Ken’s Blog

Going through airport security today, I noticed that the man in front of me, an older gentleman who was dressed up in a beautiful suit, was having trouble removing his extremely high quality shoes.

Then, after we had gotten through, I saw that it was also taking him quite some time to put his shoes back on.

I said to him, “You know a great way for somebody to make a lot of money, with all this crazy security? Make invisible shoes.”

He thought about this for a moment. “But if they were invisible, you wouldn’t even need to take them off.”

“Yes,” I said, “exactly!”

Last month I joined a KickStarter for the 3Doodler, a cool pen that lets you write directly in the air (see below). It’s essentially a 3D printer head stuffed into a pen, which works by extruding a thin liquid string of heated plastic that quickly cools after it hits the air, letting you draw wireframe 3D shapes. No computer is needed, because you are the computer.

Today I got a notice that they are fully funded (for many times their original target), and that I could expect delivery in a few months. I am very excited. Yet all this time there’s been something familiar about this thing, and just last night I figured out what it is.

I realized it reminds me of Edison’s Electric Pen. Invented by Thomas Alva Edison back in 1875, this ingenious device used an electric motor on the pen to push a needle rapidly back and forth. As you wrote with it, you would make lots of little perforations into a sheet of paper. The paper could then be used as a stencil to run off hundreds of copies of your original drawing:

It was indeed an ingenious invention, which allowed people for the first time to make large numbers of copies of their writing. Enthusiastic letters of support were written by such illustrious personages as the Reverend Charles Dodgson.

Alas, after only three years the pen had lost its market. By 1878 another newfangled invention — the typewriter — had started to become the dominant means of creating stencils.

We can look at the bright side: Even if the 3Doodler ends up failing, it will most likely end up ushering in some other cool and inspiring technology.

Too much time away
I missed my coffee maker
I know it missed me

Newspapers, unread,
Wait patiently at the door
They all missed me too

This week at a graphics conference I saw a nice little talk about crowd simulation. As I watched the presentation, it occurred to me that unless one does exhaustive measurements of real crowds, this is one of those situations where “success” just means that things look right: If people look at your simulation and believe they are seeing real crowd behavior, then you’re good.

So I decided to try my hand at crowd simulation, to figure out the simplest approach that would visually appear to act like actual crowds. It was surprisingly simple to do — within half an hour I had something reasonable, and then after another hour or so of tweaking, I was quite happy with the final result.

Taking my cue from the paper presentation I’d seen, my “test” was four different crowds of people trying to swap places — a crowd to the East swaps places with one to the West, while at the same time a crowd to the North swaps places with one the South.

As you may imagine, things can get chaotic. The simulation needs to convey a sense that people are streaming past each other intelligently, without bumping into one another.

For a first try I think I did pretty well. You can see the result by clicking on the below image.

I was hanging out this evening with a group of top researchers in the fields of augmented and virtual reality. The conversation ranged from opinions about Google Glass to assessments of the Oculus Rift to various speculations about possible directions for augmented human perception.

It occurred to me at some point in the conversation that while just about everyone around the table was carrying a SmartPhone, nobody was looking at their phone. We were all too busy sitting around with a drink in our hand, while having a grand old time discussing the future.

So at some point I lifted my glass, and I said “We will know that augmented reality has truly arrived when we can experience it while sharing a beer.”

There was a thoughtful pause, as people weighed this thought in their minds. After all, you can’t really share a drink with a friend while you’re staring down at a little glowing rectangle in your hand.

Which is all just fine with me. For now, and perhaps for a while to come, the world is safe for non-augmented social drinking.

I had the oddest dream today.

I dreamt I was plunging to earth from a great height while holding onto something, and the only thing that could save my life during the long plunge was to keep holding on, without loosening my grip even once before I had reached the ground.

The dream was so vivid that I woke with a start as soon as my dream self had made it safely to the ground. Upon awakening, I found myself in a state of agitation.

Of course the dream doesn’t make any literal sense. But as a metaphor it’s pretty intense. I’m not sure I agree with the underlying philosophy it seems to represent.

Yet clearly deep down inside me, something is taking it very seriously.

In the various tales of vampires, there is a common tradition about inviting them inside: Once you have welcomed vampires into your home, they are then free to enter your home any time.

Like many mythological ideas, this one is grounded in truth: Before agreeing to something, it is wise to understand not just what we are agreeing to, but whom we are dealing with.

Continuing yesterday’s theme (today being the 10th anniversary of the American war in Iraq), the following open letter from Tomas Young to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney provides a searing reminder of this truth. The letter is from a young man who is currently dying from injuries sustained during his service in Iraq.

In the letter, he points out that he had enlisted two days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, to fight those who had attacked the U.S.

Now, as he spends his last days in a hospice bed, he is processing the fact that his enlistment gave our government the legal right to send him to fight any war it wished — even a war that had nothing at all to do with those attacks against the U.S..

A sad reminder that once you invited vampires in, you no longer have power against them. Alas, the vampires at your door can appear very presentable.

Sometimes they even wear nice suits.

At the end of the day today, it will have been exactly ten years since the United States started the ongoing “short war” in Iraq.

Which might be a good time to take stock as to how things are going so far.

On the plus side, Saddam Hussein is no longer in the picture.

On the minus side, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives have been either ended or disrupted, tens of thousands of American men and women have either lost their lives or have had their lives and health irrevocably damaged, and the total cost to the American taxpayer over the coming decades is estimated by various experts to come to approximately six trillion dollars.

You never know what will come out of a short war.

It is fortunate indeed that we didn’t plan a long war.

A friend and I were having a conversation today about the nature of cultural upheaval in the U.S., and my friend pointed to the apparent calm of our own time.

We do not, on the surface, seem to be in an era of radical cultural change. Discourse today has nothing equivalent in urgency to hippies rejecting the Eisenhower post-war culture, or to punks declaring war on the middle class.

In fact, retro is in. Young people are mining the past for cultural influence, reaching back to the 1960s, or 1950s, or even the 1920s for inspiration.

But after talking it through a bit, we both concluded that this apparent calm is deceptive. The very nature of the cultural conversation is changing. The entire apparatus of passive consumer culture is being questioned by a generation less interested in pure consumption than in remix and collage.

For a growing number of young people, TV and movies are no longer the be-all and end-all of cultural experience. They’re just source material.

Maybe, my friend said, things seem calm because the new generation is still in the process of absorbing the past, assimilating it, gathering data.

As this generation grows into its power, and starts letting loose with a new kind of cultural production, one that is far more participatory than anything seen before, the change is going to be radical indeed.

Today I was invited to a “boxing aerobics” class. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing, and I found it quite fun and interesting. For part of the class we put on boxing gloves and took punches at large free-standing punching bags.

The instructor also gave us some really good lessons in technique. In addition to getting a workout, I learned the basics of the sweet science, including jabs, crosses, uppercuts, and effective ways to do combinations.

Just as the class was starting, my friend gave me a suggestion: He pointed to a spot at eye level on the punching bag and told me, essentially, to imagine the face of somebody I am mad at. “The next time you see that guy,” he said, “you’ll be totally cool and calm.”

I appreciated the suggestion, but as the class went on I found it difficult to think of anyone whose face I really wanted to punch. The whole energy just wasn’t working for me.

Then at some point I had an insight, and after that it all got a lot easier. I imagined my own face up there. Suddenly my jabs started to hit with precision, my uppercuts landed solidly, my right crosses connected with real power.

When it was all over, I was completely relaxed and loose — tired but happy, and ready to hit the shower. It had been a great workout, and I felt wonderful for the rest of the day.

And the next time I see that guy, I’ll be totally cool and calm.