Ken's Blog

This morning I attended the grand opening of the new RLab at the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Very exciting!!

I had to leave a bit early to race back to Manhattan for a meeting. The timing was so tight that I didn’t have a chance to grab lunch. Which is how I found myself stuck in a meeting with no snackage in sight, and a growing feeling of hypoglycemia.

To take my mind off my predicament, I opened up my laptop and started working on a program I’ve been developing. Hopefully everybody else at the meeting assumed I was taking notes. 🙂

Interestingly, I found that in my state of low blood sugar, it was very easy to program some things, but nearly impossible to program other things. Anything that was straight up coding logic was easy. But anything that involved building any sort of non-trivial data structure was hopeless.

Now I am wondering how this translates into the different ways we use our mind while engaged in any procedural task. Clearly the part of my mind that solves logic puzzles was unaffected by my brain’s feeling of distress. But for any task requiring real decisions to be made, my hunger-distressed brain becomes inoperable.

The experience reminds me of how it feels when I improvise on the piano. Certain tasks, such as spinning out a melody or a chord progression, are right at my fingers tips — my hands pretty much just play on their own. But other tasks, like a meaningful set of shifts in musical tone, require conscious attention and active decision making.

I guess the lesson here is to remember to avoid computer programming and playing in jazz bands before lunch.

I was scheduled to give a talk about our research in the early afternoon to a business group that wanted to learn about the future of AR. Which wasn’t a problem — I like giving talks.

But then a colleague called me up with a last minute emergency request: Her guest speaker had fallen ill, and could I give a talk to her class about our research?

I know how difficult these situations can be, so I said yes. So two talks for two very different audiences, back to back.

Then this evening, shortly after the second talk had ended, it was time to teach my graduate class. It’s a great class, with students who are all doing very interesting work.

Which I think is what saved my poor overworked brain. After such a long day, I was quite happy to spend two hours not needing to do anything but listen to somebody else talk about their research.

I just let the students present their projects, while I listened appreciatively, making the occasional constructive suggestion. I am not sure the students realized just how appreciative I really was.

I was at the theater this evening with a friend. We had very good seats, near the front. Although the play is very popular, surprisingly the two seats next to us were empty.

A person in the row behind us joked “Maybe those are for Elijah.”

I told him that was impossible. “Why?” he asked.

“Well,” I explained, “they’re not making any money from those seats, right?”

“True,” he allowed.

“Which means,” I said, “clearly there is no prophet in them.”

Today I rolled into the lab at a very leisurely afternoon hour, and proceeded to work on just one thing. There were plenty of other things I could have worked on, but I thought it would be nice to narrow down for once.

Instead of my usual whirlwind style of round-robin multitasking, I honed in, polished, iterated, and otherwise focused on implementing and then improving a single piece of software — in particular, a new approach to pen based computer text entry.

So I didn’t exactly take the day off today. Yet in terms of simplicity and peace of mind my Sunday was exceedingly restful.

Tomorrow morning I will do all of those other things.

Over the three days of the UIST conference in Berlin I encountered literally hundreds of new ideas. Between the papers, the posters, the demos and all of the far ranging conversations with colleagues, my sense of what is possible was greatly expanded.

Yet for the last few days I have found myself reluctant to dive right into new programming projects. Instead of doing anything really new and ambitious, I’ve been polishing up my code, adding little features here and there, and in general going for low hanging fruit.

At first I thought that I was just dragging my feet, and I was feeling guilty about that. But I don’t think that anymore.

I now realize that I am simply in a period of gestation. Somewhere in the back of my mind, all of the wonderful new ideas and techniques I saw and heard and played with at UIST are being processed.

So rather than feeling guilty that I am not getting enough done, I am just going to chill, rest up, and enjoy a pleasant weekend. After this gestation period is over, I suspect there will be plenty to do.

Many on the political right think that Elizabeth Warren erred in resorting to actual science and evidence to prove that she indeed had native American ancestry, exactly as she had said. But of course there is a divergence of opinion here.

For example, many on the political left think that anybody who would try to demean someone else by calling them “Pocahontas” is a loathsome and pathetic racist creep, unfit to run for dog catcher, let alone higher office. Clearly there is room for disagreement here.

Yet one obvious point seems to have been missed in the general brouhaha. In this country pretty much everyone has native American blood.

Alas, the native blood is not in our veins. It’s on our hands.

As problems go, the problem of writing fiction is perhaps unique. Often, when we look at the creative arts, we think in terms of solving a problem.

Yet writing good fiction is somewhat unique in the arts in that it requires solving a problem by creating problems.

Specifically, in order to solve our problem of creating a great story, we need to create problems for the characters in that story. Then we need to help those characters solve their problems.

In the process of our characters solving their problems, we have solved ours. The reader or viewer is pulled into our characters’ problem solving, and thereby becomes engaged with our story.

Things gets even more interesting when we are writing fiction involving a character who is herself a writer of fiction. In that case, we are called upon to solve our problem by creating the problem for our character of creating problems for her own characters.

We might even manage to create a loop. Somewhere down in the creative chain, one of the characters writes the top level character. What could be more fun?

For my last night in Berlin, I went with sone colleagues to a Karaoke bar, You have not lived until you have sung in a Karaoke bar in Berlin.

There is something wonderfully freeing about getting up front of a group of people and singing “Puff the Magic Dragon”. With original lyrics.

I admit it’s not an experience for everyone. But for me it was pretty good.

Today I gave a “vision talk” here in Berlin. Vision talks are a new thing at the UIST conference — this is the first year they have it. The idea is to invite a few senior researchers to present their vision for the future.

My vision talk essentially boiled down to the proposition that augmented reality will create an opportunity to evolve natural language itself to include an expressive computer-enhanced visual component. This is important because the most powerful thing about humans, I argued, is our ability to communicate with each other.

I had only fifteen minutes to work with, so it was a bit challenging. Then again, constraints create opportunities.

I focused my thesis down to the essentials, and showed a few carefully chosen interactive examples of the possibilities. Being able to use my Chalktalk program to show a live demo of all these ideas helped a lot.

The feedback I got afterward was very positive. With any luck, I’ve helped to steer the conversation about augmented reality away from a misplaced focus on mere technology, and into a more nuanced, open ended and human-centered direction.

At the opening session of the UIST conference, the conference chair talked about East Berlin. It’s where the conference is taking place, and it’s also where he grew up.

He showed us pictures from when he was born — when East Berlin was still under the thumb of the USSR. The difference was stark. In place of the vibrant Alexanderplatz of today, we saw something very bleak and desolate.

Then he showed a photo of the Berlin Wall, in the process of being torn down. He narrated the picture with these words:

“At this time in the century when people are talking about building walls, maybe we can use this as an example. Or at least, we have a spare wall if you need one.”

Everyone in the audience cheered. It was good to hear a voice of sanity.