Ken's Blog

There are long stretches of time when I feel that I am not getting much done. I feel guilty, beseiged, even slightly bewildered. Then there are the other times. Right now I am going through one of those other times.

Lately it feels as though I’ve been drinking some magic new kind of coffee. When I’m not answering emails, I’m programming, or cleaning up our lab, or arranging new collaborations, or setting up a new computer, or trying a new experiment. Suddenly the whole crazy whirlwind is making sense.

I know that these periods don’t last, and I really should enjoy it while I can. It feels like one giant bout of spring cleaning, except that the thing I’m cleaning is my life.

There are many theories why something like this sort of thing happens. I suspect that in this particular case, it’s because I’m feeling happy. 🙂

I just saw an excellent concert version of The Pirates of Penzance at City Center. I have lost count of how many times I have seen this Gilbert and Sullivan masterpiece, but every time is a fresh revelation.

One thing that struck me this time is how much their work joins together two things that are often kept far apart in today’s society: Silliness and high art. We certainly have room for both, but they rarely get anywhere near each other.

There is plenty of goofy fun to be had in post-millennial pop culture, from Zoolander to Bridesmaids, and everything in between. But as soon as you get to “high art”, things usually go all serious — even things that are supposed to be funny.

But G&S defies those categories. The orchestra might be wearing black tie and formal gowns, the musicians might be highly trained serious practitioners of their craft, but nothing really gets in the way of the underlying zaniness.

The premise of a G&H operetta is always borderline insane, the dialog delectably nutty, the song lyrics outrageously nonsensical, yet everything is done with the perfection and sheen that we associate with high opera. The only other places I can think of today where high culture and sheer nuttiness coexist as gracefully are certain scenes within some of the comedies of Shakespeare.

But for sheer head spinning goofiness matched with high art polish, nothing else even comes close to Gilbert and Sullivan. I look forward to seeing The Pirates of Penzance many more times in the years to come. And every time, if you happen to look my way, I suspect you will see that same deliriously happy grin on my face.

I am fascinated by those movies, like Frequency or Looper, where somebody in the future gets somebody in the past to change reality. For example, there’s a scene in Frequency where a person 30 years in the past plants a tree, and suddenly a fully grown tree appears in the here and now.

I had an experience today that felt a bit like that. Our Institute provides wireless mikes so that we can record our classes for any students who might miss the lectures. I noticed at one point that my wireless mike had one dead, its 9V battery having run down. We tried to contact the system administrators, but they had all gone home for the day.

So I sent an email to the system administrator suggesting that in the future, they might want to keep a spare battery in the drawer. I was nearly done with the email when it suddenly occurred to me that this couldn’t be the first time this had happened. “What if,” I asked myself, “the system administrator has already read the email that I’m writing, and has acted on it?”

Whereupon I pulled open the bottom drawer of the podium, and saw a fresh 9V battery, just where I would have suggested they put it. I popped in the new battery, and we went on with the class.

Of course if this had been a real time travel movie, there would be a problem. After all, I never actually sent that email…

For our VR research this week, we needed to attach one of those fancy Valve/HTC Lighthouse trackers to a flexible ceiling mount. Our ceiling mount and the Lighthouse unit both had a place where you could screw in a 1/4″ bolt.

Now, if either one of them had possessed an actual 1/4″ bolt, it would have been perfect — we could have just screwed the one into the other. But no, both the Lighthouse unit and the ceiling mount were “female” parts. Alas, hardware connections, ever blind to the winds of political change, remain resolutely heterosexual.

So I did a Google search for a bolt that bolts at both ends. And quickly discovered that such a part is called a “stud bolt”. Its specific purpose is to act as an intermediary, so that two female components can be attached to each other.

I love the word “stud bolt”. It’s one of those words that you can sprinkle into your party banter, so that people will realize that you know a thing or two about hardware. Sort of the way medical doctors insist on using words like “distal” and “sagittal” in casual conversation, no matter how often they get blank stares from the laity.

It also seems weird, on a whole different level, that two otherwise perfectly capable female components, obviously destined for each other, cannot get together without a male intermediary. There’s something about the whole transaction that just seems wrong, you know?

On the other hand, it’s not like either of them are having any sort of real functional relationship with that intermediary. True to its name, the stud bolt is good for one thing and one thing only.

I was thinking today about the phrase “Playing the sympathy card,” and I started wondering. What would things be like if that were an actual card?

Imagine a society more or less like our own, except that people are issued cards, which they can use when they need a certain emotional indulgence. To my thinking, these would be more or less like baseball cards, with a picture on the front and cool stuff printed on the back. Maybe you could buy them in packs.

Some cards would be plentiful and easy to come by. Others would cost you more to play. If you needed some sympathy, you’d play one of your sympathy cards.

Except you wouldn’t want to play it frivolously. Because then you’d run out, and you wouldn’t be able to get any sympathy when you really needed it.

