Ken’s Blog

I watched this evening’s presidential debate at our lab. I was joined by several students.

It was hard for me to properly assess the outcome, since at this point I can’t be anything close to objective. I saw what looked to me like one candidate calmly giving detailed and informed answers to questions of policy, while the other candidate seemed to just be reciting the same few slogans over and over. But your mileage may vary.

After the debate had ended, we spent some time discussing it. At some point an undergrad asked me how they decide the winner.

I told him that it was easy: “Fox News will announce the winner. Also, the New York Times will announce the winner. But they won’t announce the same winner.”

I generally work all the time. It’s not that I have a work ethic, more that I like what I do. Especially the programming part, prototyping, experimenting, or just noodling around in the code to make something look better.

But today I did something very rare: I took the day off. Completely. No coding, no administrativia, nada. I read the newspaper, solved a crossword puzzle, relaxed, took a nap, saw an episode of Gotham, cooked some food, but absolutely nothing even vaguely responsible.

I don’t think I need to do that very often, and I probably wouldn’t even enjoy it if I did it too often. But every once in a while it feels great!

I had never heard the term “shitposting” until yesterday. Those of you who are familiar with the virtual reality scene, and are even vaguely following politics, will know why I find this word so dispiriting.

Yes, we can disagree with one another, and we can argue with each other on the merits. What you believe to be true will not, as a rule, match up to what I believe to be true.

But to use jackboot tactics to squash meaningful discussion — to borrow a playbook right out of a 1932 National Socialist playbook — that’s just disgusting.

It was difficult for me to learn that this sort of thing is being supported by somebody I had thought of as one of us. I tend to believe, perhaps naively, that people on the cutting edge of what is possible are above fascist tactics. That they are about fostering conversation, rather than squashing it before it can begin.

I won’t say who this post is about. Those who know, will know. I will just say that I am terribly disappointed, and very sad.

Who’ll escape before
Canada builds the wall and
Makes us pay for it?

I was on a panel today with some really smart and impressive co-panelists. What we all had in common was that for the last several years we have each been completely immersed in the questions surrounding the potential of virtual and mixed reality.

We’ve all been living and breathing it, creating projects, trying one thing and then the other. And always with an eye on where things might be going next, and what might be possible when the next generation of hardware arrives, or the hardware that will arrive three or five years from now.

To the audience we must have sounded a little weird, talking about the future, about things that do not yet exist out there in the world, as though they were everyday realities. But that’s the thing: They will be everyday realities, for better or worse, which means that somebody needs to be thinking about them now.

Sometimes it can feel a little odd talking to people about things that do not yet quite exist. It’s comforting to meet other people who are also living in the future.

For quite a while I didn’t quite get it about Donald Trump. I wondered why he is going out his way to say nutty things during this Presidential race — insulting everyone from parents of slain soldiers to U.S. generals to babies, making up weird statistics out of whole cloth and then immediately reversing himself, embracing torture, claiming Vladimir Putin as a role model, that ostentatiously insane “Mexican Wall” thing — the list is incredibly long. And every day he adds to it.

But now I finally get it, thanks to his recent “Birther” announcement. As you know, since he goaded Barack Obama into producing a long form birth certificate back in 2011, Donald Trump has continued the charade, claiming in numerous TV interviews and public statements that the birth certificate might be a fraud.

So when he now announces, straight-faced, that he never said the things that he obviously said on record — and that it’s easy for the Press to show everyone that he said on record, just by rolling the videotapes — it can only mean one thing. Trump is telling the Press: “You are all my bitch.”

What we are seeing now is a raw undisguised flexing of power. And clearly it’s working. Sure, Colbert and Seth Meyers can skewer him all they want, but it doesn’t matter. The very point of Trump’s message is that he can lie bare-faced straight into the TV cameras, in a pointedly obvious way, and it won’t hurt him.

So here we have a candidate for President who is running nearly even in the polls with only one real message: I am an unstoppable strongman, and my power is absolute.

