Ken’s Blog

Speeding across the European countryside on the TGV today, my trip was mostly uneventful. The day was clear and beautiful, and the scenery magnificent. I was even impressed by the lunches on display.

Europeans, possessed of a certain sense of style that we Yanks often lack, really know how to pack a picnic for a long train ride (the right wine is very important). All around me, people sipped their wine and enjoyed the rolling view outside, as they quietly conversed in French or German.

Then, around two hours into the ride, everybody started to notice a plaintive meowing. Conversation died down — the sound was unmistakable. Apparently a small kitten had gotten onto the train. Passengers started to look around, trying to figure out where it might be hiding.

Finally a man stood up, reached into the overhead luggage rack, and took down his backpack. At that moment we all realized the sound was coming from the bag. I was both astonished and dismayed. What sort of person makes a little kitten spend a three hour train ride inside a backpack?

All eyes were glued to the backpack as the man reached in with one large hand, digging around inside.

Finally, he pulled out a small black cellphone, which he handed to his young son, who was looking extremely sheepish and embarrassed. The boy switched off the alarm, then his father put the phone back into the bag, placed the bag back up in the overhead rack, and we continued on our way.

Today a colleague told me that she was impressed with something she had seen in the Oculus Crescent Bay demo — an interactive flying dragon. Not a real dragon of course. But because the virtual dragon was rendered in full surround VR, she said she felt a visceral sense of danger, even though she knew it was all make believe.

We then discussed the connection with the Lumiere brothers’ famous 1896 train sequence, and whether we might now be witnessing the last moment in history when anybody would be able to achieve that sort of effect in VR. In another few years it is likely that what she experienced may become as ordinary and expected as a shot of a train coming toward the camera.

She then told me that every time the dragon flew at her in the demo, she involuntarily dropped down, and looked for something to hide under — even though she knew intellectually that this made no sense.

Then I had an “aha!” moment. “Don’t you realize what you were experiencing?” I said.

“No,” she replied, “what was I experiencing?”

“That was an example,” I said, “of a dragon drop interface!”

On Saturday I was wandering through Dublin, and somehow I got myself turned around. I asked a stationmaster how to get to Trinity College, and he sent me in the general direction of a bus stop down the street.

When I got to what looked like the right location, I asked a portly and somewhat elderly gentleman whether this was the right place to catch the bus to Trinity College. He told me that the proper place was right across the street, but that I shouldn’t take the bus.

“Why not?” I asked.

“There’s no point in taking the bus,” he said, “when it’s near enough to walk.”

It was a nice day, perfect for a little walk, so I asked: “OK, how do I walk to Trinity College?”

Then the man smiled, a big broad happy Irish smile, and I can swear I saw his eyes twinkle. “With your feet, of course.”

I laughed, not so much at the joke as at his perfect delivery. Then he pointed me in the proper direction, and sent me on my way.

The next day I took a flight back to Paris. As I took the RER B to Paris Nord, and then the M2 to Villiers, I was struck by all the tense and somber faces. Everyone looked dour, wrapped up in their own private world.

Paris is incredibly beautiful, I thought to myself, but nobody here is going to make a joke like the one that guy told in Dublin.

And right there, I thought to myself, is the difference between Dublin and Paris.

Today, at the very end of my stay in Dublin, I decided to honor the long and illustrious literary history of that great city by doing a mini-tour of its bookstores. Not surprisingly, there are quite a few options for the avid bibliophile, from purveyors of rare and used books to Hodges figgis, just across the street from Trinity College, where it seems you can purchase just about any volume in print.

You see, I’ve always loved books. There is something about the physical book that sets it apart from any electronic equivalent. Yes I know the book is impractical, compared with its more modern competitors. It’s heavy and wasteful of resources, it takes up far too much space, and you can’t take your library with you when you travel.

But ah, the sensory experience! The feeling of opening the cover, riffling through the pages, the heft of a book in your hands, the wondrous physicality of black ink on textured paper, the very smell of it. All of these things contribute to a powerful sense of connection.

Some might say that there’s nothing even remotely rational about this view of books. After all, the act of reading is, by its very nature, a renunciation of the physical world in favor of a symbolic realm of pure information. Yet there it is.

But what to buy? Some neglected work by a great Irish poet? A play by Shaw perhaps? Maybe something written in Irish Gaelic, just for the sheer beauty of the words on paper, even though I wouldn’t begin to know how to read it.

In the end I chose a collection of short stories by Philip K. Dick. Yes, I know, it’s not Beckett. But I think it still counts.^† 🙂

 

† Not surprisingly, PKD has cited Beckett as an influence. (see The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1938-1971. Grass Valley: Underwood Books, 1996, p 56).

