Ken’s Blog

“Daniel, will you please come into the house and wash up for dinner? It’s getting dark.”

Daniel did his best to ignore his mother’s voice. This was the third warning, and he knew that any moment his father would be sent out to fetch him. Which means he needed to work fast.

“Here you go, easy girl,” he said. He didn’t know how he was so sure this was a female. He just was. He held the jar near, and gently prodding the caterpillar with a Q-tip, but she made no response.

He frowned and looked more closely. She was definitely alive. Possibly stunned unconscious after falling from the tree.

“You are an odd little thing,” he said. She looked a bit like Papilio machaon, and a bit like Danaus plexippus, but not really like either. Maybe something new! He felt a wave of excitement.

Daniel heard his father’s footsteps coming up the path. Delicately he picked up the caterpillar between thumb and forefinger and placed her gently in the jar.

“Hey sport,” his father said, trying to sound jovial, but Daniel wasn’t fooled. He could smell the beer on his dad’s breath, and he knew what that meant.

“Dad, I think she might be a new species.”

“A bug isn’t a she, it’s an it. Anyway, it can’t be,” his father said, “there are no new species. Just species we haven’t named yet. You’ll need to know that if you want to be an etymologist.”

“Entomologist, dad, not etymologist.” Daniel looked thoughtful for a moment. “But yes, that’s something an etymologist would need to know too.”

He was about to explain the difference, but just in time he saw the frown cloud his father’s face, and decided this might not be the best time. “Thanks for coming to get me. I’ll go in and wash up.”

Last night I had a very pleasant experience spending time with my father. Which is odd, because my father passed away some years ago.

Of course it was a dream. I suspect that many of you who have lost someone have had a similar experience.

What makes this particular experience somewhat unusual is that at one point my father turned to me and said “We need to plan for my retirement.” The moment he said that, I looked at him, looking all fit and full of life, and remembered that he was, in fact, no longer alive.

Which of course clued me in that this was a dream.

My next thought was that this was my dad’s way of telling me that this was a dream, so that I would realize what was going on. And I’m glad that he did, because otherwise I probably would have forgotten the entire experience by the time I woke up.

But because he said that, I thought to myself — all while still being asleep and in the middle of this dream day with my dad — that I will need to remember this when I am awake.

And sure enough, when I woke up this morning, the entire virtual time with my dad, so alive and as delightful to be with as ever, was vivid in my memory.

Which is a good thing, because memories of time with my dad, even in a dream, are more precious to me than diamonds.

Her first impression was of a hazy and indistinct light, and a feeling of great hunger. Her mind was filled only with the urge to feed. This need, so raw, so immediate, overpowered all else.

She picked up a scent, and she knew, without knowing how she knew, the way to follow. Slowly, ponderously, she made her way, step by deliberate step, feeling clumsy, heavy in her body, aware of the terrible slowness of every movement. And through it all, the hunger.

At last she reached her goal, a bed of glorious green. Here there was food, so much food, everywhere, all at once. Greedily she began to feed, and a rush of sudden energy surged through her body, flooding her senses with exquisite pleasure.

She was too absorbed by this pleasure to notice when the surface beneath her began to move, to sway, the force gathering, swirling, gathering momentum. Until suddenly she was thrown loose, and then she was falling, falling downward, ever downward, the cold air rushing by, seemingly forever.

The ground, when it finally arrived, came up fast, impossibly fast. And then, nothingness.

Speaking of Inside Out, my friend Athomas pointed out to me the other day that when he discusses that movie with his 14 year old daughter, the entire conversation sounds like psychological introspection, right out of the Freudian playbook. But of course they are not actually engaged in psychological introspection. They are just talking about a work of entertainment.

And that got me thinking, would it be possible to design a popular film from the ground up using the jargon of a particular technical field, with the goal of introducing that field’s language into the popular culture? The measure of “success” would be that anybody overheard talking about the film afterward would sound like they were discussing that technical topic. But of course they wouldn’t be — they would actually just be talking about a fun movie they had seen.

What fields could this sort of thing work well for? Government? Carpentry? Computer graphics? Particle physics? Are there certain fields that lend themselves to this sort of game, and others for which it would be impossible?

And then the follow-up question: If you have seen a film that gets you talking in the language of some technical field, and therefore has placed certain ideas in your head, would you find it easier to learn the real thing? Would somebody who watches Inside Out find it easier to learn advanced concepts from the field of psychology?

I’m guessing the answer is yes. After all, anybody who has seen the Cohn brothers’ film A Serious Man, and was really paying attention, is much more likely to truly appreciate the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat, and therefore the concept of quantum superposition.

