Ken’s Blog

Why do we love stories so much? Objectively speaking, it seems counterintuitive. We listen with rapt attention once we know that we are hearing about something that doesn’t exist, and in fact has no literal correspondence with the real world.

I suspect that it has a lot to do with our development as a social species. Our survival as a species is linked with our development of natural language. For early humans, tribal cohesion was greatly enhanced by the ability to sit around together and tell stories, whether of myth or of tribal lore.

It is now likely baked deep into our brain that we feel pleasure when somebody starts telling us a story. If it is a good and well formed story, then we integrate the telling, fictional as the content may be, as a life experience.

This has implications for education. More tomorrow.

I’m thinking about designing a story to write — and then writing it. And so I find myself thinking in terms of the classic hero’s journey.

Fundamentally, you need a hero, a problem and a solution. The rest is all details.

Of course those details matter. For example, it’s not that interesting if the hero doesn’t learn anything. Ultimately it’s not really about what happens, but rather about the character arc.

And of course you need to know who exactly is going on that journey. I remember the first time I saw Ratatouille, and realized that the big character advancement moment was not about Remi.

It was, of all things, about the food critic. That was a character I hadn’t even thought I could like. And yet it was the moment that brought tears to my eyes.

So maybe I shouldn’t assume, going in, that I even know who our hero is. That knowledge might just end up bubbling up from somewhere in my subconscious.

And I am happy to not yet know the answer. Like Yogi Berra said near the end of his life, when his wife asked whether he would prefer to be buried or cremated: “Surprise me.”

I am thinking of spending the month of December writing a complete story on this blog. It’s something I’ve done before, but not recently.

The idea is to start on the first day of the month, and post every day until the story ends on the last day of the month. Given that I will be writing in December, my story will have 31 chapters.

In order to make that work, I’m planning to take some time behind the scenes throughout the month of November to plot out the story structure. I figure that a month for structure followed by a month for actual writing should be about right.

If you count this post, I guess I started the process today. That is, if meta-structure counts as structure.

It is very good news that Brazil now has an incoming president who is not downright scary. We can agree to disagree on policy, but democracies should not have administrations that aim to dismantle democracy itself.

Also, this election result is good for the world in general. For example, the wholesale destruction of the Amazon rainforest as official government policy is now on hold.

We can all breathe easier knowing that. Literally.

I saw the news of Lula’s election as the lead news story in the New York Times. Curiously, the on-line link to the article was followed by an option to read the same article in Spanish.

I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out why they did that. When there is an election in Germany, the NY Times generally doesn’t provide an option to read the article in French.

What am I missing?

Somebody told me I should watch “Andor”, the TV series that is a prequel to the Star Wars movie “Rogue One”. I loved “Rogue One”, so I am sure I will like this show.

But part of me — the part that loves computer science — is transfixed by the title. It just seems so, um, logical.

Could there be another prequel in the works, I wonder. Something that continues the obvious metaphor.

It would be called, of course, “Ifthen”.

Today in 1969 the first ever link was established between one computer and another. It could be argued that, from an historical perspective, this was the single most important event in the development of the internet.

It was, in a sense, the moment when that first human footprint appeared on the Moon. The moment when that first ape lifted up a bone to use in warfare.

On this day in history a computer first began talking to another computer. It’s anyone’s guess, more than half a century later, where the conversation will go next.

I attended a technical talk today that I enjoyed very much. The speaker was showing a scientific result that was very practical and useful.

Yet at the same time, the mathematical theory underlying the technique was also very beautiful and elegant. And that is not usually the case.

Most of the time, people invent very practical things that are not at all formally elegant. The invention gets the job done, but in a way that is very messy and unaesthetic.

But every once in a while I encounter a beautiful and simple theoretical framework that also produces a truly practical result. And when that happens, it takes my breath away.

And it reminds me, all over gain, why I love math so much.

I was on a panel yesterday where the topic concerned the future of communications technology. At some point, someone in the audience asked a very interesting question.

“Do the panelists think,” he asked (I’m paraphrasing), “that all of this advancement in communication technology is going to make society better? In what ways might it actually make things worse?”

I replied with the first thought that entered my head. “Societies have always been dysfunctional,” I said. “They’re just getting better at it.”

I am currently reading about dinosaurs. And I find myself thinking about the fact that they managed to stick around for more than 150 million years.

In contrast, we humans have been here for a mere blip of time. We pretty much just arrived here on planet Earth, and there is no particular guarantee that we will be here much longer.

Of course dinosaurs were not just one species — they were many species. If you take the long view, there is a reasonable chance that humans will give way to other human-like species, and then still other species after that.

All of those species will likely look back on us as a fascinating experiment, a necessary if failed step on the ladder of evolution. We will be seen as exhibiting the beginnings of higher intelligence, albeit in primitive form.

The species that will evolve from us, the ones that manage to last longer than a mere few hundred thousand years, will likely have traits that we lack. For one thing, there is a reasonable chance that they will have a very different relationship to their emotions.

An intelligent species that is capable of lasting millions of years will probably not be prone to sudden bouts of rage the way so many humans are. They will not find it so difficult to value members of their own species who seem different.

Unlike us, they will likely not lose their ability to think rationally when experiencing sexual attraction. And they will almost certainly have a much greater respect for the health of the planet that sustains them.

All of this is conjecture of course. But who knows — maybe one day, many millennia from now, these words might be read by a being far more intelligent than me.

And with any luck they will think “Well, he got some of it right.”

This past weekend somebody explained to me the concept of ego death. It is usually defined in the context of mythic stories or psychedelic drug use.

But it occurred to me that the concept fits neatly into the difference between lean-forward entertainment experiences, such as game play, and lean-back entertainment experiences, such as being told a story. The former preserves and even enhances the presence of the ego, whereas the latter temporarily annihilates it.

Our sense of self is in the very center of game-play. In a way, it is all about us. We place ourselves at risk in a safe context, and thereby learn our strengths and our limits.

But when being told a story, our self disappears. We are not in the story, and (other than in experimental works) we as individuals are not called out or referenced. It is only afterward that we apply our individual self to analysis of the narrative that we have experienced.

In a sense, good storytelling is all about ego death.