Ken's Blog

Continuing the conversation from yesterday, I love the fact that people have such different go-to movies. The movies listed by others are all films that I’ve seen and greatly admire (except for the french ones, which I hadn’t heard of), but most of them I am not sure I could watch over and over again.

I would think nothing of watching Blade Runner or Casablanca or Mary Poppins on an endless loop, but I don’t think I would be able to sit through It’s a Mad Mad Mad World too many times in any given decade. Which is not at all to say that my tastes are in any sense correct — only that they are my tastes.

How much, I wonder, can each of us be identified with our taste in movies? For example, given a group of people you know, and their respective list of go-to movies, would you be able to match each person to their particular list?

Or to put it another way, do we each have our own unique set of cinematic fingerprints?

As a medium, a movie is generally thought of as a one-time experience. We listen to favorite songs over and over, but most of us watch a typical film just once.

Which makes it all the more extraordinary when we encounter a film that cries out for repeat viewing. Each of us has our own particular list of what I call “go-to movies” — those films we would happily seen again, and again, at the drop of a hat.

There is a small list of movies that I have seen so many times that I have lost track of the number of times I’ve watched them. The following list is incomplete, but it is representative. Each time I see one of these films, I discover something new:

Annie Hall
Blade Runner
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Dr. Strangelove
Mary Poppins
Singin’ in the Rain
The Wizard of Oz

I suspect other people reading this have their own such list. Care to share?

If the Logo programming language could be implemented entirely in itself, would it be turtles all the way down?

I am saddened and horrified by the mass murder yesterday in Orlando. 49 innocent people dead, and 53 more wounded, because of something that is becoming frighteningly common in the U.S.: A madman bought a high powered military-style assault rifle and then used it.

I suppose I could use this space to talk about the NRA, but what would be the point? The horror of easy access to such high powered weaponry speaks for itself.

Yesterday was a terrible tragedy for those poor people and their families. My heart goes out to them.

And our continuing inability to have a sane conversation about these kinds of weapons is a terrible tragedy for our country.

I was attending a talk the other day, and at some point the speaker quoted Alfred Hitchcock:

“Drama is life with the dull bits taken out.”

I loved this quote, but was curious to understand the full context. So I went back to the original 1960 BBC interview. Excerpted from that interview, here is a fuller version of what he said:

“Life is more sensational. How does one describe drama? … Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”

Hitchcock’s thought, as I had hoped, was more complex than the simple version one usually hears. Seeing the full interview now, I get the sense that Hitchcock wasn’t merely trying to present entertaining fantasies.

Rather, he was trying to create films that reflected essential truths about life. Of course, given the limitations of his chosen medium, he needed to reduce life to its poorer cousin — drama.

At the Games for Change Europe conference this week here in Paris I learned that there are three things young kids in refugee camps say they are really excited about: (1) Learning English, (2) Making and sending videos on their mobile phones, and (3) Learning to program.

During a workshop at the conference, we talked about ways to make learning to program more accessible to those kids. Practically speaking, we figured it needs to be in on phones (which suggests using some sort of blocks language), and it needs to be in Arabic, since in the camps computers are scarce but SmartPhones are ubiquitous, and a lot more kids speak Arabic than English.

To get the conversation started, I sketched out a simple computer program, just to show the non-programmers in the room how simple programming can be. It’s a program that will be very familiar to some of you reading this blog.

The colleague I wrote about yesterday then translated it into Arabic. Here is what she came up with:

Other than the right-to-left ordering and the change in keywords, it’s very similar to the program I had sketched out. One thing she didn’t need to change was the use of Arabic numerals. 🙂

A good programmer who knows English but not Arabic should be able to figure out what this program computes. Can you?

This morning in Paris I had breakfast with a woman who is stateless. That is, she is not a citizen of any country. In particular, she is a political refugee from Western Saraha.

I think this may have been the first time I had ever personally met a Muslim refugee, although of course a vast number of them are out there. I was pleased to find her very warm hearted, extremely perceptive and rather brilliant. She was also clearly enjoying the open-mindedness of the people she was meeting in Paris.

And I wasn’t the only one who was having an exotic experience. At one point she reached across the table, shook my hand, and said “This is the first time I am having breakfast with a Jew.” She seemed to be thoroughly delighted by this.

It was also the first time I had ever seen the passport of a stateless person. With her permission, I took a photo of the cover:

I wish everyone were as centered as this woman is. I guess it makes sense: When you have been deprived of any place on earth to call home, you learn to be highly grounded.

I’ve gone skydiving in Grenoble, I’ve traveled down the wild Amazon river, I’ve gone mano a mano with the peddlers in Mysore. So you could say I’ve been around.

But until today I had never bicycled in Paris. Let me tell you, it’s a heady experience.

First of all, yes, you are taking your life into your hands. French drivers do not fool around. To put it bluntly, your job as a cyclist is to stay out of their path.

Second of all, it’s great fun! There really is no place like Paris, and seeing it by bike is exhilarating. History rushes over you like the wind, and your soul drinks it all in.

Still, there is something about the sheer danger of cycling through the City of Lights that I find oddly appealing.

In particular, I greatly appreciate the appeal of a physical activiy whose allure rests largely on the opportunity to not get yourself killed.

For the last few years I have been spending some time each summer visiting the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. It’s great place, with lots of energy and very hard working and talented teachers and masters students.

The CDM folks generally put me up in room 404. It’s a beautiful suite, quiet and comfy and tucked away at the very end of a hallway.

I have always enjoyed the fact that my room number there is 404, because in computer lingo that number has special significance. It’s the HTML error code number returned when you try to surf to a web page that your browser cannot find.

In such cases, host sites have historically returned a variant on the message “Error 404: page not found” (some of them very creative). I love the idea that maybe I’ve been staying in a room that cannot be found.

And sure enough, I’ve never had a random person knocking on my door, bothering me or invading my privacy. Maybe the magic mojo of that room number has been protecting me.

It’s a little like having a superpower, except in this case the superpower works only in one place in Vancouver. I’ve sometimes thought how cool it would be if I could check into my “unfindable” room wherever I went.

Today I arrived in Paris for a short conference, and they handed me a room key for room 404 — a quiet room at the end of a hallway. Maybe this superpower is portable after all…

For me, summertime at NYU is a fun time. Classes are out, and my colleagues and I are mostly here working away on research projects.

It’s a time when I really want to be around to work with my students and research scientists. On the other hand, it’s also a time of year when going away for a conference is a lot easier, since research schedules are much more flexible than teaching schedules.

Still, a trip out of town in the middle of collaborative research can be problematic. Yet just how problematic turns out to be a highly non-linear function of time.

For example, a two week trip away can cause a major disruption when you’re working with other people. In a collaborative work schedule, fourteen days is a very long time. New things are always coming up, based on the results of ongoing experiments.

Only after those results are known can we then design our next set of experiments. If you are away from that process for too long, it starts to interfere with the flow.

But I am about to go on a one week trip, and I realize that such a relatively short time away is much easier to work into the research schedule. We can all simply agree on what we are going to work on during that week — some of us on the road and others back at the lab.

Then a week later we can reconvene and compare notes. Not only isn’t it a problem, it’s actually a useful design pattern that we can work off of.

One week seems to be just about the right amount of time to go away, get something done that might contribute to an ongoing collaboration, and then come back again, without really interrupting the flow of the research.