Ken’s Blog

Today I went through all of the photos that I took with my phone for the last five years. There were a lot of photos.

There are particular photos that are very vivid in my mind, to which I have a strong personal memory or connection. I found myself looking for those photos in particular.

I eventually found them, but only after doing a chronological linear search through all the photos I had taken. This doesn’t seem right to me.

I can imagine, in the future, some way that our photos become automatically tagged because some biometric system detects that we have a strong emotional connection to them. I am sure that any such system would be imperfect at first, and it might take some time for your computer to correctly learn to accurately read your emotional states.

But over time, such systems would continually improve. Eventually, you should have no trouble finding the photos that really matter to you.

And isn’t that what we really want?

One of the things I love about Andor is the richness of its world building. Some of the best examples of this are so small and subtle that they can be hard to catch.

One wonderful detail in particular occurs when the main character goes back to his hotel room at a seaside resort, after having been away for months. He has returned to retrieve a small locked suitcase that is filled with his money and valuables.

When he gets to the room, the suitcase is exactly where he had left it, even though it is clear that many other guests had rented the room in the intervening months. In our world this would be unthinkable. In all that time, either the hotel would have stashed the suitcase away in a lost-and-found, or else somebody would have simply stolen it.

So what is going on? Well for one thing, clearly he knew that the suitcase would still be there, exactly where he had left it.

Which suggests that there are forms of security here that don’t exist in our world. For example, there might be some sort of biometric sensor that would immediately trigger an alarm, should you try to remove from a hotel room something that wasn’t yours.

So nobody would be foolish enough to even try. You would only end up being arrested and handed over to Empire law enforcement, which is something you definitely want to avoid in this particular fictional world.

For the same reason, there is no need for a lost-and-found. The resort owners know that the suitcase is perfectly safe where it is. When its owner is ready, he will come back for it.

The beautiful thing is that none of this is ever explicitly discussed. It is left up to the audience to gradually work out the significance of such seemingly small details.

To me, this is what great science fiction world building is all about.

I love the first day of every month. There is a feeling of wiping the slate clean, and having an opportunity to start again.

All of the things that I didn’t get done during the last month, I could, at least theoretically, accomplish in the next 31 days. Doesn’t mean that I will. But just knowing that I might makes me happy.

And if that doesn’t work out, in another month I will have an entire new year to work with. Hope springs eternal!

This just in from Mar-a-Lago:

The former president expressed surprise at the controversy surrounding the visit. “I really enjoyed our dinner together. He talked about his heroes, and I told him, by coincidence, my uncle is also named Adolph. So that was nice.”

In all seriousness, how can someone who wants to be President of the United States not have a staff that does even a cursory background check on visitors to his compound? Have these people never heard of Google?

Remarkably, today is the birthday of both C. S. Lewis (1898) and Madeleine D’Engle (1918). Born exactly twenty years apart, with very different literary styles, the two authors had a remarkably confluent influence on the fantasy genre.

Each, in their own unique way, used journeys of children through fantasy worlds as a way to discuss deep spiritual issues. And each had powerful things to teach us about the eternal struggle between good and evil — a struggle that we all face in our own lives.

Thinking of the two of them together, all I want to do at the moment is tesser through a wardrobe. Come to think of it, I wonder whether that was how Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy actually got to Narnia.

I read once about a creative writing teacher who would help out struggling students in the following way. When a student couldn’t think of something to write about, the teacher would suggest three words, and tell the student to write a story that tied together those three words.

Invariably this did the trick. Armed with those three words, students would turn in wonderful and inventive stories.

Here’s the interesting part: The teacher had a method for choosing the three words entirely at random. Of course he wouldn’t tell the student that the words were randomly chosen.

I wonder whether this idea can be applied to other fields. Suppose somebody is stuck on anything — perhaps modeling a kitchen, or writing a song, or painting a picture.

What if somebody were to give them three elements to work with, chosen at random, and task them with creating something that combined those elements. Imagine how many wonderful creative new ideas might start to flow!

When I am explaining a new idea to somebody, I usually start out by explaining how it works. That is mostly because I’m excited by how it works and I want to share cool new techniques.

But in fact, that is generally the wrong way to do it. Most of the time, people won’t respond to your description of “how” until you explain “why”.

Problem is, I am usually already way too immersed in the “why” to remember that other people aren’t. I am already excited by all the things that I will be able to do with this new technique, so I forget that other people aren’t there yet.

I am guessing that I am not the only one with this problem.

Celebrations are mysterious things. On one level they are simple: People gather, eat food, drink wine, maybe dance and give speeches. Then it’s over.

But a celebration is never really over, and that is the mystery part. A good celebration marks a moment when a particular group of people were connected, when they formed themselves into a kind of collective tribe.

Decades later you can still easily recall some celebrations. You still feel connected to people you met there, even if they have long departed from this Earth.

I suspect that there is something deep in the evolution of humans that privileges celebrations. As lighthearted as they may seem on the surface, they help us to form and to affirm the powerful ties that bind us together. They may be one of the reasons that our species has survived so spectacularly well.

Having finally gotten around to bingeing Andor, I am astonished by how good it is.

Finally, after 45 years, the Star Wars universe is beginning to rise to the level of its primary source material: Dune and the Foundation trilogy.

Yesterday’s discussion of a Fibonacci Day exposed a tension between how dates are written in different parts of the world. In the U.S., the date is written as month/day/year, whereas in lots of other places it is written as day/month/year.

This suggests that we might want to look for universal dates — dates that are interesting everywhere in the world. We had one of those just 13 days ago.

The date 11/11/22 was wonderful, because the month and day add up to the year. And this was true wherever you were in the world.

Another interesting pair of dates is due very soon. February 3, 2023 and March 2, 2023 are written as 2/3/23 and 3/2/23 in the U.S. and as 3/2/23 and 2/3/23 elsewhere. One of them is “23” written twice and the other is a palindrome.

Depending on where you are in the world, they swap places, yet both dates are numerically interesting everywhere. You can find lots of other interesting universal dates or universal date pairs on the calendar, once you start to look for them.

All of this might seem silly. But it’s a happier thing to do on Thanksgiving than read up on the sad history of the Doctrine of Discovery.