Ken’s Blog

a path from worries
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I was designing a logo the other day. The process involved writing a small computer program, while putting a number of variables into it to control things like line thickness, spacing, proportions between the various elements, and so forth.

Once I did that, tuning the parameters involved a mix of two kinds of thinking: (1) What looks good to me, and (2) what message am I trying to tell to others? In this case, I was going for a particular balance between formal and casual, homespun and elegant, harmonious and striking.

At the end of such a process, there is, traditionally, a single result, which everyone will see. But now that I’ve been working on sharable virtual realities, I’m wondering whether a single result is too limiting.

Maybe a logo — or any other designed object — should ideally look different to everyone, morphing itself somewhat in response to the tastes of each beholder. After all, the communication of any design — or any message for that matter — is an interaction between two participants: The sender of the message and the receiver of that message.

If my intention is to convey to you a message with a certain degree of warmth or sophistication, of casual friendliness or lighthearted seduction, why shouldn’t the system that conveys my message take your tastes and preferences into account?

Perhaps, in a virtualized world where we can each see our own custom view of the objects around us, there should be at least two stages of design: (1) The decisions made by the object’s creator, expressing an aesthetic intention, and (2) the decisions made by a software agent tuned to each observer, which renders that designed object in a way best suited to that observer.

Now that I’ve started playing with the Gear VR, I’m beginning to accept that virtual reality does not need to follow any of the conventional rules of physical reality. Some of our most fundamental assumptions about the world can be suspended, including gravity, bilateral symmetry and even euclidean geometry.

We can enter worlds together that have nearly nothing to do with these bodies of ours, with their pairs of arms and legs, their torsos, their heads perched atop little bendable necks.

We can become anything we want, limited only by what our thoughts can conceive. As we take up this challenge, wandering ever further from the restrictive bounds of natural physiology, just where might the imagination of the human mind end up taking us?

Yesterday Sally cleverly observed that 2015 is a palindrome in binary. Which got me wondering whether there could be any years that are palindromes in both binary and decimal.

So I wrote a little javascript program to search for them. After several hours of crunching, my computer found 36 such years, from the year one through the year 75015151057, which in binary is:

 

1000101110111010000000101110111010001

 

The most recent year on the list was 717 AD, and the next one won’t be until 7447 AD, so don’t hold your breath.

Are there infinitely many such years, or is there a largest one? Somebody would need to come up with a mathematical proof, but I can make a guess just from looking at the numbers.

As I look down the list, the number of digits is increasing at a pretty constant rate. That’s what mathematicians call a logarithmic distribution. If that pattern continues, then the sequence will go on forever.

If that’s true, then no matter how far out in the future you go, there will always be another year that is a palindrome in both base two and base ten. Although you probably won’t be able to get to most of them without a Tardis.

Happy 2015!!!

A year is an odd little stretch of time. To the Universe — that is, to any part of the Universe other than we humans — it is pretty meaningless. Just a bit of time that starts at some particular moment and ends at some other particular moment about thirty one million seconds later.

But we measure our lives by those funny little stretches of time. We really can’t help it. Like the scorpion says in The Crying Game, it’s in our nature.

For me this has been a year of unexpected changes, both large and small. As usual, the big events were not the whole show. Many things have changed gradually, the kind of change that can be so difficult to see while it is happening.

And that is why having so obvious marker as a year can be useful. We can stand on the high cliff of a December 31 (which is high only because we choose to name it so), and look back on that previous peak from twelve months before.

When we do this, what may have become lost in the more obvious and mundane moments can, all at once, jump out at us, and we see, with renewed clarity, the progress of our own lives.

I was very happy with the emails I got from friends with clever solutions to yesterday’s puzzle.

One thing it might be useful to add for those who really want a challenge: If you count my game of Go example (“A Game of Stones”) as one of the games, then there is at least one solution with nineteen unique answers, so that any given title appears only once. Although with that added constraint, a few of the answers are very tricky.

