Ken's Blog

I was emailing with a friend. The subject came around to national flags, and I found myself related to her this memory I had from childhood.

One day when I was a child, our family visited the United Nations building in New York City. In the gift shop, my parents got my brother and me lots of little flags from various countries.

The set of flags came with a little round black-painted wooden base with holes in it. You could insert the flags into the base.

It was entirely up to you what order you arranged the flags. My brother and I would spend hours in the basement in our how trying out different arrangements.

I didn’t know the politics, but I really loved the little flags. When I think back on all of this now, I realize that I still love them, even to this day.

we walk together
a leaf trembles, softly falls
and then we are lost

The current geological age in our Earth’s history is sometimes called the “Anthropocene”. This is because human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

Of course our entire existence as a species is just a tiny blip in the lifetime of our planet. The earliest record of anatomically modern humans is only from about 190,000 years ago — a very small span of time indeed in geological terms.

So it wouldn’t be all that surprising if our species were to go extinct in another few hundred thousand years. After all, we don’t seem to be very good at keeping the state of the Earth’s climate or environment conducive to our own existence.

So let’s skip forward a few hundred thousand years. What is likely to be the next dominant species — the one that ends up having the greatest influence on the Earth’s climate and environment?

Personally I’m rooting for bonobos. Not because I really think the next geological age is likely to be the Bonobocene, but mostly because I like bonobos.

Given any particular species, you might find it fun to imagine what our planet would be like should that species rise to global dominance. I’m open to suggestions.

Today is Independence Day in the United States. This year, a certain spoiled child in Washington D.C. decided to celebrate by playing with toys.

Except the toys this idiot was playing with were from our actual military, and included a number of fighter jets as well as two fully armored tanks. The entire thing cost at least several million dollars, and not all of the costs have yet been counted. Many of the invited guests were large donors to said idiot’s re-election campaign.

Meanwhile thousands of innocent little children are without soap or toothbrushes on our southern border. These are kids whose parents have committed no crime, and have broken no laws.

Those parents have simply asked for political asylum after fleeing oppressive and murderous regimes. Their request for asylum was perfectly legal.

I wonder how many toothbrushes and bars of soap for imprisoned little children could have been paid for by one ITU. Oh right — I need to define my terms.

In this case an “ITU” represents the cost of diverting and transporting one military tank for a gratuitous and nakedly partisan political stunt. Literally, ITUs are “Idiot Tank Units”.

The visual cortex in the occipital lobe of the human brain contains a very rich and dense set of neurons. Those neurons are activated by light hitting the retinas in our eyes.

The connection from our eyes to our visual cortex is the optic nerve, which is mainly just a fat data pipe. Most of the interesting processing happens only after the signals have reached our visual cortex.

One can imagine a future technological intervention in which information is sent directly to the visual cortex. It is interesting to consider a computer directly exciting the neurons in our visual cortex, because those neurons provide a super-set of the connections available through the retina.

In other words, a direct connect to the visual cortex could eventually provide us with a kind of super vision. Such a capability might be far richer, more detailed and sensually vivid than the signal we currently receive through our eyes.

We might be able to see colors that no human has yet experienced, to perceive textures and visual details so rich and powerful that new language will be needed to describe it.

To people with such an enhanced visual capability, our current visual system might seem woefully dull and primitive. Those future people might wonder how we ever got along with such dim and limited visual acuity.

How, they might ask, did we ever manage to get through the day in a state of constant near blindness?

Sometimes when I look into a mirror, I think of it as a great model for what future teleconferencing should be. Unlike a flat screen, a mirror gives you a fully dimensional view.

Of course it is only providing a view of whatever is in front of the mirror. But eventually that might change, as technology evolves.

Imagine a future in which you and I could simply “swap reflections”. I could see whatever would normally be visible in your mirror, and vice versa.

Compared with our present day gleaming gadgets, this scenario feels oddly low-tech, which is how it should be. After all, the most successful technologies do not call attention to themselves. They simply blend into our everyday lives.

Today on our Future Reality Lab blog, I wrote a post about my recent visit to Facebook. If the image below does not look like what you expect a Facebook building to look like, you might want to read that post.

Today was a very joyous day in Greenwich Village. The fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall brought out a lot of people to celebrate in style.

Yet seeing all of these happy joyful young people, coming together for a giant party, reminded me of the historical complexity of such situations. It’s wonderful that so many are able to join together to celebrate something positive, yet the people celebrating are, inevitably, at a certain remove.

The daring act of defiance of authority that led to so much progress took place long before most of these celebrants were born. To them those events must seem somewhat abstract.

Would the young people enjoying today’s celebration be willing to risk their own lives for a similar cause? Fortunately for them, they will probably never need to find out.

Those brave individuals who stood up to an unfair society so long ago are now in their seventies or older, if they are still here at all. I imagine some of them are watching today’s celebration with a mix of satisfaction and bemusement.

For I am sure they know that some wars are never completely won. Mindless hate and intolerance are always waiting in the wings, looking for a new opportunity to arise.

One day that opportunity may rear its ugly head, and the battle will be joined once more. Should that sad day come to pass (and I hope it never does), I hope the young people out celebrating today will find themselves able to rise to the occasion.

This evening I called up Peacefood Cafe and ordered food to pick up. When the man who answered the phone asked what I wanted, I was ready.

“I’d like the Shanghai style dumplings,” I said, “and the vegetable tempura. Also, a slice of the strawberry cheesecake.”

There was a slight pause. I wondered whether the man had heard my order correctly.

Then he said “Oh, I really like that order!”

I know it sounds completely irrational, but in that moment I felt total triumph. I had managed to impress the guy behind the counter in a NYC restaurant with the perfection of my take-out order.

Nobody ever impresses those guys. But this evening I did.

Sometimes it’s the little things.

Yesterday, on an airplane, I watched the new Aquaman. It was a bad movie.

There were so many things wrong with it that I couldn’t even begin to enumerate them. Fortunately, you have the critics for that (pretty much all of them, it seems).

Yet my traveling companion and I really enjoyed watching it — even the bad and unintentionally cheesy and ridiculous parts. There is something about watching a bad movie together that brings its own pleasures.

I subscribe to the theory that a large part of movie watching is the person next to you. When we watch movies with somebody we know, we are learning at least as much about them as we are about the movie.

We notice when they laugh, when they groan, when they gasp in disbelief. If you subscribe to that theory, then even you can see how even bad movies can be enjoyable, because they help to connect you with the person you are with.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking here about every bad movie. Some movies are so bad that they are unredeemable. When you watch a movie like that, you and your friend just end up feeling as though somebody has stolen an hour and a half from your life.

Fortunately, Aquaman isn’t that kind of bad movie. It’s the kind of over the top experience that you can genuinely enjoy picking apart for its gaping plot holes, eye rolling inconsistencies, cheesy characters, over-obvious cliches and missed opportunities.

Also, Jason Momoa is great no matter what movie he is in, so there’s that.

All in all, if you’re looking for a bad movie to enjoy, I highly recommend Aquaman. Just remember to see it with a friend.