Ken's Blog

Today we gave a demo to some potential funders of our research. The demo went really well. I mean seriously really well.

But more important than that was what we learned from the reactions of the people we were demoing to. Suddenly a lot of things that had been fuzzy made a lot more sense.

You can spend weeks trying to figure out what direction to take your research, but there’s nothing quite like actually showing your work to people who might use it in the real world. In moments, a lot of things become crystal clear.

It’s not until you see those people watching your demo that you know — deep in your bones — what is important versus what is not important. Now we know exactly what to do to make our demo even better. And it’s a great feeling.

Today my fancy new 2017 13″ Macbook Pro arrived. I had ordered it quite a while back, but because Apple has been changing over to newer models, the delivery was delayed, seemingly endlessly. A kindly grad student has been letting me use his computer in the meanwhile.

The new computer and I are still learning each other. Today I’m doing all the geeky stuff, like installing Chrome, and Homebrew, node.js, and various other words that will seem mysterious unless you program a lot.

The funny thing about upgrading to a newer model computer is that it’s kind of like moving from one house to another, but taking all of your stuff with you. You may have moved into a new place, but you pretty much have the same furniture, stuff in your closets, pictures on the walls, dishes and silverware.

Since I had prepared for this move, it was all pretty easy and painless. And now here I am, happily ensconced in my fancy new virtual digs.

Maybe I’ll start a garden. 🙂

Like most people I know, I am somewhat neurotic. We are each have our own particular neuroses, and we all learn to develop coping mechanisms to get around them.

One of my neuroses, which is not uncommon, is fear of failure in high stakes situations. The more that is on the line, the greater the chance I can get sidetracked by the possibility of failure.

Clearly this is counterproductive. After all, when a lot is at stake, clearly it is more effective to increase one’s focus, rather than becoming distracted by the possibility of a negative outcome.

Over time I have realized that when I am in such a high pressure situation, I arrange to fail at something else.

I don’t do this on purpose, exactly. It’s more that I end up finding something safe that I can fail at.

Once I have managed to fail at something else, my neurosis is satisfied: I have affirmed that I am indeed not perfect, so I no longer feel any pressure to pretend that I am.

My mind is then sufficiently liberated to focus on the other goal — the one with the higher stakes. And it all usually turns out well.

Sometimes there’s nothing like a little strategic failure to help you get through the week. 🙂

Hal Jordan was given a ring by a dying alien and became Green Lantern. Kal-El of Krypton traveled to another planet and became Superman.

But these are fantasies. In real life, encounters with outer space don’t confer super powers on anybody. Or do they?

If people are coming back to earth with super powers, you can be sure that sooner or later, the world will find out. And just this week, in a shocking development, one of these extraordinary individuals, Sandra Magnus, slipped up by revealing a long hidden super power to the world.

You may know Dr. Magnus as a respected American astronaut, a mainstay of the International Space Station, as well as a distinguished scientist with advanced degrees in physics, engineering and materials science.

Or perhaps you know her from her days as a designer of stealth aircraft at McDonnell Douglas. Or you might recognize Dr. Magnus in her highly prestigious current position as the Executive Director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

But this week all of that fell by the wayside as Dr. Magnus finally revealed her true superhero identity: Invisible Girl!

In a ceremony at the White House, the President and Vice President honored three U.S. Astronauts: Buzz Aldrin, Alvin Drew and David Wolf. Each was thanked by name for his service to our country, and both the President and Vice President shook hands with all three men.

Yet somehow, fellow distinguished U.S. Astronaut Sandra Magnus was able to stand not five feet away from the President while all of this was taking place. In a flagrant violation of the laws of physics, she apparently deployed her super powers to make herself completely invisible to both the President and the Vice President.

During the entire ceremony, neither the President nor the Vice President appeared to acknowledge or even notice her presence in the room. What would cause two such high ranking politicians to fail to even see an American Astronaut during a ceremony to honor American Astronauts?

There can be only possible explanation: Dr. Magnus is, in reality, Invisible Girl!

When you analyze much of pop episodic narratives, you see patterns recurring. This is not at all surprising. After all, if a psychological pattern in storytelling is time tested and reliable, it will continue to be used.

One pattern that keeps cropping up is the virtual family structure: The writers gather a group of characters who are not related, and proceed to treat them as a virtual family, with a particular blend of personalities guaranteed to grab and hold an audience’s attention.

One of these patterns I like to call “Calm Dad / Edgy Mom”. This pattern, in its most common variant, contains six characters. In addition to the calm dad and edgy mom, you also need four kids: Two happy children, and two troublesome children.

