Ken’s Blog

There is a trend in Hollywood to use digital make-up to dramatically reduce the apparent age of actors. Most recently, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent put Nick Cage on the screen with a simulacrum of his much younger self.

The technology is still not 100% mature, and the virtual Nick Cage looked slightly uncanny. So have other virtual younger representations, such as Carrie Fisher in Rogue One and DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci in The Irishman.

In the case of the Nick Cage film I think the uncanniness sort of worked, because the younger version of Cage was supposed to be an unreal fantasy figure. That covers a lot of sins.

There will come a time, as technology advances, when de-aging digital make-up will not only look perfectly real, but will become easy to do and inexpensive. When that happens, older actors will likely routinely take on much younger roles. This will simply become accepted as a normal part of the filmmaking process.

But the frontier after that, one which is far more difficult, is to use digital make-up to allow one actor to create a perfect impression of a different actor. This will also allow living actors to take on roles made iconic by actors already deceased.

I suspect that whenever that technology reaches maturity, it will involve not just CGI but also Machine Learning to model the dynamic facial musculature of the original actor. Fortunately those algorithms will have lots of good labeled data to work from, thanks to old movies.

I am currently working on an article in which I am supposed to make some reasonable predictions about the future. And I am wrestling with the question of exactly what voice to use.

Should I talk about the future in definite terms, as though I have already been there? Or should I hedge my bets and say things like “This might happen,” or “That could come true”?

The first way is a lot more fun for both me and the reader. I’m basically saying “We are going on a wild ride together, and fasten your seatbelts.’

The second way is more responsible, but kind of boring. Plausible deniability is never sexy.

I will probably opt for the first approach. After all, if the reader is confused by that, they will probably be confused by anything I say.

You might as well just have fun with a topic like this. As Master Yoda said: “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”

There was a time in TV history when genius detectives needed to possess some quirk or defect. In one show our hero was in a wheelchair. In another he was blind.

Yet another show had a genius detective notable for being overweight, another for being well past retirement age. A more recent example was Monk, who was seriously OCD.

I am imagining an executive memo at the studio seeking ideas for quirky genius detectives, looking for that next hit show.

Some of these ideas would be accepted without hesitation, others met with indignation, perhaps in need of correction. I imagine, for example, that the idea for Dexter — a very effective sleuth who happened to be a sociopath — might have been met with some resistance.

You might say it was a case of defective effective detective directive selective corrective invective.

Today is the first Friday in June, and you know what that means. Yes, it’s National Doughnut Day!

Which brings me back to one of my earliest memories of wrestling with a philosophical conundrum. It was a time when I was a little kid, and my dad bought us donuts.

I remember staring at the donut, and trying to figure something out. “Dad,” I asked, “when you eat a donut, what happens to the hole?”

“Don’t worry,” he explained. “the ghosts eat them.”

I found that to be an excellent answer. Ever since then, I feel good every time I eat a donut, because I’m also feeding a ghost.

So you can understand why National Doughnut Day is my very favorite holey day.

I am simultaneously working on a proposal to the National Science Foundation and a paper for a forthcoming ACM publication on the topic of Interactions in Extended Reality. Both of these focus on questions about how we can shape the future of augmented and virtual reality, and how we can design interactions within that future.

There is a lot of overlap between the two endeavors, although they are different in many ways. For one thing, a proposal talks about what we plan to do, whereas a paper about the future talks about what everybody might plan to do.

But in both cases I am finding it really helpful to look back through this blog, and see what I had to say about the future on various days. In a way, it’s a sort of conversation with myself.

Which is weird, but also kind of fun. Especially whenever I find that I don’t agree with me.

Yesterday I started with that little moving square program that I showed last week, and just started randomly playing with it. I wanted to add something that had a kind of autonomous behavior.

So I changed the square to a round dot, which you can still control. And then I added a thousand other dots around it, which respond to your presence. Kind of like you’re surrounded by a crowd.

But you don’t really feel like you are surrounded unless people are staring at you. So I added eyes to the other little dots. And then, to make sure all those dots felt alive, I made their eyes blink.

The result is kind of cool, if a little paranoid. You can play with it here.

Recently I took part in an episode for WIRED magazine, called Wired: Five Levels, where five people (a child, a high school student, a college student, a grad student and an expert) are asked to discuss the same science topic. This particular episode was about fractals, and I was the designated “expert” level interviewee.

I found the entire experience to be very inspiring. In fact, being asked on that shoot was what inspired me to implement that little Mandelbrot fractal explorer I posted some weeks ago.

I think they did a great job putting it all together. You can check out the episode here.

This morning I was somewhere where a random playlist of 1980s pop songs was playing. At one point The Bangles’ hit Manic Monday came on.

“Did you know,” I said to the person I was with, “that this song was written by Prince?”

“I can definitely hear that,” she said.

A few minutes later the next random pop song started. It was “1999” sung by the Purple One himself.

We just looked at each other. There was no reason even to say anything.

It was like we were hearing the same song again. Only with different lyrics and a more Princely arrangement.

I wonder what were the odds of those two songs coming up back to back? It felt like a good cosmic joke.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by the M4 Sherman, more commonly known as the Sherman Tank. That powerhouse military tank, topped off by a 75mm gun on a fully rotating turret, was used very effectively by the U.S. in World War II.

Those things were pretty much invulnerable, and were awesome if your goal was to ride into town and utterly destroy everything in sight. In a Sherman Tank, you could knock down or blow out entire buildings without missing a beat.

But I don’t think I would want one in my local neighborhood. A Sherman Tank would tear up the road, roll over and destroy cars, knock down traffic lights, and pretty much make any place unlivable.

And if some enthusiastic tank owner ever decided to shoot off a round or two, you might find your entire house reduced to rubble. Hopefully you and your kids would be lucky enough not to be home at the time, because otherwise you would all be dead.

Basically, if there is a Sherman Tank in your neighborhood, you are constantly under siege. You have essentially been reduced to being a helpless prisoner in a war zone — not a great quality of life.

Recently the NRA met in Texas, and various famous people got up and essentially claimed that there is no difference between a car and a Sherman Tank. Conveniently, nobody talked about Aaron Salter.

If I understand their reasoning correctly, I have a suggestion for the next NRA slogan: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a Sherman Tank is a good guy with a Honda Civic.”

Bingeing the long awaited new season of Stranger Things today. It’s even better than I had remembered!

And the great retro references are not quite about nostalgia, because it’s not so much that I miss the ’80s. It’s more that it’s so much nicer to see the ’80s happen to other people. 🙂