Ken's Blog

I am heartened that Donald Trump has picked a scary right-wing guy as his choice for running mate. Hard-core conservatives were never going to vote for a Democrat anyway, so Trump didn’t actually need to shore up support from the hyper-Calvinist right.

But now he has left the great undecided middle to Clinton, assuming she picks a centrist as her VP. Voters wary of radical politics in either direction will then have an easy choice.

This isn’t about the prospect of a Trump presidency per se. After all, if the Donald gets into the Oval Office, he’s not likely to influence policy all that much, since he doesn’t actually understand policy or government or all that complicated stuff that doesn’t fit into 140 characters.

Yes, he will probably paint the White House with the giant letters “TRUMP”. But I’m not sure he will actually do anything else, except perhaps try to enforce Article XII of the U.S. Constitution.

No, this is about what happens if anything were to happen to The Donald, and Mike Pence became president. If you’re LGBT, you’d better forget about the last 20 years of social progress. But if you’re a business that discriminates against LGBT citizens (or, for that matter, refuses to hire Jews because they offend your Christian beliefs), then Pence’s track record shows that he is totally your guy.

Also forget about abortion rights. And if you are a low income family, be afraid. Be very afraid. Mike Pence really does not like low income families. Forget about a decent minimum wage or adequate health coverage for your kids.

I’m hoping all of this means that millions of undecided voters will turn against Trump, out of a sense of self-preservation. Even if he is entertaining in a “What if Al Bundy ran for president?” sort of way.

It was hard to get through the day today as though nothing had happened. Everyone I know was very aware of the carnage in Nice.

I have been to Carnivale in Nice, so I know that Nice is a particularly child-friendly place. Families celebrate together, and the sense of joy and connectedness is very beautiful.

Which makes it even more incomprehensible that a so-called “ideology” would call for the wholesale slaughter of little children. Clearly the killers in this case did not care whether their victims were Muslim — many of the dead and injured were, in fact, Muslims.

All of this on the same day as a possible military coup in Turkey. I say “possible” because the military claims success, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims the coup has failed.

I suspect that U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump may be very confused by these events. Isn’t Thanksgiving supposed to be in November? I eagerly await his tweets on the subject.

Meanwhile, in events even more virtual, I am told that Pokémon monsters have invaded Auschwitz. The historical site of the brutal mass genocide of Jews at the hands of the Nazis is now, apparently, a place where you can catch virtual monsters with your phone, courtesy of the latest craze in location-based entertainment.

Speaking of Donald Trump, I suspect he may have the last word on this topic as well. After all, his policy toward all those hard working people he doesn’t consider “real Americans” would have made perfect sense to the National Socialists:

Gotta catch them all!

A lot of people I’ve been talking to have been asking variants on the same question: “Could you make a good narrative story in VR?” By “good”, they don’t mean award winning. They just mean passable — say, the level of a run-of-the-mill TV drama.

The issue is not one of quality. It’s more fundamental than that. Might it be the case that the very immersiveness that makes VR so compelling has other effects as well? Specifically, might it interfere with the distance needed to create fictional narrative?

To suspend our disbelief and immerse ourselves in a story, we need to be confident that it is not real. We might, for example, find it very difficult to focus on the tragedy of Macbeth if we thought that we ourselves could be murdered at any moment.

But the visceral quality of VR may interfere with this process. A primitive part of our brain might continue to remain alert, attuned to the possibility that somebody is actually sneaking up behind us.

Yet even if this is the case, it might not be bad for virtual reality. Maybe VR isn’t supposed to be some alternate form of movie. After all, film itself is not an alternate form of live theater. Rather, it is a separate medium, with constraints and possibilities all its own.

I am hopeful that VR, as it matures, will enable new ways of exploring and sharing the human condition that have never before been experienced. Yet I remain doubtful that it will do so by adopting the vocabulary and traditions of cinema.

This coming January our lab will be moving to a beautiful new facility, at the location of the former Forbes building at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. For me, one of the exciting things about this move is the fact that it will include a state of the art Virtual Reality lab.

The interiors are being constructed now, which as you can imagine is a massive undertaking. Every few weeks my colleagues and I go to the building, don hardhats and protective glasses, and get a tour of the facilities. It’s still bare cement floors and walls, exposed ductwork and wiring, and tape to mark where offices will be built.

Fortunately the University was kind enough to share with us the 3D CAD files containing detailed plans of the forthcoming interior. My brilliant student Sebastian Herscher has turned those files into a VR walkthrough.

Today, in our current VR lab, I donned a VIVE headset and took a tour through our future, still unbuilt, VR lab. It was all very vivid and wonderful.

You might say I had an experience of virtual virtual reality. There is something delightfully meta about that.

I remember when the first Bluetooth-enabled hands-free phones started showing up in New York City. I would be walking along Washington Square North, and pass by one person after another who appeared to be talking to themselves.

Seeing people talking to themselves in New York City was not at all a new phenomenon. The streets of New York, like the streets of many major cities, are filled with people who live in an alternate reality all their own.

But until the arrival of hands-free phones, you always knew that people who talked to themselves were exhibiting some form of schizophrenic behavior. After the arrival of those phones, it wasn’t so simple.

