Ken’s Blog

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Doug Engelbart. As many of you know, he co-invented many things we now take for granted, including the computer mouse, hypertext, graphical user interfaces, and computer networking.

But more important than any of these individual contributions was his influence in a powerful view of computer technology: That the true betterment of society through technology cannot come from innovations within a handful of companies. Rather, what is required is literacy on a massive scale. The citizenry needs to be fully engaged in using such technology for the creation of original ideas, of new ways of thinking and doing things.

I fully believe in this vision. After all, we already live in a world where millions of citizens are able contribute to our culture of music, literature, theatre and the visual arts. Powerful works in these media emerge from the “long tail” of the citizenry on a regular basis.

And only in the last five years we have seen a transformation in the production of film and video. Thanks to wide adoption of recently developed technologies for digital video production and distribution, young people today have a fluency in creating works for this medium that would have been unthinkable less than a generation ago.

Sometime in the coming decade, this revolution will extend to procedural creation, when a new generation of young people will be able to draw on computer programming to help in the creation of new cultural works and the expression of original ideas.

And when that happens, somewhere the spirit of Doug Engelbart will be smiling.

When we experience an author’s work, we often feel the echoes of some earlier work. Sometimes we can be sure that the influence was real, as in the influence of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” on Laurents’ “West Side Story”. In this case, the former was itself an adaptation of a tale by Matteo Bandello, by way of Pierre Boaistuau, by way of Arthur Brooke.

But sometimes these echoes are far more subjective. For example, I often hear strong chains of influence between music from different historical eras, and I am left wondering whether the connection actually existed in the mind of the composer.

Here’s one such chain, listed in forward chronological order:

NAME OF WORK	COMPOSER	NATURE OF INFLUENCE
Erbarme Dich, mein Gott!	Johann Sebastian Bach
Manhã de Carnaval	Luiz Bonfá	Harmonic/Melodic
Fantasy	Earth Wind and Fire	Melodic
Lucky	Daft Punk	Textural/Rhythmic

To be sure, there is great aesthetic change from each piece to the one below it. Just two steps suffice to make the connections disappear. Yet to me the chain of influence from each work to the next feels very strong.

Your mileage may vary.

Unicode is the standard decided upon by the computing industry for representing text in almost all of the world’s writing systems. So far, it contains well over one hundred thousand characters, and it’s still growing.

But one little subset of Unicode completely fascinates me, because it has a particular kind of resonance. That is the set of 112 Unicode identifiers reserved for arrows. How they decided that 112 was the right number is a bit of a mystery to me, but I do know the Unicode committees like to organize things into multiples of sixteen, since that makes for nice hexadecimal divisions. I guess somehow they decided that six groups of sixteen were not quite enough, eight were too many, and seven were just right.

Anyway, here they are, in all their pointed glory:

←	↑	→	↓	↔	↕	↖	↗	↘	↙	↚	↛	↜	↝	↞	↟
↠	↡	↢	↣	↤	↥	↦	↧	↨	↩	↪	↫	↬	↭	↮	↯
↰	↱	↲	↳	↴	↵	↶	↷	↸	↹	↺	↻	↼	↽	↾	↿
⇀	⇁	⇂	⇃	⇄	⇅	⇆	⇇	⇈	⇉	⇊	⇋	⇌	⇍	⇎	⇏
⇐	⇑	⇒	⇓	⇔	⇕	⇖	⇗	⇘	⇙	⇚	⇛	⇜	⇝	⇞	⇟
⇠	⇡	⇢	⇣	⇤	⇥	⇦	⇧	⇨	⇩	⇪	⇫	⇬	⇭	⇮	⇯
⇰	⇱	⇲	⇳	⇴	⇵	⇶	⇷	⇸	⇹	⇺	⇻	⇼	⇽	⇾	⇿

 
What I love about this set of shapes is that it represents all sorts of ways that one thing can relate to another, without saying anything at all about what those things might be. You can take this as a vocabulary for relating power relationships, or political affiliations, or perhaps types of love.

