Ken’s Blog

All over New York City this past week, at bus stops and various random places, I’ve been seeing advertisements explaining that the world is going to end on May 21. It seems that folks more clever at numbers than you and I have calculated that date as the precise day of the Second Coming (here’s the back story).

I haven’t done anything in response to this because, frankly, I’m a procrastinator. But now that we’re only five days from the Apocalypse, I feel perhaps it’s time to adjust my thinking to factor in the whole, you know, end of the world thing.

For example, I now finally understand why Broadway shows have no-refund-or-exchange policies. Imagine how business on the Great White Way would suffer if everyone started refunding their tix. And what about those unscrupulous folks who keep selling those orchestra seats to suckers who haven’t heard about the End of Days? I mean, how stupid would you feel if the end of the world came and you were the one left holding useless tickets to “The Lion King”?

And I’m very curious to learn how all of those Hindus and Buddhists will react when they wake up the morning of May 22 only to find that, well, there is no May 22. Are they going to get the word from the Big Guy himself? Or will He cop out and send some angel or seraph to give the bad news.

I’m trying to picture the scene: Billions of assembled Buddhists and Hindus — men, women and children — all standing around nervously. They’ve heard something’s up. Suddenly a booming celestial voice starts to explain: “Um, We don’t really know how to tell you this folks, but all this time you’ve been betting on the wrong horse. Tough break.”

At which point somebody will probably speak up, maybe a Buddhist: “But what about all our good works?” this Buddhist guy will protest. “You know, our own version of righteousness. Feeding the poor, easing suffering as a part of our religious practice?”

“And the cows,” some Hindus will chime in at this point. Don’t forget about the cows.”

“Yeah, what about the cows,” the Buddhists will agree, nodding vigorously, “Those guys have the whole cow thing. That’s gotta count for something, right?”

“Afraid not.” The celestial voice is starting to grow impatient. “Look, we’ve got an Apocalypse to run here. There’s lots of details, things to sort out, you wouldn’t understand. Do you people have any idea how complicated an operation like this is? Jesus! Now why can’t you all be good sports and just go to hell?”

We are just about to enter, for the first time, an age of rich human/computer interfaces. It is true that advanced techniques, beyond the impoverished model of Windows/Icons/Mouse/Pointer, have existed for years. What has not been true is that millions of ordinary folks at home have had access to them.

Video cameras haven’t done the trick. If you try to use a computer figure out what your fingers are doing by pointing a video camera down at your hands, you run into all kinds of problems. Skin color variations, lighting changes and depth ambiguity all work against you. A technique that works just fine in the morning might fail miserably once the afternoon sun starts streaming through your window.

But now that the Kinect provides a cheap 3D camera available to millions (and soon to get both cheaper and better, especially when competitors start jumping in), it’s easy to write software that tracks fingers accurately and reliably.

The big question is now not how, but what. Will we end up using the full richness of our hands and fingers when we use computers, or will we (collectively) cop-out, and end up with some boring variant on the pinch gesture?

My hope is that we will take seriously the language building powers of small children. There is strong linguistic evidence that natural language is actually created by small children (children younger than 6 y.o.), rather than adults. Among evidence to support this, is work by Ann Senghas on the creation by small children of Nicaraguan Sign Language in a very short amount of time.

Also, there has been work by Derek Bickerton and others on how small children spontaneously created Hawaiian Creole in only a few years, a language as complex as any other natural language.

The possibility of tapping into this capability of small children makes Kinect and similar technologies particularly exciting as potential platforms for human/computer interfaces far richer than any we have ever seen.

The purchase of Skype by MIcrosoft has got me thinking about the possibilities of putting Skype together with Kinect (now that they are owned by the same corporate entity).

Yes, I realize these two things seem very different — one is a kind of internet phone chat and the other is a fancy game controller. But to me they seem to converge in a very interesting way, and I suspect the folks at Microsoft have already thought about this.