I wish somebody would do the following mash-up of Inside Out and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask:

Our scene is set in New York City. Young Riley is now all grown up, and she’s enrolled as a student at NYU.

Who should she be on a first date with, but that guy from the 1972 Woody Allen movie. Inside Riley’s mind are Joy, Sadness, and the usual gang. Inside the young man’s mind are the crew from ’72: Burt Reynolds as Switchboard, Tony Randall as The Operator, Stanley Adams as Stomach Operator, Oscar Beregi as Brain Control, and of course Norman Alden as Brain Technician.

If you really want to see this film, do not watch the Woody Allen movie first, because it totally gives away how the evening will end.

But other than that, what kind of movie would it be? Personally, I think it should just be handed over to Pete Docter and Woody Allen to co-direct. Let them duke it out.

We had this wildly ambitious plan for our demo in Vancouver. So many features that were nearly working. Then at the last minute, about 70% of those features fell apart.

But we stil had 30% of the features working. And here’s the cool thing: The people who came to see the demo didn’t know about that other 70%. All they knew was what we showed them.

So we built an entire presentation around the 30% that worked, and scaffolded that demo with interesting and relevant context. It was all very entertaining and fun, and everybody had a great time.

I’m sure there is a moral here somewhere. 🙂

So it turns out that less than an hour before the deadline to get our work ready for some new collaborators, it was still hopeless. But then one of our team members called someone who know some stuff that we didn’t know, and he was able to talk us through the rough spot.

Then somebody else came up with a cool new way of doing something, she showed us how to do it, and we shifted our strategy accordingly and were back on track. There’s still lots of work to do before tomorrow evening’s demo, but now we have a clear path to the summit.

So in the last few days I’ve gotten a crash course in Windows 10, TeamWeaver, Vicon Blade, Visual Studio, IP addresses and gateways, Android, Unity, command line Python, NetGear routers, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t even remember.

Now I can appreciate the virtues of climbing up really tall mountains in foreign places. You might end up getting blown off the mountaintop, but along the way you sure do learn all kinds of useful stuff.

I spent much of the day today debugging a group project, mainly with people who were several thousand miles away, working on fixing experimental software I didn’t know, on an operating system I didn’t know, running on hardware I didn’t know, using internet protocols I didn’t know.

All of this required an impressively large variety of debugging tools that I didn’t know. After many hours of work, we think the end may be in sight — it feels near enough to touch — but we’re not completely sure yet.

Oddly enough, yesterday I saw a preview for that new “based on a real story” movie about people attempting to scale Mount Everest. A group of hardy humans climbing so far up that the air is actually too thin for humans to breathe. I know what you’re thinking — what could go possibly wrong?

I remember thinking to myself, as I watched that preview, “Who in their right mind would attempt something so crazy that it was nearly guaranteed to end badly?”

After today, I feel a little more sympathetic.

I finally saw Jurassic World. The plot is stupid, the characters are shallow and obvious. The dialog is invariably lame, and the pacing most of the way through is seriously problematic.

This movie makes the original look like Hamlet. Its plot twists make no real sense, and it violates the rules of its own fictional universe at every turn. In fact, it possesses absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever as a work of narrative fiction.

But it has dinosaurs. Big beautiful ugly man-eating dinosaurs. They run, or they stomp till the earth shakes, or they swoop down from the sky to rain terror. They have big scary teeth, they can fell a mighty tree with a single flick of their massive tails, and some of them are scary as hell.

Awesome awesome movie. Buy a jumbo tub of popcorn and see it on a big screen in 3D. Bribe the folks who run your local cinema to turn the sound way up.

You won’t regret it.

So The Borg decide that the only certain way to defeat the Federation Star Fleet is to go back in time to the very dawn of Earth space travel, capture the greatest human mind they can find, and co-opt that supreme intelligence to their own alien ends.

After doing extensive research, they determine that the greatest of all mid-twentieth century Earth philosophers with a favorable attitude toward collectivism was an individual named Jean-Paul Sartre. Through an enormous investment of time and effort, they manage to invent a temporal probe, which travels back to early 1950s Paris, whisks the great man away from his usual table at Les Deux Magots, and transports him forward in time to the 24rd Century.

After various cyber-bionic adjustments Sartre emerges, transformed into a formidable creature, half man and half machine. The Borg, certain now of impending victory over those pesky humans, ask him what their new strategy should be.

Sartre shrugs. “Existence,” he says, “is futile.”