Maybe there is also a meta version of this game. Instead of starting with “A Game of Thrones”, we can start with the idea of titles that cry out for variation.

For example, instead of requiring a rhyme for the last word, we might generalize the pattern, perhaps finding another real title with a parallel grammatical construction. Under this particular rule, “The Hunt for Red October” would lead to:

“The Importance of Being Earnest”
“The Secret of Santa Vittoria”
“The Taking of Pelham 123”
“The Bridge over the River Kwai”

I suspect there are a lot more titles of the form “The NOUN PREPOSITION NOUN-MODIFIER NOUN”. Maybe you can think of some. 🙂

A Game of Thrones has become such a powerful cultural meme that it is tempting to look for ways to extend the concept. I was talking with friends about this just yesterday.

We thought it might be fun to vary the title itself, and see where that leads. For example, you could describe the ancient Chinese game of Go as A Game of Stones.

Below are some other possible games (some real, some not). See if you can find an apt title for each. In every case, your proposed title should be of the form “A Game of ______“, where “______” is a word that rhymes with “Thrones”.

Feel free to leave a comment saying how many you figured out, but don’t reveal the answers — that would ruin it for others. Getting thirteen right is good. Getting all eighteen is brilliant! My answers will be coming in a few days, after people have had a chance to play.

• Angry Birds
• Appalachian bake-off
• Atari’s Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Being John Malkovich for PlayStation
• British bake-off
• Buddhist wit
• Diva Wars: Collins versus Crawford
• Enacting urban planning laws
• Flying robots
• Grave robbing
• Guitar Hero
• Knife sharpening contest
• Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1
• Nintendo’s Stealth Inc 2
• Paying for college
• Pornography
• Redirecting traffic
• This puzzle

Every once in a while, when I see a film I like, I go onto IMDB and find out who wrote or directed it. And then I will go on a journey, systematically watching one film after another written or directed by that person.

The results have been fascinating, and decidedly mixed. When you go through such an exercise, you quickly learn what a highly collaborative medium is the cinema. Rarely can you see the sensibility of a single person shining through. Yes, in a few cases, a creator gets to make the movie they intended to make.

And a small number of auteur film-makers — Woody Allen is one example that comes to mind — have managed to grab control and keep it. But it become all too apparent that for most commercial releases, many hands have been laid upon the film before the public gets to see it.

I guess this makes sense. Millions of dollars are involved in the making of even a modest budget film. If it’s your money that’s being spent, you might find it difficult to keep your thoughts about the ongoing production to yourself.

Perhaps evolving technologies might change that. Maybe one day the costs of filmmaking will go down so drastically that production of a feature length film might become truly manageable by a single individual — the way writing a novel is today.

When that happens, perhaps more unique and individual voices will emerge.

Have you ever noticed how every once in a while something in one sphere of thought reminds you of something in a completely different sphere of thought? Maybe there are certain organizational structures that nature — or perhaps human nature — is always drawn to, and destined to replicate.

For example, I was thinking recently about the battle back in the day between Apple and Microsoft over the graphic user interface, the mouse, windows, pulldown menus, and all of those related concepts, and the irony that both companies had both actually “borrowed” these ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center — where all those powerful concepts had really been put together for the first time.

And I was thinking that this precise structure — A and B battling, in a very public way, for ownership of a great concept, when the concept was actually originated by C — had occurred somewhere before. The paradigm seemed so familiar, yet I couldn’t quite place it.

And then I had it.

It was Tolkien and George Lucas, each famously creating the wise advisor to a young hero on a quest. You know, the old man with a staff, a long robe and a white beard, who has great powers over the elements themselves. In the case of Tolkien, this was Gandalf, mentor to the young hero Frodo Baggins. For Lucas, it was Obi Wan Kenobi, and his disciple was Luke Skywalker.

So those are our A and B — the Apple and Microsoft of this tale, if you will. And C, of course — the Xerox PARC of the story — is obvious.