Ken’s Blog

“Wow, that’s strange — a dream about your grandmother Amelia, the one you never met. I remember you once told me she died when your mom was a girl.”

Jenny looked at Josh a while before answering. “I wouldn’t exactly say we never met. After all, I had a perfectly lovely conversation with her last night. In my dream, I mean.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t really count, does it? I mean, there’s a difference between dreams and reality.”

“That’s your theory,” Jenny said. “Suppose you found out something in a dream, and then, after that, it happened in ‘reality’. Would you still think there was such a big difference?”

“Coincidences happen,” Josh shrugged. “Doesn’t mean you’ve got to rearrange your whole view of the universe.”

“Well, what if, um, I said to you ‘You’re going to meet some guy named Charlie’, and then you met some guy named Charlie? Would that be just a coincidence?”

Josh shook his head. “Now you’re just reaching. I mean, stuff like that doesn’t really…”

“Hi, I’m Charlie. I’m new at school. Mind if I sit here?” The body stood politely, waiting to be asked to join them.

Josh looked up in open mouthed astonishment. Unable to get any words out, he merely nodded. When he was finally able to talk, he said “How did you…”

“Like I told you Josh,” Jenny said, “I had a nice conversation last night with my grandmother. Our new friend is very handsome, isn’t he?”

Josh looked at Charlie, but this time really looked at him. Charlie was indeed handsome, but the word ‘handsome’ didn’t even begin to describe it. It was like he had a kind of golden glow about him. In a way, Josh thought, it’s unfair, people like that walking around. How do you compete? With a feeling of furtive panic, he looked over at Jenny.

But Jenny was looking at Josh, not at Charlie. “Don’t worry, he’s going to be a friend. A very good friend. Isn’t that right Charlie?”

“Yep,” Charlie said. “Nothing to worry about. Did you tell him yet?”

“Tell me what?” Josh asked.

I saw a talk yesterday by Jaron Lanier, in which he mentioned Pascal’s Wager. For those of you who don’t know, this was the argument by the mathematician Blaise Pascal that you are better off believing in God, because if there is no God, then you have nothing to lose, but if there is a God, then you have everything to gain.

To me this argument has always seemed flawed, since in a universe with an infinity of metaphysical possibilities, it is just as likely that atheism will get you sent to heaven, whereas believing in God will land you in hell. When it comes to pure conjecture, any possibility is as likely as any other.

But Jaron was only using Pascal’s Wager as a model for a much more interesting wager. Speaking to our current cultural fascination with computers, he argued that the best way to develop better user interfaces for computers is to ignore the computer entirely — essentially act like it doesn’t exist — and think only about the human brain and body.

In particular, he said that if a designer of user interfaces is given the metaphysical choice between “the brain is just another kind of computer” and “human thinking is unique in a way that is beyond mere computation”, it is more useful to choose the latter.

Just to be clear, he wasn’t saying that the human exceptionalist view is correct, merely that it is more useful when designing user interfaces. And I tend to agree with him.

In fact, as I’ve said here before, it is arguable that the most influential user interface designer of the last dozen years has been J.K. Rowling, since her vision of Harry Potter’s world was pretty much a description of the way we’d like our computer interfaces to behave, if they could do whatever we wanted them to do. Not surprisingly, reality has been catching up to her vision of a world in which maps can show you where your friends are now, and people in newspapers wave to you.

Someone from the audience asked Jaron whether it is always useful to think this way. Jaron judiciously said no: When you are studying the computational abilities of the brain, it may very well be useful to think of the mind in cybernetic terms.

But when you are trying to create better user interfaces for actual people out in the world, it is clear that Jaron sensibly sides with J.K. Rowling and her fellow modern philosopher Arthur C. Clarke, who famously pointed out that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Josh and Jenny were sitting in the school cafeteria. “That teacher yesterday was weird, wasn’t he?” Josh said.

“Oh I don’t know,” Jenny replied. “Sid’s ok.”

“What, are you two on a first name basis now?”

“Josh, he called himself Sid. I’m just using the same name he used.” As she spoke, Jenny was absently fingering the golden key, which she now wore on a string around her neck.

“OK, you don’t need to be touchy about it,” Josh said, trying to change the subject, “I guess you must really like that key.”

