Ken’s Blog

This is the first birthday you’ve missed
You, who were always there for mine,
Are now not here
For yours.

There will be other birthdays you will miss,
(You, who never forgot a birthday),
Until it will come to seem
Almost normal.

But never quite normal, because of one thing:
You, who are not here to celebrate,
Are still celebrated
And loved.

Inspired by Vi Hart’s post about 3D printing an Apollonian gasket, I started to wonder whether it would be possible to get to that deeply Apollonian form through something more, well, Dionysian.

After Xiao mentioned Zhuangzi’s lovely dream of the butterfly yesterday, I started thinking about the relationship (which has been discussed by many philosophers) between Dionysus, the god of beautiful chaos, and Apollo, the god of rational beauty.

And I decided I would take a butterfly on a journey to attain a state of Apollonian perfection, but only after it has traveled through the chaos of dreams.

After playing around with some fractal programming, I found a suitable way to create and transform a mathematically defined butterfly (click on the image below to see the result). The cycle repeats endlessly because, of course, journeys in dreams are never finished.

 

For the first time I can ever remember, last night I had a dream about having a dream.

I didn’t remember this when I first awoke. Rather, it was only when, after becoming really awake (at least, I hope I’m now really awake), I found myself in a situation that reminded me of my nested dream. Then it all came rushing back to me. The interesting thing is that I can remember the dream within the dream in vivid detail — obviously it made an impression on me. So much so, that I felt moved to describe it, moment by moment. to my dream friends, who were all greatly amused.

I have no idea who those dream friends were supposed to be — generic stand-ins, I supposed, for the “group of people I know who are listening to me recount a dream.” Very pleasant people they were, though admittedly a little blurry around the edges.

I realize this will all remind most people reading this of Christopher Nolan’s recent film Inception. It certainly reminds me of Inception. Except of course that Nolan wasn’t really describing dreams, but rather “lucid dreams”, in which you know you are dreaming, and can utilize all of your waking free-will.

This wasn’t like that at all. At each level of my dream, I can recall being quite convinced that I was awake — a particularly ironic state of mind to be in while dreaming you are describing a dream. My experience was very much like a series of one-way mirrors, since each of my dream states could be seen into from the outside, but not out of from the inside.

This of course raises the usual philosophical questions: Was I having a dream within a dream, or just a dream? Is Hamlet’s play within a play more fictional than Hamlet himself, with characters who are somehow “less real”? I haven’t the faintest idea, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to guess.

Or maybe I would.

There is a moment, before you have actually met, when all you know is the work, the external manifestation of another’s genius.

You might stand in awe, poised between knowing and not knowing, on the knife edge of possibility.

There are so many possible futures, so many ways that ideas can come to life, in a conversation about to begin. You find yourself captured by a narrative, a fractal, a story sketched in second person singular.

It is — how shall I say it — camels, all the way down.

Those of us in research create things for many reasons. For some it is the sheer love of discovery, for others a kind of aesthetic journey for Truth. And for many it is mainly about that delicious feeling of striking out on one’s own, of finding some new path within the universe that has never before been traveled. I suspect it is usually a mix of all of these reasons, in one proportion or another.

But what about our clients — the rest of the world that uses our discoveries? What is it that motivates them, that draws them to drink from the well of some new creation? I’ve been thinking about this, and I think I can see three different kinds of motivations behind those who would make use of research, of new discoveries and methods of doing things.

First there are, for want of a better word, the capitalists — those who are in it for the money. These are people who are continually monitoring what the world wants — or at least what the world is willing to pay for — and are looking for a way to fulfill that need so that they can take a piece of the action. The contradictory thing about this group is that they can often help to make new discoveries possible by providing funding, but they may not care about the research itself on any intrinsic level. All discovery tends to become flattened to the one dimension of its monetary potential. This can create some odd misunderstandings between researcher and capitalist.

Second are the artists. These are the people who are perpetually in a dialog with beauty, with balance, with harmony, with bold statements about the human condition. For such people, a new research discovery is a beautiful agent for new aesthetic possibility, for human expression that takes our minds to new places.

Finally, there are the social activists. These are the people who are always asking the fundamental question “How can I make the world a better place? How can I reduce the suffering of the world’s poor, or diminish the vast inequities of wealth within society?”

Of course this is not a mutually exclusive set of traits. For example, the iPad — an integration of years of technological and design research by many people (not all of them at Apple Computer) — is a commercial creation, driven by the profit motive, with all of that motive’s attendant social power and baggage. Yet the iPad is also an object of aesthetic contemplation, a successful work of visual proportion and tactile responsiveness that is quite lovely and elegant in its way.

In an analogous vein, the fruits of some medical research can lead to great public good at the same that they are creating the potential for enormous corporate profit (as well as enormous financial risk). In this case, given the huge amount of capital that may be required to fund research in the first place, it’s not a choice between profit and helping the world, but rather a system in which one is entangled with the other.

I imagine there must be cases where the same research discovery leads to all three kinds of clientele — to the money makers, the artists and the social reformers, all at once. At the moment I can’t think of any such discoveries. But perhaps you might be able to think of one.

I had the pleasure today of talking with people in the Intelligent Narrative Computing group at Georgia Tech, and the wonderful conversation we had got me thinking about the relationship between readers and writers.

The act of writing a story is a human activity quite distinct from the act of reading a story. If you’ve written stories, you know that it’s a kind of process of discovery. As soon as you start writing, all sorts things start to emerge — characters, situations, conflicts, dramatic arcs — that surprise you yourself, the author. In a way, you are writing a travelogue into your own mind, a place that may turn out to be foreign and exotic even to yourself.

