Ken’s Blog

I’ve noticed a pattern that persists through everything I do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s teaching, research, drawing a picture or organizing my apartment.

The only effective way to get anything done is to proceed in a “coarse to fine” manner. If you want to be effective, you need to rough things out before you dive into the details.

This might seem reasonable, but it can be hard to do in practice. The reason is that working on those details can be loads of fun.

So there is a temptation to go there right away, because it feels so good. But the problem is that if you start out working on those glorious details, you might very well need get to a point where you need to throw out everything you’ve already done.

Alas, if any given task doesn’t suit your larger project, you might find yourself going in circles. No matter how much fun it is.

I’ve decided to take seriously this project of reordering Wikipedia history. Mostly it has led me to node.js.

Using node.js, I think I can write a fairly simple program that does most of it for me. Then, once I have the entire history stream in proper chronological order, it will be fun to start using it for various things.

Maybe I will make it available as a resource so that people can try to do their own searches and visualizations over it. Fun for all!

Many mornings I start my day by going to the Wikipedia and learning about what important things happened in this day in history — at least according to the Wikipedia community. Usually I follow at least one link to learn more about some intriguing historical event.

This morning I realized, going through today’s historical events, how it has all been diced up and scrambled to suit the format. From the perspective of history itself, the grouping into days of the year is completely arbitrary.

I am thinking I might write an app that gathers all 366 entries and puts them into proper chronological order. That would allow different kinds of exploration of what happened throughout history — at least according to the Wikipedia community.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” — E.M. Forster, Howards End

When those lines by Forster were first published in 1910, they had deep resonance. Today, alas, “Only Connect” is a phrase that evokes disappointment.

What a difference a century makes.

Having watched lots of theater recently, I am becoming more aware about the interesting relationship between good theater and likability. In particular, the need for characters to be somewhat unlikable.

One of the things that draws us to good characters in good theater is the question of the ways in which we don’t like them, and why. We can sympathize with them, but the whole enterprise fails if we just think of them as swell people.

This is because the driving engine of good theater is the underlying question: “What is wrong with this person?” The audience is being asked to do the work of figuring out the nature of the trauma that each dynamic character is working through.

There needs to be a convincing portrayal of sickness before there can be wellness. There needs to be a mystery so solve, an injury to heal.

In short, we need to understand why we are being asked to go on this journey. If we find ourselves, in just the right way, not liking the characters up on stage, then we might very well be in for a great evening of theater.

On this day of the year 1446, the king of Korea invented a new alphabet. It is an alphabet that is used today by millions of people.

King Sejong the Great was dissatisfied that only a small percentage of his subjects were literate. So he invented an alphabet that would be accessible to all.

Of course this was all frowned upon by the elite literary class of the day. But it initiated a societal transformation by creating new educational and therefore economic opportunities for ordinary Koreans.

What I find most remarkable is the scholarly consensus that the king did not commission someone to create this alphabet for him. Rather, he personally created it himself.

Can you imagine any modern ruler doing something like that? It truly is unique as far as I can tell in the annals of history.

Today I saw three plays — one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. We in the audience wore masks, and that seemed right.

The first play was excellent. The second was problematic. The third was atrocious.

But even if they had all been great, I am thinking that three plays in one day is too many. Each play should be given its own space and focus.

From now on, I am going to limit myself to one play a day at most.

Following up on yesterday’s post, I’ve been thinking about what will happen when the physical and the virtual become ever more entwined. We won’t think of the objects around us as being either / or, but rather as both.

When that happens, there will be a seamless bidirectional interaction between the real and the virtual. We will still move the objects around us, but those objects will also move themselves.

We will come to think of the objects around us as the arms and legs of the software that runs our world. Chairs and tables will rearrange themselves for our convenience, lights and window shades will adjust themselves in subtle and useful ways, robots that we pay no attention to will pick up our groceries, organize our tables and bookshelves, clean and put away our dishes, and generally keep our lives in order.

That reality has already been coming for quite some time. We have robots all around us in the form of thermostats, air conditioners, pop-up toasters, elevators and doors that open for us when we walk into stores. And of course the automobile becomes an ever more sophisticated robot with every passing year.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to see this trend continue. Year after year, successive advances in machine learning continue to change our interaction with our physical world.

I suspect that as time goes on, some folks will end up feeling nostalgia for the “old ways”. But I, for one, will not miss putting away the dishes.

There will come a point when our physical objects and our virtual objects weave together seamlessly. With our smart glasses, we will be able to look at our toaster, our vacuum cleaner or our household robot, and see all sorts of virtual controls.

At that point various sorts of “consumer friendly” programming languages will become more relevant. Programming the world around us won’t just be something we do when we find ourselves in front of a computer screen.

It will be something that you can do anywhere and any time. And it will be a way to customize the world around you.

I am sure that those future programming languages will be very different from Javascript or C++. They will be intended to be used by people who don’t consider themselves programmers.

Maybe learning such languages will be considered a fundamental form of literacy, taught to school children the way we now teach reading and writing. As those children grow up, they may look back at our current era and marvel that we managed to get by with the benefit of such a basic form of literacy.

I spent part of today rearranging my office. The problem, which I know is not unique to me, is that I have lots and lots of books.

So I needed to put in new bookshelves. A very pre-internet sort of problem to have.

On the one hand it was difficult work — moving around boxes of stuff and piles of books. On the other hand, it made me feel very connected to the space and to the things within it.

As we all go more and more virtual, these problems will gradually go away. Books may become thought of as a quaint artifact of another age, the way we now look at steam engine locomotives.

But that sense of physical engagement, the investment of your own body into the process, will have been lost. I suspect that after that has happened, when accumulated knowledge no longer has a physical aspect, people will not realize what they are missing.