Ken’s Blog

Let’s say you are on an airline run by a culture you know is different from yours. You respect this culture and its people, yet you must acknowledge that there are some significant differences. For one thing, they eat dogs and cats.

You request the “non-pet meal”. The people who run the airline understand that you are from a different cultural background, and they respect that. They honor your request for such a meal, as foreign as the idea may be to them.

When the tray arrives at your seat, it is indeed a pet-free meal. Yet you also see, incongruously, a fried puppy appetizer on your tray.

“I did not order this,” you say to the flight attendant.

“That appetizer comes with all the meals,” she explains helpfully.

On your return flight, you receive a side dish of roasted kitten. You now understand that there is no point in raising a fuss. You offer the dish to the young woman sitting next to you. She is delighted to accept it, and eats it with relish.

This has pretty much been my experience on several recent flights, with just a few culture-specific details changed.

The orange one challenged us to figure out what he meant by “covfefe”.

After much careful analysis, and given this latest news about his pull-out from the Paris climate agreement, I finally figured it out.

It is actually a description of his three step plan:

(1) Con our voters
(2) Fuck economy
(3) Fuck Earth

I know that the last few months have seemed random to many of you. Yet when you actually understand his plan, the man is remarkably consistent.

The strange thing about being in Dublin, apart from the amazing beauty of this place, is the sense of dislocation. I had thought I was truly away, but it seems I was wrong.

For me, being a prof at New York University normally means a steady stream of work, responsibilities, meetings. So you would think that being in Dublin would provide a respite from such things.

But apparently (to borrow a phrase from a recent U.S. president), I am a Decider. People ask me things and then, based on what I say, they make decisions. Some of those decisions involve questions about how to spend money.

And that means I am responsible, wherever I happen to be in the world, for budget. There is, it would seem, no escape.

Alas and alack.

A friend and I were passing by a tennis court the other day, where people were happily playing tennis together. It struck me in that moment how prevalent it is for people to enjoy each others’ company through competitive activities.

Certainly this is not true for all shared activities, but it tends to be true for many of the more active ones. I wondered out loud whether there could be a sentient species who would find such a way of spending time completely incomprehensible — who might even find such behavior downright psychotic.

In other words, could a species evolve intelligence without ever evolving a sense of pleasure in competing with other members of their own species? Or is such a species impossible on first principles?

My friend pointed out, quite sensibly, that puppies and children compete with each other as a way to grow their skills. There is clear survival value in learning through competition.

But that didn’t completely satisfy me. That merely shows that competition is one successful paradigm for evolution. It doesn’t show that competition is necessary for all possible successful paths of evolution.

I found myself positing a species that is more like The Borg from STTNG. In such a species, individuals might be physically separate beings, yet possess a kind of communication that to us would seem like telepathy, like cooperating cells in a single organism. The evolutionary advantage possessed by such creatures would be linked to an inherent quality of cooperation, somewhat the way the tentacles of an octopus always cooperate with each other, even when they are engaged in disparate subtasks.

That still doesn’t mean that evolution of this kind of intelligent species is possible. There could be sound evolutionary reasons why it is not possible. But for now, it seems at least plausible.

Today in the NY Times I read a fascinating article about a Museum of Failures. Focusing on such failed products as the Segway, Google Glass, and Harley Davidson perfume, the museum takes a look at objects aimed at consumers that did not meet expectations.

One paragraph in the article, a quote from the founder of the museum, jumped out at me:

Dr. West said the idea for the museum dawned on him when he visited the Museum of Broken Relationships. “I couldn’t believe they had a Museum of Broken Relationships,” he said. “Then I decided I had to get busy with my Museum of Failure.”

My immediate thought upon reading this paragraph was, why not go meta? Given the vast variety of museums out there, shouldn’t there be a museum of museums?

Now that we have virtual and mixed reality, we can totally do this. In one physical location, you can embark on a journey to everything from a museum of Himalayan art to a museum of Natural History to a museum of Sex to a museum of Broken Relationships.

The museum of museums would be the ultimate museum. Isn’t it about time we created this?

One of the salient features of physical interaction between humans is that we all expect each other to be roughly the same size. Between you and the person you are talking to, there might be a height difference of as much as a factor of two, but just about never more than that, and usually much less.

We are not physically co-present with people with whom we are speaking on the phone, or texting, or exchanging email. Yet we still retain a mental picture of them as being more or less “human sized”.

But with the advent of ubiquitous mixed reality, there will be no intrinsic reason why people need to appear to each other at their natural scale. If you show up on my desk for a brief virtual chat, it might turn out to be convenient for me to see you as a miniature version of yourself, whilst I might appear to you as a giant version of myself against the sky.

Technically, there would be no impediment to this mode of interaction, and there might be some practical advantages. As a tiny person, you could show me a dance sequence, or a walk a path through a proposed architectural space. As a giant person, I could draw some choreography on your floor, or arrange some lights or cloud cover for you.

The more you think about it, the more different practical uses suggest themselves for people adopting asymmetric scales when interacting virtually. But would people accept such arrangements, on a social and psychological level?

My guess is yes. After all, you regularly go to movies where you see the faces of your favorite actors at enormously large scales. And when you turn on the TV, you see those same actors looking very small indeed.

So it would appear that you are already good at dealing with people who have been virtually rescaled. It’s just that soon they may be showing up as tiny people standing on your desk, or as giants, peering into your window.

One thing you count on:
Old friends will always be there.
And sometimes, that’s true.

I went out this evening to watch the new Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s a really fun movie if all you are expecting is a Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Before the previews they have all those annoying advertisements that nobody likes, but we all have to sit through anyway. Of course nobody pays attention to the advertisements, so we all spend that time talking with the friends we came with.

At one point there was a Hyundai commercial that, like everyone else, I wasn’t paying any attention to. But in the periphery of my attention I happened to catch a glimpse of a name.

I turned to my friend and said “Did they just say Lisa Sonata? Who is Lisa Sonata?” I kept trying to figure out why that name sounded so familiar.

And then a beat later it occurred to me — this is a Hyundai car commercial. They weren’t actually talking about someone named Lisa Sonata, it just sounded like that.

OK then. Lisa, wherever you are, you can rest assured that people aren’t actually talking about you in pre-movie advertisements.

So many anniversaries! Yesterday Star Wars turned 40, and today Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band turns 50 — at least in the U.K.

It’s strange to feel the tug of these cultural milestones from the past, and to ponder how powerfully their long reach continues to resonate. Film as a medium of popular entertainment fundamentally changed with the release of Star Wars.

And of course rock and roll was fundamentally altered the moment the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper. From the perspective of today, it’s almost hard to imagine the world that had existed before.

Before May 26, 1967, rock was just silly kid’s music, without any cultural caché. Then, in one fell swoop, it entered the pantheon of the Arts, alongside theatre, cinema, painting and opera.

Kind of cool, when you think about it.

Time ago, in a
Galaxy far far away.
Happy fortieth!