Ken's Blog

This afternoon I finally realized something on a conscious level that I have sort of known for a very long time: Familiar places are haunted.

In particular, I entered my office at NYU today — something I do pretty much every day — and realized that every time I walk through that door, somewhere in the back of my mind I flash back to people I used to know.

These ghostly people are quite a diverse bunch, and the memories span many years. What they all have in common is that at some point they were in my office, and they made an impression on me.

Don’t get me wrong — I am not assaulted by these memories. Many of them are very subtle, just tendrils of memory, impressions of ideas and relationships, that come to mind when I look at a particular book on my shelf, or at some little gift given to me by a former student.

But other memories are very strong indeed, and can cause me to replay entire snatches of conversations in the back of my mind, the way you can suddenly realize that you’ve been hearing a song in your head for the last half hour.

One strange aspect to all this is that these are not memories of these people as they are, but as they were. The actual people may be long gone from my life — or even gone from this earth.

But their ghosts remain, flickering just at the edge of my view, as if waiting for me to notice them.

This evening a friend mentioned to me the Feynman Algorithm for solving problems. It’s a simple three step technique:

1. Write down a problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

I had never heard of this wonderful algorithm, so when I got home I looked it up. It was actually suggested by the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann, presumably as a way to convey how much more brilliant Richard Feynman was than anybody else.

But when my friend told me about this algorithm, I had a very particular response. I told her that I often find myself solving the reverse problem, using what might be called the Inverse Feynman Algorithm:

1. Write down a solution.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the problem.

This describes, more or less, how a lot of research actually works. We’re always thinking of some cool new technique or other. But every once in a while, if we think very hard and we’re very lucky, we sometimes also figure out what it might be good for.

I recently saw a talk that compared how-to instructions that used exploded-view diagrams with instructions that used step-by-step illustrations. Needless to say, each has its own advantages.

The step-by-step is great for novices, since it leaves nothing to chance. But the exploded-view approach gives you leeway to try different things, within constraints.

As I was watching the talk, I started wondering whether the exploded-view approach could be applied to different domains. For example, what about musical scores?

We generally think of a musical score as a linear prescription. A score starts on the first measure, and ends on the last. Your job as a musician is to get from the former to the latter, with latitude to vary your playing style for expressiveness.

But what if a score were more in the nature of an exploded-view diagram? What if you could, when playing a musical piece, feel free to visit different parts of the score in varying order, as long as you respected the relationships between the parts?

I realize that this approach might be more difficult both for composer and performer, but it would certainly open up possibilities.

A play could be constructed the same way, or a novel, or a poem.

We already experience some forms of art in this way. After all, when we walk into a well architected house, enjoying the transition from kitchen to living room, or from sitting room to front hall, our exploration is not a linear journey, but something more flexible — essentially, an exploded view.

Paul Bettany, a British actor whose work I really like, seems to have chosen a fascinating trajectory for his career. Intermixed with his more mainstream roles, he keeps coming back to a very particular one:

He is, in many appearances, the best friend and intellectual confidente of the main character. This is, of course, an honored tradition, going back to Nigel Bruce, Burt Ward, Vivian Vance and Donald O’Connor.

But sometimes Bettany’s character has a particular twist.

In “A Beautiful Mind”, his character was never seen by anyone other than the main character, John Nash.

By the Iron Man films, he had completely disappeared from sight, appearing only as a voice. Even Tony Stark himself — the many responsible for his very existence — cannot see Jarvis.

This progressive invisibility of signature roles is so striking that I need to ask: Is this all really a coincidence?

In any case, it could be argued that these roles have increased his visibility.

A friend, while giving me a rid to the airport this evening, observed how patient his GPS is with him. “She never gets upset, no matter what I do,” he said.

I agreed that this has been my experience as well. No matter what sort of boneheaded mistake I make, no matter how many wrong turns I take, the voice on my GPS never gets in the least upset with me. She just says “Recalulating”. Then, after a slight pause, we are on our way again, cheerful as ever.

