Ken's Blog

My friend Sally says that I should put a “trigger warning” before this post in light of the attacks in Paris, because I talk about fictional violence in a sci-fi cop show. I’m not sure I agree — to me fiction is a safe place, because it isn’t reality, and that’s part of the point of talking about a silly sci-fi cop show right now. But everyone is different, so here is a trigger warning, just in case.

When the sadness of the real world gets you down, you can always take a mini-vacation by watching a silly TV show. Which is exactly what I did last night.

At the recommendation of a friend who knows I am interested in time travel, I started watching Flash Forward, an extremely high concept TV show from 2010. In the first episode, everybody in the world blacks out at exactly the same time, for exactly two minutes and 17 seconds.

After everyone wakes up, they eventually realize that each person on earth has had a vision of what they will be doing at the same moment six months into the future. Totally trippy, right?

On the surface this might seem like a great basis for a series. Unfortunately the narrative constraint of the premise forces the show’s characters to be more like characters in a video game than in a flesh and blood drama.

Fortunately, this same problem can also lead to some great unintentional comedy. For example, one lead character, a cop, is freaked out because he had no flash-forward vision at all. He worries that in six months he may be dead.

But then a minor character, another cop, shows up and tells him not to worry. She didn’t have any visions either, she says, and she finds it rather refreshing. At which point all I’m wondering is how many minutes of show time this character has left to live.

Sure enough, in the very next scene she dies in a gun fight. Soon after that, the cop who had no flash-forward is telling somebody how freaked out he is. “I met a woman today who also had no vision during the blackout” he says. “Five minutes later she was dead. How do you explain that?”

In that moment I felt a flicker of hope. Because right then and there the show could have totally redeemed itself, if only the other person had replied: “Bad writing?”

Alas, they didn’t go there. Sigh.

I looked for you today in Washington Square.

They are painting flowers there, one by one.

People murmur quietly in two languages, under the Tricolore that now waves high atop the arch. The feeling is of great sadness.

I become aware of a stunned yet insistent voice that has been speaking within my head.

And I finally listen to what it has been telling me: “We are all Charlie Hebdo now.”

This evening I am too devastated by the horrifying events in Paris to be able to focus on anything else. Such cruelty is far beyond my understanding.

As I write this, we do not know who is responsible for those attacks, nor their reasons. But at some point reasons cease to matter. No ideology, no matter how fervently held, justifies the mass killing of innocents.

Could there be anything more fundamentally true than this? What kind of monster is capable of deciding to slaughter large numbers of innocent people, merely to score political points?

I am writing this on Thursday November 12, but you will probably not read it until Friday November 13. That’s because my ISP host crashed. Two days of digital data — everything since their last backup — is currently in limbo. They are trying to restore things, but it’s not clear that anything I post will make a difference until they finish, which they say will be some time tomorrow.

I find it both fascinating and disturbing that this blog has lost several days of memory, at least for now. Anybody going to this site (until the problem is fixed) who has already read the posts of the last two days will find them mysteriously vanished, as though those posts had never existed. It’s as though we’ve slipped into an alternate reality in which this blog has contracted short term digital amnesia.

I sense an opportunity for a dystopian story somewhere here. Imagine you wake up one morning to discover that everybody else has forgotten the last several days of your life. You have all of these vivid memories of specific events, but to everyone else, it’s as though those events never happened.

Somehow I suspect that this idea has already been used in literature, but I can’t quite figure out where or by whom. Maybe my memory is going… 😉

The New York Times has two daily KenKen puzzles: a 4×4 and a 6×6. After having done them for many months, I can always do the smaller one in my head. For the larger one, I need to use a pen, except on Monday, which is the easiest day.

It occurred to me recently that the 4×4 KenKen puzzle would make an excellent plot point for a spy novel. Every morning, our intrepid secret agent would open up the daily newspaper, solve the 4×4 KenKen in his or her head, and then use the order of the four numbers first row as a one time code. Because the code would change every day, the enemy would never be able to figure out the pattern.

Unless, of course, the enemy were to read this blog entry. So in a sense, just by writing this, I have potentially ruined an entire method of subterfuge for any would-be spy.

