Ken's Blog

Today I read a recent interview with Danny Bonaduce. He played Danny Partridge in the TV show The Partridge Family. In the show, he was the kid with attitude who was always causing trouble. Man how I had loved that character.

Fast forward to now. At one point in the interview Bonaduce was asked about his school days, which led to this exchange:

“You went to school with Michael Jackson. What was he like back then?”

“He was painfully shy. I remember one day I startled him by saying, ‘Hey, Mike, how come you never say anything?’ And he said, ‘Because I’m in constant remembrance of God.’ I said, ‘That’s cool, but what about girls?'”

Somehow, reading that made me very happy.

Yesterday I had the oddest thought. If I were a god, and I became tired of whatever was going on with my little humans, I could just swipe right.

With that one gesture I would move time forward by 100 years. Every person on the world stage would be gone, and there would be an entirely new set of players for my amusement.

I could just keep doing this until I found a century to my liking. With each wave of my hand, billions of people would simply be replaced by billions of different people.

The humans would never even know that this was happening. Which might be a good thing.

Today I was stuck on the NY Times Spelling Bee puzzle. There were a few words left that I just couldn’t get.

I started wondering if maybe these last few words were things I had never heard of. Perhaps they were the names of exotic South American plants or animals, or items of traditional garb in native cultures.

Then I took a little nap, and woke up quite refreshed. I picked up my phone, looked at the puzzle, and immediately keyed in those missing words. They were common English words after all.

So what was going on here? Was I unconsciously working on the puzzle while I was napping? Or does a good nap just make you smarter?

I guess it is all part of the mystery of naps.

Today is the day of the year, in 1446AD, when the Hongul alphabet, created by Sejong the Great, was first published, as the Hunminjeong’eum. In South Korea, October 9 is known as Hongul Day.

The introduction of Hongul remains perhaps the most radical and effective use of literacy to level the economic playing field for an entire society. Its creation was a very rare instance when someone at the top of an economically stratified society did something effective to make their society more just and less stratified.

Today is also John Lennon’s birthday. I suspect he would be very pleased to know that he was born on Hongul Day.

I completely understand why Mitt Romney doesn’t endorse Kamala Harris for president. It’s not that he doesn’t admire her leadership qualities. He makes it clear that he does.

Romney fully acknowledges that the current Republican presidential candidate might very well be the creepiest person who has ever tried to run for high office in this country. With the possible exception, he makes a point of noting, of the current Republican vice presidential candidate.

But we have a two party system, and that’s a good thing. After this clown show of convicted criminals and fear mongering wackos has run its course, the Republican party will need to be put back together again.

The Republican party, before it got hijacked, stood for more than denying election results, fawning over murderous dictators, trying to reduce women to second class citizens, and accusing black people of eating the pets of white people. I respect Romney for keeping open his option to help fix what these idiots have broken.

If we fast forward to the future, our relationship with generative A.I. will evolve. At some point it will no longer be new, and it will also be thoroughly integrated into our lives.

Foundational information technologies that we now take for granted were all once new. Studio recording of music, mass market book printing, motion picture recording, the pianoforte, to name just a few examples among many, were once seen by many as dangerous interlopers — fake things threatening to replace authentic things.

But eventually people figured out how to use those technologies as instruments to express human thought and emotion in ways that had never before been practical — or even possible. And now we forget that those things were ever more than tools which help to form our human culture.

The same thing will inevitably happen in our relationship to generative A.I. It’s not a question of whether, but of when.

Sometimes you get a chance to just get your work done. A cup of coffee, your computer, and that thing you wanted to work on but somehow just couldn’t find the time.

Today was one of those days for me. I had a solid block of hours just to work on my computer program, without needing to worry about anything else.

I got a lot done. And the experience was a complete delight from start to finish.

Now I can go back to dealing with so-called “real life”. 🙂

I would like to become a playwright, just so that I can write a play for Francis Jue and Kara Young.

Is that too specific?

Today I gave a talk, and something went wrong. Not terribly wrong, but wrong enough that it was clear to my audience that something went wrong. In this case I was using an unfamiliar projector, and I was foiled by some over-eager projector software that moved things around on my screen.

And from there reality forks into two directions. In one direction, there is the real time question of how to deal with what is happening in the moment. What do you say next? How do you keep your talk going, and integrate the error into your presentation without losing momentum?

In the other direction, what have you learned, and how do you apply that knowledge? Of course you start finding a way to make your software more bulletproof. But can you also develop new ways of recovering, in the moment, from the next inevitable presentation mishap?

The good news is that every failure is a lesson. As the saying goes, we never learn from our successes.

Are we moving through the world, or is the world moving through us?

And would we be able to tell the difference?