Ken's Blog

When you hold a seashell to your ear, it sounds like the ocean. Of course it doesn’t sound exactly like the ocean, but the day you found that particular shell you were walking along a beach, and the crystal clear blue water stretched away as far as you could see.

Afterward, you brought the shell back with you, to the city. Surrounded once more by the hustle and bustle, the constant chatter and sounds of traffic, you held the shell up to your ear and you said “Ah, the ocean sounds just like — this.”

But sometimes you might find yourself on a lovely beach and realize you miss your city home, just a little. The crazy traffic sounds, the roar of the subway, the cafes full of strangers arguing late into the blustery night.

For those times, perhaps you can reverse engineer the shell. Then you can take it with you on vacation, pack it in your bag between the socks and the toothpaste. And when you need to be reminded of home, you hold it to your ear, and you hear the traffic, the noise, the calls of street vendors and hissing brakes of municipal buses — the constant reassuring hum of the big city.

The shell knows whether it is in town or not — a simple embedded radio receiver sees to that, listening for frequencies found only in the city. Now you will always be able to take that city with you, just for those moments when you really need it.

After you get home again to your little apartment in town, your vacation just a memory, you find the shell in your bag, in its place between the toothpaste and socks. You hold it up to your ear one more time.

And hear only the sounds of the whispering ocean.

Continuing yesterday’s post…

I realized, as I started a collaboration here at MIT with Xiao Xiao (one of Hiroshi Ishii’s Ph.D. students), that collaborating with somebody else at a different institution, as opposed to just working on my own or with my own students, requires a different approach.

I shouldn’t expect somebody else to maintain something built on my own home-brew tool kit after I go back to New York. So I decided it would be good to change my ways, even if it takes me out of my comfort zone. Maybe especially if it takes me out of my comfort zone.

But I also want whatever I do to run on the web. So I’ve started using THREE.js. It’s similar to yet different from my own tools — kind of like driving in England if you are used to driving in the U.S.

The first thing I’ve made is a little walking character — its legs are musical notes — that will walk on Xiao’s piano keyboard. This will be a procedural variant of her brilliant Andante system.

You can see my very first experiments HERE.

I am one of those people who likes to build his own tools. Of course you can’t build all your tools from the ground up. Even if I wrote my own programming language, I’m still not building my own computer. And even if I built my own computer, I still wouldn’t be able to fabricate my own silicon wafers. No matter how DIY you are, you need to start from somewhere.

Still, for years I’ve been using a computer graphics package that I wrote myself. This has helped me in some ways, and held me back in others. For example, I’ve never been stuck, unable to do something because “the package doesn’t support that”. Then again, there are many things I haven’t done because it would just have taken too long to build a decent support infrastructure.

Of course, people do things for many reasons. If your goal is to learn how things work, I highly recommend starting at a low level and building your own tools. But what is the right level? That’s not really a question about tools, but about community.

Whenever you build something, you are implicitly joining the community of people who build similar things — and who therefore share a common sense of mission, aesthetics and design. These are the people with whom you can get into an excited conversation about topics that might be meaningless to most other people. Many communities form around this principle, around subjects as diverse as politics, music, comic books and quantum physics.

But that also means that you are excluding yourself from other communities. I’ve recently started to shift from an attitude of “I need to build it all myself” to “I’m interested in learning other peoples’ tools — and maybe adding to them.” And so for the first time, I’m really engaging with open source communities.

More tomorrow.

Last week a friend from England, on a visit to NYC, was saddened by the need to go through layers of security and airport-style scanners to get into several major tourist attractions around the city. It wasn’t the inconvenience, she explained — it was quite literally sadness.

“Your culture used to be the freest culture in the world,” she explained over dinner. “Now look at what they have done to you. Everywhere you are fearful. In a way the terrorists have won — they have robbed you of one of your greatest cultural qualities.”

Of course she had a point. On the other hand, I was having dinner with another friend this evening, after we had gone together to a thought provoking talk about the need for greater openness in government, and he raised another interesting point.

Although it has come at a very high price, he pointed out that people in the U.S. are, in general, far more aware of the world outside our borders than we used to be, far more engaged with the politics and culture of other places, and far more likely to think through the difficult thought: “Hey, not everybody thinks we’re the good guys.”

Although we may be a sadder people than we were fifteen years ago, we have also perhaps become a wiser people.

In the last several weeks I have given three different talks. I could have “recycled” any one of these talks, using the same “slides” with only minor reshuffling. That is routinely done by a lot of people I know.

But instead I built each talk from the ground up. Yes, there was some overlap of material, but not all that much. It was a lot more work, and at times I wondered why I was driving myself crazy.

But now, having finished the third presentation, I realize that in each case it hasn’t been about giving the talk, but rather about affirming my connection with a community. And because each of these communities is very different, I have needed to be different.

What I realize now is that putting the talk together is at least as important as actually giving the talk. It’s only when I am faced with specific authoring choices — what to put in or take out, what vision to emphasize, what story to tell — that I really understand my relationship with a particular community of people.

And that tells me, in way I might not otherwise have understood, why I want to be a part of that community.

The other day a friend sent me an email in which he had clearly meant to talk about renting a car for an upcoming trip. But good old autocorrect “fixed” the word “car” in his message to the word “cat”.

And it occurred to me what a lovely idea this is. Somewhere off in a parallel universe, people who take a flight to halfway around the world will immediately rent a cat on their arrival. Because everybody needs a cat right?

Don’t scoff — this is my made-up universe, and I’m allowed to make up any rules I like.

In this universe, when your flight arrives at its destination, there will be kiosks set up by rival cat-rental agencies. This is good because it provides a variety of choices, from the Hertz pure bred all the way down to the Dollar mangy stray.

Of course you will want to book early, because who wants to arrive in a new place only to find they will be without a cat?

Needless to say, in this universe the most popular videos on the internet will show cute little automobiles rolling over piano keyboards and engaging in various other irresistible antics. Sometimes people will wonder why everybody loves something as useless as a car. Then someone will show a video of an adorable little Chevy playing with some string, and everybody’s heart will melt.

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.”