Reading is also a process of discovery, but of a very different kind, since the reader experiences the story as a received object. We tend to think of this transaction as a duality: Traditionally, there is a “writer” and a “reader”, and nothing in between. And this is generally true for all of the traditional arts. The painter or sculptor is distinct from the museum-goer, just as the song writer is distinct from the song listener.

But in music we have a concept of jazz improvisation. Richard Rodgers may write one version of his lovely melody for “My Favorite Things”, but then John Coltrane and his quartet can turn it into quite a different object of beauty.

Could we have jazz writing, in which the reader is also a writer? There are stories that are structured in a way as to suggest such an activity. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods are each structured so as to imply a kind of call and response, a deliberate turning around of the camera to invite the reader in as an active participant, although in both cases this “reader participation” is an illusion.

There are music games, such as Guitar Hero, that put the listener of music into the pose of performer. I wonder whether there can be some analog game for storytelling. Perhaps a card came in which the bones of a story are laid out, and the player is charged with constructing a plausible story that connects the dots. It could even be a cooperative game, in which people form teams, as we do when we solve a jigsaw puzzle.

This could be an interesting way to invite readers to understand what makes a story work. For example, the player could be presented with the pieces that constitute a hero’s journey, including the mentor, the villain, the conflict between what the hero thinks he/she wants and what he/she actually needs, the necessary suffering, the second-act low, the redemptive third act.

People might even come to see what makes great writing work, such as the way Aaron Sorkin structured The Social Network as a variation on the classic hero’s journey, but one in which the hero is deprived of a true mentor (and therefore can never find a moral center).

To round out this series of posts on the possible future of user interfaces, I must say it’s great fun to try to look ahead and try to predict what might happen in the years to come. Of course you never really know. As the great user interface imagineer J. K. Rowling once said: “Predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.”

Indeed. Sometimes you may get the big picture right, but not the details. For example, here is a magazine advert from 1965 for a very future-looking vision from Western Electric:

 

We now know, forty five years later, that such a product never took the world by storm. And yet, all those years ago that team of Western Electric designers had hit upon an essential grain of truth: That eventually, as outlandish as it might have seemed to most people even recently, the television and the telephone would converge in the consumer marketplace:

 

Sometimes the dreamers have it right.

And on that hopeful note we leave this topic — but we may return to it again after a time.

After all, you never know what might happen in the future. 🙂

I started to write a post today about a cool conversation I recently had with a friend on an interesting math topic, until I realized it just wouldn’t work. It’s not that the concepts were out of anyone’s grasp — the ideas we were discussing were all very simple and logical and beautiful, and certainly not beyond the reach of anyone who reads this blog.

It was rather that the only way to discuss those ideas would require the notation of math. And I am all too acutely aware that most people have a very unfriendly relationship with mathematical notation. If you write something like e^x, or x + iy, most people will start to panic, and promptly set about finding somewhere else to be.

The ideas that these expressions represent are not at all difficult, but somehow the very fact that it’s “math” stops people dead — you end up discussing not the ideas, but rather the wall of incomprehension surrounding the way those ideas are expressed.

It’s a shame, because mathematical ideas have the kind of immense beauty found in so few things — a glorious sunset or a great Shakespearean sonnet come to mind. But unless something changes radically, that beauty will likely remain, for most people, out of reach.

Mari’s comment the other day, about extended embedded interaction technology to other senses, leads to a very good point. The more we build our interaction technologies into our own bodies, the more vulnerable we become to perception hacking.

It’s one thing if a computer screen is hacked, since the damage is localized. You might not be seeing a true representation of networked information, but the misinformation does not become conflated with the world around you. Once somebody else can hack into channels of perception that you use to see reality itself, the results can be far more damaging.

If you have technology that lets your eyes see things that aren’t there, or your ears hear things that don’t exist, or your fingers touch objects that are not real, you become open to the possibility that malicious software will be able to send false information through your enhanced senses, giving you a false impression of the reality around you.

And so an entirely new field might arise — a field of security that protects you from having your augmented reality replaced by a chimera. If you get used to seeing ambiscopic signs to give you directions, or to verifying the identities of people by looking at the information you see floating above their heads, you become vulnerable to this sort of hacking.

I don’t have any solution to this problem, since there is never a simple solution to the abuse of any new technology. But this is an issue that we will need to keep in mind, as we continue to augment the interface between brain and sensed reality.

There is a very solemn burial scene in the new Harry Potter movie. I know it’s supposed to be moving and deeply emotional, but the scene doesn’t work if you’ve been to an actual funeral in the recent past. One of the primary functions of such a scene is to comfort us with the knowledge that “it’s only a movie”, and that everything will be ok when we leave the theatre.

But of course if you already know that everything won’t be ok when you leave the theatre, then such scenes have the unintended effect of pulling you out of the fantasy of the movie, and bringing you back to sad events in your real life.

In contrast, gallows humor definitely helps. Today my friend Gerry told me about something that had happened at his father’s funeral some years ago. His father’s body was lying in its coffin in the funeral home, and Gerry was paying his last respects — looking at his father one last time and giving him a final highly emotional kiss.

Gerry told me that as he was walking away from the coffin, the only other person in the room — the funeral director — spoke to him. “I’m sorry to have to say this,” the funeral director explained, “but it will be a closed casket ceremony, so officially I need to ask you now the following question: `Is the person lying in that coffin actually your father?'”

The sudden transition from a deeply personal and emotional moment to something so absurd was a bit much for Gerry, which explains what he did next. He looked the funeral director squarely in the eye, and said “I’m afraid that’s a question you’re going to have to ask my mother.”