Ken's Blog

I mark the sad possing of the great Joe Cocker with a link to my favorite of all his recordings, Jimmy Webb’s classic song “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”.

Some of you will also recognize this as the title of a great novel by Robert Heinlein. The Heinlein story and the Webb song are, on their face, very different. What they share is a sense of the difference between the ideal reality we wish for, and the harsh reality that is.

This mournful longing for something better that seems to elude our grasp, is a theme that runs through so many songs. You can hear it in Judy Garland’s rendition of the Arlen/Harberg song “Somewhere over the Rainbow”, in Tom Waits’ “Time”, in so many of the songs of Leonard Cohen.

They all seek the answer to the same question — a question we all ask ourselves from time to time: How can we be so unhappy, when we have such beautiful dreams?

But nobody ever did it better than Joe Cocker, singing this immortal Jimmy Webb tune.

I am writing this from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. This being the holiday season, the terminal is filled with travelers waiting patiently — or in some cases not so patiently — to get from one place to another.

A surprisingly large number of people are simply standing around, just staring at the LCD monitors showing when their plane might depart. In some cases they stand there a very long time, knowing full well that their plane isn’t scheduled to arrive for another hour or more.

I find myself questioning the approach we take to airport design, on a fundamental level. If you know that a significant portion of your population will be spending hours of their lives in a location, why design it to be such an “in between” place?

It seems to me that airports could be thought of differently. Why not make it a place for constructive engagement? An airport could contain a library, or a problem-solving place, or a focus for community discussion or other activities.

I suspect that with a little imagination, the entire experience could be turned on its head, promoted from an oddly liminal zone where chunks of life are largely wasted, to a destination in its own right, where people can go to be fully engaged with each other and with their own lives.

This evening at a coffee shop we were discussing virtual reality. I was excited because I’ve just bought the Samsung Gear VR, which was developed in partnership with Oculus Rift. I was explaining how if you hook the Gear VR headset up to a Galaxy Note 4 smart-phone (I’m getting one of those too), you get a really good quality virtual experience, considering how little it all costs.

Then the waiter came over. He told us that he’d overheard parts of our conversation, and he’d realized we were talking about virtual reality. He said that he has tried the Oculus Rift dev kits 1 and 2, and we compared notes about those. I told him that the Gear VR provides a much more polished experience.

Then he proclaimed, with real enthusiasm, “I love the future!” It turns out that he is an engineering student, and he is incredibly excited about all of the new technologies coming out in support of virtual and augmented reality.

“But what about the possibilities for things to go wrong?” my friend asked him.

The waiter was undeterred. He acknowledged that any technology can be used for both good and bad purposes, but he was very confident that these new capabilities would make the world a better place.

That is a wonderful thought, isn’t it?

And it might even be true.

The other day a friend showed me the cool app on her phone that lets her monitor her beloved puppy when she is away from home. She has puppy-cams installed throughout her apartment, and she can see not only where he is and what he’s up to, but which bit of toy or furniture he may have been chewing up.

I told her that it reminded me of an academic paper I saw some years ago, that not only allowed an animal companion’s activities and location to be tracked remotely, but also create new activities. For example, you could initiate a game of fetch with the press of a computer key.

And I remembered that when I had first seen that paper presented, I had thought it a bit one-sided. After all, why should the humans have all the fun?

Don’t you it might be cool to create an app that can be used by a dog or a cat? Fido could watch the location of his beloved human throughout the day, as that human goes from one adorable human activity to another. Princess could initiate fun activities for her human friend at any moment of the day.

Which leads to the following question: If you were a dog or a cat, what fun activity would you want to start your adorable human doing, at the touch of a paw?

Many of us who find ourselves programming in HTML5 — basically using Javascript to create dynamic or otherwise interestingly interactive web pages — start out with something very simple. By “simple”, I mean that all of our Javascript code (other than code already built into the browser) fits right in the web page itself.

Eventually this wonderfully minimal approach starts to get unwieldy. As you develop your program, the code in that one file gets longer and longer, and more of a potential mess. Eventually it starts to make sense to split up your code into multiple files, just as in the physical world you might hang your clothes in the closet or place your dishes in the cupboard.

But on some level I think you never give up on that wonderful moment — when you wrote your first simple and elegant program that fits entirely into a single HTML file. Sort of the web programming equivalent of a haiku.

I just saw Inherent Vice, the new film from P.T. Anderson based on the Pynchon novel. Hands down the best new release, in my opinion, since Michael Haneke’s Amour came out two years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if Joaquin Phoenix wins an Oscar for his astonishing performance.

But one thing kind of unsettled me. Owen Wilson played a key role in this film, and like everyone else in the cast, he was excellent. Except whenever I see Owen Wilson on screen, I tend to think of the other Anderson.

