Ken's Blog

This morning at the annual SIGGRAPH conference I started to get texts and emails from people, telling me that the little sandwich stand in the convention center had my name up on its lunch board. It seems that various foods on the menu were named after assorted people in our field, and I was one of the chosen.

Other food selections were named Phong, Catmull, and so on. My name, for some reason, was at the very top of the lunch board, as you can see in the picture below, taken from an photo emailed to me by a former grad student:

 

I went there for lunch today and ordered a delicious peanut butter and banana sandwich named after Jim Blinn. When the lovely woman behind the counter realized who I was, she very graciously (and a bit shyly) presented me with a ceremonial peach. As you can see, the actual peach has a beautiful procedurally generated texture:

One of my favorite films of all time is “Wings of Desire”, the 1987 metaphysical meditation by Wim Wenders. It’s one of those rare works that seems to perfectly realize its ambitions. The achingly beautiful story centers on Bruno Ganz as an angel who must choose between heavenly immortality and his love for a human woman.

Today at lunch a friend told me that this movie was remade by Hollywood in 1998 as “City of Angels”, starring Nicholas Cage in the Ganz role and Meg Ryan as his human love interest. I never saw the latter film because at the time various friends warned me away.

Now going back and reading the reviews of “City of Angels” on IMdB, I see that they are neatly divided into two opposing camps. Anyone who had never seen “Wings of Desire” finds “City of Angels” to be charming, if somewhat flawed. Whereas everyone who had previously seen “Wings of Desire” expresses a deep dislike for “City of Angels”, bordering on horror and revulsion.

I suppose it’s similar to the situation with many Hollywood remakes of great films. For example, if you have any intention of enjoying “The Magnificent Seven”, do not under any circumstances see “The Seven Samurai” first. Seen alone, “The Magnificent Seven” is a somewhat silly and offbeat American oater. Yet seen as a remake of “The Seven Samurai”, it is an abomination and a desecration, more or less a rancid vial of stinking urine flung at the gods of cinema.

There might be cases where the Hollywood remake is actually better than the original. I can’t think of any examples off-hand, but the sheer force of numbers suggests that such a thing most likely exists. Meanwhile, I am left to ponder the dynamics at work here.

For example, suppose Hollywood were to randomly remake great Bruno Ganz films, in each case casting Nicholas Cage in the same role. Imagine, for example, the Nicholas Cage version of “Downfall”. Somehow the thought of Mr. Cage as Hitler in the bunker sends chills up my spine, for all the wrong reasons.

Not to denigrate the unique talents of Nicholas Cage. After all, I’m not sure I would want to see Bruno Ganz in a remake of “Valley Girl”.

A living demo
Is only for us. Here. Now.
And then it is gone.

Only we were there
To share that exact moment.
That’s why it’s magic.

I was just looking at Sargent’s “Portrait of Madame X”. When it came out the scandal around this painting was sufficient to drive its painter from France and to make its subject, the popular socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, withdraw permanently from Paris society.

Today the same painting is seen as an important work, with an honored place on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In our day and age, it is distinctly not scandalous.

 

I am trying to imagine what work of art today might end up following a similar historical trajectory. Specifically, what aesthetic creation is out there today that scandalizes people, to the extent that it has the power to ruin careers and reputations, yet will one day be seen as an important and eminently respectable work of art?

Of course the future is notoriously difficult to predict. Still it is fun to imagine.

So here is a game to play: Pick any work of currently scandalous creation, and declare it to be a respectable work within some imagined future. From that seed, you might be able to construct an entire forward cultural trajectory.

Recently I was at the head of a trail in a national park. Perusing the bulletin board I observed that there were theme hikes listed for nearly every day in the summer. It seems that you can register on-line to take your group on a wilderness trail hike around most any theme.

For one of the scheduled hikes the theme was a word I had never heard of — friggatriskaidekaphobia. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I jotted the word down. It just seemed like one of those words that might some day prove useful.

This morning I finally got around to looking the word up. Yesterday I would not have been able to tell you on which day of the summer this hike occurred. But today, thanks to the wonders of internet search, I know, with certainty, exactly which day this hike took place.

Now I am wondering whether somebody will ever schedule a follow-on hike, perhaps for some balmy Saturday afternoon, around the theme of hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

George Harrison once said “life flows on within you and without you.” In addition to being a wonderful play on words, this is a nice statement about the duality of subjective experience.

We each have a universe within our minds, which is ours and ours alone. At the same time we share a common physical world. Life is a constant negotiation between these two realities.

