Ken's Blog

Yesterday a friend asked me to follow an old tradition I’d never heard of before. “When you find yourself by the ocean,” she said, “you must dip your shoes in the blue water.”

So yesterday, before leaving Sea Island, I walked down to the shore and dipped my shoes in the ocean. I felt great after following this little ritual, as though I was now somehow more connected to our planet.

Later in the day, over drinks, I was telling a colleague about this interesting tradition. Being in a punful mood, he replied, “Sure, you can dip shoes. But at a beach, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to dipthongs?”

“Maybe,” I told him, being in a punful mood myself. “But that wouldn’t have been consonant with my friend’s request.”

Yesterday, during one of the fancy breakfasts at The Cloister on Sea Island, a waiter looked at my plate and asked whether I wanted the scrambled eggs. He was so nice about it, clearly wanting to make sure I hadn’t missed seeing the eggs when I had gone to the buffet table.

I politely declined, thanking him. I realized he had no way of knowing that I don’t eat eggs.

It occurs to me that when people start wearing those future reality glasses, waiters will be able to know such things. In fact, that sort of knowledge might save lives. If somebody has an extreme peanut or seafood allergy, you don’t want to put a plate in front of them that contains peanuts or seafood.

There are all sorts of situations like this, where the right knowledge at the right time can be anything from convenient to life saving. But of course we also need to think about privacy.

We already have a complex set of systems in place to get information to the right place without compromising privacy or security. You can withdraw money from your bank at a convenient ATM, but the person in line behind you cannot then proceed to withdraw money from your account.

Similarly, we have ways for doctors to send each other health information about you without anybody else getting access to that data. In fact, such security is necessary for a computer-based health care system to be able to function.

I suspect that in future reality we will develop similar systems for even more casual interactions. The waiter will know whether you have food preferences or food allergies because you have granted restaurants access to that information. But that doesn’t mean they have access to other personal information about you.

It will be interesting to see how all of this develops. Most people will not be interested in the implementation details of such wearable-enabled systems for ensuring privacy and security. But they will be very interested in — and invested in — the outcome.

Today I went on a nature walk along the coast here on Sea Island. There were so many wonderful things to see, from ospreys to rare trees to islands and dolphins off the coast.

Everyone on the walk had a pair of binoculars. Very often, in order to better see something especially cool, such as a far-away tree or a bird circling in the middle distance, I would look through the binoculars, and everything would look eight times larger.

Looking through the binoculars meant lifting them from where they hung from a strap around my neck and positioning them in front of my eyes. It was a simple enough act, but sometimes even that simple act took too long. By the time I was looking through the binoculars, the bird might have flown away, or the dolphin vanished beneath the waves.

It occurred to me that someday soon we may no longer need binoculars. The pair of glasses that we use for virtual and augmented reality will also allow us to zoom into things of interest all around us.

Magnifying our view, seeing in infrared, or other acts of augmentation, such as learning the identity of a tree or a bird, may become as simple as looking. We will start to take this superpower for granted.

Like any successful technology, such a capability will come to seem perfectly natural, an extension of our own body, like clothing or shoes. In time, we will wonder how anybody had ever managed to get along without it.

There have been so many great speakers during this two day workshop. Most of them touched on the ethical considerations of the topics they discussed.

Various speakers spoke of injustices around the world. I started to see a theme emerging of the complicity of “good people” in acts of cruelty and destruction, simply through the act of standing by passively and doing nothing.

Speakers referred to the systematic dismantling of native American culture, governments paying lip service to climate change while allowing it to continue, America demonizing black people as a way to avoid its past injustices to toward them, the international trade of diamonds from Sierra Leone that has been “paid for” with human atrocity, and unreasoning prejudice in general. These were just a few of the topics that involved difficult ethical questions.

Two of the speakers spoke about standing up for animals. But only cute animals.

Even among thoughtful people, who spend a lot of time and effort pondering deeply about ethical issues and trying to make the world a kinder and more just place, have a kind of blind spot. It’s good to be nice to non-human sentient beings, but only if you think they are cute.

What about the other sentient beings? The consensus seems to be that it’s perfectly fine to torture and kill them and do various unimaginably monstrous things to them.

One speaker in particular stood out in my mind. He had just finished suggesting various ways to experiment on living creatures that were so horrific they would make Dr. Moreau blush in shame.

Someone in the audience then asked him “Are there any ethical considerations to any of this?” His simple answer: “No.”

Why are people like this? I’m not sure exactly, but it seems to be because people think it’s fun.