I told my friend that it would be amazing if our human relationships were this way. That time you somehow don’t walk the dog, or you leave your socks in the sink again, or you forget her birthday.

And in response your partner just says “Recalculating”. Then, after a moment’s pause, we’re on our way again, cheerful as ever.

It seems like this would be very nice. But I wonder, would it be a good thing?

There are technologies everybody thinks are cool, and there are technologies nobody thinks about at all.

In the first category you can find things like flying cars, holographic displays, and missions to Mars. In the second category are things like air conditioning, washing machines and toilet seats.

The wonderful irony is that the less cool technologies tend to be the ones that have truly changed peoples’ lives. It is their very success that has made them invisible.

Maybe one measure of the success of a technology is how it has managed to disappear from our consciousness. Perhaps we will know that virtual and augmented reality are truly successful when they pass a simple test: We no longer notice them.

Today I come to understand, a little better, what a number of my female colleagues have been trying to tell me for years: That men do not realize they are sexist.

I’m not talking about obvious sexism. That kind is easy to spot.

I mean the sexism of highly educated, politically progressive men, thoughtful intellectuals, who would be horrified to be labeled as sexist. That is why theirs is the most insidious kind of prejudice.

I think Simone de Beauvoir framed it very well: Men think of themselves as genderless. So to invite a woman into a an intellectual conversation is perhaps to introduce a “person of gender” — to bring gender into what would otherwise be a purely genderless discussion.

Of course such thinking doesn’t make any rational sense. But irrational thinking can become the norm when a prejudice is so pervasive that it becomes part of the very air a culture breathes.

Perhaps that is why it can be so difficult for even the smartest men to see their own acts of prejudice.

In a discussion today about the future of virtual and augmented reality experiences, Alan Kay told me that what the medium really needs is the equivalent of classical music. It took me a few minutes more of conversion to work through the thought and understand the full dimensions of what he was suggesting.

Basically, he was positing that things will really get interesting when the audience of works created in such media are literate, in the way that audiences for classical music tend to be literate. It is not sufficient that audiences just think “this is cool”. They need to understand the language of what is going on well enough to appreciate why something is working.

Of course this sort of expectation of audience literacy is not limited to classical music. It is found in other genres, including various types of jazz, theater, poetry and computer games.

I was struck by how similar Alan’s observation was to something Marvin Minsky told me in 2003. When I raised the subject of the potential benefits of everybody learning to program — and computer languages that might make such a project easier — he said: “Computer programming doesn’t need a shared grammar. It needs a shared literature.”

In the news recently I’ve been seeing a lot of diverting fluff. We’ve got people pouring buckets of ice water over their heads, Ted Cruz working extra hard to make sure he gets no votes in the Bronx, Miley Cyrus doing a pitch-perfect reenactment of Tom DiCillo’s 2006 film “Delirious”.

It’s all very entertaining, but none of it really matters.

Yet I don’t see daily stories about those heroes in Liberia, sacrificing their lives to save others during the Ebola outbreak. I am in awe of these nurses. They know that their very courage will almost certainly cause their own death in a matter of weeks, yet they put their fear aside to save as many lives as they can, while they can.

How many of us would have the strength of character to make such a decision? In a sane and sensible world, the pictures and personal stories of these courageous nurses would dominate the front page of every daily newspaper around the world.

Of course we don’t live in a sane and sensible world. Oh well, at least we can pour buckets of ice water over our heads.

I went to visit another long time favorite restaurant, Soy and Sake, only to discover that it had shut down forever on the same day that Gobo closed its doors. Now I am wondering whether there is a connection.

Could it be a coincidence that two of the best vegetarian restaurants in New York City both close, after many years in business, on exactly the same day? Or is it just that August 30 is a common “last day of lease” date, and that both establishments happened to get caught up in the same general rent spike?

I am suddenly feeling very protective of our city’s remaining veggie restaurants. On the one hand, there are still a lot of them left here. On the other hand, the U.S. once had so many passenger pigeons that the sky would go dark whenever a flock would fly overhead.

And look how that turned out.