Ken's Blog

I just heard a rumor that the estate of Randy Wolfe of the band Spirit is being sued. Lawyers representing the estate of George Harrison have pointed out that the intro to Wolfe’s song Taurus — a relative minor chord with a prominant descending baseline — is eerily similar to the intro to While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

There is another rumor that the estate of George Harrison of the band The Beatles is being sued by The Walt Disney Company on behalf of songwriter Richard Sherman. Laywers representing Disney have pointed out that the intro to Harrison’s song While My Guitar Gently Weeps — a relative minor chord with a prominant descending baseline — is eerily similar to the intro to Chim Chimney.

Rumor also has it that the whole seedy affair is blowing up into a major scandal, on a par with the Panama Papers. It seems that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of songwriters have been blatantly stealing this musical structure from each other, in a major creative crimewave that has been going on for centuries.

Lawyers are very happy.

This morning, multitasking in my kitchen, I shut off the running water in the sink and then turned to switch off the blender behind me. But then a funny thing happened.

While I was looking at the blender, I realized I could still hear the water running in the sink. Figuring I had not managed to shut it off all the way, I turned back toward the sink.

But the moment I looked at the sink, two things happened simultaneously: (1) I saw that the water was no longer running, and (2) the sound of running water suddenly vanished. All I could now hear was the sound of the still-running blender.

Apparently the loud whirring of the blender had created a kind of sonic illusion. Somehow my ears had been tricked by the presence of that louder noise into continuing to “hear” the sound of water running.

Now I am wondering whether we can use such sonic illusions when designing immersive virtual realities. Rather than creating a literal sound for every activity in a simulated environment, we might be able to use sleight of hand to merely suggest the presence of some activities, and then use sonic masking (the equivalent of that running blender) to help sell the illusion.

Sounds like an interesting research project waiting to happen…

When I first watched The Truman Show I was already an adult, but the kid in me felt a powerful tug of recognition. I was reminded of when I was around nine years old, and I would often wonder whether the ostensible reality around me was merely a cover for a deeper reality.

Maybe, my child self had thought, everybody is just pretending, putting on a show for my benefit. At school I would find myself carefully watching my classmates and my teachers, waiting for some false move, a telltale rip in the fabric of so-called reality.

But at the same time, another part of me was wondering why I was doing all this. I did not yet know the phrase “Occam’s Razor”, but the principle would have made perfect sense to me. Why postulate an elaborate ruse, when directly perceived reality is already so wondrous and amazing?

Eventually I came to a different conclusion about my wish to uncover a deeper truth behind so-called reality. I decided that this wish did not come from an intellectual place. Rather, it came from an emotional place, out of a desire for some sort of transcendence.

Rationally, of course, such “reality is fake” theories don’t really add up. Once you start looking for a “truer” reality behind this one, where do you stop? Wouldn’t it just be turtles all the way down?

Science fiction and many religions share this idea of a “deeper” reality beyond the one we see. From the Hindu concept of Maya to the Christian belief in a Heaven that awaits us after death, through mystical thinkers from Siddhartha to Teresa of Avila to Meister Eckhart, in popular fantasies from The Wizard of Oz to Dark City, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor and Inception, we are perpetually drawn to the idea of drawing aside the veil of our perception to discover something deeper and more real.

I’ve long concluded that this phenomenon, this burning desire to ask, in essence, “What is the Matrix?”, is a side-effect of macro-evolution. For whatever reason, a social species capable of bonding through grammatically evolving spoken language apparently has a better chance of survival if its members question the reality of their own perceptions.

I’m not sure why this is a survival trait for our species, but on balance I’m sort of glad it is, since it makes life a lot more interesting. Now excuse me while I look for the door in the back of that wardrobe…

Yesterday, for the first time in this election cycle, I heard Hillary Clinton give a great campaign speech. Not a great policy speech, or “position-paper” speech, but a flat-out great campaign speech.

She took down her opponent by decisively and accurately enumerating his weaknesses and deficiencies. And she did it calmly and cooly, with humor, cleverness, and tremendous poise.

Like it or not, the race for the President of the United States is partly about which candidate is able to most effectively project a sense of power and command. That’s largely a result of the multiple roles a President plays in the U.S.: top military commander, most powerful agent for economic policy, and the nearest thing our country has to a regal figurehead.

Today Clinton hit those marks perfectly. She stopped acting like a policy wonk (although she really is a highly gifted policy wonk) and started to act like a President.

One of the two leading candidates for President is an actual expert, with deep knowledge of our government, our legal system and our economic system, and the other one is a highly gifted TV personality. Up until now, the TV personality had been grabbing the entire spotlight.

Perhaps the conversation is finally starting to shift from reality television to reality.

i wrote code to type
text by piano, and my
thoughts turned to music

Today I got back the student reviews of my class from this last semester. In general were really positive. Several students said it was the best class they had taken at NYU.

