Ken’s Blog

We all want our children to grow up fearless. In particular, we want them to believe that they can do anything they set out to do, that with the right combination of hard work and belief in themselves, they can achieve any goal they aim for.

I would guess that most young people come into this world with sufficient general natural ability that with enough practice and dedication they could indeed become decent writers, musicians, lawyers, artists, athletes, and so forth. I’m not saying they could necessarily become the best, but that focus, dedication and hard work, over a period of years, is an enormous force — sometimes even an unstoppable one.

Yet societies are not generally structured to optimize for fearless children. Getting young people to grow up obeying the rules of society involves a certain level of unconscious coercion. From the time we are little, we are told in various ways — some subtle, others not so subtle — that there are lines we shouldn’t cross, doors we’re not supposed to walk through, that in fact we cannot treat everyone as an equal, because there are certain “high status” people we are supposed to defer to.

Socialization, in just about any society, is a continual prodding toward the average, to the place where people are not going to question things too much, nor to stir up an inordinate amount of trouble.

I wonder whether it is even possible for a society to fully embrace the extraordinary possibility within each child. Or would that just violate too many taboos, create too much uncertainty, and result in the dangerous (and exciting) possibility of a citizenry of individuals with the self-confidence to do more than tend toward the norm?

I participated in a rousing discussion today about the future of gestural interfaces. One thing that was pointed out during the conversation — something I had not really fully absorbed before — is that with all the enhanced focus on innovations in gesture on the iPhone, iPad, WiiMote, Kinect and other devices, younger folks are actually using text far more than ever before.

It’s not that these new swipe, pinch and wave devices aren’t getting a real workout. Indeed they are. It’s more that among young people the telephone is becoming less of a medium for talking than a medium for texting.

This is perhaps an inevitable consequence of increased mobility combined with merging of telephone and internet. Younger people are multitasking on the go, keeping up simultaneous conversations while going about their daily lives. The consequent high level of continual context switching is something that simply cannot be done through voice.

We may very well continue to develop ever more exciting and innovative ways to use gesture to control our technology. But when it comes to communicating with each other, it seems the future may very well belong to good old fashioned text.

Definition (from the Free Online Dictionary):

im·preg·na·ble 1 (im-preg’ne-bl)
adj.
      1. Impossible to capture or enter by force: an impregnable fortress.
      2. Difficult or impossible to attack, challenge, or refute with success: an impregnable argument.

im·preg·na·ble 2 (im-preg’ne-bl)
adj.
      Capable of being impregnated.

Today I was thinking about Margaret Hamilton, who famously played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz. When I was a little child I was terrified of her. Yet by the time I got to college, she had become my favorite character in the film, the one I liked the most.

Some years later I tried to figure out why this was so. And then one small snatch of dialog in the film revealed all, the moment when Dorothy’s Auntie Em says: “Elmira Gulch, just because you own half the county doesn’t mean that you have the power to run the rest of us.”

This is the moment when you realize that not only is Miss Gulch a spinster, but that she also happens to be an exceedingly rich spinster. And according to the iron-clad laws of physics that ruled American movies in that era, a rich unmarried older woman was the enemy, the Antichrist, the scourge of all that is true and beloved and, well, American. The idea that a woman could live on her own past marrying age, becoming independently wealthy without leaning on a man, was considered such an abomination, such a hideous affront against God, that it would have seemed to audiences at the time a very short step indeed to labeling her as a witch.

And thus I realized that this was the reason I liked her. Elmira Gulch, that detested woman who became the literal embodiment of evil in Dorothy’s dream, was the true victim of the piece. For the film was, in a sense, an attack on women’s right to equality. Of course the people who made the film didn’t know this, any more than a slave owner thinks of his whip as a tool of oppression. Once you buy into a concept of a “natural order”, you see any defense of that order as reasonable.

And so we get to that wonderful word “Impregnable” with its two opposing meanings. On the one hand it defines the significance, in some societies, of a young unmarried woman — like Dorothy. Rather than being celebrated for intelligence, for talent, for the capability to go out and accomplish things in the world, she is seen as passive, dreamy, confused, waiting for somebody to rescue her and fill her life with meaning. The girl on the cusp of womanhood is portrayed as a sort of empty vessel, existing mainly to wait until she is ripe for the plucking, for a man to claim her, to fill her, and thereby give her an identity.

Unlike the young man striking out to make his fortune, this young woman’s identity is defined by the fact that she is nubile — impregnable, as it were.

But of course the older figure of Elmira Gulch is the opposite. She has become a success, and wealthy, through her brains (although her enemies would likely use the less kind word “cunning”). And she is clearly never going to settle down with a man, so she cannot be co-opted. She is the enemy fortress that must be destroyed. In that sense she is the embodiment of that other meaning of the same word — impregnable.

One can argue that the evolution of feminism has been an ongoing attempt to avoid being reduced to this dialectic. To exist as more than a sexual conquest, to be recognized for one’s accomplishments. And yet to do this in a way that does not negate one’s own sexuality.