Just as Robert De Niro was muse to Martin Scorsese, and John Wayne to Howard Hawks, Owen Wilson has long been the on-screen avatar for Wes Anderson. So as I watched, part of me kept waiting for Bill Murray or Jason Schwartzman to show up.

Oh well, it could have been worse. If Malcolm McDowell had appeared in the movie, maybe I would have started thinking about Lindsay Anderson.

Suppose, through some future technology, everyone could dial in their mood, deciding how they feel at any given moment of the day. What would such a world be like?

If you need to focus for an exam, or pay attention in class, or maintain your poise during that potentially nerve-wracking job interview, just choose the appropriate settings. If later that evening you want to get frisky with your partner, no problem — you can both always be in the mood if you want to.

If you have a fear of flying, you can set yourself, pre-flight, to Zen-like calm. Or maybe you want the high that can come from drinking, without its debilitating side-effects. Just set your mood knob to “elation”.

Of course there would be limitations. The human brain has evolved built-in mechanisms at a very low level that compensate for any sustained deviation from the norm.

For example, if you try to set your mood knob to ecstatic for too many hours at a stretch, your brain will work progressively harder and harder to bring you back down. You could eventually crash, and go into a depressive tailspin.

But let’s say that these future technologies come with sensible brakes, so they don’t allow you to tweak your mood in ways that would actually cause you harm. Sort of the way an elevator will bring you up or down on command, but won’t let you crash through the roof or the floor.

Would people who have access to such a technology be fundamentally changed by it?

This week I sat in on some really wonderful thesis presentations by Masters students in the NYU Music Technology program. The sheer amount of intellectual energy and inventiveness on display was very inspiring.

One trend I noticed was that some students would start with a traditional acoustic instrument they really know and love, such as a trumpet or a classical guitar, and convert it into a musical controller. The result would not make any direct use of the sounds that the instrument produces naturally.

Rather, the student would use those sounds as data, to be input into a computer synthesizer. A new sound would then be computed — perhaps one that could only be created with computer assistance. The result, however radically different, would retain a subtlety and expressiveness that is characteristic of the original musical instrument.

This general approach reminds me of other recent trends in computer mediated performance. For example, there are similarities to the way Andy Serkis “performed” his own body in the Lord of the Rings films, to create a digital Gollum. You never saw the actor himself, but only the computer-transformed result of his performance. Essentially, he was using technology to puppeteer his own body.

In a sense, an artist’s use of any tool — from the paintbrush to the piano — is a kind of puppetry. And as computers continue to become more powerful, new kinds of puppetry will continue to emerge, allowing us to use our brains and bodies to create ever more powerful forms of aesthetic expression.

After all, what is the piano, but a complex industrial innovation, enabled by advanced technology, which interposes itself artificially between musician and nature, in order to give the performer a greater power of expression?

The lyrics to the wildly popular theme song “Let It Go” from the recent Disney film Frozen have puzzled many people. What exactly is the song trying to say?

It occurs to me that one valid way to interpret it is as an avowal of Buddhist tathagatagarbha. Specifically, the song expresses a mindful path to contentment based upon acceptance of what is, rather than on a craving for what is not.

Excerpting lyrics from the song, we uncover something that sounds very much like a succession of Zen koans:

snow glows white on the mountain
a kingdom of isolation
distance
makes everything seem small
and the fears that once controlled me
can’t get to me at all
no right, no wrong
the past is in the past
let it go, let it go
i am one with the wind and sky
here i stand
in the light of day
let the storm rage on
the cold never bothered me anyway
 

That’s pretty cool. Also the fact that this is the very first Disney song in history with lyrics that include the word “fractal”.

The tragic stories keep piling on, one atop the other. One that has recently cycled back to public consciousness was the teenage boy shot to death by a cop — in the kid’s mom’s bathroom.

This was in 2012 right here in New York City. The police department says they thought the young man might have a gun, and that he was running from the police. But surveillance video shows the teenager calmly walking to and entering his mother’s apartment building.

A group of cops then ran into the building, guns drawn, without a warrant. When they burst into his mother’s bathroom, they found the teen trying to dump some marijuana down the toilet.

One cop, thinking the teenager might be reaching for a gun, shot him dead in the chest where he stood, while his six year old brother and grandmother looked on. Afterward, the cops took his grandmother down to the precinct for seven hours of questioning, not letting her lawyer talk to her for about two hours.

No gun was ever found.

What I have been trying to imagine is how this scene would have played out if the kid had been white. Would the police officer have shot the blue eyed youngster right in front of his tousle headed six year old brother, and his sweet old white grandma? Would the police department then have interrogated the old lady, who wasn’t charged with any crime, for seven hours straight, right after she’d just seen her grandson shot dead?

I’m trying to imagine whether that policeman would have pulled the trigger — whether he would have been emotionally capable of pulling that trigger. I’m trying to imagine whether, if the kid had been white, such a scenario — such a now horribly familiar scenario — could ever ever happen, even once, in these United States of America.

And I cannot.