In the late 1990s the NSF funded a project called “The National Tele-Immersion Initiative”. Led by such top minds as Jaron Lanier and Henry Fuchs, the goal was to enable people at remote locations to perceive each other as though they were in the same room. Back then this was a very difficult proposition indeed. Computers were slower, digital cameras had poor resolution, and just about every other piece of the supporting infrastructure from projector to network was in a state that today we would call primitive.

Yet they succeeded in creating a working demo, as you can see from this image of the prototype in action:

At the root of that success was a combination of digital video chat and 3D tracking of head position. Once you can digitally capture and transmit a 3D representation a person’s head and face in real-time, then you can remotely compute what that head and face would look like from different points of view.

This means that each remote observer is free to move their own head (and hence vary their point of view), while your system reconstructs what each person will look like to the other. Note how different this is from video chat, in which you can see the other person from only a single point of view (wherever their video camera happens to be).

What the NTI accomplished in 1999 is exactly what you can get by combining Skype with Kinect. The two technologies together, when properly combined, can give you a seamless 3D representation of a person who is far away, as though that person is right there in front of you.

What this means is that you can probably expect video chat in the next few years that will seem far more real and immersive, with a much greater sense that the person you are speaking with is present.

Of course none of this should be surprising. After all, Jaron Lanier was a partner architect for Microsoft’s Kinect. 🙂

Recently I got into a discussion with a friend on that time-honored topic of interesting new words that emerge if you drop a prefix. In particular, words that begin with “pro” are intriguing, because that first syllable seems to infer a positive value. Without those three little letters, the resulting neologisms can become unmoored in all sorts of ways.

For example, a “pensity”can mean a feeling about doing something, but maybe not a favorable one.

A “pinquity” means you’re somewhere, but you might not be very close.

If something is “nounced”, then there’s a certain amount of it, but not necessarily a lot.

And if a thing is “tected”, then it probably needs defending, but it might be out of luck.

To “ject” means to extend, but maybe not very far.

A person in a story can be a “tagonist”, which means we feel some way or other about them, but we’re not really sure how.

Now I’m going to be “lix”, so this doesn’t go on for too long.

One could easily imagine replacing “pro” with some other value-laden prefix, but that could all too quickly become a con-game. 😉

It seemed to be a good idea today to write another post in sonnet form. I figure I can write it Shakespeare’s way since that’s as good as any kind of “norm” for writing things in fourteen lines of verse. The rhyming scheme is just “ABAB” (repeated thrice).

I guess you could do worse than trusting in old William, so you see it isn’t hard at all to tell a story, or at least a rant, in very metric ways. I know it isn’t strictly mandatory but I kind of like the way the rhythm plays upon the written page. In case you care, the last two lines must form a rhyming pair.

Today my friend Alec showed me this picture:

The image is just so brilliant in its perfection — these young Buddhist monks looking at the virtual world they hold in their hands. One notices upon their faces an expression of total serenity, of peaceful acceptance of this new reality.

It is a new world my friends, a world you and I will never truly understand, however hard we try. For it is their world — it belongs to these young children who breathe these pixels as freely as the air, who understand this reshaped reality, this parallel universe, for it is the world into which they were born.

You and I may stare at its wonders, as one stares through a glass darkly lit by visions of things yet to be. But for those being born into it, even as we speak, it is not a glass but a doorway — a doorway that leads to the only home they know.

It’s becoming ever more clear to me that the transitional technology to fully immersive human-centered augmented reality (a world I described in previous posts as “eccescopic”) will most be the SmartPhone.

In particular, some form of good 3D video capture is going to go on the back of SmartPhones. It might be a variant on the structured-light technology in Microsoft’s Kinect, or it might just be two-camera stereo combined with very good algorithms for extracting distance from stereo pairs.

When this happens, SmartPhones will start to become more like the Nintendo 3DS — through our SmartPhones we will start to see virtual objects in the world around us. This will create a pressure for a new generation of SmartPhone that has an autostereoscopic display that continually adjusts for your viewing position and distance as you hold your phone.