Here are three examples of this structure in action. Two of them were architected by Joss Whedon, which is not surprising, since he is very good at this sort of thing:

	Agents of Shield	Guardians of the Galaxy	Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Calm Dad	Coulson	Quill	Giles
Edgy Mom	May	Gamora	Buffy
Happy children	Fritz Simmons	Drax Groot	Xander Willow
Troublesome children	Skye Ward	Rocket Nebula	Spike Faith

This sort of pattern only provides an initial framework, and over time characters can move all over the map. For example, by season six Willow has become both troubled and troublesome. Yet when her virtual family was first formed, she very much filled the role of a happy child.

This morning when I awoke I had a momentary feeling of disorientation. It seems I had had a very long dream.

You’ve probably had an experience like this at least once: You wake up in the morning, in your own bed, and feel as though you are in a strange place. The reason is that you had a long dream about a non-existent place, with non-existent people, which was so detailed and comprehensive that you had come to think of it as real.

For me the first moment of the experience was very jarring. Not only did I not recognize my own bedroom, but I started looking around for the people with whom I had been deep in conversation. After all, I had been their guests (or so I thought) for quite a long time, and there was still much to talk about.

The second moment of the experience was even more jarring. For it was only then that I realized that these people, men and women I felt I had come to know, would never return. Not only would I never again speak to them, but they had literally ceased to exist.

Over the course of the next several minutes, the details of this other world gradually faded from my mind. All I could remember was the intensity of the connections I had made, and the fondness I still felt for a world I could no longer quite remember.

When people ask me, during the academic year, whether I am looking forward to the summer break, I respond with an emphatic yes. Perhaps counterintuitively, I look forward to summer because it’s the time I get work done — it is sort of a reverse vacation time.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy teaching. Yet it is a position that carries with it significant responsibility. Students spend quite a bit of time and money to take my class, and I need to make sure they get the most value out of it. That tends to take a lot of attention and focus.

But during the summer, my research students and I get to just make stuff. We can explore and play, experiment, go off in new directions, try out crazy hypotheses, all without distraction. Summer is the time when I tend to work the hardest, but it’s an incredibly enjoyable sort of work.

And that paradigm extends to weekends. Today I went into the lab — just me and a few students — and we got a tremendous amount of work done. It was fun and productive, and my mood at the end of the day was a mix of satisfaction and delight.

So you could say that this pattern of reverse vacation time repeats within itself: weekends are to weekdays as summer is to the school year.

Have you noticed how fantasy universes seem to come in pairs?

For the superhero we have the Marvel Universe and the D.C. Universe. As much as we may want to see Superman square off against the Hulk, or Charles Xavier match wits with Lex Luthor, it’s probably not going to happen any time in the near future.

Similarly, Star Trek and Star Wars may share a film director from time to time, but they clearly exist in very different Universes. That long awaited face-off between Q and Emperor Palpatine is probably not coming soon to a theater near you.

This seems to be a tradition that goes way back. For example, early in the twentieth century you could choose between two major fantasy Universes: Middle Earth or Narnia. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends in real life, and fans of each others’ work, but their visions were strikingly distinct. It would be very interesting to hear Galadriel debate questions of metaphysics with Aslan, but I am not going to hold my breath waiting for it.

Is this recurring pattern of bifurcation merely a coincidence? Or was Yoda onto something?

If you issue a travel ban against countries that have no history whatsoever of terrorism against the U.S., you are making it very clear that the ban has nothing to do with terrorism.

So what then is it about?

Hermann Göring wrote the manual on this: If you can get people to follow you on a principle of mindless hate, then you become powerful. The more mindless the hate, the more powerful you become.

And really, how can you get more mindless than a totally nonsensical travel ban on countries whose people have never even once harmed or threatened us?

Oh wait — I know, I know! You arrange it so that Americans with relatives in these countries no longer have the right to claim any meaningful kinship with their overseas grandparents, grandchildren or fiancé.

This is pure genius. Its very crudeness and casual cruelty is the source of its power: You are pointedly — and ostentatiously — “unpersoning” some Americans.

By treating these Americans with such extreme disrespect, you are essentially labeling them “not real Americans”. As an inducement to mindless hate, policies don’t get any more ingenious than this.

I worry that we are just a short step now from our own home-grown version of something we have seen before: First we pin on the yellow stars, then we start loading the trains…

I very much enjoyed reading the various thoughtful comments on yesterday’s post, and following the links to learn more. There seems to be a consensus that utopia itself cannot sustain a dramatic narrative. It can sustain a polemic (as in Bacon’s New Atlantis), but only because a polemic does not require drama.

So if you’re going to create something with dramatic weight, you either need to threaten the utopia (as, for example, Pandora is threatened), or you need to create a society which believes itself to be utopian, but which the reader sees as dystopian, because its core values are alien to our own. A good example of this might be Star Trek’s The Borg.

Alas, dystopian societies are so much easier for dramatists. They practically write themselves! I find myself reminded of something my friend Luke DuBois told me on the morning of this last November 9: “This is going to be great for art.”