Ken’s Blog

My favorite sonnet by Shakespeare does not appear in collections of his sonnets. Rather, it is embedded in a the dialog of Act 1, Scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet. Here are the fourteen lines of dialog between the two young lovers, leading up to their first ever kiss:

Romeo:	If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet:	Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this: For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo:	Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Juliet:	Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray’r.
Romeo:	O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do, They pray—grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet:	Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo:	Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.

I love the fact that this perfectly rhymed and brilliantly metered Shakespearean sonnet appears as the back-and-forth of two teen lovers. As though they just happened to say these precise words while flirting with each other.

In a somewhat geeky parallel, it would be great to see something similar done with the digits of pi, with one modification: Rather than being an artful construct created by a master playwright, it would be a real back-and-forth, perhaps an email conversation between two real people.

Each person, in their turn, would continue the dialog using as many or as few words as they’d like, with the one constraint that the letter count of each successive word in the conversation would need to equal the corresponding digit of pi.

I wonder how such a discussion, constrained as it would be in word choice, would compare to a non-piemic conversation.

Perhaps it would be better.

My post yesterday was an example of a piem — a poem in which the number of letters in each successive word equals the corresponding digit of pi. Many people have tried their hand at this highly constrained art form.

Not all piems are very good. In fact, most are very bad. Here’s one I made up just now, to convince you how truly awful a piem can be:

Now I make a rhyme unsublime.
As poetic verse, far worse.

I hope you are convinced. 🙂

One thing that humans can still do much better than machines is decide what humans like or don’t like. It would be interesting to submit a slew of piems to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — which is actually a human crowd sourcing resource that vaguely masquerades as AI — and put things to a vote.

Rather than focusing on artistry, I think it would be useful simply to focus on clarity. Can a relatively long piem manage to sound like English — to the point where nobody is even thinking of it as a piem?

There should also probably be different categories, based on the number of words. Word count for a piem is a little like age for a marathon runner: The larger the number, the more impressive the feat.

It’s possible that a few really wonderful longer piems would rise above the doggerel. I, for one, would love to read them.

πππππππ
πππππππππππππ
πππππππππππππππππ
Had a nosh (a slice, precisely)
Of   simple   apple   pie   today.
Joyfully     deploying     fingers,
Observing the pi day ceremony
Just covered my digits with
Pie, ate greedily, and so
Enjoyed infinity.
—

I’ve been wondering why I was so taken aback yesterday when somebody asked that I remove certain commonly used words from my vocabulary while in his presence. I was worried that I might be overreacting. Why would I care so much about this?

I think I have it figured out now. The problem is that I am not always, or even usually, in the presence of this person in one-on-one situations.

More often we are in a group situation, where I am acting in my capacity as a professor, leading a group of students in research projects. If you’ve ever led a team project, you know it’s not always easy to keep group energy flowing, while simultaneously maintaining a relaxed and supportive atmosphere.

I realize that agreeing to edit myself as requested would require self-consciously picking over my words, in a way that would have nothing to do with the needs of the group. If part of my mind must continually stay focused on something outside of those needs (for example, to use Sally’s analogy, on never saying the word “keyhole”), then I might not be able to do my job properly.

And that’s something I care about very much.

Today during a conversation I used a common figure of speech. The person I was talking with then asked me never to use that figure of speech around him, because it offended his beliefs. I’m deliberately not specifying the particular phrase at issue, because I think it is beside the point, given that it was an phrase nearly everyone reading this has used as a matter of course.

He told me that he requests the same thing of everyone, and that it is a question of being considerate.

This little conversational exchange completely changed my view toward him, and I found myself feeling uncomfortable around him. Not because I have any problem with his beliefs (I don’t), but rather because I have a problem with his expectation that other people must pretend to not be themselves when they are around him.

I say this as a vegan who happily sits down to eat with omnivores. And I realize that it is an important part of my belief system that one should not impose one’s own beliefs on others.

So here we have a fundamental clash of beliefs: My acquaintance believes that I should pretend to be someone I am not, out of respect for beliefs that I do not share, whereas I believe that nobody should ever be asked to pretend to be someone they are not.

I haven’t figured out yet what I am going to do about this. It seems too aggressive/excessive to say “Well then, I guess we should stop speaking to each other.” Maybe I can send him an email saying that while I respect his right to believe whatever he believes, I am not willing to make any promises.

I guess, to be accurate, I could tell him that to make such a promise would be a violation of my beliefs.

Not sure. Maybe I’ll sleep on it.

At conversation this evening over dinner, the topic came up of what would be the most difficult human task for a computer / robot to be able to emulate.

