Ken's Blog

Because of the COVID19 outbreak, I now teach all of my class lectures at NYU on-line. Our lab holds all of its meetings over Zoom or Google Hangouts. No two people are actually in the same room.

For all of the difficulties this has caused, it has created some positives. For example, I now record all of my lectures for later viewing. This is actually a necessity, since a number of the students are in Hong Kong or other parts of the Far East, half a world away from New York City.

Yet Zoom could never replace physical proximity. Many of the important subtleties of interpersonal communication involve body posture and movement, gaze direction, pointing and other hand gestures, and variations in inter-personal distance.

Inevitably, as we are forced to keep our distance from each other, our on-line tools will improve, providing ways for us to embrace our inherent physicality. As technology continues to advance, meeting on-line will inevitably evolve toward something that will feel quite a bit like meeting in-person.

Ironically, the need to social distance might have the paradoxical effect of making us feel closer to one another.

Some days are all the same. Others are different.

This has been one of those days.

For obvious reasons, all of my class lectures are now given remotely. I use Zoom, set the share screen, and then use a variety of tools.

One of those tools is my Chalktalk drawing program. But this use case is different from my usual use case.

Usually I use Chalktalk to give invited talks. In those cases there is relatively little back and forth with my audience.

But teaching a class is different. There is a lot more room for surprise, for sudden shifts in topic and focus.

Which means that in my class lectures, I do a lot of improvising. And that means I need tools that are amenable to improvising.

And so I notice that Chalktalk itself is evolving. After every lecture, I add some features to it that will make it easier to improvise during the lectures that follow.

By the end of this semester, I suspect that Chalktalk will be a much better tool for improvisational off-the-cuff lectures. And I am very happy about that.

I love good romantic comedies. If a Rom Com is well written, acted, directed and edited, I can’t get enough of it.

But the funny thing, all that said, is that a good Rom Com is extremely predictable. Right from the beginning, you know what’s going to happen. You even pretty much know when it’s going to happen, and often how.

Romantic comedies operate within very narrow constraints, like sonnets or haiku. Any real deviation from those narrow constraints creates dissonance and audience dissatisfaction.

That said, it’s not easy to create a really good Rom Com. The psychological twists and turns, reversals, plot reveals and key supporting characters all need to be well thought out.

This includes the inevitable betrayal of some unspoken code by one of the two lovers, leading to the nadir of despair at the end of the second act. If this moment is not truly earned, then the inevitable triumphant finale will seem unearned, and the audience will be left with a hollow feeling.

I suppose then that the answer lies in this very contradiction, which is common to so many art forms: The creators need to operate within a very narrow set of constraints, and yet the design and execution must be flawless.

When you are waiting out a global pandemic, you sometimes have food delivered. As it turns out, you don’t always know exactly what you will get.

This weekend I opened up a package of yummy Gardein brand frozen plant-sourced burgers, and did not see exactly what I expected to see. Below, you can see the label on the packaging:

Toward the bottom left, if you look carefully, you can see that the package states that you get four burgers per serving. I have purchased these burgers many times before, and that has always been a true and accurate statement.

But this time, when I opened the package, I got a surprise:

As you can clearly see, there are not four, but six frozen plant-sourced burgers inside. Somehow, two extra frozen plant-sourced burgers decided to come along for the ride.

It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a secure yet easily opened plastic wrapping. It seems that I am the recipient of a mutant Gardein burger package.

But I am not complaining. If providence wants to send me more of them, then to providence I just say thanks for the burgers.

This evening I finally saw The Bob Newhart episode of The big bang theory, and I am very happy.

If you’ve ever seen it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I am very happy right now.

Usually I think of cleaning a room as a chore. But it turns out that there are notable exceptions.

When you are cooped up in one physical space, and don’t have the option to leave, the place where you are takes on new significance. Your electronic presence may roam the world, but your corporal body remains bounded by four walls.

Today I’ve been engaged in radical room cleaning. I’m putting things into neat piles, separating out the useful from the less useful, throwing out the clearly useless.

And it feels absolutely wonderful. It’s as though I am putting my entire world into order.

Which, in a sense — considering the current circumstances — I am.

In some traditional Passover Seders, children love the fact that a portion of the matzoh, called the Afikoman, is hidden by the head of the household somewhere in the house for the children to find. Usually the hiding place is chosen very cleverly, but the children always find it anyway.

This Passover, when everything has gone virtual, and my brother and sister-in-law held their Seders over Zoom, there was a need to improvise. Each Passover there are two Seders, and tonight was the second Seder, when my brother and sister-in-law often plan something whimsical (last year the Seder was run as a game of Dungeons and Dragons).

The idea for this’s year Zoom Seder was to have people contribute a song. You start with the melody of a well known song, then substitute original lyrics on a Passover theme. Everyone sings along, and sometimes the goal is to get people to laugh as they gradually realize what they are singing.

I contributed several, but I was particularly pleased by one. It is sung to the tune of “Found a Peanut” (you know: “Found a peanut, found a peanut, found a peanut last night…”). Below are the first three verses:

Afikoman, afikoman, afikoman last night
Last night I found the afikoman
Afikoman last night

In the bathroom, in the bathroom, in the bathroom last night
Found the matzoh in the bathroom
In the bathroom last night

Ate it anyway, ate it anyway, ate it anyway last night
Last night I ate it anyway
Ate it anyway last night

I have been having a number of conversations with friends in recent days about how particularly odd is this pandemic. It’s not that we haven’t gone through difficult times before — we certainly have.

It’s that no other tragedy in our lifetimes has utterly changed the nature of society. The very way that people connect has changed, in fundamental ways. Ways of personal connection that we thought were immutable have ceased full stop.

One topic that comes up often is how we will describe this time to those who are not yet born. It might be impossible to truly comprehend to anyone who has not actually lived through it.

I imagine it might be something like the dilemma facing soldiers who came back from the front in WWI and WWII. There was no way to truly convey what they had gone through, so in many cases they simply did not try.

The difference is, of course, that in this case the “front” is everywhere. So the question is not so much what we will tell our children, but how we will tell them.

This evening, tired of watching all the sad TV news reports about the current situation, I went out for a walk. It was a beautiful night, not a cloud to be seen, the sky opening up dark and beautiful above me.

Tonight is a full moon, and I bathed in the light of Luna in all her glory, as Venus shone like a precious Jewel in the sky, while Orion fairly leapt out at me, as I vmarveled at the strangely uncharacteristic dimness of Betelgeuse.

These majestic objects out in the universe provide so much beauty. Yet in their vastness and their majesty they are indifferent to both the triumphs and tragedies of human life down here on Earth.

For reasons I cannot quite explain, at a time like this I find their serene indifference to be strangely comforting.