There could be cards for every occasion: victim cards, race cards, ignorance cards, righteous indignation cards and more. You could get away with pretty much anything, if you played your cards right.

Over time, with everyone using them, the true value of each type of card would become known, and this form of emotional exchange would form a currency of sorts. Wouldn’t the world be a better place, if everyone just placed their cards on the table?

Now where did I put that irony card? It was around here somewhere…

I was having a discussion the other day about possible future societal norms, after everyone has gotten used to seeing the world around them through cyber-enhanced contact lenses. As I’ve discussed here before, how you appear to others in such a future society, when you go out in public, may become a matter of choice.

And if such choices become the norm, then those future norms may become protected by privacy laws: To gaze upon somebody in public with your “naked eyes” — without the socially accepted intermediary of cyber-contact lenses — may come to be considered an invasion of their privacy.

In such a world, it might become a big deal to reveal your true biological appearance, perhaps akin to the way, in present day, we decide who gets to see us naked. And this change might have an effect on all sorts of things.

I can imagine a future conversation between two people who have just started dating:

“Would you like to see what I really look like?”

“I don’t know whether I’m ready for that level of commitment before the third date.”

“Yeah, me neither. Let’s just have sex.”

“OK. Thanks for understanding.”

I was discussing with a friend today the decision by Stephenie Meyer to reissue Twilight with the genders reversed. Rather than a story about a teenage girl being romanced by a 100 year old male vampire, it will be a story about a teenage boy being romanced by a 100 year old female vampire.

My first thought was “Gee, if they reverse the genders in Harry Potter, wouldn’t Dumbledore be a lesbian?”

But then I continued the chain of thought. What if J.K. Rowling were to issue a gender reversed Harry Potter? It would be a story of a teenage girl, born to greatness but at first unaware of her true potential, who is looked over by a kindly magical female guardian, while an evil older woman — the young girl’s nemesis — tries to destroy her and take her power.

And that’s when I realized that Harry Potter does not need to be gender reversed. It’s already a gender reversed Walt Disney princess movie!

I bought a Casio Privia PX-160 electric piano keyboard at the recommendation of a student who used to be a concert pianist. And I am really glad I did.

Unlike the electric piano keyboards that I am used to, this one feels nearly like a real piano when you play it. It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty darned close.

For me, the crucial test is whether, when I place my hands on a keyboard, my fingers start to improvise and create new melodies. With a real piano, that happens as a matter of course. With most electric piano keyboards, it doesn’t happen at all — my fingers just sit there, waiting for inspiration that never comes.

The Privia PX-160 passes this test with flying colors. Throughout the day, whatever I am doing, I find myself drifting over to it, creating new melodies each time.

I’ve just ordered the proper Midi/USB cable so that I can connect my Privia to a computer. Once I have that connection set up, then all of those spontaneous melodies will be saved.

Over time these melodies will flow together into a growing reservoir of musical possibilities, like water.

A number of years back I was giving a demo of a technology we had come up with in our lab — a new and improved form of autostereoscopic display. That’s a kind of display that lets you see in 3D stereo without the glasses.

Unlike previous ways to do this, our display let you be any distance away from the screen, and showed things with very high quality, without the visual artifacts that usually accompany autostereo displays. We were very proud of it.

I was just at the point in the demo where I was explaining how a sufficiently advance autostereoscopic display might obviate the need to travel to conferences. “Just think,” I said, “people won’t need to deal with the bother and exhaustion of getting on airplanes and traveling long distances, just to have a high quality face to face interaction.”

But as it turned out, I was wrong. And I only know this for the following reason.

One of the people in the room was Ben Shneiderman, a pioneer in the field of human/computer interfaces. When I got to this point in the demo, he spoke up.

“Ken, people don’t get on those airplanes and travel thousands of miles to conferences just so they can have a face to face conversation.”

“Then why,” I asked, “do they do it?”

“They do it,” he explained, putting his hand on my shoulder, “because of the danger that they might touch each other.”

Most people reading this are, by comparison with the typical human at any earlier era in history, cyborgs. We have vast and constantly updating information literally at our fingertips. We initiate casual face-to-face chats, at a moment’s notice, across vast distances. We collectively create complex webs of social networks and tribal allegiances, all supported by immense engines of computation and connectivity.

Yet we remain, at our core, human. It is true that to be an individual in a human society is a shifting target, buffeted by ever evolving technological capability. Yet this has always been so, and in some essential way our humanness remains unaffected. We love, we laugh, we our share the day with those we care about, we build our little anthills in the sun.

Which is why I suspect, as we creep ever nearer to a seamless merging of the physical and the virtual, that nothing essential will change. Some day soon the very ground under our feet will seem to be one with future abstractions floating in the air, abstractions that will become part of our shared language.

We will continue to upgrade, incorporating cyborg affordances unimaginable to previous generations. Yet we will still understand, at a deep level, what our species has always understood: That such changes are all just part of being human.