Ken's Blog

While writing yesterday’s blog post I had what is often called a “senior moment”. I knew I wanted to mention Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called.

Since I was sitting at a computer anyway, I figured I’d just look up a list of his work on-line, and then I’d recognize it. Except I couldn’t remember Neil Gaiman’s name. Which is kind of embarrassing, since I’m a big fan.

Fortunately, Neil Gaiman is married to the indie singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer, so I knew I could just look her up on-line, and that would quickly lead to him.

Except I couldn’t remember her name either. 🙁

But I did remember that in 2012 she had a Kickstarter campaign for her solo album, which ended up raising over a million dollars. I remembered this because it was controversial: When Palmer invited local musicians to be her back-up band on stage during her next tour, some people objected. If she was getting all that money from the community, they said, maybe she should start paying those musicians.

So I typed into Google the search words musician kickstarter $1000000 — and the name Amanda Palmer came right up.

The rest was easy. Typing Amanda Palmer husband brought up Neil Gaiman, and then a quick scan of his Wikipedia page revealed Neverwhere.

The entire process, start to finish, took maybe twenty or thirty seconds. And afterward I thought about what will happen when technology eventually allows us to do Google searches in our heads.

When that day comes, what I experienced might no longer be called “having a senior moment”. That little pause people will make, while they access their inner search interface, may end up being called “having a Google moment”.

One of the things about spending time in Boston is that I spend a lot of time riding the T. So I often look at the map, which contains wondrous exotic place names. I’m not sure I want to visit these places, because the reality could never measure up to the enchantment conjured by such evocative words as Alewife, Wonderland and Braintree.

If life were indeed a fantasy, I would very much want to go to Wonderland, named for the charming yet sadly short lived amusement park of that name early in the 20th century. But I am not at all sure I would want to visit a place that has a Braintree. I would indeed like to meet the Alewife one day, but I have no idea what she would be like.

Seeing it all through the eyes of a visitor, I realize that my own home turf — Greenwich Village — must look hopelessly exotic on a map. What sort of folk be they (I can almost hear a would-be visitor wonder), who live in the Village, where the witches are green.

By the way, I should send a shout-out to Neil Gaiman, who used a similar idea in his wonderful BBC teleplay and then novel Neverwhere, which posited a parallel world in which the names of stops on the London Underground, such as “Knightsbridge”, “Earl’s Court”, “Hammersmith” and “Blackfriars”, were literal descriptions.

One year, believe it or not, Kermit the Frog spoke at the Harvard commencement ceremony. The beloved amphibian was, as usual, accompanied by his constant companion and bodyguard, Jim Henson.

I remember having a discussion with a friend about this notable event, some time after it was announced. We both agreed that Kermit was an excellent choice.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” I said, “if one year they invited Snoopy and Woodstock to speak at commencement?” For those of you who don’t know, Snoopy and Woodstock are a beloved cartoon dog and bird created by the late Charles M. Schulz.

My friend objected that this wouldn’t make any sense, because Snoopy and Woodstock would not really be a choice of one speaker, but of two.

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” I said. “Together they constitute a single speaker.”

“Why is that?” my friend asked.

“Because,” I explained, “One is a woofer, and the other is a tweeter.”

As some of you know, every week the New Yorker magazine runs a contest in which readers compete to supply the best caption for a cartoon. Several weeks ago I saw a cartoon that just cried out for a caption, so for the first time ever, I entered the contest.

Here was the cartoon in question:

The winning caption for this cartoon, which you can see as contest #417 on their website was “Why does this never happen on the way to work?”

Now, I don’t mind not winning. After all, the odds of winning one of these contests is extremely small. But that winning caption is just not very funny.

Yes, I do realize I’m not objective about this. 🙂

My caption was: “I hear the Tunnel is even worse.”

Today, via text message:

My friend John: “Did you hear about Oculus?”

Me: “Yep.”

My friend John: “It says something about VR, right?”

Me: “That it’s almost as trendy as thermostats?”

Today at least three times I had a premonition that I was about to say or do something that would cause more problems than it would solve.

In each case I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so I went ahead and did it. And in each case, my premonition turned out to be correct.

So here’s the dilemma: In such situations, clearly something is being worked out by our subconscious mind, which then shouts out a warning to our conscious mind. Sadly, these warnings usually don’t come with an instruction manual.

Which can lead to much false interpretation. If we were to heed everything from our unconscious that felt like a warning, we might not get much done in life. Besides, at some point somebody might ask you “Why didn’t you do that?” And if your conscious mind has no answer, things can get pretty embarrassing.

