Ken's Blog

I was having a lunch conversation today about an experience I had years ago, which I now realize touches upon what C.P. Snow referred to as “The Two Cultures”. Those cultures are, respectively, the cultures of scientific thought and of humanistic thought.

This particular experience dates from the very beginning of my career in computer graphics. I was part of an interdisciplinary team that was creating special effects for films and TV commercials. At some point Chris Wedge — a phenomenal animator, and later to become the founder of the great NY computer animation house Blue Sky Studios — asked me whether I could program a tool that would allow him to achieve a certain lighting effect.

All fired up by the task, and maybe too young and stupid to see beyond my own ambition, I stayed up all night and implemented a software tool that would allow Chris to do pretty much anything. It had all sorts of variables and parameters, complete with a cascading crescendo of calibrated components, creating a cornucopia of cool capabilities.

The next morning, flushed with pride, I showed Chris my creation. “Here,” I said, “you can use this to do all sorts of things. For example, this is the particular thing you wanted, if you just set these variables like so.”

He hated it. “I just wanted a tool that would let me do this“, he said, “I don’t care about all this other stuff.”

And that was the first time I got an inkling that there are two fundamentally different ways to look at the space of interesting problems. The ‘scientific’ approach looks for the most general solution, the one that will encompass as many answers as possible. THe ‘artistic’ approach doesn’t care about this vast space of all possible answers. Rather, it looks toward a particular human space of meaning, and is only interested in paths that lead to that space of meaning.

It’s not that one of these approaches is right and the other is wrong. They are both quite powerful, each in their own way. It’s more that these are two different languages — each better at approaching a different kind of truth.

When faced with the reality of these two different languages, maybe it’s best to be bilingual.

I’ve been doing various research recently that involves propagation of energy. In one case I’m using it to make cool interactive animations of water waves. In another case I’m simulating the propagation of forces through solids, to find out, for example, how strong a building is, or where an overloaded bridge would be mostly likely to collapse.

These may seem like very different problems, but it turns out that the math (at least the simplest version of the math) is pretty much the same in these and lots of other cases. Essentially, the value in each location is decreased, while some of the values in the locations next to it are added to it. This is done everywhere at once. Repeat.

That probably seems too simple, but it works amazingly well, and it’s a reasonable approximation of how various kinds of forces propagate in nature.

And it has occurred to me that this is also a nice description of what happens between people. As we interact with each other, and get to know one other better, we each gradually become a slightly less pure version of ourselves, and instead begin to incorporate little bits and pieces of the people to whom we are closest.

Just as with water waves and the weight of buildings, this exchange of forces can seem imperceptible in any one given moment. But over the course of time the ripples that travel from person to person can span the globe, and the force of our collective being can grow beyond all imagining.

This morning I had a very difficult time dodging an oblivious commuter who was staring into a SmartPhone. This occurred on the steps of a subway platform, at the height of rush hour, with a crowd of people streaming past each other.

Objectively one would think that somebody wouldn’t attempt to text while walking up a flight of steps in such circumstances. But I realize that this person was really absent — somewhere else in all but the physical sense.

This problem, which most of us run into pretty much every day, is at least partially the result of a technology still in transition. As SmartPhones get better/faster/cooler, they can draw your attention ever further away from the actual world — the world that contains your body.

The technologist in me says “Hey, we can fix that!” If we can just invent a better technology, then everything will be ok.

But there’s another part of me that says “Hey, wait a minute — isn’t technology part of the problem?” Maybe the solution to every problem isn’t a continual advancement of technology. Maybe there are ways of thinking of this that actually have nothing to do with inventing something cool.

For all of our collective problem-solving inventiveness, maybe our view of how to “make things better” with technology is missing something essential.

I’ve been going through old YouTube videos of classic performances, as I do from time to time, comparing different performers in the same role.

Recently I’ve been watching old videos of one of the greatest of them all — Gwen Verdon — who lit up the musical theater stage for much of the twentieth century. Alas, she never quite had the same impact in Hollywood (with the notable exception of her performance as Lola in “Damn Yankees”), and some of her greatest song and dance performances have gone unrecorded.

Gwen (as some of you know) was married to the great choreographer Bob Fosse, and some of his best work was made specifically for her brilliant performance style. One of the great dance scenes in all of filmdom was their outrageous comic duet in Who’s Got the Pain from “Damn Yankees”.

Although Fosse built the entire show of “Sweet Charity” as a showcase Gwen’s astonishing talent, but when the show went from Broadway to Hollywood, she didn’t go with it, even with Fosse directing. The film simply wouldn’t have been green-lighted without a major movie star, and in this case that star was Shirley MacLaine.

If you compare their performances, Verdon is the vastly better dancer, but MacLaine is far more effective as an adorable waif. That was, after all, her specialty.

It’s a shame that millions of people never got to see Gwen Verdon in such a great role that was written specifically for her. One day perhaps, as new technologies evolve, a version of “Sweet Charity” might appear that merges the best qualities of these two actresses into a single performance — the incomparable dancing of Verdon and the unique vulnerability of MacLaine. Would such a thing be a gift to humankind, or an abomination? And would they need to call it “Sweeter Charity”?

Meanwhile I will leave you with this inspiring little clip, which shows the sort of dancing that Gwen Verdon was capable of at the age of fifty.

This week I was attending a lecture by Herbie Hancock (he also treated us to some of his latest improvisations). One of the questions during the Q&A was rather odd. The questioner asked why, with all the wonderful new kinds of technologically advanced musical instruments that musicians like Hancock are exploring these days, do some people still insist on playing old and out of date instruments.