Jenny held the golden key up and looked at it for a long while. Then she looked up at Josh. “I had a dream last night,” she said quietly.

“About the key?”

“No,” she shook her head. “about my grandmother Amelia.”

They were dark times. Dark times indeed.
There were rumors, omens, murmurings just
under the surface. It was the end of
something we had all believed would
never end, and the beginning of a
time we had known only in our dreams.

The thousand year wait had begun,
the march of countless armies against
a foe beyond imagining.

The fortress had given way, that
citadel they had said would outlive
us all, when only those who
had held the door against our foe
could bear to speak its name.

I met you before the war, but we
were children then. Time and its
ravages have changed us. I bear
the mark, that same mark you know
only too well.

In a way it is our badge of honor,
that was meant to be a badge of shame.
Yes I hold my head high, and stand
before the gloaming night, in
the fierce time of watching. For all
through the hungry night, all
I seek is you.

In school the next day, Jenny was sitting in her seat, waiting for class to start. She was looking at the key, turning it over in her hand, when Josh came up..

“You look distracted,” he said, sliding into the seat next to hers.

“Hi Josh,” Jenny said, “no, not distracted. Not exactly.” she was silent for a moment, staring at the key. “Do you ever think about the future?”

Josh laughed. “I’ve got enough trouble thinking about the present. The future’s going to happen anyway, whatever I do. It doesn’t need me to think about it.”

“Yes,” Jenny said seriously, “but which future?”

“Is it just me,” Josh said, “or is this conversation starting to get weird? Nice key, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Jenny said. Then she looked up toward the door. “Teacher’s coming.”

“The teacher never comes this early,” Josh began. But just then the door swung open and their new teacher walked in. “Hey,” Josh said, “how did you…”

“Morning kids,” the new teacher said, walking briskly to the desk in the front of the room. “Mr. Symarian ain’t comin’ in for a while. I’m gonna cover your English class. Nice to be here.”

Jenny smiled at Josh. “Right on time.”

Their substitute teacher was surprisingly short and completely bald, with a compact body and round head. When he reached the teacher’s desk, he turned to face the class. “You can call me Sid.”

Over the next few days I am running a major event. Well, at least for me it’s a major event, since I’ve never run anything this big before. Of course, when I say “run” I don’t mean I’m doing it myself — far from it.

Rather, I’m a bit like a starship captain on the deck of the Enterprise, pointing toward some cluster out beyond Altair or Centauri and saying to a capable crew “Make it so”. Like Captain Picard, except with more hair.

Which wouldn’t work at all but for the fact that the crew — the people I’m working with — are amazing. Hard working, focused, constantly coming up with solutions to problems or ways to make things better. All to create the best three day experience we can for several hundred participants.

Many of us have been on the other side of this kind of thing before, of course. You show up at a conference, and you idly wonder “How did they do that?” Or “How did they know how much food to order?” Well, it turns out that it’s a mix of two things: On the one hand, there is traditional lore passed down from year to year, the time tested ways of doing things that people know without even realizing they know it.

But then the rest is just plain winging it — flying without a net, and hoping the landing is soft. Things come up and surprise you, budgets change unexpectedly, people make mistakes, that resource you were relying on turns out to be unavailable, and all your careful plans that were months in the making have to be rethought mere days before the event.

The funny thing is that the people who show up at your event aren’t aware of any of this. To them it all seems inevitable, and that’s the experience you want to create — the feeling of a stately ship sailing though calm and unruffled seas.

It wouldn’t do to have anyone realize how much work went into that hard won appearance of calm, or how close your ship’s even keel could have come to teetering, or to capsizing altogether.

***

The house had been in their family for about two hundred years, and had somehow managed to pass from mother to daughter. So great was the pull of the old place that successive generations of husbands always ended up moving in.

Jenny had always heard stories about her grandmother’s secret jewelry box, the one that was supposed to be lost somewhere in the attic, and how grandma, when she was a girl, had found it there one day, left by her grandmother. Mom used to tell the story with a wistful look, as though talking about some long lost childhood friend. But it was one of those stories you don’t really think is true. Grandma had died when Jenny’s mom was just a girl, so there was no way to check, and Jenny was rather practical minded about these things.

So she was a little taken aback when she actually came upon the little jewelry box while rummaging around in the attic one day. The inlaid figurine of a ballerina on the top surface was exactly as her mom had always described it, and she knew at once that it was the real thing, with a certainty that she couldn’t really explain.

