Ken’s Blog

Somewhat quietly, in the midst of all the noise and hubbub of politics and pop culture, a news item has appeared reporting that neutrinos have been measured going too fast.

The speed of light in a vacuum — or more precisely, Einstein’s limit on how fast any information carrying event can travel through space — has been regarded for the last century or so as a universal absolute, a fundamental property of our Universe. The value of this constant been repeatedly verified by a large body of careful experimental observation through the years.

Yet these neutrinos were measured traveling from CERN near Geneva to the OPERA detector in Gran Sasso Italy just a bit faster than that. One part in 40,000 too fast, to be more precise. If this measurement turns out to be correct, it will turn much of what we thought we knew about the Universe on its head.

In a few months, this measurement will quite likely turn out to have been the result of some unaccounted for experimental error, as such things usually do.

But we can’t yet know that for sure. And meanwhile, isn’t it fun?

I’ve been thinking about how much of life is consensual illusion. I mean “illusion” in the sense of an invitation to make-believe.

When an illusion is well done, we don’t even think about it. In a good production of “Hamlet”, we don’t sit there thinking “this is all obviously fake”. We know it’s all fake, but we don’t care. The players have invited us into a make-believe world, and we gladly enter that world. We are deeply moved when Hamlet dies, even though we know it’s all a chimera created out of words and greasepaint.

If someone were to simply announce “Here is he death scene from Hamlet” and then flatly recite Shakespeare’s lines, we would be unmoved. And if an actual death transpired on-stage, most of us would be horrified, and perhaps deeply scarred by the experience. But that strange liminal space of consensual illusion, of willing suspension of disbelief, creates a safe conduit for the sharing of all sorts of deep and intense emotional experiences.

A great magician does not merely perform tricks, but rather creates an invitation for us to enter an entire illusory world. Similarly, J.K. Rowling never claims that Hogwarts actually exists. We know it doesn’t exist, and that gives us permission to happily go there and experience its reality. These invitations to enter the magic circle of shared illusion are so deeply woven into human nature that even small children immediately understand and accept them.

This principle also pertains in places where we might not think to look for it. For example, I would argue that that the business of Apple Computer these days is, precisely, creating and marketing consensual illusion. Other companies that find themselves unable to compete with Apple for consumer mind-share don’t seem to realize that this is what Apple is really up to. These rival companies appear to be under the impression that it’s all about technology.

Which of course it is not. Like most things that make people desperate to part with their money, it’s really about conjuring an irresistible world of magic.

Yesterday I wrote about “Taken”. By far the best performance in this mini-series was given by then eight year old Dakota Fanning. Her preternatural presence towered over all the other performances. I suspect Spielberg might have green-lighted this project precisely because he knew that for about a year or two he would have the perfect actor to play the pivotal child role in his epic fantasy.

“Taken” is a multigenerational saga. Actors playing characters we first see as children are then swapped out to play their young adult selves. Aging make-up is then gradually applied as they grow old, even as new generations of actors/characters appear. After watching a few episodes, you come to expect people to age dramatically, practically before your eyes, from one episode to the next.

I remember thinking last night, as I started to watch the ninth of ten episodes, that of course the mini-series would need to end soon, because Spielberg knew it would be impossible to find an adult actress who could match Fanning’s immense charisma and sense of presence.

Which is why I was taken aback today, as I took the elevator up to my office at NYU, to see Dakota Fanning riding in the elevator with me. Not the eight year old Dakota Fanning of 2002, but the seventeen year old version of today. Turns out she’s a student at NYU, where she takes courses in our building, just a few floors below our lab.

For just a moment I found myself in Spielberg’s world. “Of course she’s almost ten years older,” was my first thought. “It’s the next day.”

I’ve been watching Steven Spielberg’s 2002 mini-series “Taken”, ever since having recently stumbled across it on NetFlix. Somehow the existence of this miniseries had completely eluded me until now. Maybe because I don’t have a TV.

The wonderfully zany premise is that all the UFO stuff is true — Roswell, the abductions, the big Government cover-up — all of it. But with the following clever twist: It’s not treated as a big SciFi special effects extravaganza, but rather as a series of intimate small-scale stories of the generations of people whose lives have been affected by these events.

The confluence of these two opposite principles makes for wonderful fun. Take the most insanely ridiculous premise, and treat it with utmost seriousness in every way. No tongue-in-cheek self-referential winking (as in the X Files), or comic absurdity (as in Men in Black) or superhero wish-fulfilment fantasy (as in Green Lantern). Just straight carefully constructed human drama, focusing on families, relationships, human emotion, loneliness and connection, the everyday betrayals and small revelations that define character.

It all works spectacularly well as entertainment. And I find myself trying to think of another example of such a thing. An absolutely straight ahead serious and psychologically plausible treatment of a completely laughable premise.

So far I haven’t been able to think of any others.

