Ken’s Blog

These days many movie theaters play commercials before the previews for coming attractions. I guess it’s just one of those sad things we all have to put up with.

But this weekend a friend and I had an even sadder experience. My friend was talking to me during the interminable (and very loud) commercials, when a woman in front of us, who seemed to be in her late 70s or early 80s, turned around and told my friend to stop her loud talking.

I recognized the woman, because I had held the door open for her and her husband when they had first entered the theater (her husband walked with a cane). I am not sure whether she recognized me.

To put the woman’s complaint in context, all the while she was saying this to us, pretty much all the other people around us in the theater were also talking to each other. It’s not as though most people actually watch those stupid commercials. 🙂

We tried to reason with her, but the woman was adamant. She was convinced my friend was being inappropriate by talking in a movie theater during the pre-preview commercials.

I found the encounter disturbing mainly because of my suspicion that the woman may have been suffering from some form of dementia. How awful it must be, I found myself thinking, to live in a world where you are convinced that all the people around you are being rude all the time.

I wanted to help her, to find a way ease her evident suffering, but I could think of no way to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between her reality and the reality of all the rest of us.

Oy, such a big fuss
About a nice Jewish boy.
It’s Erev Christmas.

Last night with a friend I saw Denis Villeneuve’s new film Arrival. I am a huge fan of the story it is based on, Ted Chiang’s novella Story of your Life. I have very fond memories of reading it when it first came out in 1998, and I’ve reread it several times since then.

So I went into the movie theater with more than a little trepidation. After all, I have seen how the meaning of wonderful written works can be betrayed by Hollywood adaptations.

Think, for example, of what Hollywood has done to the work of Alan Moore. Zach Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen completely reversed the meaning of the work — turning what had been a thoughtful criticism of violence in popular culture into a celebration of it. Even worse, the Hollywood adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen just tossed out all of the wonderful ideas in the graphic novel, and the resulting film was just excruciatingly stupid and incoherent.

So I was delighted to find that Arrival was true to the original. Of course it was, in a literal sense, very different from the story, because film is a visual medium. But the deep sense of wonder, the intelligence and humanity of the central character and the poignancy of her psychological journey, the brilliant and exciting conceptual twist at the heart of the story, all made it to the screen intact.

Great science fiction stories so rarely turn into great science fiction movies. Which makes those rare occasions when it happens even more wonderful and satisfying.

When I think about the potential of those future cyberglasses that will be showing up sometime in the next fivew years, it’s not the graphics that excite me the most. It’s not even the visual registration of those graphics with the physical world. It’s the A.I.

Sure, those glasses will provide a wide angle view of the augmented world, with high resolution, accurate motion tracking and correct stereo. Sort of like a Hololens, but with wider field of view and smaller form factor.

But what’s really interesting is that you will essentially have the equivalent of real-time Google search operating behind the scenes wherever you look. If you look at a person, your glasses will know who that person is. If you look at a bus stop, the glasses will understand, and will be able to tell you how long until your bus will arrive.

Unlike a Google search, which is something you do while you are not doing other things, all of this will be happening while you are walking around the world and talking with people, and that creates a key difference: It can be happening without you needing to be giving it your attention.

Which means that there is an opportunity for the machine learning algorithms to start figuring things out for you behind the scenes. The experience will start to feel more like having a personal secretary who can figure things out for you.

By analogy, some of us remember a time when you needed to memorize telephone numbers. To millenials, those old ways now seem strange and archaic.

Similarly, suppose you and a friend are on your way to the airport. You won’t need to think about your route if your glasses can just tell you “go one block and take the bus that will be arriving a minute later”.

Or more likely, your glasses will simply indicate those directions visually as an overlay on the world around you — you won’t even have to think about it. The process will be so seamless that you won’t need to take your attention away from the conversation you are having with your traveling companion.

After that world arrives, our old ways will seem strange and archaic.

I am now into my eighteenth year of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I started watching this television show right after it was canceled, in 2003, on the recommendation of various trusted friends and colleagues. After seeing all seven seasons, in complete awe of the show’s growing brilliance, I turned around and watched it all again.