I seriously doubt we’re ever going to get our conscious and unconscious minds to speak the same language. So how do we get them to communicate better?

Maybe this is one of the reasons to meditate, and to do other things that increase mindfulness. If we can rid our mind of some useless clutter, then we might be able to hear our unconscious more clearly, the next time it tries to tell us something.

This weekend I attended a workshop that contained a very impressive research talk by someone from Adobe. The speaker showed a picture of a little girl looking somewhat bemused. Then, using a second photograph of the same girl smiling, he demonstrated how to transform the first picture, so that the girl was now smiling.

This is harder than it might seem. The two photos were taken at different angles, with different lighting. Furthermore, to make the resulting picture work, the entire facial expression needed to be transformed, not just the mouth. For example, when we smile the shape of our lower eyelids changes. Despite all that, the algorithm got it right.

By convention, after each talk speakers took questions from the audience. Until that point, all of the questions at the workshop had been technical. But my question broke the pattern.

“After you add the smile,” I asked the speaker, “would you still call it a photograph?”

He seemed a little unprepared for the question. After a bit of thinking out loud, he said “I’d call it a Photoshopped photograph”. Which made sense, since Photoshop is an Adobe product.

But of course the issue is larger than that. Maybe there was a reason that little girl was unhappy. When we can change a facial expression in a photograph, we are rewriting history. And not in the obvious way that Stalin “disappeared” Trotsky and many others from official photos, but in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious way.

In the end it’s not really a question of technology. It’s a question of where we want to go as a society. Eventually technology will allow us to walk around seeing the entire world through a Photoshop lens, in real time. When that happens, what will we see? And what will we never see at all?

We all have the concept of the warm furry mammal, running between the legs of the doomed dinosaur, and replacing it for predominance upon this earth.

But we don’t generally bring this concept down to our own lives, day by day — even though we ourselves are the descendants of that warm furry mammal.

What if we could actually witness, on a cultural level, a translation from old media to new, from dinosaur to whatever. something profound and yet inevitable? Sometimes, if we are paying attention, we can see a societal evolution as it is happening.

Would we argue, would we put up a fight? Would we object to a paradigm shift out of our comfort zone? And if so, what exactly would we rail against?

I recently encountered an interesting take on what Fischer and Applin refer to as “Mixed, Dual and Blended Reality” — the phenomenon whereby people using various modern technologies may not be psychologically located where they are physically located.

Consider one familiar example: If you are crossing the street and talking obliviously on a cell phone, then your mind is having a pleasant chat with a friend while your neglected body, perhaps crossing against the light, has become a soft fleshy target for oncoming traffic.

I had mainly been thinking about such situations from the perspective of the pedestrian who, being psychologically absent, is in danger of serious injury or worse. I hadn’t really thought about it as thoroughly from the perspective of the driver.

Then yesterday a colleague — who often has occasion to drive through pedestrian-heavy intersections — told me of her unusual strategy for preventing oblivious pedestrians from wandering through red lights into the path of her moving vehicle. It’s a very simple strategy, really.

As she approaches an intersection where it looks as though people are about to cross against the light, she picks up her cellphone — which is actually switched off — and holds it to her ear, as though carrying on a conversation.

She reports that this works like a charm: Rather than cross against the light, people in the crosswalk, even if they themselves are on the phone, wait until her car has gone by.

This is certainly a form of dishonesty. On the other hand, everybody gets to go home alive.

Bret Victor gave a guest lecture today to a class I’m co-teaching with Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. As always, what Bret had to say was inspirational and highly thought provoking.

For me one of the highlights of the class was a spirited discussion between Bret and Xiao Xiao — one of Hiroshi’s Ph.D. students, and also a brilliant musician.

Bret had used The SIMS as an example of a simulation world that is deliberately stylized. As Will Wright has explained, the unreality in the look and behavior of the characters in this game is a key part of its design. This feeling of unreality creates a sense of mystery, which allows players to project their own stories and emotions onto the characters.

Xiao then pointed out that in fact character behavior in The SIMS goes beyond merely mysterious — SIMS characters often do things that no real human would ever do. In fact, their behavior can be at times downright alien. She posited that this feeling of the SIMS characters being “impossible” people helps to remind players that this is an alternate world, thereby increasing the sense of freedom and possibility.

Which leads to an intriguing question: Is there an “optimal” level of unreality in a virtual world, at which a sense of possibility is maximized? Science fiction plays with this edge all the time. If characters and stories are too weird and incomprehensible, then the reader can become lost. But until this point is reached, the experience of encountering strange beings and unfamiliar ways of thinking can be very mind expanding.

Which is, after all, one of the reasons we make art.