In fact, simply looking at some of these arrows suggests ideas about how things could relate to each other. One can imagine, say, the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince penning an album of songs with some of these evocative symbols as titles. For example, the rightmost arrow in the fourth row could be interpreted as meaning, roughly, “Nothing compares 2 U”.

You might want to try your hand at mapping these suggestively sagittate glyphs into some meaning structure near and dear to your heart, whether it be battles of the American Civil War, concepts of quantum physics, or the daimonica in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.

I’ve generally thought of Vampires and Zombies as being on opposite ends of the pop culture spectrum, and I’ve written before in these pages about the dialectic created by such perfectly contrasting monsters.

But I’ve just discovered the wonderful gem Lifeforce. Directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist), with visual effects supervised by John Dykstra (Star Wars) and music by Henry Mancini (just about everything), in its own cheesy way this neglected 1985 film is a pop-cultural masterpiece.

It is, in the grand tradition, a space opera / monsters from outer space movie.

But it is also a wonderful vampire movie.

And it is also a wonderful zombie movie.

It is also, I am happy to say, an example of a movie that just gets kookier and more out there as it goes along. Watching it was a hoot. Just when I thought things couldn’t get more nutty, they got more nutty. Highly recommended.

If you’ve ever wondered how a vampire movie and a zombie movie can be seamlessly combined into one sublimely crazy package, you definitely need to check this out.

Happy Canada Day!

In 2012 I contributed money to the reelection of Barack Obama. And while I am not happy with everything our president has done since the election, I am satisfied that on balance the actions of this administration remain far more aligned with my vision for our country than anything I had heard from the opposition party.

However, I have been comparing notes with my friends, and have discovered that we share one unfortunate collateral effect of our collective generosity: many emails a day from all sorts of political groups aligned with the Democratic party.

I get emails from concerned groups in Iowa, from Indiana, and from many other places in the U.S. far from where I live, all explaining that my $2 contribution is the only thing saving the great state of [fill in the blank] from political ruin.

I get urgent personal emails from Barack Obama, or Michelle Obama, or some famous rock star, all of which leave me wondering whether these so-called correspondents even know that such emails are being written in their names.

I receive emails wondering why I have not yet jumped on the absolutely free opportunity to meet Barack Obama. That particular gambit is clearly a way to gather “higher quality” names. If you respond, then you can be tagged as far more likely to donate money.

A few of these groups give you a way to opt out of their list, but most do not. The only way I know of to fight the rising tide is to add filters to my email program. But the people who do this apparently thought of that, because they keep switching the sender’s name and email address. Which makes me wonder — do they think I will send money just because I enjoy being annoyed?

I propose to start a Political Action Committee whose sole mission is to help people fight email spam from their own political party. Unlike most PACs, I believe this one will be equally popular with Republicans and Democrats, with those on the left and those on the right of the political spectrum.

At last, a cause behind which everyone can rally, a truly unifying mission to bring together our sadly divided nation.

We are going to raise so much money. 🙂

I had a conversation this week with a game designer who targets her games specifically toward female players. The underlying premise of her game design approach is based on studies showing that, on average, girls and women are better at keeping track of large numbers of objects, whereas, on average, boys and men are better at keeping track of moving objects.

Much current game design privileges the latter skill, hence the common perception that boys are better than girls at playing computer games. Her argument is that alternate game mechanics based on “discovering things”, rather than “shooting things”, would be more interesting and fun for female players.

I suggested that this disparity might also explain some other cultural phenomena. For example, on average, boys seem to enjoy action films more than girls, whereas girls seem to enjoy romantic comedies more than boys. Perhaps, I said, this is because action films require an interest in following moving targets. A romance, in contrast, does not usually involve lots of objects flying around on the screen. But taken as a whole, it involves a much greater degree of complexity.