This negation of sexuality was a fate that seems to have befallen Elmira Gulch.

Oh, and also getting killed.

Yet another show has appeared — Alphas on Syfy — about a group of super-powered misfits who must team up to save the world by virtue of the respective special gift/curse each one possesses. This, of course, was the premise of X-Men, The Fantastic Four, The Incredibles, Charmed, Heroes, and many, many similar fantasies, most recently No Ordinary Family on the ABC network here in the U.S.

The general unifying conceit, of course, is that anything that makes you special, even if it’s a super-power that enables you to save the world, also singles you out, separating you from the fellowship of humanity and therefore making you a kind of outcast.

The problem is that it’s a tired, obvious idea, with limited dramatic potential, since every character is stuck in their own private dialectic — either embracing their particular power as a true mark of their identity, or else doing the opposite, trying to assert to an uncomprehending world that “this thing you see first about me is not really who I am!” This was precisely the point of the wickedly deconstructive Mystery Men.

Only one show ever got things right, a brilliantly conceived BBC series from 1968-1969 called The Champions. The elegant premise of this show was that none of the three protagonists (two men and a woman) were actually misfits, because they all had exactly the same super-powers.

The three government agents, their plane having crash-landed somewhere in the Himalayas, were rescued and nursed to health by a mysterious advanced civilization. Except that they were all put together better than before, so they now possessed superior intellect, strength, vision, hearing, a modest pre-cog capability, and a limited ability to read each others’ minds. Nothing as flashy as flying or invisibility, just humans “turned up to eleven” as Nigel Tufnel might say.

The brilliance of this premise is that the three protagonists, because they possess identical gifts, are allowed to be individuals. Their powers do not define their interactions, but merely enhance them, putting everything on a higher level.

This is not like, say Monk or Numbers or Columbo or House or Heck Ramsey or The Closer or The Pretender (I could go on — the list is very long) where one flashily hyper-brilliant misfit sucks up all the oxygen in the room.

No, to each other, the Champions are perfectly normal, charming, funny, interesting, human, except of course that everything between them is happening on a wonderfully advanced level. I suspect that today, in the hands of an Aaron Sorkin or Joss Whedon, a show with this premise would blow all those “group of misfits” fantasies out of the water.

Thanks for the wonderful suggestions about community-created work. The suggestion by Li-Yi Wei to use a Wikipedia-like history model could be intriguing, when applied to building an animated sim — a kind of modifiable world where you set up conditions, and then let your simulated universe plays things out. Especially if navigating between universes is very easy.

My Fish Tales toy is a very simple example of a sim, since the fish is running a low-level A.I., which gives him a limited amount of autonomy (not over what he does, but over how he does it). It could be even more interesting to apply a save-all-history model as the A.I. underlying such a sim becomes more advanced, and the creatures in it more autonomous. In a sense, each authorable state of the sim would generate a particular alternate universe, whose inhabitants live by unique rules.

Anybody who goes to the site can set conditions any which way they like. As long as all previous authored states are saved, then none of these universes will ever be lost. I’m picturing a giant scroll-bar, which could be called the Multiverse Express, to let you quickly scrub through the history to see all changes ever made by past authors.

If all previous universes are saved, there is no need for branching. Just copy a universe you like, paste it on the end of the growing track, and edit to taste. No harm, no foul.

Some universes would most likely be rather boring, with characters doing dull and repetitive things. But others might be gloriously alive, if an author is talented enough to find just the right settings. Those alternate universes that get more frequent visits along the Multiverse Express become marked as popular tourist destinations (sort of like Rod Serling’s town of Willoughby).

Welcome to the Multiverse Express. Next stop, Willoughby!

The largest computer monitor we have in our lab is a Dell Ultrasharp U3011 30″ LCD Monitor, which has a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels. I realized today that with my tiny font, one could comfortably fit an entire novel, say “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, on a single screen (I did the math, and indeed Jekyll and Hyde would totally fit on that screen).

So today I started to do just that, until at some pint I realized that nobody would actually ever read it in that form. While it is intriguing to contemplate a novel that can be taken in all at once on one computer screen, such a thing would exist only as a kind of conceptual artifact, to show what is possible, not what is practical.

Not that I’m against conceptual art. Sometimes such projects are so utterly crazy, they attain a kind of grace. Like if a nation were to spend countless billions of dollars just so a few people could take a stroll on the Moon. What could be cooler than that?

But I think a tiny font novel-as-screenshot would be worth doing if it were visually overlaid with the movie version of Stevenson’s classic allegory, using the variable font-boldness technique I showed yesterday. Since this story has so many film adaptations (a few of which are quite good), it might be interesting to switch between them. But in every case, the theme is clear: Like Jekyll and Hyde, a novel and a film are as different as two media can be, yet they are actually two aspects of the same entity (cue scary music).

