Ken's Blog

The ancient Greeks believed that there was a special class of deity — the Muses — who collectively provided the inspiration that begat human invention and achievement in the arts and sciences. The reality may be even more interesting than this.

I have noticed that random meetings with individual people at some opportune moment can often inspire me to work on something new. Perhaps I’ll be thinking about some idea, somewhere in the back of my mind, but then I will have a great conversation with someone who shares that interest or particular set of obsessions. Suddenly my brain shifts from dreaming mode to problem-solving mode. The very fact that somebody else is interested in the same thing creates a feeling of reality around the goal, and my mind instinctively starts to move toward that reality.

At any moment, you might run into somebody — a colleague or just a friend of a friend — who has been thinking about some of the same things that you have been thinking about. Perhaps our brains are wired for such meetings. They invoke a feeling of community which elevates and focuses those thoughts in our minds, and we immediately become more inspired and creative.

In a sense, we are all the Muses for each other.

There is a balance somewhere between order and chaos where things become the most aesthetically pleasing.

Very few people are drawn into a shape or pattern that is completely ordered. We tend to find these patterns dull, boring, overly simplistic. At the other extreme, most people also tend to find completely random and chaotic patterns to be boring and devoid of meaning.

But somewhere in the middle, it all starts to happen for us. Whether it be smoke, water, fire, clouds or marble, many natural phenomena are poised in balance between order and chaos, and these are the phenomena to which we are most strongly drawn.

I wonder whether there could be a way to measure this balance, to look at any given object and assign it a rating, describing how perfectly and pleasingly balanced that object is between order and chaos.

Since teaching is one of the things I do, I often look at things in terms of “how would I use this to teach something?” Recently I have caught myself in everyday situations, say at a meal or while playing a musical instrument, thinking about how I would add interactive computer graphics to teach something, perhaps a music lesson, or perhaps a foreign language.

For example, I find myself picturing little interactive animated characters hovering over things and posing challenges or games to help learning, and then I work through how I would author those characters and games — or create a way for other people to author them.

I think the fact that Google’s Project Glass is now being publicly talked about has changed my assessment of how near all this is. The other big players who are working on augmented reality glasses are still keeping mum, but it only takes one to move the conversation from the dreaming stage to the planning stage.

These events have also energized my graduate students, and certain research projects in our lab are shifting into higher gear. Twenty years ago the Web went from being a gleam in Ted Nelson’s eye to being a practical reality, eventually changing all sorts of educational practices. More recently, mobile phones have had a similar impact — particularly in the third world.

I think we are about to enter an exciting and transformational period in the development of situated learning, especially as the costs of the technology come down over time. If it is done properly, everyone can benefit.

Today I spent quite a bit of time at the Le Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal. Looking at the array of work on display, from cubist to abstract expressionist to electronic minimalist, I became acutely aware that I was being invited to participate in the addressing of various questions.

In each case, these were questions that have been under discussion for many years, between extremely thoughtful and passionate people. What does it mean to look at something? To express emotion in a non-figurative way? To examine our core assumptions about form and meaning?

Every field has its defining questions, and any particular work within that field becomes meaningful only if you catch the drift of the larger discussion. For example, if you were to attend, without any context or preparation, a major computer graphics research conference, you might not be nearly as excited as I am by what you see, because you would be unlikely to know, just by looking at the work, what ongoing questions are being addressed, or why any given result is interesting within that context.

Perhaps it is fair to say that any shared field of discourse is defined not primarily by the answers it provides, but by the questions it seeks to ask.

Today I gave a talk at a conference, and decided that the talk would consist of demonstrating fifty of my Java applets, with nary a PowerPoint slide in sight. This ended up being an interesting choice, because each applet, as it turned out, connected to several others, and themes began emerging of which even I had not been fully aware.

The entire experience was fun, in the way that live performances are always fun. You never entirely know what will happen in a live performance — what might go right and what might go wrong — and this sense of heady danger creates a kind of bond between everyone in the room. As Bill Murray said so memorably about theatre in Tootsie, “These are people who are alive on the planet.”

I may just give up entirely on prepared slides!

We take so much for granted as humans in our perception of the world, from bilateral symmetry to the privileging of human faces and voices in our observation of the world around us.

It makes perfect sense that we are this way, since our higher brain functioning evolved largely to facilitate complex and subtle interactions with other humans (as well as the occasional co-evolved species, such as dogs).