When people walked by me apparently talking to themselves, I found myself checking out how they were dressed. That was usually the most reliable way to figure out whether I was passing a lost homeless soul wandering within their own private universe or a yuppy investor making a business deal on the way to their power lunch.

Something similar is going to happen once mixed reality wearables become ubiquitous. More and more people are going to be walking down the street looking at things that nobody else can see, and gesturing in the air. Some of these people will be talking to actual other people, enabled by the latest technology. Others will just be living in their own imaginary worlds.

At some point the eyewear involved will look indistinguishable from ordinary eyeglasses. After that, if you want to figure out who is who, I guess you will just need to trust your fashion sense.

There is a lot of disagreement at this point about where virtual reality will be going. One camp says that it will take over the world.

Another camp suspects that prolonged exposure is fundamentally bad for us physiologically, on both a proprioceptic and vestibular level. People who worry about this are especially concerned about the effect on the still-developing brains of children.

On the other hand, children generally don’t go out to bars for a drink after work. Which means that one of the more interesting conjectural questions doesn’t really pertain to them.

Namely: Will VR bars ever become a thing? Will you and I ever go out to a bar together to throw back a few and chill out together after a long day’s work?

Except that I will be in New York and you will be in California. Or wherever.

Note that we don’t have Skype bars. So clearly there is some test of “being there together” that video chat fails. But is that a limitation of video chat, or a fundamental property of physical co-presence?

My guess is as the technology continues to improve, at some point the need for social connection will eventually win out over the need for physical co-presence. VR bars will be a thing.

If you can prove me wrong, I’ll be happy to buy you a non-virtual drink.

Today when you look at paper money in the U.S., you can tell at a glance what denomination you’re dealing with: Washington is on the one, Jefferson on the two, Lincoln on the five, Hamilton on the ten, Jackson on the twenty, Grant on the fifty and Franklin on the hundred.

Which means you can actually get away with not being able to read the words or numbers on these bills. All you need to do is recognize faces.

Yet all of that might change soon. If Donald Trump is elected in November, it is doubtful that he would tolerate so much unnecessary facial diversity.

By early 2017, the line-up is likely to be far more consistent: Trump on the one, Trump on the two, Trump on the five, Trump on the ten, Trump on the twenty, Trump on the fifty and Trump on the hundred.

Also, of course, Trump on the twelve, to match the number of articles in the U.S. Constitution. 🙂

The good news is that in order to know what money we are spending, we will actually need to be able to read the numbers on the bills. Which means that Donald Trump can legitimately say that his campaign is promoting literacy.

Isn’t that wonderful?

I was typing stuff into node.js today, and I was curious to know what would happen if I fed the Fibonacci function into itself. Feeling lazy, I first implemented the function the easy way, which takes an exponential time to compute:

fib = function(n) { return n < 2 ? n : fib(n-2) + fib(n-1); }

But when I ran it on numbers from 1 to 10, it hung after 9:

1 1
2 1
3 1
4 2
5 5
6 21
7 233
8 10946
9 5702887

So I decided to do it properly, using the non-recursive way of computing the Fibonacci sequence:

function fib(n) {
   var a, b = 1, c = 1;
   while (--n) {
      a = b;
      b = c;
      c = a + b;
   }
   return b;
}

This time everything computed immediately. Here are the first 11 results of fib(fib(n)):

1  1
2  1
3  1
4  2
5  5
6  21
7  233
8  10946
9  5702887
10  139583862445
11  1779979416004714000

After that it totally blows up. fib(fib(12)) is about 10³⁰, fib(fib(16)) is about 10²⁰⁶, and from 17 onward the result is so huge that node.js just returns Infinity.

Now I know. 🙂

Whenever I get on an airplane that travels between time zones, I set my computer’s clock to the time at my destination. I do this mainly to help my body adjust to the new time zone — specifically, to know to sleep and when to wake up. I know it seems silly, but it seems to actually work.

At the moment I am writing this while traveling on a flight from the East coast to the West coast of North America. Following my usual practice, I have already shifted my computer to West coast time.

Yet in some sense I don’t feel as though I am in any definite time zone. Rather, it feels like I am in a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty state of time zones. Not literally of course, but psychologically.

Writing a blog post while hurtling around the globe at nearly the speed of sound sort of blurs the whole notion of time zones, or of locality itself. Perhaps this is just one more manifestation of Applin and Fischer’s PolySocial Reality.

Or, in the immortal words of The Firesign Theatre, how can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?

I recently saw Noah Diamond’s spot-on re-creation of the Marx Brothers’ magnificent 1924 stage show I’ll Say She Is. Unlike their other shows from the 1920s, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, this one never made the transition to the big screen, so most people would never have seen it.

Amazingly, yet somehow not surprisingly, it was side-splittingly, laugh out loud funny. Amazingly because the show is 92 years old. Not surprisingly because, well, it’s the Marx Brothers.

Most comedy from the early 20th century does not age well. Intellectually, you can usually work out why it was supposed to be funny, but understanding why something could be funny is not the same as finding it funny.

Yet, remarkably, the Marx Brothers’ humor does not age. Decades may come and go, but their best work somehow never seems to dim with the passing years.

What is it about them that makes this so, I wonder. What, precisely, is different about their work? How did Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx somehow stumble upon an eternal fountain of comic youth?