At first Hancock seemed a bit nonplussed by the question. It was clear that he was being asked to join a club that he did not want any part of. But then he thought about it for a bit, and came up with the following reply:

“As you move forward, you don’t have to close the door behind you.”

Then he paused, thinking about it a bit more, and added this:

“Otherwise, you’re just in another box.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more graceful and cogent summation of the relationship between evolving technology and the arts.

This evening I attended a wonderful event at Boston’s Symphony Hall, a joint lecture/performance demonstration by pianists Bruce Brubaker and Ran Blake that used Beethoven’s improvised piano concerts as a departure point to examine the line between improvisation and formal composition.

One thing we learned was that while improvisation during live performance was the norm in Europe during the early 19th century, the practice died away soon thereafter. Now, as you probably know, improvisation is really no longer part of the “classic music” culture.

So what changed? During the question period my friend Xiao, who attended with me, proposed a theory. Perhaps, she posited, the explosive growth of the middle class through the 19th century created a shift in culture. At the beginning of the century, the relatively small number of extant pianos were predominantly played by experts. And for experts, improvisation is part of what they do.

But the rapid rise in the middle class brought with it a corresponding growth in the number of pianos manufactured and sold. And that created a new and very large market for music to be played in drawing rooms by non-experts. Amateurs who could play piano only by following the sheet music became the new norm.

Brubaker and Blake wholeheartedly agreed with Xiao’s theory, which seemed to be new to them. I was quite pleased that my friend had presented such a brilliant insight.

My own insights for the evening were decidedly less impressive. Maybe the most profound thought I had was the following:

Q: “Why do most people not know who Beethoven’s teacher was?”

A: “Because he was always Haydn.”

Feel free to groan. 🙂

I attended a talk the other day by John Ratey. He is, I learned, an expert and best-selling author on the subject of healthy lifestyle. His last book, which came out a year ago, is “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain”.

Boiled down to its essence, his message was two-fold: (1) sitting around is really really bad for you, and (2) the best thing you can do to develop your brain is strenuous exercise.

Dr. Ratey filled this message in with lots of facts and figures, user studies, scientific explanations of what goes on in our bodies and our brains when we sit or when we get our heart pumping. It was all fascinating and very informative.

But then I started looking around the room, and I realized that there were about a hundred people all sitting. Including me. Physically, that’s all we were doing — sitting. According to the talk I was hearing, it would actually have been better for our intelligence and our learning capacity to spend that time running, or swimming, or playing tennis, rather than to be sitting in a room just, um, listening.

That’s when it occurred to me that I really should take Dr. Ratey at his word. I left the talk somewhere in the middle and got up to take a vigorous walk.

I hope he would have approved.

I was listening to the beautiful Tom Paxton song “The Last Thing on my Mind,” and I realized that in a way the title forms a kind of puzzle. What is the last thing on his mind? The very phrase evokes a sense of mystery.

When you listen to the song, you find out the answer to this question — and there is a definite answer — but it’s not an answer that you would ever guess on your own.

Other songs have a similar structure. For example, Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” What happens, exactly, by the time this guy gets to Phoenix? That one turns out to be easy, because the singer gives it away right at the beginning of the song.

But the song “The Hardest Thing” by 98 Degrees makes you wait quite a while before you find out what the hardest thing is.

I wonder how many other songs there are like that?

I attended a talk yesterday about sharks. At one point the speaker, an expert on shark behavior who seemed to be a genuine fan of the species, explained that sharks use the stereo disparity between their two eyes to judge distance.

I asked whether, if a shark had the use of only one eye, it could judge distance via motion parallax. The speaker said, somewhat tongue in cheek, that such a hypothesis would be difficult to test, since IRB regulations governing ethical research would probably not approve poking out a shark’s eye in the name of science.

This was the point when I realized that the speaker, for all his putative love of sharks, clearly did not think of sharks as individual sentient beings.

After all, if you were going to ask the same research question about a human, it might occur to you to cleverly get around those pesky IRB regulations by covering the human’s eye with an eye patch, rather than, say, removing one of the human’s eye balls. .-)

Coincidentally, that very same evening I visited someone who owns one of Marcel Duchamp’s original Rotoreliefs. These are works of kinetic art consisting of designs on flat cardboard circles spun on a turntable. When the turntable spins, the flat disks appear three-dimensional.

I told my host about the shark story, which suddenly had more resonance because Rotoreliefs work much better if you close one eye. In other words, they are a perfect example of motion parallax in action. In fact, according to Tompkins’ biography of Duchamp, scientists have actually tried using these works of kinetic art to restore depth vision for people who have lost the use of one eye.

How appropriate that Duchamp’s work leads to thoughts about sharks. After all, his concept of the ready-made led the way for such later works as Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, which is essentially a pickled shark.

I strongly suspect, based on this work, that Hirst does not think of sharks as individual sentient beings.

There may be artists out there who do. I haven’t found any yet, but I’ll keep an eye out.

I had a freewheeling conversation this evening in which one of the participants did that thing some people do when they don’t know anything specific about a subject:

“It’s not really my field, but I have a friend whose cousin wrote the paper about that physics thing, where there’s a whole, you know, quantum theory about the brain, and how it’s really a simulation.”

These random thoughts ended up making the rest of us work harder. We’d have a little bit of back and forth, and then this person would jump in with the whole “cousin with the theory” thing, and we’d all listen and try to fit those ideas into the rest of the conversation.

In a way it was good, the sheer unpredictability of it. It got the rest of us thinking more creatively, this requirement that we fit this random energy into our discussion.

Maybe every serious conversation should involve a person who has a cousin with a theory. Especially if that theory involves, like, the whole physics thing with the brain, because it’s, you know, really a simulation.