Ken’s Blog

New York in summer
Becomes a perfect playground.
Too bad summer ends.

I was recently having a conversation with two very intelligent and politically well-informed people, both of whom were shocked when I said that I knew from first hand experience that parts of our federal government are not corrupt. My friends were shocked not because they believed me, but rather from astonishment that I could be so hopelessly naive as to not realize that our government is rotten to the core, a hopeless miasma of stinking corruption, with everyone on the take.

In a wish to help me through my unfortunate gaffe, one of my conversants helpfully pointed out that my experience was, by definition, merely anecdotal, and therefore could seem real to me while not actually bearing any relation to reality.

It took me quite a while to realize what was going on in the conversation, and then only a bit longer to take them through the nature of my experience. I explained that my experience has mainly been with the NSF. Over the course of many years, interacting with an extremely large number of program officers, I have found every one of them not only to be scrupulous in ethics, but to go quite a bit further.

For example, whenever a junior faculty member is naive or inexperienced enough to offer to pay for lunch, NSF program officers will invariably explain, in a patient yet respectful manner, that they must never take money from their academic colleagues for lunch, for travel, for housing, or for anything else. Sometimes the program officer will cite the exact governing statutes, just to clarify the point. More recently I have interacted with representatives of the Obama administration’s Department of Education, and have found them to be exactly the same in this regard.

After I explained all this, my acquaintances finally acknowledged that this constituted more than “anecdotal” evidence. But they still did not budge on my larger point, which was that such successful models of uncorrupt governance could, with diligence, find their way into other parts of the government.

On this last point, my friends simply looked at me with a combination of pity and fondness. I think their fondness was in remembrance of a time in their lives when they too had been so naive and innocent. Before they had come to view all government, with the exception perhaps of a few oddly incongruous pockets of integrity here and there, as a seething pit of putrescent rot, a thing of horror and pestilence, the work of the very devil.

Today I needed to put together two pieces of software, each of which had its own gnarly quirks and peculiarities. The task seemed daunting — I couldn’t see a way forward that would not immediately result in one or the other piece breaking.

So I created a little toy version of one of the two pieces of software — just a few lines of code pretending to be the real thing — and stuck it inside the other one. In this way I got a little of it to work, and then a little more, and then after that a little more still.

Finally, I was able to bring in the real code, since by now — by working with my little toy version — I had layered on the little tweaks and adjustments that made it play well with others.

I am reminded of the old days when bridges would be built by flying a kite across a river. Once the kite was on the other side, the bridge builders would use that string to pull across a slightly thicker string, and then use that string to pull across an even thicker string, and so on. Eventually there would be a strong rope across the river, and bridge building could begin in earnest.

Maybe there is some generalizable lesson here. When a task seems too formidable, start out by solving a manageable toy version of that task, and then gradually level up until you get to the real thing. Once you look at problems in this light, there is always a way forward.

Have you ever gone back to a place that was strongly associated in your mind with a person you were once very close to — someone who is, for one reason or another, no longer in your life?

Such places can have the power to exert a ghostly pull. There was, perhaps, the conversation you had on this day, or the smile you shared on that. In random moments, a single location can transform into an entire telescoping almanac of events, a sudden onrush of phantom images from a world that is no more.

It can be nice on occasion to savor these images, painful edges and all. As a wise man once said, “Without a hurt the heart is hollow.” On the other hand, sometimes one wants simply to fling open the shutters — inviting the fresh air to pour in and our ghosts to flutter out.

There should be some sort of exorcism for these places in our lives. Even a minor spell would do, sufficient to provide a temporary respite. Perhaps an incantation or ritual, a lighting of candles and mumbling of words in some half forgotten tongue. Some way to be able to say, every now and again, “Today, at least today, this place is not ours, but mine alone.”

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

This summer I’ve been gradually pulling together various research software that I’ve built over the course of many years and many projects. The general idea is to create a single environment that easily allows anything to be used together with anything else.

So all of the procedural modeling and texturing tools, animation, A.I., user interface widgets, musical keyboard and midi access, exotic tracking devices, live coding editor, and so on, are gradually ending up in one place.