Two weeks ago a friend and I went to the Rubin museum in NY to see a talk by a person who is a legend in his field. It was, as expected, a wonderful talk, insightful and full of information and fascinating anecdotes.

Afterward, people went up to the stage to talk to the great man. My friend asked me whether I wanted to go up as well. She knew I had questions I wanted to ask him.

I said I’d rather not. I’ve seen that scene before: An already exhausted speaker, patiently entertaining random questions from strangers who want a moment with the famous guy, when all he really wants to do is chill out and rest after being up on stage for an hour.

I told her I’d rather just wait until I run into the man at some professional event, when he and I can meet as colleagues. I don’t think my friend quite believed me, and I’m not really sure that I believed me. She and I both knew that the speaker and I are not at all in the same field.

By complete coincidence this same man and I were both invited to be speakers at this weekend’s little Sea Island think tank. We ended up having a deep conversation about one of the technical points in his Rubin museum talk, followed up by an email exchange with references to published research papers.

So it turns out, by some crazy twist of fate, that I had been right. I did indeed meet the same guy at a professional event, only this time not as a random audience member but as a professional colleague.

Maybe it was a complete coincidence, or maybe it was just the Universe having a bit of fun. In either case, it’s nice to know that sometimes life hands you a backstage pass.

This weekend I am participating in an interdisciplinary think tank on Sea Island. The idea is that the organizers get a bunch of people together from different fields, invite them hang out together for three intensive days at a fancy resort, get each participant to give a talk about their own work, and then have everyone discuss it all over drinks and meals.

I shared a shuttle bus ride from the airport with Jack Horner. He is a noted paleontologist who, among other things, is studying how dinosaurs might be brought back to life.

The most promising approach, as I understand it, is to start with birds, which share a lot of DNA with dinosaurs. After all, birds evolved from dinosaurs. Then you use cutting edge science to transform those birds into dinosaurs (lots of technical details omitted).

Jack was telling me that there are many more possible ways to use the same technology. “For example,” he said, “you could create a duck with the head of an alligator or crocodile.”

“Wait,” I told him, “that sounds like a bad joke.”

“How so?” he asked.

“Imagine,” I said, “that it’s some time in the future, when all of this technology has been perfected. A man walks into a restaurant.

“Waiter,” the guy says, “I’ll have that new thing — the duck with the head of a crocodile.”

“Ok,” the waiter replies, “If that’s what you really want. But just wait until you see the bill.”

My recent raytracing breakdown was, in a sense, the beginning of a story. It was, in particular, the first part of a story about implementing a ray tracer in a WebGL fragment shader.

As the computer graphics class I’m teaching this semester has progressed, I’ve added more chapters to that story. With each new chapter, the reader learns a bit more about raytracing.

If you want to see how far the story has gotten, click on the image below.

“Actually,” he continued, “It was a antacid commercial commissioned by the NY State Governor, assembled from color lithographs of the Florence Cathedral, over a British beatbox soundtrack.”

“Oh I see,” she said, “You’re the Po-Mo homo Como slomo Duomo chromo Shlomo Cuomo bromo promo domo.”

~

“That’s right,” he bragged. “I’m the guy who came up with that edgy TV ad which reimagines a sweater-wearing 50’s singing star as a gay icon, and it was all filmed in a single action shot.”

“Wow,” she said, “You’re the Po-Mo homo Como slomo promo domo!”

Today I picked up my guitar again.^*

To put this act in context, the first time I seriously picked up a guitar was many years ago. I was quite young back then, and had just had my heart broken by a beautiful and beguiling woman.

The young lady in question was learning to play the classical guitar at the time. So in a sort of psychic jiu jitsu, I dealt with my pain by going to her classical guitar teacher and asking to take lessons from him.

In the months that ensued I poured every drop of my heartache into learning that guitar. Practicing for several hours a day was easy, since the only times when I could feel any joy were the times when I was practicing my music.

In a remarkably short time I had become proficient at playing the classical guitar. Which just goes to show you what you can accomplish if you have sufficient motivation.

Now, after many years, I am circling back to the instrument. I’ve mainly been looking at on-line courses, and following along with the lessons.

I find that my fingers never really forgot how to play. My skills started to return after just a few minutes, almost as though they had never left.

Only this time I’m not doing it because a woman has broken my heart. Although I may be doing it now partly because my country is breaking my heart.

 

* In an earlier draft I started this post by talking about our current political situation. But I’ve decided it might be good to sometimes lower the volume on that topic, at least a little. 🙂