Which might seem odd, unless you think of it as a kind of novel. After all, nobody looks at you funny if you reread Pride and Prejudice. Or they shouldn’t, anyway.

The multi-year character arcs, the highly layered approach to mixing comedy, drama and romance, the way the highly witty dialog reflected serious themes in the ever-evolving relationships, these were all new to American television at the time. Nobody had ever attempted anything like it.

Now I am watching the series for a third time. This evening I just watched Hush, the only episode in the entire series that actually belongs in the horror genre (while also belonging firmly in the genres of comedy and romance).

After watching this episode, I am in a state of complete delight. How could Joss Whedon, or anyone for that matter, possess the combination of talent and sheer chutzpah needed to write and direct such a television episode?

I guess fortune favors the brave.

Somebody sent me an email the other day, presumably the first of a series of email exchanges. She started off her email by saying she was “opening the portal of digital communication”.

I found this phrase to be very evocative and extremely pleasant. While name-checking the clearly digital nature of our conversation, her turn of phrase coyly pointed past the medium itself, to the deeper value at play: the desire to communicate.

I suspect that as our society transitions from SmartPhones to wearables, we will find ever more ways of “opening the portal of digital communication”. Yet no matter how advanced our technologies become, the underlying human imperative will not change.

That human imperative was beautifully described by E.M. Forster more than a century ago: Only connect.

Days when I’m jet lagged
Are longer than others, yet
Go by in a daze

I am sorry to be leaving Paris. But I met wonderful people here, and discovered many new opportunities for collaboration, so I know that I will return soon.

I am reminded of a time I visited Rio de Janeiro many years ago. The parents of a colleague invited me over for a generous and delicious dinner.

After a long and wonderful evening, it was time for me to go. I told my hostess how sad I was to be leaving.

“It’s ok,” she told me, “there is an old and happy Brazilian saying.” Then she said something in Portuguese which I could not understood (I learned Portuguese only later).

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means,” she said, “you need to leave to come back.”

There is a definite feeling of Joie de vivre here in Paris, a feeling of optimism, of excitement about the future. I sense this strongly, in spite of the recent terrorist attacks.

I sense it in the academy, and in the start-up community. People here clearly believe that Paris is a place where things are happening, where the future is being created.

I think two recent events have influenced this change of mood, although I don’t think people here would be so gauche as to openly agree with me. The first was Brexit, and the second was the recent American election.

For many years there has been a sort of economic rivalry between London and Paris. Now that enterprises in London will no longer have the powerful backing of the European Union, forces of innovation are gradually shifting more toward Paris. Public / private partnerships are a large engine of change here in Europe, and private enterprise in the U.K. has just lost the E.U. as a potential partner.

The other event, of course, was the outcome of the recent U.S. election. It’s hard to overstate the psychological role Barack Obama has played in Europe in recent years. He has been seen as a level headed economic partner, a thoughtful intellectual leader, a force for moderation and greater international cooperation. His considerable influence effectively tilted economic power in the West toward America.

But now, from the perspective of Europe, America has just considerably diminished itself. The incoming administration does not seem interested in forming a cohesive trade policy, or, from what anyone can tell, in engaging in international economic strategy or partnerships of any meaningful kind.

All of which means that the importance of Paris to the economy of the West is significantly larger than it was a year ago. This city is now one of the few places in the West where international forces can still meaningfully converge, and where the future is being created.

In Paris yesterday, at a seminar to which I had been invited as a visiting examiner, one of the students displayed the word “catachresis”, and then asked whether people knew what it meant. There was no response.

His talk was actually about his ongoing research into the best way to scaffold teaching, and he was using this word as an example of a word that students generally don’t know. The problem he was working on was how to introduce new vocabulary to students in a way that will best help them to learn and remember these new and unfamiliar words.

He then explained that catachresis (pronounced KAT-A-KREE-SIS) means something that is used incorrectly. For example, he said, if you use your TV remote control as a hammer, that is an example of catachresis.

One of the seminar attendees then mentioned that the most common use of the word is in the context of language: Catachresis usually refers to a word that is used incorrectly in speech or writing.

Since I was the native English speaker in the room, I felt a responsibility to chime in. “For example,” I offered helpfully, “if you keep giving your cat too much food, then your catachresis.”