The world has had a few of those before within this past century. I can’t say it has ever turned out well.

I structured this evening’s class into two halves. In the first hour I showed them some software tools, and some demos that illustrate what can be done with those tools. In a way, I was just dangling possibilities in front of them, to get their own minds working.

Then, for the second hour, I asked them to organize into small groups, and to define their own project based on what they now knew to be possible. At the moment I am happily listening to the students as they work out designs, concepts, plans and schemes. I am very confident that some of them will come up with exciting directions that I would never have thought of.

It’s a balancing act, of course. You can’t just tell students to form into groups. You need to give them an exciting and worthwhile direction to aim toward. And you need to be careful about how you judge their work. For example, I’ve learned from experience that I must be scrupulously fair when assessing the presentation of each group. No playing favorites!

But once all that has been taken care of, you need to trust them. Sometimes the best thing a teacher can do for his students is to know when it is time to get out of their way. Students who are trusted to fly will find their wings.

When we look back through history, there are certain individuals who stand out. William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Virginia Woolf, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — these are among a pantheon of individuals who have, each in their way, had a positive impact on the culture of future generations.

It is now well known that genetics is mostly random, and inheritance a crap shoot. Any child born into the world might grow up to be a luminary who can positively influence the course of history and culture, if given a chance. This possibility is a sort of human birthright, which might called a “right of transcendence”.

But of course that last part is key: “if given a chance.” There is a tendency in many modern societies to systematically exclude entire groups of people, based on nonsense. This person happens to be a Jew or Muslim, that one a woman, another one has some irrelevent characteristic such as skin color, or eye shape, or sexual preference.

Unless you are a complete idiot, or are ideologically willing yourself to impersonate a complete idiot, you know that those are all smoke screens. And they are astonishingly damaging smoke screens. Somewhere, a child who was born with the genetic predisposition to be a great writer, or inventor, or philosopher, or healer, is being denied reasonable health care, or has been thrown in prison because he happened to be in the wrong place for somebody with his skin color, or is part of an entire community of children whose IQs have been lowered by lead poisoning.

I think any society that cares about its own future should recognize the right of individuals to be protected in childhood from being thrown onto the ash heap of history, and to make sure that each child is given a fair chance to become the next great contributor to his or her culture.

Is that asking too much?

In a way, the history of the iPhone and its ilk parallels the history of the stereoscope. Both of them seemingly burst upon the scene when the time was right, although neither one was exactly new.

The modern era of the stereoscope actually dates back to around 1823. That was just a year after the invention of first permanent technology for recording photographs, although that first stereoscope wasn’t used with photographs, since most people didn’t really know about photography yet.

But it wasn’t until 1849 that Sir David Brewster got the configuration right. His device was used to make a stereograph of Queen Victoria which proved so popular at the Great Exhibition in London of 1851 that 250,000 of them were made. Photography was new then in the public mind, and this little gadget represented to many people the magic of living in the modern age made possible by photography.

Similarly, the iPhone wasn’t the first “smart phone”. But Apple got all the details right, and the first iPhone hit it big in 2007, starting a vast craze for smart phones that continues to this day. The idea of “carrying the web with you in your pocket” was new then in the public mind, and this little gadget represented to many people the magic of living in the modern age made possible by portable computerized communication devices.

Of course we now know that the two inventions are linked. Although many tinkerers quickly started pointing a stereo pair of lenses at the iPhone soon after its introduction in 2007 (mostly using an arrangement similar to Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1861 configuration of the stereoscope), the earliest significant play was Hasbro.

In 2010 Hasbro came out with their My3D stereo viewer that worked with the iPhone. The My3D was, of course, a riff on that iconic earlier variant of the stereoscope, the View-Master, which had been patented in 1939.

Pretty much everything we are seeing today in Virtual Reality is the result of combining these two key innovations, the stereoscope and the smart phone: two parallel inventions from different centuries that perhaps were not all that dissimilar in spirit.

Long flights confuse me.
Not sure where I am. Guess that’s
Neither here nor there.