I’m hoping to get it all working smoothly together before the semester starts, as a platform that students can use to develop their own cool stuff. I’m sure the students will do a lot of cool things with it that I never would have thought of. 🙂

As long as we are talking about presidential politics — and continuing on the general theme of word games — I was fascinated over this past weekend to see the U.S. presidential Republican ticket of “Romney” expand to become the ticket of “Romney and Ryan”.

That added part “and Ryan” is, of course, an anagram for “Ayn Rand”.

This is entirely consistent with the fact that Rand, the well-known Objectivist author and philosopher, has been a muse and moral guide for Paul Ryan for quite some time. He has made a point of quoting her ideas in various speeches as an underlying intellectual justification for his important and gallant proposal to provide economic relief for the top 1%.

Oh ok, actually, the top 0.01%, but let’s not quibble.

Unfortunately, as you may know, Rand recently betrayed Ryan’s faith in her — and by extension the faith of the top 0.01% — by revealing herself to be an atheist (atheism, for those of you who do not know, is in fact the antithesis of faith).

Remarkably, Rand figured out how to achieve this dastardly about-face after having been dead for over thirty years. Which just goes to show what a slippery character she is.

I’ve been watching the heating up of the political debate in this country around the coming presidential election, and I can’t help but notice that it’s been getting a bit weird. Everything is being framed in terms of “good guys” versus “bad guys”.

Of course, depending on whom you ask, the identities of those representing “good” or “evil” are mutable.

This is, of course, a classic media circus production. It reminds me a bit of the plot of the Charles Dickens novel “Bleak House”, which centers around a multigenerational fight over the family fortune. The result in the end is that nobody gets any money — except the lawyers.

In this case the winners are, arguably, not the lawyers, but the media industry. The more angry and cynical and divisive we all become, the more we are pushed to the reliance on polarizing sound bytes, rather than on our own abilities, as citizens, for reasoned debate.

Yesterday Andras and I were talking about various and sundry pop cultural subjects, and the topic came around to cool slacker characters. I said “You know, like Rispoli.”

Andras said “you mean Jeff Spicoli.”

“Exactly!” said I. Mr. Hand’s nemesis in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”, played so perfectly by a young Sean Penn, is such an iconic cultural touchstone that to invoke his image you don’t even need to get his name right.

Marveling at how quickly “Rispoli” had been understood to mean “Spicoli”, we went on to posit the creation of a story or play or movie in which every single cultural reference would be similarly fractured, but in such a way that the audience would always know exactly who or what was being invoked. Needless to say, to create such a work it would be useful to amass a file of great examples.

Today I was describing an idea for a gestural computer interface, and Andras said “You mean like in ‘Blah blah blah Authority’.”

“You mean,” I said, “‘Minority Report’.”

“Exactly!” said Andras, and then we just looked at each other, pleased that we had snagged another example for our files.

It’s amazing how the English language overloads words to create secondary meanings.

For example, if you are in a circle then you are hanging out with people you feel close to. Yet if you are in a box then you are being fenced in against your will.

If you find yourself in a square, then you are in a public place, but if you perform in the round then you are surrounded by your public.

Being in an area means merely that you are expert at something, whereas being in the zone means you are using that expertise optimally — firing on all cylinders, as it were.

If you are in a line then you are probably waiting for something, but if you are in a triangle, then you are in love with two people at the same time. Which probably means you are not the kind of person who likes to wait. 🙂

Yesterday I talked about the passing of the once ubiquitous (and in fact iconic) SIGGRAPH message board. This phenomenon of once essential technologies passing into obsolescence has a history as long as we care to go back in human culture. History is littered with discarded or highly marginalized technologies such as the steam engine (both Watt and Newcomen), scrolled parchment, pneumatic tube message delivery, punched card reader, and many many others.

In most cases, the discarded technology was replaced by some specific new technology or combination of technologies: steam engine → internal combustion engine ; scroll → codex ; punched cards → magnetic disk storage + terminal.

Sometimes a technology comes back for one reason or another. For example, even as the music CD is being replaced by its purely software equivalent, the old-fashioned LP is making a surprising comeback, an example of a retro technology being embraced by hip young people.

For any currently ubiquitous technology, such as the automobile, SmartPhone, LCD display, or digital projector, or even an emerging technology, such as the 3D printer, it would be interesting to try to predict what future technology might displace it.

Of course such predictions are often wrong. A lot of people I know are still waiting for their flying car.