For example, to properly follow a Transformers film, you must be motivated to observe and understand the movements and locations of a large number of flying robots. But to properly follow “Pride and Prejudice”, you need to be motivated, and able, to observe and understand far more salient details than will ever be found in an action film.

To my game designer acquaintance this seemed like a plausible theory. Of course it has no scientific validity until somebody does a well designed controlled study. I wonder who would fund such a study?

Today I was trying to describe to someone my view on the limits of artificial intelligence, compared with the intelligence of the human brain, and I ended up drawing an image on the whiteboard to explain it.

I then went back to my computer and generated the image below, based on that sketch:

Basically, I see human intelligence as a kind of mountainous island in a sea of “how much human intelligence we can emulate with technology”.

As our technology gets better, the water level gradually rises, and we observe that the area of the island is gradually shrinking. This gives us a satisfying feeling that we are “solving” the problem of artificial intelligence.

Alas, only early successes are easy. The more we fill in the shallows, the more challenging things get, as we encounter the ever steeper slopes of human-like intelligence.

The real issue, as I understand it, is that center of the island — actual human intelligence — is vastly high, far taller than anything we are capable of doing with our current level of computation.

It is possible that many years from now we will manage to raise the sea level to the very top of the mountain. But I suspect that if this ever occurs, it will be so far in the future that nobody alive today will still be around when it happens.

The other day a friend was showing me a feature of his rented Car2Go. Because your only cost is a per-minute rental rate (the company takes care of everything else), it is in their interest that you get good gas mileage, and in general avoid doing things that add to wear and tear.

To this end, they provide a little game for the driver. The better you drive — accelerate smoothly, get better gas mileage, brake properly — the more points you score on a cute little game that is displayed on a screen near the dashboard.

My friend was quite addicted to this game. He said that not only does it lead him to drive better, but he also feels great whenever he manages to return the car with high scores.

I found the whole thing fascinating. “They are not just providing a rental car as a utility,” I said, “They are repositioning it as entertainment.”

He pointed out that cars have always had an entertainment component, and on one level I had to agree. After all, the utility of a $250,000 BMW as a vehicle for getting from one place to another is not what justifies its high price tag. At that level you are paying for the entertainment value of driving around in a beautiful high status car.

“But this is different,” I said, after thinking about it for a few minutes. Traditionally the entertainment value of a car is intimately connected to its ability to raise your social status. The game on the dashboard of the Car2Go has nothing to do with social status, unless you happen to tell your friends about it and they happen to be impressed.

You are playing a computer game, pure and simple. The rental company might be deriving a utility benefit, but to you the value of this game rests almost entirely in the entertainment value of playing it.

I would argue we are seeing here the emergence of something new, evidence of a fundamental shift in society: The information economy is now becoming so dominant, that it is even starting to take over the manufacturing economy.

I was with a group of fellow scientists recently on a selection committee that was charged with choosing sessions for an upcoming science conference. At some point we got to one submission that had a title something like “Women in science: Encouraging broader participation”. That’s not the exact title, but you get the idea.

One of the scientists said “Finally, a submission about gender!”

I turned to her and said “No, it’s about women.”

At which point I realized everybody was looking at me, and I would need to explain myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I was just channeling my inner Simone de Beauvoir.”

I’m fascinated by words and phrases whose form is the opposite of their meaning. Sort of like an oxymoron, but on a meta-level.

One example that comes to mind is “to noun” — a term that describes the process of turning a verb into a noun. For example, an archeological dig, a witch hunt, a clam bake, are all examples of a verb being repurposed to serve as a noun.

They have all been nouned. Yet “to noun” is itself an example of a noun that has been repurposed to serve as a verb — exactly the opposite of nouning (I guess you could say it has been verbed).

What should we call these examples of the form of a word or phrase suggesting the opposite of its meaning, such as “breviloquent”, or “eschew obfuscation”?

I’m open to suggestions.