Ken’s Blog

Today I was at a meeting where people with various kinds of expertise were gathered around a table to help figure out how we can use to use technology to better respond to disasters in cities.

We were discussing possible scenarios, and somebody suggested Hurricane Sandy. I said I was worried that this was too specific. “There are many different ways,” I said, “that something can put a big foot down on the city.”

Somehow this phrase stuck, and for the rest of the meeting people used the phrase “big foot disasters”.

In retrospect I realize that on some level I must have been thinking about Godzilla, although I didn’t realize it at the time. “Big foot disaster” is an oddly apt term, because it gets at the combination of insult and injury to a city that has been hit by any kind of assault just too big to shrug off.

Now all of these experts may very well continue to use that phrase. It might become part of the lexicon. I think I should be proud, but I’m not entirely sure.

I heard the most wonderful story today, from a colleague who works for a software company that helps optimize work flow.

He was telling us about this one time his company had developed a computer program to help a municipal power utility find the best route for its maintenance trucks. The general idea is that when a work crew goes out on the job, repairing and upgrading things around the city, choosing the optimal route through heavy traffic can save hours — and time is money.

One day he was showing the route his company’s software had calculated to the client’s road crew, when the foreman pointed at the screen and asked “Why does it say to turn left here? It’s a lot faster if we go right.”

He was surprised by the question. “You can’t go that way — it’s a one way street.”

He was even more surprised when they all started laughing. “Why is that funny?” he asked.

“You don’t get it,” the foreman explained, still laughing. “We’re the guys with the orange cones.”

For a dare, a quite intriging if absurd poser:
You might consider strangely rounded sentences.
Set in odd cadences, they reveal, by degree,
what age old absolute and, in essence, unvarying thing?

Three gifts I presented on this Mother’s Day,
Each one said something I wanted to say.

Each wrapped in paper, and sealed with tape,
All three were books of the same size and shape.

Yet all were quite different in subject and tone,
For each book was meant for one person alone.

One showed how Yiddish evolved by degrees,
The second, inventions by crazed Japanese.

The third described answers by students in school
That were all incorrect yet were funny and cool.

A few folks who know me, from those clues I’m sure
Will figure out just who each present was for.

And that, in a way, gets us right to the heart:
It’s important to know — to know right from the start —

That issues of wrapping, of size and of shape,
Are of no more import than the choice of Scotch tape.

In giving a gift those are not the core mission.
The key is that small spark of true recognition

Which is why when we shop so much time is involved
Until the true riddle of giving is solved:

To find that best gift, the best one by far,
That says: “I can see you; I love who you are.”

One my favorite moments in recent movie-dom occurred in “The Muppets” (2011), when the characters realize that they can get to Paris faster if they “travel by map”. Fozzie hits the conveniently located “TRAVEL BY MAP” button on his car’s dashboard, we cut to one of those old-fashioned animated maps with a big red traveling line right out of “Casablanca”, and voila! nous sommes arrivés.

The hell with the Star Trek transporter. That’s what I call traveling in style.

Today I had an experience not entirely dissimilar. I was meeting friends for brunch at the wonderful Champs Diner in Brooklyn (highly recommended!!!), so I went on Google Maps, which showed that the nearest subway stop was several blocks from my culinary destination.

I don’t carry a SmartPhone — one of my little rebellions, which I plan to keep up until Federal law is changed to make carrying of a SmartPhone a requirement for both U.S. citizenship and the right to use public bathrooms. The way things are going, I suspect that will happen sometime around mid-2014. But I digress.

Rather than draw myself a map, I decided to visually trace the route from subway stop to restaurant door, courtesy of Google Maps Street View. The experience was eerily like walking along a street. Even the pace felt similar, as I glided past houses, shops and intersections, turning corners as per Google’s directions until my virtual self arrived at the restaurant door.

When later in the day I emerged from the actual subway stop in Brooklyn, everything clicked into place. As I walked along, I recognized this fancy entrance on my left, that funny colored building on my right. These streets I had never before visited felt completely familiar, with never a moment of doubt about where and when to turn.

You could call it a successful experiment. My only regret was that my little walk brought me to my destination all too soon, so much was I enjoying this pleasant stroll in a familiar place where I had never been.

Alas, there is not much Oracle support for Java these days. So if you happen to be interested in musical performance in Java, as I am, you need to turn to other sources.

Fortunately, there is an answer — which has actually been there all the time. It uses a combination of two wonderful interpreters — the “K” interpreter and the “LN” interpreter. Each of these is impressive individually, but when combined, the result is really amazing musical Java performance.

But why take my word for it? You can see for yourself here!

I talked to my class yesterday about this project of making it easier to learn how to visualize things in four dimensions.

We went over the principle of the 4D virtual trackball, then everybody got to try out the Oculus Rift, to experience for themselves what an immersive graphical world is like.

