Ken’s Blog

I am working with some colleagues on a large proposal to the National Science Foundation. Every once in a while, I need to stop word-smithing, and instead explain what we are doing by making a diagram.

I know that that’s supposed to be work, but there is something just so darned fun about explaining things in pictures. It feels less like work and more like play — sort of the grown-up equivalent of a kid getting to color with crayons in school.

I think that this is because when you make a diagram, you aren’t just communicating ideas. You are also communicating, in a visceral way, how those ideas relate to one another. The physical arrangement of the components of your diagram is itself an important part of the story.

Words are amazing — they are our human super power — but sometimes a well-designed diagram gives the sense of things, in a way that words could not. And maybe that’s why the part of proposal writing where we make diagrams is so much fun.

Today is the third anniversary of my first ever use of Zoom. I taught a class on Zoom for the first time on the morning of March 12, 2020.

To put this into context, on the morning of March 11, 2020 I had not even heard of Zoom. But then came March 12, a Thursday. That was the day my University went suddenly and completely virtual, which it remained for a year and a half.

We now take Zoom so much for granted that we forget how recently most of us had never even heard of it. We would occasionally use Skype, but for most people it was not a primary means of communication. And then one day we were all transported into the opening credits of The Brady Bunch.

People are again meeting in person, but we will never go completely back to the way things were. I now have quite a colleagues around the world, people I have never met in person, with whom I regularly meet over Zoom to discuss shared research.

Zoom, it seems, is here to stay. Now if only they could fix the problem of who is looking at whom…

I absolutely loved the Jordan Peele movie “Nope”. I saw it by myself, which I think really helped me to appreciate it. Seeing it alone, it felt as though I was reading a very thoughtful novel.

I saw that on IMDB quite a few people gave the movie a 1 out of 10 rating. They didn’t just dislike it — they actively hated it. Some wrote that it was the worst movie they had ever seen.

I had quite the opposite reaction. Peele packed so many ideas into that one film, and he did it with subtlety. Rather than hitting you over the head, the movie forces you to tease out the many overlapping meanings on your own.

But there was one moment in particular that was absolutely transcendent. I have rarely experienced a moment in a movie when so many threads of meaning have come together in one startling camera shot.

But I can’t talk to anyone about it, because I would need to find somebody else who saw the movie. And nobody I know seems to have seen it.

Some days, all you need is a really beautiful sky.

Today, if you want to make something really original on the computer, and somebody hasn’t already written a program for you to make that particular kind of thing (like Minecraft or Photoshop or PowerPoint), then you need to write code. And writing code is a difficult to learn and specialized skill that most people never master.

I think one of the major changes that will be brought about by this new generation of chatbots is a fundamental shift in this paradigm. These tools allow you to describe the things you want to create in plain English, without needing to explicitly write out the computer code to implement what you’ve specified.

This will enable children of the coming generation to develop a new kind of literacy. Those children will grow up to be adults who possess the ability to create things for themselves that until now have required a full-on knowledge of computer programming.

The skill to work this way with a chatbot assistant does not yet widely exist. But in the future it will.

Many of the things that people now need to hire programmers for, they will be able to do for themselves. And this will have a transformative economic impact, the way the rise of mass literacy between 1600 and 1800 transformed the European economy.

Yesterday somebody pointed out to me that for people under 30, the phrase “by accident” has largely been replaced by “on accident”. Someone in the conversation who is under 30 nodded and said “yes, it’s ‘on accident'”.

I found this startling because I had literally never, until that moment, heard the phrase “on accident”. I always use “by accident”. I think this is a clear example of the English language evolving before our eyes.

I must admit that “on accident” is more logical than “by accident”. After all, it parallels the complementary phrase “on purpose”.

But a related question is why such a mutation occurs. Surely it can’t be completely by accident.

Or on accident, if you prefer.

We celebrate the birthdays of highly accomplished people, whether they be saints, artists, athletes or political leaders. We do not celebrate the day that they died.

Yet on the day that any individual was born, they have not yet accomplished anything. They are, at that point, all potential, no accomplishment.

But on the day an accomplished person passes away, they have accumulated a lifetime of achievement, sometimes towering achievement. Given that we are celebrating what they managed to accomplish while they were here on this Earth, might it not make more sense to celebrate them on the day that they left?

I realize that this may be a controversial idea. 🙂

There are few things more fun than great dinner conversation about movies. But you need to be with the right dinner companions.

I was visiting a museum today. One of the exhibits featured a circular projection against the wall.

To be clear the projector they used was a perfectly ordinary projector which protects a rectangular image. But a mask was installed near the lens, blocking out all light outside of a soft-edged disk shaped region.

The result is surprising effective. The region within registered not so much as a projection, but as a magical round window into another world.

I am delighted that a technique which is so simple can produce something that is so effective. Somehow this makes me very happy.

Yesterday somebody pointed out that the opposite of “woke” is “fascist”. After watching what is going on in Florida, I can see exactly what they mean.

Hopefully people will wake up before this goes too far.