Being in a physical environment (a beautiful mountain lake and environs) that is very different from my usual haunt, I can feel the change in external world seep into my internal world — in this case, very pleasantly.

I don’t know about you, but I often forget just how much the well-being of my inner life depends on the occasional visit to a harmonious environment. As a person who lives a “life of the mind” I too often need to be reminded of such things.

It’s nice to get such a reminder. 🙂

Today I was looking at a beautiful mountain lake. A cool wind was blowing off the water, ripples sparkled in the sunlight, and the mountains in the distance were framed by gorgeous light. I felt a great inner peace, and the sense that I could sit and watch this lake forever.

Yet somewhere in my mind I could hear the voice of my inner hacker. “We can totally simulate this. Then you won’t need to go to a mountain lake to have this experience. High resolution projection onto a slanted ground plane, phase adjusted speakers on either side, software-controlled blower fans in the right position…” The mental “how-to” checklist was comprehensive and insistent.

My better judgment knew that this was all nonsense. If you could have a “mountain lake” experience anytime and anywhere, it would no longer be a magical moment in your life. It would simply be one more channel on the all pervasive multi-media idiot box. Yet it was surprisingly hard to tell my inner hacker to shut up.

Later in the day I went on a mountain hike. It was not easy, but it was fun. By the time I had made it up to a beautiful secluded waterfall and was on my way back down the mountain, I was completely exhausted and happy.

Fortunately, this time my inner hacker knew when it was outclassed, and had the good sense to just shut the hell up.

There are two general approaches to interface design — methodical application of scientific studies and comparisons, versus reliance on artistic talent and instinct.

Both the power and the deficiency of scientific approaches is that they require some sort of explicit model. You need to understand something about the structure of what you are looking at in order to ask sensible questions about it.

In contrast, artistic approaches to design do not necessarily require an explicit and well-understood model on the part of the designer (although there can be one). The designer does indeed always have a deep understanding of underlying structure, but the designer can be effective even if this understanding remains at the unconscious level.

We’ve all seen somebody sit at the piano, or pick up a pencil and paper, and proceed to create magic. Clearly they know a lot, and are drawing on a wealth of understanding and experience, but they don’t need to have examined that experience in order to call it forth.

Interface design might be one of those cases where the intuitive approach of a single talented artist/designer might be more effective than the methodical approach of a team of researchers.

If you tell somebody to line up ten bottles of different sizes, and then you give them the following instructions to sort the bottles in order of size, pretty much everyone can do it:

(1) Go through the bottles from left to right, swapping any adjacent bottles if they are out of order.

(2) Keep doing step (1) until all the bottles are in order.

The above is the classic Bubble Sort. Here is a lovely YouTube video of a Bubble Sort being performed as a Hungarian folk dance.

But if you say pretty much the same thing in a standard computer programming language, relatively few people can follow:

is_out_of_order = true;

passes = 0;
while ( is_out_of_order )
{
      passes = passes + 1;
      is_out_of_order = false;
     
      n = 0;
      while ( n < 10 - passes )       {             if ( item[n] > item[n + 1] )
            {
                  is_out_of_order = true;
                  swap ( item, n, n + 1 );
            }
            n = n + 1;
      }
}

Somewhere between the Hungarian folk dance and the computer program, comprehension breaks down for most people.

It would be useful to do a careful research study to see just where most people get lost between these two ways of describing a Bubble Sort. The answers might give us better insight into how more people might eventually attain the power to program computers.

Over lunch today, Peter Norvig told me that his two daughters (who are, respectively, 15 and 17 years old) solve problems in different ways. The 15 year old thinks like a programmer, whereas the 17 year old thinks like a mathematician. Not that one way is better than the other — they are simply different.

In particular, the 15 year old frames solutions in terms of “here is what you should do”, whereas the 17 year old frames solutions in terms of “this is what the solution is”.

It occurs to me that this distinction extends to other areas. There are people who, seeing a goal, think about the route that they will take to get there (what might be called “programmer mind”). Then there are people who, picturing their goal, define things so that they will arrive at that goal (what might be called “mathematician mind”).

For example, one person who wishes to have more friends might set out, step by step, to do things that make them popular. But another person might work to become the kind of person who is popular. The former is procedural, whereas the latter is definitional.

It’s a dialectic, of course. Every one of us travels between programmer mind and mathematician mind many times a day, usually without being aware of it. In a sense these two ways of thinking define fundamentally complementary ways of thinking about our relationship to the world around us.