Even before we demo’d the Oculus Rift, I asked the class how many of them would be interested in exploring the fourth dimension. A lot of hands went up.

I consider this a very good sign.

Today it was raining in NY City as I walked to work. It was a rather light and pleasant rain. Except for one oddity.

As you undoubtedly know if you live in a big city, fellow pedestrians carrying umbrellas can be hazardous to your health. If people are not mindful, those ungainly objects, with their sharp and spiky metallic parts, can poke you in the eye.

Unfortunately, there is now a class of pedestrian that is very much not mindful. These are the people who hold their umbrella in one hand and their SmartPhone in the other.

It’s not so much that they are holding the SmartPhone — it’s that they are staring intently into it, oblivious to the world around them. When I see somebody carrying both an umbrella and a SmartPhone, I steer a very clear path.

I suspect that if one of these multi-taskers did poke you in the eye with their umbrella, they wouldn’t even notice. After all, they are not really present on that rainy street. Rather, they are living in the world of whatever or whoever is currently on the little screen in their hand.

It makes for an odd rain experience, and one can only live in hope that something will come along soon to wean people off this strange way of being.

Hmm, come to think of it, “odd rain” is an apt anagram for the situation. As is “in hope”, for that matter.

Just what they are anagrams for, I will leave as an exercise for the reader. 🙂

Many years ago, when I was a lot younger, I saw Star Wars for the first time. Like a lot of people, I was entranced by the adorable robots. I thought “wouldn’t it be cool if we actually had robots like that in our own lives?”

Being a practical young man, I set about thinking what might be a good way to do this. It occurred to me that the best way might be to cheat — to create the theatrical experience of a robot, without trying to really make the robot as smart as a human. I called my concept “House with robot”.

I’ve come to realize that all through my career I’ve embraced this sort of cheating as a general theme — from my work on procedural textures to interactive animated characters to robot swarms to zooming interfaces: The trick is to create the illusion that something impossible is going on, while pulling strings behind the scenes to support that illusion.

The basic idea of “house with robot” was that your house itself would actually contain the real smarts — via computers responding to sensors embedded in the walls and floors, microphones, heat detectors, and cameras that would watch you to figure out what you were doing. Your robot servants, which to you would appear to be really smart, would actually just be puppets, tele-operated by a behind-the-scenes computer array to create the illusion of an embodied intelligence.

The robot would be the face that you see, but the brains and much of the sensing smarts would really be somewhere else in the house.

This might seem weird, but it’s actually what your iPhone already does. Without the “cloud”, your pretty SmartPhone would be little more than a useless hunk of metal, plastic and glass. A distributed server located somewhere else is actually computing all those map routes, looking up facts for you, feeding answers to Siri, and doing most of the cute and amazing things that you associate with the magical electronic object in your hand.

Today I was talking with a friend who is working on writing a book about the future of robots in our lives. I described my idea from long ago, and he said that it still sounds like a good approach, even after all these years.

So if you want to have R2-D2 and C-3PO in your life, maybe you need to build a house, from the ground up, that does all the heavy lifting to make your robot seem intelligent. What you really need is a “house with robot”.

If you recall, when you look head-on at a virtual trackball, you can’t actually see that your movements to “spin the ball up and down” and “spin the ball left and right” are creating curved motion. In the picture I first showed (below), the red and green arrows look straight to us, even though they are describing curves:

That’s because we were looking edge-on at the third direction. It’s like looking at a spinning bicycle wheel when the bicycle is heading toward you.

Similarly, if you are looking at a sphere floating in space in front of you, and you are looking edge-on into a fourth dimension, then your view of any spin that rotates the ball into that fourth dimension is going to have the same problem: You are basically looking head-on at a spinning bicycle wheel.

To turn a floating sphere into a four dimensional trackball, you just need to count how many ways there are to spin a bicycle wheel edge-on. It turns out there are three, since each of our familiar three dimensions can spin into that fourth dimension.

If you add the three ways of spinning a sphere that only involve our familiar three dimensions, you get six spin dimensions all together:

It should be pretty clear from the picture what’s going on: You can rotate the ball in three directions that don’t involve that fourth dimension at all, just like a regular track ball (the red, green and blue arrows).

Or, you can rotate it in a way that swaps any of our three dimensions for that fourth dimension (the cyan, magenta and yellow arrows).

Recall that some rotations on a regular virtual trackball require moving your finger in a straight line on your iPad screen (as in the first picture above). Something similar is happening here.

Namely, on a 4D virtual trackball you make those last three rotations (cyan, magenta and yellow) by moving your hand in a straight line inside the sphere that is floating in front of you.

I find it thrilling that you can manipulate a 4D object while staying safely inside our little 3D world. We’re working on building this stuff right now at NYU, using the Oculus Rift and our own hand tracking software. I will let you know when we have something cool to show.