Ken’s Blog

This afternoon we were visiting a middle school in Brooklyn where several groups of seventh grade girls (mostly ages 12-13, all black or hispanic) were presenting their original ideas for math games. This is part of a Motorola Foundation funded project that we’re doing at the Games for Learning Institute. One of the girls showed a math puzzle containing the following algebra problem: “g / 6 = 36”. The goal was to figure out the value of “g”.

I wondered to myself whether she was really expecting kids to know the value of 36 × 6, or was just getting the algebra wrong (ie: whether what she’d really meant to write was “g × 6 = 36”).

So after her group was finished presenting its game idea, I asked her: “What’s the answer for ‘g’ in your equation ‘g / 6 = 36′”?

With no hesitation, she replied “Six!” Alas, it was as I had feared.

But then, about ten seconds later, another girl, a little 12 year old who had been very quiet up till that point, piped up — “Oh I know!”

“Ok, what is it?” I asked, trying not to get my hopes up.

“Two hundred and sixteen!”

Which completely made my day. A happy ending after all. And maybe even a future collaborator.

This weekend I had a sudden inspiration to use the i-Sight camera on my MacBook Air to write software that figures out where my eyes are looking on the computer screen. Such gaze tracking is definitely a hot topic these days. The newest Lenovo notebook computer has it built-in.

It turned out that the hardest part was finding code that would get anything at all from the i-Sight camera into Java. Once I found that out, the rest was pretty straightforward.

But one question kept nagging at me: I’ve been using one MacBook or another for almost two years now. Why did I suddenly, just this weekend, get an urge to implement a gaze tracker? And then it came to me — on some subliminal level I’m responding to the announcement of the IPad 2.

I never got an iPad when they first came out. I wasn’t even interested in the iPad. My response to all the hype was a consistent “Meh”. But the iPad 2 is not like the iPad. It has cameras — one facing you, and the other facing away from you. And that is interesting.

The camera facing you can be used to know where you are looking on the screen of the iPad 2. And the camera facing away from you can be used to create a cyber-enhanced (one might even say eccescopic) view of whatever lies on the other side of the iPad.

I think it is this possibility that the iPad can know where you are looking that matters here. Once millions of people can wander around in the world holding a consumer-friendly window into the internet, it becomes really interesting — empowering actually — for them to communicate through that window using their gaze and attention.

All of a sudden, just like that, after decades of interest by the geeky few, gaze tracking is actually about to become relevant to millions of people.

I’m listening to two people improvise together on a piano keyboard. And I am struck, as always on such occasions, by the “conversational” aspect of it. One person introduces an idea, the other takes it and riffs on it, the first person responds with their own variation / counterpoint, and before you know it they are off and running.

When one topic has been exhausted, they begin another, and seemingly in no time they are having an entirely different musical conversation together.

Of course this sounds a lot like what happens when two people start talking to each other. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I suspect that we have within us a much deeper instinct for “conversation” than could entirely be due to our species’ relatively recent development of language.

When we see two dogs or cats together, we see similar rhythms of back and forth. The ebb and flow how we spend time together — how we create time together — is a quality of our shared experience that I suspect stems from something deep into our mammalian brains, and perhaps underlies much of our common appreciation of music, as it underlies much that we find enjoyable in life.

There was a time when you couldn’t make endless copies of a song. If you tried to play a recording, then record the copy you’d just played, then record that copy, after a few iterations it would all just turn into noise.

Same thing with images. If you scanned or photographed an image, then printed it, then made another scan, and repeated this a few times, you’d be left with nothing but snow.

This was the analog world we used to live in. Now of course we’re in a digital world, where you can make endless copies of things, because there are lossless digital formats.

Today I was talking to somebody who makes 3D scanners (exotic devices that do 3D scans of physical objects), and I had a sudden inspiration. I was thinking about the 3D printer I have at home, and I realized that if he were to scan an object I had made on my 3D printer, and I tried to 3D print the result, the shape would turn to mush after a few iterations. Just like it used to be for music and pictures.

And then I had a sudden inspiration. I said “Why can’t we do digital 3D printing?” In other words, why can’t we 3D print something losslessly, so that if we scan it, we get a perfect copy, no matter how many times we scan → print → scan → print, and so on.

But how do we do this? Well, let’s think about how much information we’re talking about here. Assume we have a reasonably accurate 3D printer — one that can print things to 0.1 mm accuracy.

Suppose I print a fairly complex object on this 3D printer. Let’s say it’s a famous sculpture that can be described on my computer as a polygonal mesh of 10,000 vertices. That means I need to encode 10,000 points. A point needs three numbers, for its x, y, and z coordinates. Each number needs about 16 bits (for the geeky among you: since one unit is 0.1 mm, 16 bits suffices to give an accurate position up to a length of 6.5 meters).

So we’re talking 16×3 bits × 10,000 points, or about half a million bits.

If our 3D printer can build up a model by depositing melted plastic filament with 0.1 mm accuracy, then we can “wiggle” that filament from side to side as we lay it down, so that it represents a zero bit when it wiggles to the left and a one bit when it wiggles to the right. This wiggling will make the filament take up twice as much room, so we need to make space for 1,000,000 bits.

But at a resolution of 0.1 mm, 1,000,000 bits takes up only 10mm × 10mm × 10mm, or one cubic centimeter.

Which means we can fill our 3D printed model with copies of this one cubic centimeter solid texture, made by our wiggling process. Even a fairly small fragment of the printed model will contain multiple copies of this information. If the printed model is scratched, gauged, cut into pieces or even smashed, we will still be able to recover the 500,000 bits of information that represent the 10,000 vertices that describe the model’s surface.

We don’t need to continue this wiggling all the way to the surface. The model can have a thin shell of solid material, so that if you look at it from the outside you will see only a smooth surface, just like the original sculpture.

I’m going to try some experiments along these lines with my little home 3D printer. If I succeed, then I might just help 3D printing to truly enter the digital age.

I’m writing this on a train, which is stopped because onto the tracks somebody rolled a very large boulder, which our train has hit. The collision with the boulder has caused sufficient damage to the train (which had been traveling 125 miles per hour) that we passengers now need to transfer to another train.

The conductor has announced that in about half an hour another train will come by, and then we will begin the process of moving everyone.

Sitting here, I am slowly absorbing how fortunate we all are to be alive and well. If our train had gone off its rails, many of us would have been either killed or seriously injured.

The oddest thing is that the conductors say they are quite sure, based on where the event occurred, that the boulder was placed there deliberately (as opposed, say, to having rolled down a hill).

Which leaves me trying to understand the mindset of someone who would roll a giant boulder onto train tracks. Were they just being stupid, or did they actually understand how close they came to causing death or injury to hundreds of people?

I’m working on a way for people to build stories by snapping together words and phrases. The goal is for this to be collaborative — which means there’s going to be a server side, where the stories that people build together can live.

But first I’m working out the interaction — how you put the pieces together into larger pieces. This effort is very much inspired by the snap-together tiles approach used by the Scratch project at MIT. Except that I’m applying it to natural language.

I hope to have the server side connected soon. Meanwhile you can get a sense of it by clicking on the image below:

Today I usher in a brand new month by welcoming a brand new voice to the blogosphere. Murphy Stein’s new blog “Subject to Change”, which appears to the right in my Blogroll, promises to touch on a very thoughtful range of ideas about the future of social media, games, learning, math, fun, and the exciting discussions that seem to hover in the air all around us these days.

I have had the privilege and pleasure of discussing some of these ideas with Murphy these last few years, and I am glad that he is now sharing them with a wider audience.

Happy reading!

There are months that just seem to glide by, without containing any events of consequence. And then there are months that grab you by the collar, drag you off into a corner, beat you about the head and neck and scream “remember me, damn you!”

I’m not talking about whether a month has been good or bad, only whether it has been memorable. Looking back over this month, I would definitely have to say it has been one of those drag-you-off-into-a-corner kinds of month.

I am not complaining, rather more feeling amused. After all, this is a February we’re talking about — and therefore about as short as a month can be, going by the calendar. We’re not even talking leap month here. Yet for me the last four weeks have been crammed chock full of event and consequence, about as full as as any four weeks can be.

I don’t know whether I would want every month to be so intense. Nonetheless it is interesting, every once in a while, to go through one of these.

Although I do very much hope March will turn out to be more peaceful.

And maybe shorter. 🙂

I am writing this just before seeing the 83rd annual Academy Awards. The large field of best picture nominations this year really brings home something odd about the entire endeavor — the idea that there can be a “best” movie in a highly diverse field of high quality movies.

Clearly this is something people want. After all, the Academy has parlayed this desire for one film to triumph into arguably the most potent commercial brand on the planet. People seem to hunger for this sort of competition. Perhaps this particular kind of struggle and outcome puts order into our lives, satisfying some deep primal urge to bring things to some kind of resolution.

Even if it is, in a case like this, a fairly arbitrary resolution. What does it mean to compare a film like “The Social Network” with a film like “The King’s Speech”? In what sense can either of these excellent examples of collective commercial craftsmanship be said to be better than the other?

And yet we rank them, and we will continue to do so. Although I suspect that this entire exhilarating yet more than slightly silly enterprise doesn’t reveal nearly as much about the nature of these movies as it does about the nature of ourselves.

On a whim, last night I rewatched the 1968 musical film “Funny Girl”, a highly revisionist take on the great vaudeville comedienne Fanny Brice. In the title role, the young Barbra Streisand won that year’s Academy Award for best actress.

Watching the film now, I was struck by something odd. While Streisand’s singing is spectacular (as always), and she is completely adorable, she’s not very funny. I mean, she’s sort of funny, but not very funny. And this in a role where she is playing a legendary comedienne.

The problem couldn’t be due to a shift in culture in the last four decades. After all, the Marx Brothers are every bit as funny now as they were almost 80 years ago. So I went to YouTube and watched every clip I could find of the actual Fanny Brice, mostly from the 1930s. And man is she funny! Her performances are completely over the top, borderline insane, fearlessly comical.

By complete coincidence, I was having lunch today with my sister, and she mentioned something Jerry Seinfeld had said about his “Seinfeld” co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He pointed out that although she is a beautiful woman, she never lets any desire to look good interfere with her comedy. She’s willing to be as crazed, rubber faced or ridiculous as needed to get the laugh across. Which, he said admiringly, makes her a true comedian.

Immediately, of course, I thought of Lucille Ball, another beautiful woman who was willing to go to the mat for comedy. And it struck me that this was exactly the problem — Barbra wasn’t willing to go to that edge. In fact, she never went anywhere near it. She gave the idea of a person willing to do pratfalls, but as you watch her performance you can always see her signaling to you that it’s just an act.

Of course Barbra Streisand was fighting other battles. She was busy showing the world that a woman who looked ethnically Jewish could also be seen as very beautiful, which was a real battle back then. Similar battles have been fought in other eras over the beauty of other ethnicities — black, hispanic, greek, italian and, in its day, almost any other “outsider” culture. And it’s not just women — Al Pacino fought this battle as well (see the history of the casting of “The Godfather”). So maybe the stakes were too high for Barbra to go to the mat for mere comedy.

But Brice was not interested in fighting for beauty, and she never portrayed herself as one. Beauty, in our society, can itself be a kind of prison. Free of that prison, Brice was free to express herself without restriction, and to be a great comic genius.