It would be interesting to be able to temporarily impose an “Alien filter” on our perception, to remove our human-centric bias from the way we perceive the world around us. You would certainly want such a filter to be temporary, since using it would, from a certain perspective, make you functionally insane.

But the insights to be gained from such a visit to an alien’s point of view might be quite beneficial. We might discover how to see familiar objects and concepts in new and potentially useful ways.

The first time I ever visited Oslo (which I believe is the nearest I’ve been to the North Pole while on the ground) it happened to be June 20 — the longest day of the year. I had a magical and slightly surreal experience wandering around the town in the excellent company of the friends I was visiting, in a city without night. As midnight came and went, and darkness never quite arrived, I felt not tired at all, but rather exhilarated.

The first time I ever visited Albuquerque it happened to be the weekend of the annual hot air balloon festival — one of the zaniest and most fun sights to be seen in these United States, with giant balloons in all sorts of surreal and eccentric shapes floating over the landscape. I didn’t realize at first that this was a once-a-year spectacular, so my initial thought was that I was witnessing a very civilized, if unusual, way for a town to be organizing its daily transportation needs.

The oddest such experience was the first time I visited Nice, after having attended a conference in nearby Monte Carlo. I was delighted to discover that the streets of Nice were filled with jugglers, magicians, stilt-walkers and clowns, street fairs and puppet shows. Wherever I went, people wearing giant papier-mâché heads were walking around in broad daylight, to the general delight of children. I found myself wondering at how tourist friendly Nice was, while pondering how on earth such a city could maintain a sustainable economic model. “Wouldn’t this be a great place to live all year round!” I thought.

It took a while before I realized that I had just happened to wander into town during Carnival.

Yesterday I attended the impressive doctoral defense of a brilliant Ph.D. student in our department. Nektarios has been blind since birth, yet he is able to quickly understand and reason about many advanced spatial concepts with which other students struggle.

A bit later in the day I showed him a research prototype, and it was fascinating to see him assimilate the idea, ask a few questions, and then rapidly build a model in his head, which then led to a wonderfully interesting and free ranging discussion.

It could be that many concepts we generally categorize as “visual” are actually more properly called “spatial”. Nektarios clearly does not have a visual model of anything, yet his reasoning process involves a highly sophisticated and flexible form of spatial reasoning.

Perhaps we should be doing more to bring in other senses such as touch, hearing and proprioception when we teach spatial reasoning to our students, much as Montessori schools now do for some younger children.

Having taken a Greyhound Express eight hours from New York to Pittsburgh on Friday and then another eight hours back on Sunday, I am happy to report, with unalloyed enthusiasm, that the experiment was a success.

I managed to get a vast amount of work done in those sixteen-odd hours. Before my trip I had made a long wish list of all the things I had hoped to create en route, and what I actually ended up accomplishing exceeded even my most optimistic estimates

Although, all things considered, I would rather take a train. Alas, there is no direct train route between New York and Pittsburgh, so the bus will have to do.

I noticed that not everybody on the bus seemed as happy as I did to be taking such a long ride. I wonder whether they would like it more if they learned how to program. 🙂

When my sister was very young, my parents took her to see “Mary Poppins”. The film had first come out many years earlier, but the Walt Disney Company had recently rereleased it, and my parents jumped at the opportunity to introduce her to this classic children’s movie the way it should be seen — on the big screen.

Unfortunately the screening was a little late in the evening for my sister, and within a few minutes she had fallen fast asleep.

Not wanting to wake her, my parents watched the film by themselves, all the way up to the scene where our heroes have jumped through a painting into a cartoon world, where they proceed to happily cavort with assorted animated characters.

At this point my sister suddenly awoke. For a few moments she stared at the sight of Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews dancing up a storm with a gaggle of animated penguins. Then she solemnly (and rather loudly) pronounced “Penguins have no elbows!”, whereupon she promptly fell back asleep, a state in which she blissfully remained for the duration of the film.

My sister says she has no recollection of having issued this solemn declaration. Yet down through the intervening years the story of this moment has continued to be told and retold, achieving a kind of immortality within our little extended family.

Even today, if you mention Mary Poppins to any of my little nieces and nephews, they are as likely as not to exclaim, with cheerful enthusiasm, “Penguins have no elbows!”