A parallel development will take place with our tablets. At some point those little phones in our pockets and slates in our hands will become windows into a shared augmented world. Application builders will come to take this capability for granted, at which point that parallel world will rapidly become an ever richer and more interesting place.

At some point this parallel world will become so compelling that wearables will kick in. WIthin a few years SmartPhones, having finished their job as a transitional technology, will simply disappear, and our cyber-enhanced world will be something we see and hear all around us, with our own eyes and ears.

To us, this world will simply be reality. To go about one’s day without the ability to see, hear and interact with this reality may eventually come to seem as odd and eccentric as going to town buck naked.

Yesterday my sister told me that the favorite word of my niece, who has just turned one year old, is “uh oh”. OK, technically that’s two words, but I don’t think my niece cares about such distinctions yet.

I asked my sister whether my niece liked the word because it had only vowels (consonants can be a little tricky at that age). My sister said, no, in her experience, what little kids seem to like is the idea of “uh oh”. That precise concept amuses them greatly.

As I thought about this, I realized that “uh oh” is, in fact, the basis of all literature: The Montegues and Capulets don’t get along — “uh oh”. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy find each other incredibly annoying — “uh oh”. King Lear is starting to lose it — “uh oh”. Anakin has gone over to the dark side — “uh oh”. Rachel is a Replicant — “uh oh”. The Cat in the Hat is making a mess — “uh oh”. Gregor Samsa is having a very bad morning — “uh oh”.

Without the “uh oh” there would be no literature as we know it. Most novels, plays and movies could not exist. The more I thought about my niece’s favorite word, the more clearly I realized that the pleasure of “uh oh” is something very deep within us, not so much a product of growing up in a culture where people tell stories, but rather the built-in biological precondition for story itself.

I loved the comments on yesterday’s post. Anton’s solution to the puzzle was very creative. My only caveat is that it might be hard for someone looking at that shape to realize that it is suggesting a puzzle about squares, since the shape isn’t built from squares, but rather from shapes with a width:height ratio of 4:3.

My own solution is based on the observation that you can always fold up a corner of a shape made up of squares, thereby removing a square while preserving the length of the perimeter:

Applying this idea iteratively to the puzzle of finding a shape with the same perimeter as a square, but half the area of that square, I found the following solution:

Although to make things more fun (and prettier) in posing the puzzle, I would present the shape rotated 45^o, so it would look more like this:

The puzzle Alec discussed in his comment — to find a shape with the same perimeter as a circle, but half the area of that circle — has a solution very different from the one he proposes, reminiscent of my recent Yin Yang post. Actually, it has an infinite number of solutions, of which these are the first two in a series:

Today I saw the below shape in a design on a T-shirt. It happened that at the time I was in the middle of a conversation with somebody who shares my interest in teaching math. So I said to him “that would make an interesting math problem”.

It turns out that the moment I said those words, he thought of the same math problem I was thinking of. Apparently, just saying the word “math problem” and showing this picture was sufficient to define a particular associated math problem. In this case, the problem we both thought of was:

Find a shape whose area is 3/4 the area of a square and whose perimeter is the same as the perimeter of the square.

Notice that this is more or less the same as saying “find a shape whose area is three and whose perimeter is eight”. When I rephrased it that wasy in my head, I thought of another solution:

In the above picture, I put in the dashed lines just to make it clear what’s going on — the shape is a box three times wider than it is high. Interestingly, if we had started with this shape, I doubt either of us would have come up with that particular math problem. Apparently the first shape suggests the math problem, but the second shape does not — probably because it would suggest too many math problems, and therefore no one problem in particular.

Maybe shapes can be classified by the math problem (if any) that they suggest. Many shapes work as solutions to math problems, but I suspect that far fewer work as suggesters of one particular problem.

I leave you with the following riddle: What shape, if any, effectively suggests the following math problem:

Find a shape whose area is 1/2 the area of a square and whose perimeter is the same as the perimeter of the square.