Ken's Blog

Jazz and Improv theater have a lot in common. Both are examples of an art form where the parameters of the content are deliberately narrowed so that performers can freely create new work within those narrowed bounds.

A jazz improvisation will never have the depth and complexity of a well written symphony, just as an improvised sketch will never have the depth and complexity of a well written play. Yet the tradeoff is worth it, because this narrowing of writerly scope is accompanied by the thrilling feeling of new material being created right before an audience’s eyes (and ears).

Today I was having a discussion about my Chalktalk interactive drawing program in this context. Philosophically it has much in common with Jazz or Improv, since it focuses on supporting real time improvisory performance.

Chalktalk will never be able to support the visual complexity of a well animated film, nor should it. In its current incarnation, Chalktalk is meant to be roughly the equivalent of Jazz or Improv: a tool designed to be used by experts to communicate to an audience a real time improvisatory performance.

But what do we call this forthcoming field of “drawing based improvisation”. It’s not Jazz, and it’s not Improv.

Maybe we could just call it a Sketch. 🙂

This evening I gave a talk about the future to a really interesting group of scientists, students and animators in Paris. The talk went well, but even better was the talk after the talk.

A group of us headed out to a local bar and discussed all of the larger topics, the cultural threads that connected with what I had talked about in my presentation. As you might expect, the conversation was far freer and more far reaching than what had come up in the seminar room.

There is something about sitting in a bar and having a beer that gives people permission to speak freely, to bring up their craziest and most interesting theories. It’s not something that can ever happen in a formal setting.

At one point somebody asked me what I would have predicted in 1996 about where media technology would be in 2016. It was a very good question.

After some thought, I told him that I probably would have predicted that we would end up with something like the world we have now — people using their phones to surf the Web and do pretty much everything else. The only thing I think I might not have predicted was the commoditization of graphics processors, because that didn’t really start to happen until the end of the 1990s.

But I might well have predicted that too. After all, my first rule of thumb when thinking about this kind of thing is to assume that Moore’s Law will continue, and then, from that, look at what will become affordable.

Definitely a good sort of conversation to have over a beer in Paris.

When you’re in Paris
You just need to stop and say
“Hey, I’m in Paris!”

feral roving packs
of drunken naughty santas
on the prowl today

The other day I wrote in a post that no matter who you are, there are fewer people older than you every day. Juozas Baltusnikas commented, correctly, that this would not be true for the world’s oldest human.

This observation can, in fact, be generalized. There is a small group of people, all over the age of 100, for whom my statement is not true.

More formally, there is some age X such that if you are under that age, then at least one person older than you will die every day. Conversely, if you are above the age of X, then at least one day will go by when nobody older than you will die.

It is interesting to ask the question: “Approximately what is the size S of the set of people who are age X or greater?” I wonder what sorts of analysis tools you would use to approach such a question.

Other related questions are also interesting. For example, approximately what is the value of X? Do the values of S and X fluctuate significantly over time, or do they hold very steady?

Also, does it matter how many people are in the world? For example, if the world population varies from 2 billion people to 20 billion people, will the value of S change by a lot, or will it remain pretty much the same?

When people think about the Gutenberg bible, their first association is usually with the general idea of movable type, although movable type actually dates back to eleventh century China. Many (although not all) scholars believe that Gutenberg’s was the first European press to use cast metal alloy fonts, a key technology for the mass production of books, which led to a great increase in literacy throughout Europe.

Yet ironically, Gutenberg’s bible cost far less per copy than hand written manuscripts, it was not actually a mass market product, but more of a high end luxury item. Even so, its eventual impact on mass publication is undeniable.

Recently I’ve been thinking of the Valve/HTC Vive as the modern equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible. It is definitely a high end item. After all, when you add in the PC it costs around $2000, and it generally requires a dedicated room.

Contrast this with mobile VR, which just needs a smartphone. And that’s a big deal, because there are already 2.1 billion smartphones in the world, and that number is growing rapidly.

Of course mobile VR is not yet “room scale”. Phone based VR products like GearVR and Google Daydream still track only your orientation. If you physically move your head, they don’t know about it, so actual walking and head movement can’t be part of the experience.

But a high quality room scale experience in the VIVE is aspirational. It shows people what mobile VR could look like in the next few years.

When that happens, this sort of more powerful VR immersion will move from the high end to the phone in your pocket. And then VR will get its equivalent of the mass market paperback.

But first it needed its Gutenberg bible.

I was having a conversation with a friend last night, and the subject of age came up. And I found myself saying, apropros of pretty much nothing, that every day there are fewer people older than me.

I hadn’t really ever thought about this before, and neither had my friend. So we pondered it for a bit. No matter who you are, from the moment you are born there is one thing that is certainly true: Every day, there are fewer people who are older than you.

Generally speaking, we assume that the converse is also true: Every day, there are more people who are younger than you. And this is a great thing, because young people are the future.

But even that is not certain. Hypothetically speaking, the U.S. might one day elect a president so heavy handed and inexperienced that he accidentally goads, say, the People’s Republic of China into a conflict that escalates into nuclear war. Not that that would ever happen.

But independently of all that, there is one thing you can be sure of: No matter who you are, or where you are, or how old you are, every day there are fewer people who are older than you.

It’s kind of nice to know that there is at least one thing we all have in common. 🙂

I’ve been posting one post a day to this blog, every day, since January 1 2008. The fact that I have been doing that seems kind of crazy when I stop and think about it.

On the other hand, it also seems perfectly normal. After all, anything that you do every day will eventually come to seem normal.

But one thing I’ve realized, something I don’t think I would have guessed when I started writing this blog, is it has also given each and every day during these past nine years a unique identity. Whenever I go back and read any of these posts, I find myself transported right back to that day, and I remember what was going on at that point in my life, the thoughts I was thinking, what I was happy about or struggling with.

So in a way this project has functioned for me as a kind of magical portal into my own life. Without quite meaning too, it seems that I invented a sort of time machine.

The New York Times and other news organizations have been using a certain term to refer to a very scary group of people in this country. The term seems cute, inoffensive, almost adorable, like a group of people who get together at their local library on Saturdays to form a community support group.

But the Times also went through the effort of precisely defining the meaning of this term: “A racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces an ideology of white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist.”

So why use a euphemism, when the meaning itself is right there? For example, can’t we just state the obvious, that Donald Trump has appointed, as his chief strategist, one of the thought leaders of a racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces an ideology of white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist?

And is there something wrong with simply noting that Donald Trump has become the hero and figurehead of a racist, far-right fringe movement that embraces an ideology of white nationalism and is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist?

Or has stating the simple and obvious now become unpatriotic? Are we so scared of the truth that we need to hide behind euphemisms, like scared little children?

I got my undergrad degree in theoretical mathematics. Then right after graduation I went to work for a computer graphics company. Eventually I got my Ph.D. in computer science.

The other day a colleague asked me whether that math degree had been useful in my career. It was a thoughtful question, and it deserved a thoughtful answer.

I told him that the process of learning to program and mastering the principles of computer science, was, by analogy, like learning to play the piano. It was an enormously important set of skills. Having all those skills and concepts under my belt has very much helped me in my career.

But by the same analogy, learning math was like learning to understand music itself. Computer science merely gave me the tools needed to execute my vision of what could be possible with computer graphics. Mathematics taught me how to understand and think about that vision itself.