But I’m ok with that. After all, you get certain privileges when a puzzle is named after you. 😉

Speaking of architectural style, today I had lunch at a restaurant in Vancouver that had a particularly vivid interior design. Sadly, this is the last day of my visit to this wonderful city, so perhaps I was making sure to take especially careful note of my surroundings.

There was something very precise about this restaurant’s decor: Tall ceilings, support columns made of rough vertical timbers, lots of exposed unpainted air ducts crossing high in the air above our heads. It all felt vaguely industrial, but with a particular sort of rustic flavor, subtlely evoking the way Vancouver itself might have been when many such towns were early western outpost for the lumber mill trade.

Of course there were also wine racks built into the walls, a gleaming bar, a well turned out wait staff, and plenty of polish to tell you that this was, in fact, an upscale establishment. If you had any doubt on that score, you had merely to glance at the prices on the menu.

We have equivalent restaurants in New York City, although I am so used to them by now that they barely register. They tend to be brick and wrought-iron, sporting tall ceilings covered with embossed tin-plate. The goal there is to evoke the long lost New York of the the Industrial Age, a colorful and storied place now lst to history, where the robber barons ruled Manhattan, and the Irish mob ruled Five Points out in Brooklyn.

I thought about those actual original nineteenth century houses of food and drink, and these fashionable new restaurants which evoke them with such artful subtlety. And I thought about all the points between, from that time to this.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating to have an “authenticity knob” that one could turn, to see the continuous transformation from original to its ersatz echo? I think that would be a great use for virtual reality.

I was walking along a street in Vancouver yesterday, and I noticed that the house numbers were on the order of 1841, 1847, etc., and were gradually increasing. And I had the obvious thought: These house numbers seem an awful lot like historical years.

And suddenly I had a thought about a possible use for virtual and augmented reality. Imagine you are walking down the street, and you can switch in to an alternate view mode in which, wherever you are, the number on the house corresponds to what year it seems to be.

You can start out in the 1700s, and gradually walk your way up through history, through the 1800s, the 1900s, and beyond. All of the architectural details, the vehicles, the way people are dressed, would gradually change as you progress up the street.

If you really like a particular year, you can make a right turn onto a side street. Here you will find different places around the world. Perhaps Florence, or London, or Bucharest or Rio de Janeiro.

Then, if you are really curious, you can take the next left and keep walking. At some point you will end up in the future. And that could be really fun.

Unless you find, after a few blocks, that the street dead ends. That would be a major bummer.

Speaking of video records of memorable events, it has now been exactly a week since we put on our shared virtual reality event at NYU/MAGNET, inspired by the Mexican “Day of the Dead”. More than a hundred people came through over the course of last Sunday afternoon, sharing the experience of being a spirit in a virtual spirit world, in the midst of a joyful celebration.

The production was the result of the hard work and collaboration of many people, mostly students, who did it just out of the sheer jooy of working on something cool and wonderful.

Video footage of that experience was then edited down by the masterful David Lobser, and posted on Youtube. Of course it’s not the same as having been there.

After all, mere video cannot viscerally transport you into another world the way that shared VR can. But this should give you a sense of how much fun was had by all:

Dia de Los Holos

I’ve been giving a number of talks about this whole “vision for the future” thing lately, but I think the one I gave in Vancouver yesterday finally got it right. It was one of those talks where everything came together. The audience was great, the demos all worked, and the “flow” of it all was exactly on target.

Also, as part of the talk, I got to play some piano music. 🙂

And the best part is that they recorded it! As soon as that shows up as an actual video, I will share the link.

I am about to give a talk at Emily Carr University. Just one day after having given a talk to a wonderful group of VR enthusiasts in New York City. I am actually typing this from up at the lectern here in Vancouver, as the audience slowly drifts in.

I feel like a globe trotter. Although, admittedly, a slightly jet lagged globe trotter. 🙂

It’s funny to think about how this all works. My talks these days generally circle around ideas of “Future Reality”, of people being able to fold physical space itself, so that they can be present with each other wherever they may be in the world.

Yet ironically, in order to most effectively convey that message, I still need to be in the same room with the people I am talking to. Actual presence is, not surprisingly, the gold standard of “presence”.

Maybe it will always the the gold standard.