One person suggested giving a massage. There ensued a lively discussion about the subtleties of this task, the need to accurately sense what someone else is feeling, just from minute shifts in their posture and muscle tension.

More than anything else, a good masseur or masseuse requires a sense of intuition, an ability to be in sync with another person, even though that other person is doing nothing but lying passively on a massage table.

But then we talked about it some more, and we realized that there is another task that humans are very good at, which would be a far more difficult thing for a computer to do properly than giving a massage.

And that is getting a massage.

Everybody has invisible walls. It can take a while for us to see the walls that surround each other (if we ever do) because, well, the walls are invisible.

These walls are constructed out of whatever we were taught as little kids: Limits on what we can achieve, on the places that we allow ourselves to roam in our minds, on how well we can understand people who are different from ourselves.

One person might have invisible walls that make them think they are never supposed to be rich, while another person has walls that make them think they are never supposed to graduate from college. A third person might have walls telling them that it’s ok to love somebody, but only if that somebody doesn’t love them back.

I’m not saying that these walls are unbreakable. They are just very hard to break, for two reasons: (1) We can’t see them, so we might not even know they are there, and (2) When we try to break them, we feel an enormous stress, as though we are fighting with ourselves. Which, in a sense, we are.

It can take years of effort to break through our own invisible walls. Sometimes it can take us years even to learn that they are there. And sometimes we never even get that far.

It is easy to judge people by the invisible walls that began to hem them in from an early age. But I think a more accurate (if more difficult) way to judge someone is this:

First, try to understand what their invisible walls are, where those walls are located, and how high they are. Then, see how successfully that person manages to tear down those walls.

Today, in a conversation about virtual reality, I told a colleague something I’d once read in a book: That the invention of the automobile was by itself not transformative. The real change happened some years later, when the local, state and federal governments began to systematically build paved roads.

Without suitable roads, early automobiles were just a bad second cousin to the horse. But with them, autos went far beyond horse drawn carriages, becoming a serious competitor to the mighty iron horse. The car beat out the train at its own high-tech game, by virtue of superior mobility and finer granularity.

We see this story repeated over and over again in technology. Apple timed the iPhone perfectly. As late as 2006 it would have been too early to introduce a Web based SmartPhone. But by mid-2007 the Web was mobile ready, and the iPhone rode it all the way to the bank.

One of the reasons the world took so much notice when Facebook purchased Oculus was that each represented complementary capabilities, and therefore their combination seemed potent. Another apparently perfect pairing of pathway and vehicle.

Only in this case, it isn’t clear which is the road and which is the car.

Continuing from yesterday…

Doesn’t it strike you that there is something wrong with the fact that we learn that our favorite neighborhood restaurant or bookstore is closing only after it is too late to do anything about it? Shouldn’t we at least be given an option to do something about it?

After all, if a community is anything, it is at the very least a group of people willing to join together in support of a common cause. And what could be a greater common cause than a shared component of our quality of life?

We live in the age of Kickstarter, IndieGogo and Razoo, when it seems perfectly natural for large numbers of people to band together and contribute financially to something they believe in.

So why the expectation that our favorite shop, bistro or purveyor of rare music is expected to simply take it on the chin when their rent goes up? I would have eagerly contributed money to help Gobo through some financial bumps if only I’d been asked.

Of course this is no panacea. Sometimes a place has problems that nobody can help them with. There could be a systematic inability for the business in question to pull in sufficient monthly revenue to cover their expenses. Or the owners may simply not have the requisite skills to properly manage a business. In those situations crowdfunding won’t save them.

But what about the cases when it’s just about getting over a temporary rough patch in cash flow? About keeping the doors open and making payroll until tourist or holiday season? Shouldn’t we, as a community, be able to pitch in and help keep our favorite places afloat?

There is something screwy about living in a city where shops and restaurants that are deeply loved, even worshipped, simply go out of business without warning.

These last months have seen the closing of so many places that I’ve thought of as personal mainstays, including The Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore, Shakespeare Books on Broadway, restaurants including Gobo, Soy and Sake, Pure Food and Wine, the Barnes and Noble on 6th Ave and 8th St., even Blatt Billiards — which had been in continuous operation since 1923 — and the list seems to lengthen every day.

It’s hard to know the reasons for the spate of closings. Rents are always going up in NYC, but I suspect the increase may have to do with the influx of high income money from around the world into the city, leading to a more rapid than usual increase in rents.

As was pointed out last year in The New York Times, in any city where the highest residential apartment in the Western Hemisphere has just been sold (the Penthouse at 432 Park Ave, for $95 million), real estate pressure is going to eventually trickle down to the other 99%.

But maybe it doesn’t need to be this way. More tomorrow.