There didn’t seem to be a key to open it, or a keyhole either for that matter. After a few minutes of fiddling around trying to find a secret door or something, she was about to give up in frustration, when on a sudden whim she pressed down on the little figure of the ballerina. With a click the box sprang open.

The inside of the box was lined with a thick cushion of red velvet. It smelled slightly musty, as though the box had been closed for a very long time, which she supposed it must have been. Other than that the box appeared to be empty, except for a single old-fashioned skeleton key, golden in color, nestled within a matching depression in the velvet cushion.

Jenny picked up the key, and that’s when it happened…

The sheer haiku-like brevity of a tweet is a large part of its appeal. When you tweet, you don’t need a lot of preamble or set-up time to get your message out — you just get right to your thought. For better or worse, a tweet is a pure a spontaneous expression of now.

So suppose we knew that a bot were listening to our tweet, and that this bot could do things that bots do — post a link, put an event up on our calendar, bring up a map of our whereabouts on our friend’s screen, buy something on eBay at our pre-arranged signal. All of those many things that we’d like computer software to do for us.

I can envision a kind of computer programming language specifically designed around the immediacy of 140 character messages. One thing that makes this approach to programming interesting is that it is inherently social in nature. In fact, you could tweet something that would influence the actions of my bot.

For example, if you twitter about a party on Saturday, I might already have sent a tweet to my bot telling it that party announcements from you should go onto my calendar. My bot is listening to you, under my direction.

One of the barriers to entry for learning traditional programming is the way coding fosters a particular mind-set, one that privileges building large structures. Programs tend to be long and involved, requiring serious engagement and focus to understand.

But if anything you told your computer to do had to be stated in simple declarative 140 character chunks, maybe we’d develop an entirely new way of thinking about how to order our computers about.

Maybe Twitter will turn out to be the way to universal programming literacy.

The moment their fingers touched, Jenny felt a surge of something — like electricity, but not quite — flow between her and her grandmother. The room started to fade away. She tried to look over at Josh, but it was as though she was seeing him from a great distance. The little dog he was cradling in his arms was somehow, impossibly, huge. Her mind could not make any sense of it.

She turned to find Mr. Symarian. But where their teacher had been, she now saw something — something unspeakable. It was as though her brain could not reconcile the unearthly shape that stood before her. She could feel her mind trying to match it to something, anything, from her experience, and failing utterly.

Jenny quickly looked away, and attempted to turn her gaze back toward her grandmother, but the directions were all wrong. She was somehow staring downward, into a long dark spiraling tunnel. She felt herself start to tumble forward, and then she was falling. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realized she was screaming.

The last thought she had, before losing consciousness, was about how odd it was that her scream didn’t seem to make any sound. No, she decided, just before everything went black, not any sound at all.

Now that I have a 3D printer at home, I realize that I can do something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time, but never had a good way to do — audio holography. The basic idea is to create a surface with just the right pattern of little bumps and valleys in it (all calculated on a computer, of course). If you design these bumps and valleys just right, the surface acts as an audio hologram.

It works like this: Once you have this surface, you send a pulse of sound that has a very high frequency, say around 300Khz, toward the bumpy surface. At that frequency the wavelength of sound through air is around one millimeter. Because of the little bumps and valleys, the sound reaching the surface bounces off a little sooner in some places (the hills) and a little later in other places (the valleys).

These slight variations kick the reflected sound out of phase in interesting ways. Using computer software, you can arrange the bumps and valleys so that the sound comes back into phase at just the points in space where you want it to.

None of this would be all that interesting to me if there were no way to create a visual display out of this. Fortunately, you can do various optical tricks to convert fine vibrations of air into something that people can see, such as virtual objects that appear to float in mid-air.

The part of all of this that I was always missing was how to create an accurately contoured surface. I knew how to write the computer program to make the right little bumps and valleys, but I didn’t know how to print out the 3D shape in the real world.

Well, now I do. 🙂

Of course it will take a more advanced technology to do what we really want — to create an animated audio hologram. That’s the true long term goal, but the technology needed for that is way beyond my budget.

Meanwhile, I can print out one of these audio-holographic plates with my handy dandy 3D printer. And that’s all I need to get started.