More generally, the tiny font technique could be used to display the entire screenplay of a film you are watching, directly on the screen. The scale of the font is so much smaller than the scale of the film imagery that they would not visually interfere with one another. It could even be a kind of hypertext — as the film progresses, resonances and parallels between different places in the film could be subtlely highlighted in the screenplay itself.

Today I became curious to know whether the tiny font I made a while back could support different font styles. It’s a useful thing to determine, because as far as I know this font is the smallest readable screen font.

By the way, if you’ve been a grownup for a while (he said oh so diplomatically), you might want to wear reading glasses for what follows. 🙂

As a base comparison for the following discussion, here is my standard benchmark test — the first 515 words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on a 320×240 screen, with enough room left over for a comfortable margin all around:

As a test I added bold and italic styles. In the following screen shot, all of the characters on the right half of the screen are in bold, and all of the characters on the bottom half of the screen are in italic (so the bottom right quadrant is all in bold-italic):

It seems to work just great! Nicely enough, I didn’t even need to make the bold characters take up more room than the non-bold characters. As you can see, the words all remain at their original locations on the screen.

I also realized that with a font this small, it might be interesting to embed visual messages — or even animations — within the relative boldness of each character on the page. This could lead to a new kind of art form.

For example, in the below version of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, a shadowy figure appears to loom mysteriously over the document, perhaps subtlely shifting its significance into directions unforeseen by our Nation’s founders:

In a way this image is sort of funny. As long as you don’t, um, think about it too much. 🙂

As Sharon pointed out, my “Fish tales” experiment the other day was a mixed bag. On the one hand, the sandbox nature of it fostered a sense of openness by letting anybody modify anybody else’s movie. On the other hand, it really was a sandbox, in the sense that any sand castle you make might be gone the next time you visit the sandbox.

Which means people aren’t going to put a lot of work into making something great. In the immortal words of Rutger Hauer, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

So what to do? I don’t want to allow people to type in names for their creations, because that will open the whole thing up to trolls — I worry that I’ll come back in two months to find that somebody has used my little fish tales space as a place to invent new varieties of curse words.

My thought is to let everyone create in their own private sandbox until the moment they want to save their work. Then I prompt them to type a password (unseen by anybody but them). Once your work is uploaded, anybody can see it, but if you want to modify something that’s up on the site, you need to know its password.

This has the advantage that people who want to work together on something can still do it — one person uploads it, and then shares the password with their collaborator(s).

There is still the problem that the site might get cluttered with hundreds of uninteresting fish tales, which will make it impossible for visitors to find the really good ones.

One solution might be to rank each fish tale by how often people play it (weighted by how much of it they play), roughly following the YouTube philosophy. If tale 47 gets a lot more play than tale 93, then maybe it’s more worth your while to check out tale 47.

I’m open to suggestions on all this. I’d love to figure out a good general model for effectively nurturing a creative community.

I’ve been thinking about Brian May. In a particular way he is a paragon — a kind of ideal.

Please understand that most of the people I hang out with on a daily basis are part of a small contingent of the population that really believe, down in our bones, that science and art are deeply intertwined — that thinking seriously about how the universe around us really works, and building shared aesthetic meaning between people, are simply different parts of the same larger quest.

This is definitely not the cultural norm. Most well known people who have contributed to both the sciences and the arts have done so as two entirely divergent pursuits. Samuel F Morse was perhaps the single most influential figure in the invention of the telegraph, yet this has nothing at all to do with his considerable contributions as a painter and fine artist.

Similarly, the invention by Hedi Lamarr and George Antheil of spread spectrum (essential to both radar and modern cell phone technology) had nothing to do with her career as a Hollywood star or his as an influential avant-guarde composer.

But Brian May is different. A serious first rank rock star — the lead guitarist of the legendary rock group Queen, and by general consensus one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time — he is also known in the field of astrophysics for his research into the movement of interplanetary dust clouds (the subject of his Ph.D. in astrophysics).

But what really distinguishes May is the fact that one of Queen’s biggest hits — “’39” — was essentially a lecture on Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity — and quite a good one at that. The essential plot of the sad lyric is that a ship of space explorers leaves for a one year journey, but because of relativistic time dilation, one hundred years have passed (therefore they also return in the year of ’39), to find that everyone they had known or loved is long dead.

What fascinates me about this lyric is the way the astrophysicist channeled his love of science, without any watering down or compromise, into one of the most popular songs by one of history’s greatest rock bands.

I have seen examples of well known scientists “doing art”, and well known artists “commenting on science”, but I can’t think of a similar instance in modern times where an individual managed to connect their inner scientist and inner artist in such a seamless and completely successful way.

I’m curious to see what kinds of fish tales people might make. So I’ve given you the ability to save the tales that you create.

In this version, you can choose one of 42 tales to tell. You can also visit and modify anybody else’s fish tale.

Of course, if somebody creates a really amazing and wondrous tale, I hope the rest of you will recognize how cool it is and not mess it up. 🙂

Click on the image below to try out this new version: