Ken's Blog

Today I was thinking, what if we lived in an alternate universe where buildings were never designed to stay in one place. Yes, a building would be a single or multiple family dwelling, but it would also be a vehicle, a kind of self-propelling communal caravan.

Cities would form spontaneously as buildings came together in critical mass, and then they would drift, as dictated by the mysteries of time, fashion and economic circumstance. A person’s address would be a dynamic thing, an ever changing variable of lived experience.

Some buildings might wander south for the winter, others would cluster together in solidarity. Perhaps they would travel in packs, a pride of abodes drifting across the landscape in slow and regal splendor.

Coincidentally, this evening I saw an episode of “Fringe” that took place in an alternate version of our universe. As you can see in the picture below, our well-worn trope of the well appointed Yuppie kitchen has been selectively modified. The happy couple draws their fine wine from a box, their expensive steak from a can.

 

As I watched this scene, I couldn’t help wondering whether their building would migrate south for the winter.

Today, by coincidence, I received several new toys simultaneously.

Well, “toys” might not be the best word. More like “stuff I ordered on-line to do science experiments.” They are all pictured in the photo below, arrayed artistically on my living room floor:

 

In the center are two magnifying glasses. The one on the left is 2.5″ in diameter and has a 3x lens. The one on the right is 2″ in diameter and has a 4x lens.

Below the first magnifying glass are four ring magnets. Each is 1/2″ in diameter and 1/2″ long. They are kind of hard to separate.

To the far right are two bigger ring magnets. Each is 1/2″ in diameter and 1″ long. These are very hard to separate. And if you do manage to separate them, don’t get your fingers caught between them when they try to snap back together.

In the upper left, looking deceptively like a single long cylinder, are ten little ring magnets arranged end to end. Each of these is 1/2″ in diameter but only 1/8″ long. I’m guessing that these are the ones I’ll end up using my experiments.

Last week a friend from out of town came back from his day trip to the Museum of Modern Art and told me he had a great time at the MOMA.

“MOMA,” I said.

“That’s what I said,” he responded.

“No,” I said. “You called it ‘the MOMA’. You should just say ‘MOMA’. That is, if you don’t want people to realize you’re a tourist.”

Then today I was talking with a friend who happens to be in her twenties. I said I had ordered something from on-line, and she laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You said ‘from on-line,'” she explained. “It’s just ‘on-line’, as in: ‘I ordered something on-line.'”

I vowed that from now on I will just say ‘on-line’. That is, if I don’t want people to realize I’m a tourist.

OK, this is a bit of a grammar gripe.

I’ve been noticing that the entire idea of when to use “I” versus “me” in a plural clause has mysteriously disappeared, and nobody seems to notice.

I’d always thought the rules were simple: When you’re the subject of a sentence, you say, for example: “I am going to the store”. And when you’re the object of a sentence, you say, for example: “This is happening to me.”

So far so good. “I” versus “me”. Everybody seems to get that right.

But throw another person into the mix, and people start to get confused. Instead of saying “Jenny and I are going to the store,” I hear people say “Jenny and me are going to the store.”

And instead of saying “This is happening to Fred and me,” I hear people say “This is happening to Fred and I.”

The whole thing sounds so strange to my ears, as though people were saying “Me is going to the store,” or “This is happening to I.”

Am I the only one left who notices this? Has the English language somehow changed while I wasn’t looking?

Tonight I saw “Kick-Ass 2”. I had thoroughly enjoyed the original, and was very much looking forward to seeing what Matthew Vaughn would bring us in the sequel.

I’m not saying I didn’t have a good time, because I did. But the unique blend of transgression and sweetness that was the original was simply missing. Where the first film was, at heart, a lovely character piece about misfits trying to find themselves (and each other), the sequel wasn’t so much a movie, as it was a series of loosely connected sketches, each trying to outdo the other in some category of outrageousness.

I can understand how this sort of thing happens. A movie does well, perhaps unexpectedly, and suddenly there is a franchise. This franchise is a sort of hungry beast, which must be fed. Many millions of dollars are on the line, so the stakes are very high.

Alas, those high stakes do not mean that there is actually anything new to say. While an original film generally comes out of some unique passion, a coherent vision of characters going on a journey, its sequel is usually a product of money and its demands.

Even worse, at the end of the first movie (assuming it was a good movie), the characters have completed their story arcs, so they really don’t have anywhere they need to go. Which means that the sequel begins with a serious structural disadvantage: From the perspective of story, it has no inherent reason to exist at all.

So sequels often do what “Kick-Ass 2” did — they jump the shark. The film piles excess upon excess. To paraphrase the incomparable Nigel Tufnel, “This movie goes to eleven.”

If it weren’t for the brilliant Chloe Grace Moretz finding amazing depth of character not in the screenplay, but rather through her reaction shots and quiet moments between all the scripted nonsense, the film would have been unwatchable. I recommend seeing this movie not because I think it is good, but because it is a great lesson in how a brilliant performance can nearly salvage a bad movie.

Today I wanted to learn how to load the contents of a file from my own computer into a web browser. I did a Web search, and discovered lots of forums, tutorials and discussion groups on the topic.

A number of the on-line discussions seemed to devolve into a kind of religious war, with some participants asserting that such a thing was simply impossible, and others saying that accessing a file from disk was sort of morally wrong. Apparently it goes against the spirit of the Web.

One odd thing about such assertions is that they seem to have no relationship to reality. After all, if you’ve ever uploaded to a web site a document you wrote or an image you took (which nearly everyone has done by now), then you have clearly read the contents of a file from your computer into a web browser.

I did find some tutorial sites on the topic, but they were all very long, with gnarly code that ran on for pages. It had seemed like such a simple question, and I was astonished to find the on-line answers to be anything but straightforward.

Eventually I figured out what was going on, by assembling little bits and pieces from different places. When I was all done, the whole thing took just one line of HTML plus four lines of Javascript. For those of you who care, here they are:

      <input id=”input” type=”file”>
      …
      var chooser = document.getElementById(‘input’);
      var reader = new FileReader();
      chooser.addEventListener(‘change’, function() {reader.readAsText(this.files[0]);});
      reader.onload = function() { fileText = this.result; }
 

So what are all those people out there going on about? I’m starting to suspect there may be something very odd about Web programming culture.

I’m just not quite sure yet what it is.

Periodically I get emails from Amazon.com recommending things I might want to purchase, based on my previous purchase history.

The recommendations are always logical on a very low level, but completely nonsensical at a higher semantic level. The basic problem is that Amazon has no clue why I purchased something, which means they have no context for assessing what that purchase might predict about my future buying habits.

For example, today I received several recommendations, including one for a 75mm diameter curved watch glass. As it happens, I purchased a 50mm diameter watch glass through Amazon some months ago, because I needed a curved piece of glass for a scientific experiment. I didn’t actually need it for a watch.

It occurs to me now that even if I had needed it for a watch, it would have been for a specific 50mm diameter watch, not a hypothetical 75mm watch that I do not own.

Now my curved glass experiment is long finished, yet I continue to receive watch glass suggestions from Amazon, like pleas from a child who asks for a pony one more time, hoping to wear down a distracted grownup through sheer repetition.

I am left wondering — does this whole email recommendation thing ever actually work?

I’ve been doing quite a lot of retooling recently for my research. Switching over to Javascript, writing tools to create procedural diagrams in HTML5, rebuilding my 3D modeler in WebGL so it can use triangle strips and fast fragment shaders, and starting to control sensors and output devices through an Arduino while getting up to speed on the real microprocessor that I will need to use for serious projects.

Today I was doing all of those things, in a kind of crazy round robin of happy hacking. Then I spent some time on-line learning about how to make strong tiny electromagnets, and right now I’m revisiting Etherpad for synchronous code sharing.

At some point, when you find yourself in one of those modes, you realize that it’s all one big project. Somewhere in the back of your mind is an idea, and every acquired skill gets you closer to finding it. Each new tool becomes part of a kind of laboratory workbench, and the real power comes when it becomes easy to pick up any tool from the bench, combine it with the others, and extend your reach in new directions.

The exciting part is seeing how the space of reachable places grows with every new tool in your arsenal.

I guess this has been true down through history — the vehicle defines the journey. Back when anything that traveled faster than a horse was considered a marvel, a thousand miles was thought to be an epic distance. Now, in these days of space travel to other planets, the Moon is considered too near to bother with.

Watching all those episodes of Fringe has gotten me thinking about alternate realities — the many possible versions of the future that end up not happening.

What if I had done this instead of that, had made a different choice at a crucial moment? This is basically the same question asked by such films as “Sliding Doors”, and it’s one that seems to endlessly fascinate the human mind.

In particular, I was pondering that most peculiar of fictional super powers, the ability to choose, at will, a different branch in the expanding tree of alternate universes.

On the face of it, this would clearly be a good power to have. So many unfortunate accidents, lost chances, avoidable tragedies, all averted with the ease of flipping a switch.

On the other hand, surely there would be hidden costs. Suppose you knew that it was all a zero-sum game — that a life saved by choosing one alternate universe would result in some other life lost? Would you be willing to pay that price?

Recently I was scheduled to take a train that got delayed, which was a shame because a friend was planning to take me to some good theatre that evening.

I called my friend from the station to give her the bad news.

She asked what the prognosis was, and without thinking I said “I’ll get there eventually, Allah willing.”

Then I stopped for a moment — something about what I had just said made me pause. I looked at the cell phone in my hand, as though seeing it for the first time.

“And I would just like to add,” I continued, “that I think the folks at the NSA are doing a fine job.”