Ken's Blog

First class of the semester this evening. It’s an advanced graduate level class, and I find those to be especially fun.

That’s because for one thing, the students are coming in at a very advanced level, with mad skills and original ideas. For another, advanced classes tend to be small, which means that every student has a good opportunity to contribute their individual voice and perspective.

I tend to organize these advanced classes as projects courses. Each student proposes and then implements two original projects over the course of the semester.

That gives them a chance to do original research in a relatively structured and guided setting. Also, sometimes their class project ends up getting published as original research in very cool places.

The project of one of the students in last fall’s class ended up becoming a very well received paper at this year’s prestigious SIGGRAPH conference. It’s really exciting to get to work with students who have the combination of talent and drive it takes to do that.

To be sure, teaching advanced students is more challenging. To do it right, I need to bring my best game.

But hey, what’s wrong with that? It’s always better when you can do things first class.

I was having a conversation with my cousin, who works in film and television production, about the difference between working on a TV show intended for broadcast, and one intended for internet distribution. It turns out they are quite different.

When you work on a show intended for broadcast, you need to produce a finished episode each week. Even as each finished episode goes out on the network to be seen by the public, your crew is already working on later episodes of the season.

But when you create a show intended for internet distribution (eg: a show commissioned by Netflix), you generally deliver the finished season all at once. Audiences are then free to watch one episode at a time, or to binge the entire season. It’s entirely up to them.

This means that up until the moment you deliver the finished season, you always have the possibility to go back and modify earlier episodes. My cousin tells me that in some cases, the show runners realize that a character arc needs to be adjusted, or an extra shot needs to be inserted in an earlier episode to help clarify something seen in a later episode.

In extreme cases, they can even decide, late in the production schedule, to add a new character. In that case they can shoot and then insert new scenes between that character and the show’s principal characters, to distribute into multiple past episodes of the season.

This greater freedom to go back and tinker allows creators to make decisions based not just on the script as written, but also on discoveries made in the course of production itself. The process is less like writing a diary, and more like writing a novel.

There was a time when nobody except Joss Whedon could produce long form commercial episodic television with the character depth, resonant overlapping story arcs and meaningful psychological growth that we associate with novels. Thanks to internet distribution, such things can now also be accomplished by mere mortals — albeit very talented mortals.

One thing we seem to lose as we make the transition from childhood to adulthood is our easy sense of wonder. I still remember very clearly the feeling when I was six years of encountering a forest in the summer just after the rain had stopped, or lying on my back looking up at the sea of stars at night, or watching a hot air balloon take off and sail gently away into the afternoon air.

I didn’t think “I know how that works,” or “Here is this fits into my idea of science / eternity / The Universe / God …” I just took in the magic of it all, and felt pure wonder.

There are times when I can still do that. But it’s harder now. My head has become crowded with thoughts of what needs to be done, which tribes I belong to, the urge to attach significance to everything.

Sometimes I think that as we leave childhood, we are in continual danger of forgetting one of the most important aspects of our existence — our boundless capacity for wonder. If we can just manage to hold on to that one superpower, while also embracing the complementary superpowers of our adult minds, just think of the wonderful world we could create for each other.

Suppose you were to take a time machine back to 1860. While you are there you meet Charles Dickens. Knowing him to be an intelligent and literate person, you try to describe to him the future medium of cinema.

You know that he would already know about photography, which was about two decades old at the time, and he would certainly know about theater. So you might tell him, imagine a combination of photography and theater — a kind of play consisting of thousands upon thousands of photographs one after the other. So far so good.

But then you start to explain that the faces of the actors may be up to twenty feet tall. Also that every few moments the point of view will suddenly change, perhaps from very far away to mere inches from an actor’s face, and then back again.

As you start to describe the conventions of movies, Mr. Dickens gradually gets a look of disbelief on his face. At some point, he realizes that you are probably insane.

“Nobody in their right mind,” he tells you, indignant that you have wasted his time, “would ever sit through something like that.”

A colleague of mine is organizing a debate around the question of whether synthetic media will do more harm or more good. Today he sent around the following description to potential participants:

At the intersection of computer generated images, video, text and voice lies a potentially
divergent future for media. From holographic pop stars to new tools to automate workflows, from deep learning techniques to generate media out of whole cloth to highly engaging artificially intelligent characters, the potential is enormous.

And yet, the potential for danger is extraordinary. These same tools can be employed for the purposes of misinformation and propaganda. Their very existence may cause the public to doubt the veracity of documentary evidence. This debate will address the proposition, “synthetic media will do more good than harm,” in order to explore these important issues.

Unable to resist such an opportune moment for expression of technocultural relativity, I immediately replied as follows:

“Awesome! Glad to participate. I think there was a similar debate some time ago. I will try to reconstruct the description of that debate as best I can:

At the intersection of books, periodicals and newspapers lies a potentially divergent future for media. From literary pop stars to new tools to automate workflows, from rapid publishing techniques to generate content out of whole cloth to highly engaging artificially existing characters, the potential is enormous.

