Because the future has just started
No you won’t go all at once
There are hints, intimations
Someone whispers in your ear
Gives you the cheat code
When nobody’s looking
One day maybe
A piece goes missing
Nothing too important
A tiny detail
In the vast mosaic
But this time you notice
And something you’d heard
About a friend of a friend
Comes back to haunt you
Then it all comes together
No you won’t go all at once
But one day you wake up and know
In the marrow of your bones
That sooner or later
You will go
Today, for the first time ever, I posted an on-line comment on an article in the New York Times. The article was a long-delayed and somewhat apologetic obituary of Alan Turing, one of my great heroes.
I was worried that the Times would not publish my comment, because maybe they wouldn’t understand it. Based on the obituary (which seemed way too inspired by the recent Benedict Cumberbatch pseudo-biopic), I don’t think the writer really understood just how important and fundamental was Alan Turing’s contribution to the computationally altered world that we live in today.
But I just now checked, and they did indeed publish my comment. Maybe they even understood it, although that is a very hopeful thought.
What I wrote was:
“The NY Times has finally passed the Turing Test.”
Today is one of those insanely busy work days where even my multitasking is multitasking. I needed to give two talks — in two very different places — then race back to the lab to work with students on a deadline for tomorrow, another one for Friday, and a third one for Monday.
A day like this reminds me that I do indeed have a go-to strategy for those times when I feel that I’m juggling too many plates at once (speaking metaphorically). It goes something like this:
When I start to realize that I’m trying to keep too many plates in the air at the same time, I often give in to the temptation to look up. Of course when I do this, what I see is a whole lot of plates coming down toward me.
In that moment, I know exactly what to do. I quickly look around, find a brand new plate, and fling it up in the air.
It works like a charm. That said, your mileage may vary.
On this day of the year, 100 years ago, the U.S. Congress ratified the 19th constitutional amendment. That’s the one that essentially says women are allowed to vote.
I remember as a little kid being amazed that it had taken so long — 130 years — from the time the U.S. Constitution was ratified to the time women got the vote. It seemed like an awfully long time.
As I got older, I came to understand it was even worse than I had thought. Even after the 19th amendment was ratified, millions of women were effectively barred from voting for a long time.
For example, it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that black women in many parts of the U.S. really got the right to vote, along with black men. Until then, if they tried to register, officials could — and often did — just beat them up before turning them away.
For the first time in 1965, the Voting Rights Act made it a federal crime for state officials to physically beat up citizens or otherwise deter them from exercising their right to vote. It is tragic that we needed that to be stated in a law.
But hey, we live in a tragic world. After all, also on this day of the year, just 30 years ago, the government of another very large nation half way around the world used extreme violence against its own citizens for somewhat similar reasons.
When governments begin to think of their own citizens as “the enemy”, something has clearly gone very wrong.
A lot of what I do is go out into the world and talk about the future. And always I do it with live demos.
Why go through so much trouble and preparation to talk about something that hasn’t even happened yet? Today I talk about that in my Future Reality Lab blog post.
I have always had mixed feelings about interactive narrative. On the one hand, it’s a subject of endless fascination in some quarters.
There have been entire conferences devoted to the liminal space between game and story. What if we, the reader or viewer, had the power to change the outcome of a narrative?
Yet every time I actually encounter such a thing, I feel a sense of disappointment. When I am being asked to make decisions about what I am viewing, I feel less immersed in the experience.
My best theory about this is that the part of our mind which listens to a story is very different from the part of our mind which makes active decisions. It’s not that being an audience is a passive experience — on the contrary, it’s a very active experience.
To be a member of an audience is to accept a contract to perform a very particular kind of work. We are agreeing to use our minds to understand where a story is going, to find resonance in the characters and their journeys, to connect the particulars of the plot with larger themes.
If you ask an audience member to do a different kind of work — to actually choose the outcome of the story — then you are breaking that contract. I think interactive narrative fails not because it asks too much of us, but because it asks too little.
I watched the first episode of the reboot of Roswell, after reading the on-line Netflix reviews. I was intrigued that every review is either near 10 (awesome) or near 1 (awful).
When you read the reviews, the reason becomes clear. The reboot has been cleverly configured as a star-crossed (literally!) love story between two young people whose parents were aliens. Both of the young lovers want desperately to fit in, to simply be acknowledged and allowed to chip in as a productive member of society.
Both lovers fear, above all, becoming identified as an “other”, rather than as a unique individual. The thing that makes all this so clever is that the heritage of one the young lovers is outer space, and the heritage of the other is Mexico.
It seems that about 40% of viewers who left a review think this approach is a blatant left-wing politicization of a once beloved show. I strongly disagree, yet it’s hard for me to be objective, since I clearly belong to the other 60% of viewers.
But I will give it a go: The entire point of the original Roswell was sympathy for misunderstood and persecuted children of alien parents. All the producers of the reboot have done is emphasize that exact point in a way that would resonate in 2019.
Unless of course you have no sympathy for hapless young people of alien heritage, just trying their best to get by in a sometimes hostile world. In which case, why were you watching a show like Roswell in the first place?
O Poet! my Poet! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Poet! dear teacher!
Your words live in my head!
It is some dream that on this earth,
You’ve long been cold and dead.
Today is the 30th day of the 5th month of the year, and also the 150th day of the year. If you multiply the day of the month (30) by the number of the month (5), the result is the number of days in the year so far (150).
How rare an event is this? Is this something we can say is true for many days of the year? Obviously it is true for all 31 days in the month of January, but that’s a sort of degenerate case.
Not counting January, how many days in the year have this unusual numerical property?
Let’s hearken back to a time pre-millennial
For today is a calendar date most centennial
When Eddington went on the trip of all trips
To Príncipe, where he measured the total eclipse
Which led to a truth most perennial
‘Twas a topic, they say, of some sensitivity
Noted physicists felt extreme negativity
Toward Einstein, whose spirits were certainly lifted
When all of the stars on the photo-plate shifted
Which confirmed, for all time, relativity