Ken’s Blog

Yesterday I bought an old book for a friend. I mean a really old book, one filled with fashionable descriptions of up-to-the-minute comings and goings of people now long gone from this world.

I wonder whether, when that book was being put together, any of the individuals involved in its creation stopped for a moment to wonder whether it would be read by people far off in the future.

If so, would those denizens of a now vanished world have been able to put themselves into our shoes, reading about their own time as some exotic and long lost place?

Could we ever imagine our own time in such a way?

One week from today, New York City’s ban on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces will go into effect.

From a health perspective there is logic to it. After all, the scientific link between massive sugar intake and an early death is becoming ever more clear, with each successive study.

Yet from the perspective of civil liberty, it could be argued that this is a slippery slope. At what point do we decide how much something being “bad for you” is sufficiently bad for you to be outlawed?

Here’s a modest proposal: Those same studies that have linked high blood sugar load to obesity, heart failure and Alzheimer’s disease could be used to do a cost analysis.

So rather than asking the question “Should you be allowed to purchase a 24 ounce sugary drink?”, we could ask the question “How much does your 24 ounce sugary drink add to the expected average cost of health care?”

A tax could then be imposed for that amount, but (unlike the 2010 NYS soda tax), there would be an important proviso: 100% of the revenue collected from this tax would go toward providing more affordable health care.

In other words, should you choose to slowly kill yourself, your choice does not pay for improving subways, adding park benches, or fixing up City Hall. It all goes toward increasing the average length and health quality of everyone else’s life.

Yesterday’s somewhat haunting post was prompted by an old memory that had resurfaced unexpectedly after many years. Given the intensity of the original experience, I’m surprised that it had never surfaced before.

Then again, perhaps that’s exactly why this memory had never surfaced. After all, if our most intensely emotional memories were to pop up all the time, it’s hard to see how we could get through the day.

Yet I have a feeling that this and other powerful memories lie not all that far below the awareness of the conscious mind. Like silent creatures of the deep, I suspect they circle slowly about in the seas of our subconscious, biding their time, waiting for just the right moment to resurface.

Perhaps this explains those odd feelings we all get from time to time of unexpected anticipation, fear, excitement or dread. They could be the traces of old memories waiting to be summoned, silently warning us that they may, at any moment, come back into our lives.

Broken windows and empty hallways
A pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it’s going to rain today

Years ago I had a friend who was diagnosed with leukemia. She was beautiful, in her early twenties, full of energy and life, with the entire world before her.

The doctors prescribed a bone marrow transplant. The prognosis was not all that good, but where there is life there is hope.

Everyone brought presents. Mine was Judy Collins’ album “In My Life”. I’m not sure why I chose that album. Perhaps it was because each of its songs had been a great discovery for me, and I wanted to share that experience.

There was one song in particular — Randy Neuman’s “Think It’s Going to Rain Today” — that I really wanted my friend to hear. Even today I’m not sure why. I guess there was just something so fierce about that song, a sense of powerful connection, of life and friendship being sacred no matter how flawed, how imperfect, we all inevitably are.

She loved it. And then she had the bone marrow transplant. And then she died.

Even today, when I hear that song, I think back on that moment in life, now frozen in time.

Bright before me the signs implore me
To help the needy and show them the way
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it’s going to rain today

I spent much of the day worrying that the next step in modifying my software project would plunge everything over a cliff.

You see, there are more or less two kinds of changes you can make in a software prototype: Small changes that have a large chance of success, because they work within the existing structure, and big changes that modify the structure itself.

These latter changes can be scary. If you get them wrong, things can quickly come crashing down around your ears.

So I procrastinated — watched a trashy TV show on NetFlix, raided the fridge, read a chapter of a book about Joss Whedon, exercised, went onto Amazon to buy a copy of Keith Richards’ “Talk is Cheap” album for a friend, raided the fridge again, read the New York Time Book Review cover to cover, as well as all the letters and OpEd columns, both Arts sections, and every NY Times weekend puzzle (there are seven altogether).

Then sometime in the late afternoon I came into the lab, took a deep breath, and got to work. Before I knew it, all the changes were made, the new structure was in place, and everything worked beautifully. Didn’t even take that long.

I suspect I was actually working on those changes all day, without even realizing it.

When you file a patent, you are claiming property. It is not your description of the invention, but the claims in your patent which declare exactly what area you are claiming. The broader your claims, the more territory you can get, but the harder it will be to defend your borders against hostile invasions by existing patents and other prior work.