And yet, the potential for danger is extraordinary. These same tools can be employed for the purposes of misinformation and propaganda. Their very existence may cause the public to doubt the veracity of documentary evidence. This debate will address the proposition, “printed media will do more good than harm,” in order to explore these important issues.

I recently went to a museum of miniatures. I was delighted by the craftsmanship, the perfect fidelity with which dedicated artists faithfully created the illusion of reality, on an exceedingly small scale.

At one point I saw a life size table and chair. Next to this tableaux, in a little glass case, I was delighted to see a precise reproduction of the full size furniture, perfect down to the tiniest detail. I admit I was vaguely disappointed not to see, within that little glass case, another still smaller case, containing recursively tinier versions of the scene, echoing down to infinity.

In a few years, as mixed reality glasses start to become practical, and then very common, the experience of seeing such miniature worlds might change. We may come to expect them to be inhabited, full of tiny animated people going about their day.

Every once in a while one of those exquisitely formed tiny people will turn to look at us, noticing the presence of giant beings in their midst. I find myself wondering whether that tiny person will turn to one of her companions, and point to us. “You know,” she might say, “until recently we didn’t have the technology to do that.”

I made a dinner reservation for six for some colleagues and myself, and then sent an email to one of my colleagues, who sent out an announcement giving the name and address of the restaurant. So far, so good.

A few minutes later this colleague sent out a second announcement to the group. He explained that I had sent him a second email to tell him that I had meant the restaurant’s other address.

Which was odd for two reasons. For one, the restaurant has no other address. For another, I had never sent him a second email.

After several confused emails back and forth with screen-shot attachments, I figured out that his Outlook program was the culprit. The word “reservation” in my email to him had triggered a bot which took it upon itself to create a calendar invite, including name and address for the restaurant.

The email also said “Accepted on 1/2/29”, which means it thought it was being sent from the future.

Other than that telling detail, the email was worded in such a way that my colleague thought I had generated it. Oh, and also, Outlook got the address of the restaurant wrong. Much hilarity ensued.

I did eventually figure out from a Web search that the wrong address was a long ago former location for this restaurant. The few sites on-line that even still know about that old location (like Yelp) list it as NOW CLOSED.

I wonder how many false automatic notifications are sent out every day by Outlook. And how many people who receive those emails think they were sent by a real person, and act on them accordingly?

At what point does Office become “The Office”?

Maybe this is all a secret plot by Skynet to prepare us for judgement day. After all, that email did come from 2029…

 
      lonely night
      side street
      feel scattered
      downtown blues

      only sight
      wide feet
      real tattered
      brown clown shoes

 

Today is my first day of jury duty. Frankly, it’s not even clear that I should be telling you this, because one of the first things they tell you when you start jury duty is that you are not supposed to talk about jury duty.

I guess that makes it like Fight Club. But so far it’s as if in Fight Club absolutely nothing ever happened. Sort of the Zen version of Fight Club.

Imaging Brad Pitt and Edward Norton sitting around all day, doing nothing. Except at one point Brad says “The first rule of jury duty is you don’t talk about jury duty.” And that’s it. For the rest of the day nothing else happens and nobody says anything.

Except maybe at some point Helen Bonham Carter shows up, and gets confused about whether she is talking to Brad Pitt or Edward Norton.
Because, you know, nobody is saying anything.

So far that’s what jury duty is like. Except without the movie stars.

Today is the day after Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday. I didn’t write about it yesterday because everyone else was. I thought it would be nice to wait a day and help give the man a entire birthday weekend.

Like many people, I have been heavily influenced by the musical legacy of Mr. Bernstein. But I also have a memory of a more personal nature.

When I was still a small child, we would be given Scholastic Readers to read in school. The real purpose of these books was to help us improve our reading skills, and the way that was accomplished was quite clever.

Readings were organized into little stories on various topics that would be of interest to a kid. I always looked forward to the next one, but one story in particular has always stayed with me.

It had been written many years earlier by a piano teacher. She talked about a little boy who would come to lessons fresh from baseball practice. He’d show up at the lesson wearing his baseball uniform, carrying his bat and baseball mitt.

Then he would sit down and play, like nobody she had ever heard. That little boy was, of course, a young Leonard Bernstein.

I remember as a ten year old reading that, thinking about the famous musical legend. Before then I had only known of him as a gray haired man, the composer of the music for West Side Story (which I already loved by age ten).

But after reading that, I could also see him as that little boy Lenny, showing up for his piano lesson with dirt still on his pants from sliding into first base. And that change in perspective fundamentally changed my view about a number of things.

I thought to myself “that kid could be anybody, he could be me.” Reading about Leonard Bernstein as a boy dissolved the imaginary wall in my head between “famous person” and “real person”. We can’t all grow up to be Leonard Bernstein, but we can each grow up to do something unique and wonderful, something the world has never before seen.

It was a pretty good lesson.