a way to promote togetherness, or would it simply create new sorts of barriers between family members?

Somebody asked me today what impact remote instruction has had on my teaching. Obviously there is something lost when you go from an in-person classroom to a group Zoom meeting.

So I found myself thinking about what I’ve been able to do to compensate, to add things to my teaching that I had not been able to easily do in real life. And I found myself talking about creation tools.

When I am sitting by myself in front of my computer screen, I am using all sorts of tools to make things. I’ve got text editors, visualizers, programming environments, 2D and 3D modeling tools and more.

I realize that as I’ve grown in confidence in using Zoom for teaching, I keep bringing in more of these tools. I am able to show students, in a way that would be awkward or impractical in a classroom setting, how I actually make things and conduct my own research.

I don’t think such features will ever replace in-person teaching. But maybe they represent something emergent that is valid and important in its own right.

It will be interesting to see how such approaches to instruction evolve, as necessity forces many teachers to become creative in new and different ways — and as our tools evolve accordingly.

Suppose technology were not the limiting factor. What then would we actually end up with as a “holodeck”?

Would it be like the vision we saw in 1987 in the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation? Or would it be radically different?

If we could enable anything, will people want to have the sense that their physical being is transported into another world? That very literal vision is both comforting and limiting.

Or might it be more like Ready Player One, where you are transformed into a being with great powers that make sense only in a virtual world?

Or will we split the difference? The Matrix posits a virtual world that seems just like this one, until you unlock the codes that give you super powers.

Or will we gradually abandon this literal body image, and shift to something else entirely? That probably seems like a very strange idea, yet if everyone does it, it will just seem normal.

After all, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy were represented only by a string of words printed on paper. In 1813 nobody seemed to mind.