I was in a car yesterday with my cousin, discussing how best to make use of a Global Positioning System. My cousin, who was driving, said that he liked to try to get places on his own. If he takes a wrong turn or finds himself getting lost, he can then turn on the GPS, and it will give him the advice he needs to get back on the right path.

I thought about my cousin’s philosophy for a bit, and then I told him, “I use a similar philosophy in my personal life, except that the GPS I end up turning to are my friends.”

Then, as we drove along, I thought about it a little longer, and I said: “Come to think of it, in my personal life I usually wait way too long before turning to the GPS.”

To snowclone or not to snowclone, that is the question.

But what do I know? I’m a doctor, not a snowclone. Well actually, I’m not a snowclone, but I play one on TV.

Even so, I can tell you that the Eskimos have twenty words for snowclone. Snowclones are the new snowclone, and imitation is the sincerest form of snowclone.

Wait — is this a snowclone which I see before me? It is the snowclone from hell, not your father’s snowclone. It is the mother of all snowclones.

Oh where are the snowclones of yesteryear?

Now all the world’s a snowclone, so do not ask what your snowclone can do for you, but what you can do for your snowclone. For we are a snowclone nation, and it’s the snowclone, stupid.

I, for one, welcome our new snowclone overlords.

😉

Today a bunch of books arrived from Amazon. Some of them were very high toned, literary, informative — pretty much all over the map.

But I confess I spent the afternoon reading the book about the history of the 1960s phenomenon The Monkees. I picked the book up, expecting to read a few pages, and found myself completely gripped. Icouldn’t put it down until I was done.

There is something deeply sad and powerful about their story. Four talented young men caught up in a strange whirlwind that nobody quite understood, a whirlwind that end up tangling them up with the entire world. They were given the illusion that they owned the world, yet they all ended up becoming strangely captured and emprisoned by that very power.

Reading the story of these four lives over the forty five years, I found myself thinking of Gollum and the Ring. If there is a moral to their crazy tale, it might be this: Beware of a gift that seems to offer you everything. You might find that rather than you owning the gift, it ends up owning you.

Today a group of us took a quick trip from NYC, spending the day at the MIT Media Lab to brainstorm with potential collaborators there on ideas for future interfaces.

Interestingly, the tools that were most useful for brainstorming were scribbling on whiteboards and scribbling on flip-charts. Unlike computer-based media, these old-fashioned “stupid” tools allowed us to freely sketch and draw any idea that came into our heads, instantaneously. These tools did not need any “model” of what we were talking about, because we all were building the model together in our heads.

I guess one take-away lesson here is that until we actually invent some better futuristic new media, the old ones are still the best. And maybe another lesson is that those future media may only improve things if they manage to retain some of the “stupid” (and therefore protean) qualities that make the old analog media so wonderfully flexible.

I read this week, in a NY Times profile of Dr. Arthur Horvich, about research by him and his colleagues in understanding a key protein in the human cell (as well as in the cells of other critters) called “Hot Spot Protein 60”, or HSP60 for short.

Proteins start out just as strings of amino acids. But in order to be useful in the cell, they need to fold into particular geometric shapes. Over half a century ago, Christian Anfinsen and others discovered that proteins, removed from a cell and isolated in test tubes, could still fold properly into their useful shape (work for which Anfinsen and his colleagues won the 1972 Nobel Prize in chemistry). Since then biochemists have widely assumed that proteins in the cell can fold properly without needing to be inside a cell.

Unfortunately, things don’t always work out that way inside the cell. Many diseases, including Alzheimer’s, stem from proteins failing to fold properly. The cell is a crowded place, with lots of things going on at the same time. All that bustle and chemical activity can interfere with a protein’s ability to fold correctly.

HSP60, as Dr. Horvich and his colleagues eventually discovered, acts as a tiny barrel-shaped isolation chamber. A single protein enters one side of this barrel, and the barrel lid shuts for about 10 seconds, giving the protein the peace and quiet it needs to fold properly. The lid then opens, the protein drifts out, and another protein gets a chance to have its personal space.

What strikes me about this is what it says about the universality of the need to personal space, for a “time out”. Human lives are complicated. We are constantly bouncing off each other, jostling and jumbling around and interacting with other nearby humans. Sometimes, with all that activity going on, we can find ourselves bent out of shape. And then things don’t work so well.

Most of the time we get by just fine. But every once in a while, we each need to find our own little HSP60.

For some reason I recently remembered a long ago phone conversation I had once had with a friend, a few years after we had both left college. She had become a lawyer, and I had gone on to do research in computer graphics.

We were comparing our different career paths, and what they might mean. At some point she said “of course, one of us is doing something that is actually impacting the world.”

I remember thinking, upon hearing her say this, that she was being incredibly gracious by acknowledging that my work was so important. After all, unlike a trade (eg: being a lawyer) research can produce results that end up having a positive impact on the lives of millions of people.

It took me a while to realize that she had actually meant it the other way around.

Oops.