The more narrow and focused your claims, the smaller your territory, but the easier it will be to defend.

Today it occurred to me that a patent is like an island floating in the sea. Broader claims give you a bigger island, but there’s a greater chance you will end up under water. Narrower claims give you less room to build your little hut, but a better guarantee that you’ll be ok in the rainy season.

There’s something to be said for safely narrow claims. You never know when a storm is going to hit.

This happens more often than you might think, since big corporations have been known to fill their shores with wave making machines.

Last night I had the oddest thought: When person A feels a sense of longing for person B, perhaps deep down it is not actually person B who is being longed for.

Rather, somewhere inside the mind of person A, they have labeled a part of themselves “residing within person B”. In some important emotional sense, person A has placed a portion of their sense of self into the identity of another soul, to be worn like a phantom limb. A common way among lovers of describing this feeling is “I am yours”.

If person B reciprocates this operation, the resonance can create a tremendous mutual sense of euphoria. Each lover perceives a part of their essential self within the person of the other, which creates a feeling of heightened existence for both.

Alas, either A or B might one day drift away, for whatever reason. This leaves the other person feeling that a part of their own self has been severed. The resultant loss can bring about a sense of mourning, as though there has been a death.

Yet within mere months following such a loss, these phantom limbs of the soul will, of their own accord, fade away.

I was having a conversation today about career choices, in which my friend and I realized that careers can be roughly ordered along a scale of what might be called “intellectual flexibility”.

The basic question here is “How much freedom do I have, in this career, to go wherever my mind takes me?”

There are some quite intellectually challenging disciplines, such as Law, where such freedom is sharply bounded. Yes you can have freedom (and the study of law contains fascinating intellectual challenges), but within a context in which 99% of the field is beyond your ability to change — since the law has a long established set of precedents.

At the other extreme, a writer can pretty much write about any ideas, and a painter can paint just about any image. There are virtually no externally imposed limits.

I can safely say, based on my direct experience, that being a professor of computer science at NYU is a lot more like being a writer or a painter than like being a lawyer.

I think this is a good thing. 🙂

This evening I was on a panel where the topic was the future of user interfaces. At some point I riffed on the very ideas I discussed here last week — beginning with the announcement last week of FDA approval for artificial retinas.

I suggested that if we wind forward by another twenty five years or so, those artificial retinas will improve to the point where every American parent will demand that their child get implants — simply so that the child can stay competitive with all of the other children.

This will lead to a world where everyone will have augmented reality — the technology will move out of those little round SmartPhone boxes, and migrated into our bodies. We will eventually cease to see this development as “technology”. It will just be normal.

In this new normal, you and I will be able to perceive virtual objects anywhere, including the empty space between us.

Of course we will want to touch those objects. And that’s the point when everyone will get finger implants. After which we will simply come to see such objects as real, just like we now tell ourselves that all our other artificial objects — couches, chairs, cars — are real.

I was heartened by the fact that people completely accepted this radical vision of the future. In fact, over dinner afterward, somebody said: “Twenty five years? Do you really think it will take that long?”

I noticed a pattern in last night’s winners of the Academy Awards. In just about every case, the winner was essential to the film, perhaps even the decisive factor in making their respective film a success.

“Silver Linings Playbook” is, at heart, a soppy and sentimental romantic comedy. But Jennifer Lawrence’s fierce performance lifted it, in its finest moments, into something much more. Unlike her costar Bradley Cooper, whose nominally borderline character pretty played it “cute and adorable” (the staple traits of RomCom leads), Lawrence made us believe that she was actually dangerous, that there was a dark core running through her character which at any moment might tip over into violence. To me this made the film far more watchable — even interesting — until the movie went all soft and soppy and lost its edge.

And of course I’ve already written here about Anne Hathaway in “Les Miserables”. Without her transformative portrayal of Fantine, and that one extraordinary and pivotal scene, the film would have been remembered at best as a failed experiment, and at worst as an embarrassment.

Similarly, Daniel Day Lewis was the saving grace of “Lincoln”. An otherwise ponderous and over-inflated affair, the film would have sunk beneath its own self-important weight, were it not for its lead’s surprisingly nimble and impish portrayal of our 16th president. I strongly suspect that the Abe Lincoln portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis would have loved Seth MacFarlane’s irreverent turn as Oscar host. Including the joke about John Wilkes Booth.

Maybe especially the joke about John Wilkes Booth.