Today, being in Dublin, I went on a little day trip to the charming seaside town of Dun Laoghaire (when you say it out loud, it sounds like “Dun Leary” — don’t ask). While there, I had a splendid time exploring the National Maritime Museum of Ireland.

I learned all sorts of things today about sailing, lighthouses, engine technology, nautical charts, shipwrecks, lifeboats, sextants, trade routes, and many other fascinating topics, far too numerous to list here.

But one fact in particular really stuck with me: In their hay day, every lighthouse flashed at a unique rate. That is, the motor that spun the light around was set to a different rate of rotation for every lighthouse.

And the reason for this was simple and ingenious: If your ship was lost out at sea, and all you had to navigate by was the faint pulse of a distant lighthouse, you could time that pulse and you would know where you were.

This concept is also the basis for heterodyning, the core technology behind broadcast radio and television — a more recent innovation whereby multiple signals can be distinguished by their differing carrier frequencies.

What I love about the pulse frequency scheme for identifying lighthouses is the way it shows that people are not getting more clever over time. People were always clever. It’s just that, at various times in history, they have access to different technologies for showing how clever they can be.

In my work recently, I was beating my head against the wall trying to solve a particular problem. It seemed to me that getting the solution to that problem, however difficult, was a bridge that I must cross, in order to get to the place I wanted to be.

Then today, during a meeting about something else entirely, I realized that I could instead solve a far easier problem — crossing a little side bridge, as it were — and use that much easier path to find a good enough solution to the larger problem.

It occurs to me that there must be some principle at work here, some simpler and more productive way of looking at the solving of seemingly intractable problems. Perhaps it could be called the “minimal subproblem” principle.

Two excellent comments on yesterday’s post! The reason this all came up is that I gave a talk this week about possible directions for socially shared virtual reality, and a student asked whether replacing reality with virtual reality will change who we are.

I responded that we are already living in virtual reality. We just don’t know it because we are subject to Alan Kay’s dictum that “Technology is anything invented after you were born.” I told the student that we generally go through our day sincerely believing that we are living in some sort of natural state, whereas in truth our perception of the world and of each other is highly mediated.

To put this in context, if you and I talk on the phone, or over Skype, you don’t think “Oh, that’s not really Ken, that’s just a technological reconstruction of Ken.” And the same goes for email or handwritten letters, both of which are technologically mediated artifacts. You don’t think “I received an avatar of Ken in the form of his handwriting.” Although, in a sense, you have. Rather, you think “I got a letter from Ken.”

The important thing is that the thoughts between my mind and your mind are connecting. Any medium that achieves this, for people who are used to that medium, is simply labeled as part of reality.

So yes, the self may be a complex, multifaceted and ever changing thing, but reality (if you are a human) is quite simple: It is whatever medium of communication allows my self and your self to effectively connect with each other.

One of the questions that keeps coming up, as I talk with people about the possible future where everybody is wearing (in the Verner Vinge sense of the word), is the relationship, if any, between the nature of our physical interaction with the world and the definition of ‘self’.

For example, if Neo in The Matrix actually only believes that he is walking around and interacting with the physical world, whereas in fact his body is floating in a vat somewhere, does this impact in any essential way who he is? Does it mean that his ‘self’ has been altered in some fundamental way?

This is a potentially thorny question, and there are many possible directions from which to approach it. But for now I’m just going to let the thought linger. Something to chew until tomorrow.

Every superhero has an origin story. Superman is an alien from planet Krypton, Thor a misplaced Norse god, the Hulk the product of an overdose of gamma rays. I love all these origin stories.

But my favorite origin story of them all is the one for Spiderman. Instead of relying on one preposterous premise, two such premises are mashed together, and somehow that tips it all over into a kind of crazy pseudo-plausibility.

I mean, we all know that being bombarded by intense gamma rays doesn’t actually give you super powers. In fact, it kills you rather efficiently. And we all know that being bitten by a spider doesn’t give you super powers. It gives you a nasty rash, and sometimes a fever.

But if you put the two of them together, now you are tapping into the joint mysteries of cosmic rays and genetics. I mean, who knows for sure what kinds of mutations radiation might cause in a spider? I certainly don’t, and you don’t either.

And so this origin story manages to cross the line from the patently ridiculous to “Wait a second, could that work?” At least to an open minded eleven year old, and that’s all that really counts.

There’s something else I like about Spiderman’s origin story, which has more to do with the complexity of our relationship with our superheroes, and that is the element of the monstrous that lurks around the edges of their stories.

In fact, I suspect this monstrousness may be an intrinsic part of our continuing fascination with them. Batman is an emotionally damaged little boy turned vengeance machine, Superman a lonely alien orphin who flies around in his underwear. And the Hulk is, well, a monster. But for sheer borderline weirdness, Spiderman has them all beat. He’s basically an insect.

It doesn’t get any better than that.