Some students had constructive suggestions for how the class could be better, and I’m always grateful for that. It’s a class I really care about. I spent long hours preparing the lectures this semester, I wrote a lot of custom code to enable students to do assignments at a high level, and I often met with students one-on-one to help them when they are having difficulty.

But one student review was weirdly personal, in a way I’ve never seen before. This student (anonymous of course) called me lazy and rude, and several other negative things.

I tried to think back over the semester, to identify a moment when I could have said something off-putting, or inadvertently offensive. I came up with nothing.

The general feeling in the class the whole semester had been so positive. Students were clearly proud of the work they were doing, everybody was mutually supportive, and we all loved the subject.

So I kept trying to make sense out of this one negative review, thinking that perhaps there was something I could learn from it. Maybe there was some lesson I could take away to help me be a better teacher.

But in the end I was stumped. Sometimes you just need to accept the mystery of other human beings.

Suppose reality checks were actual checks? I mean, suppose there were financial consequences for constructing and maintaining a self-delusional narrative of your own life.

Every time you mentally replaced the actual actions and beliefs of other people by your own fictitious version of those actions and beliefs, you’d be required to write a check. The greater the self-delusion, the bigger the check.

And everytime you got it right by managing to see people for who they really are, you’d receive a check. The greater your degree of honesty and self-awareness, the larger would be your cash reward.

Do you think that would work? Would an actual incentive system prompt people to be more honest with themselves, and sensitive to each other?

Or would people still prefer to cling to a cherished delusion, no matter how high the cost?

We will be moving our research lab here at NYU sometime in the next year to larger and fancier new digs. Needless to say, there have been a lot of meetings about this to plan out the space, work through the details, and make sure our new location will be everything we want it to be.

In particular, we will be getting a much nicer and larger virtual reality lab. Right now that VR lab exists only as a set of plans. Over the course of the coming months, a lot of construction work will be done to make it a reality.

Fortunately, the architects were kind enough to send us digital files that specify the size and shape of everything. This includes ductwork, columns, window locations, and all the myriad details that are part and parcel of a professional work environment.

That information was enough for our research team to create a virtual reality version of the envisioned space. Donning our VIVE headsets, we can walk around in the not-yet-real space, and experiment with lighting, furniture placement, configurations of the wired ceiling grid, and all the other details that go into making a successful VR lab.

It occurs to me that there is something very meta about all this. We are using our research in virtual reality to design a space for doing research in virtual reality.

How cool is that?

“What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”
— Carol Bayer Sager

Tonight an old friend and I were having one of those free ranging conversations that travel effortlessly between the present and the distant past. Anecdotes from long ago mingled casually with up to the minute events.

I found myself thinking of the song “Time Warp” from Rocky Horror, and specifically the lyrics “It’s a bit of a mind flip / you’re into a time slip / and nothing can ever be the same.” And I found myself thinking, is that really true? Is it true that, as Wolfe said, you can’t go home again?

Suppose you could go into a time slip whenever you wanted, transport yourself back to when you were twelve years old, or five, or seventeen, and relive those moments in all their vivid reality. You couldn’t change anything, because then you’d negate the existence of your current self. But you could look, and hear, and feel. Like Emily Webb, you could relive a day long past.

Would you do this? My first answer upon pondering this question was an unequivical “Yes!”. But then I thought about it some more, and now I’m not so certain.

Memories are not literal. Rather, they are part of a narrative that we have each constructed for ourselves through the years, a sort of living defense against the randomness of reality. We need our stories, our personal myths. Just as Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, we each stand upon the shoulders of our younger selves.

But if we went back and had to face our past reality as it truly happened, we might discover all sorts of unpleasant truths. We might no longer be able to draw upon our most sacred truths.

Maybe that’s a good thing. On the other hand, maybe it’s not worth the risk.

I was talking with my mom this evening, and she reminded me of a time when I was little and I made a cat sculpture for a school assignment. She said that this sculpture had convinced her I was really into art.

I reminded her that I had never actually finished that cat sculpture. I can still remember, all these years later, the unfinished cat, its blocky form facing me accusingly, as though reproving me for having left it incomplete.

She said yes, that’s true, but that wasn’t the point. What she remembers is that I had described to her in great and enthusiastic detail just what it would take to finish the sculpture.

And she had realized in that moment that for me the point wasn’t to finish the cat, but rather to understand it. In my process, the important thing was not completing a task, but rather using that task to learn and to understand the process of creation.

After that, she and my dad paid for me to take art lessons. I am very glad that they did, because what I learned about visual expression in those lessons has been incredibly useful.

Thinking it over now, I realize that this has been my strategy ever since. I’ve gone into research rather than production. In research I can quickly prototype, and then iterate on those prototypes to explore new ideas as they come up. I don’t think I could have worked that way if I had been, say, working on feature films.