Ken's Blog

When I was little, one of my favorite things was to tag along with my dad on weekends as he went about his day running errands. It didn’t matter whether he was picking up something from the store, fixing something in the garage, paneling the basement, or raking leaves out back, it just felt good to hang out with him. No matter what the context, his calm reassuring presence always made me feel safe.

I have long remembered that he would often sing a song as he went about his chores. Yet only recently did I realize there was a common theme: All the songs he sang featured colors.

For example, some of my dad’s favorite songs were “The Red Red Robin”, “The Autumn Leaves (of red and gold)”, “Bye Bye Blackbird”, and of course “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. These were songs that were fun to sing, and also fun for a little kid to listen along to. And every single one featured colors.

The funny thing is, my dad was color blind.

Today I finished Alice Munro’s brilliant story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, which I had been reading at a friend’s excellent suggestion.

The very next story I read today was H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”. I had picked it up at a different friend’s equally excellent suggestion, and I greedily finished it in one sitting.

The two stories, in an odd way, form a perfect pairing. Both are about the abyss, the unnameable horror lurking just around the corner of our safe illusion of life’s normalcy. And both are about the struggle we can face in finding a path of sanity in the face of the unfaceable.

Yet the two stories proceed by exactly opposite methods. Munro is a miniaturist, using the tools of everyday situations, of tiny precise moments and emotional shifts, all with a perfect economy of mood and description. She never uses three words where two would suffice, and her characters reveal their pain entirely through indirection, by the very process of holding back.

Lovecraft is, if anything, a maximalist. He revels in the bubbling horror, the revelation of the unfathomable beast from the depths — spun in extravagantly turgid word poems — of humanity’s worst nightmare made hideous flesh. In a Lovecraft story, one word will never two where ten could suffice.

And yet the two authors speak to the same theme — the theme of how precious is this little illusion we have of safety and sanity, how fragile is the wonderful and oft-overlooked refuge of the everyday. In the hands of an expert author we are made to see and to cherish this simple truth: That just outside our little circle of human warmth, the bitter cold and howling winds lie ever ready.

I had dinner this evening with an old friend. She and I were reminiscing about something that had happened soon after we first met, when we were both very young. We were both attending a panel discussion about the MIT Media Lab, which at the time was fairly new.

On the panel were assembled the senior faculty of the MIT Media Lab, including such luminaries as Marvin Minsky. At one point they were fielding questions, when a young man stood up and said, rather indignantly: “You people are dangerous. Thanks to folks like you, one day we will all be tracked — our identity, our whereabouts — and there will no longer be any privacy.”

Marvin responded by saying, rather dryly, “We have gathered together some of the best minds of of the world to study media technology. You are very welcome, if you like, to gather minds together for the purpose of studying anti-media technology.”

My friend and I had thought that this was a marvelous suggestion, and we immediately set about working out what would constitute such an “Antimedia Lab”. We quickly realized that possibilities abounded. For example, there was a project at the Media Lab called “Put That There”, consisting of an interface that allowed people to interact with a computer using voice and gesture. We figured that an antimedia lab should discourage people from talking to and pointing at their computers, so we devised an anti-media project called “Put That Away!”

Similarly, the Media Lab had a project called “Transmission of Presence”, whereby a person, thanks to the miracle of computers and networks, could transmit a sense of their physical presence across great distances. In reality of course, it’s more common to find yourself face to face with somebody you would really rather not deal with. An Antimedia Laboratory should aim to render such an inconvenient person undetectable. Hence our anti-media project: “Transmission of Absence”.

We had lots more of these ideas. Alas, our wondrous Antimedia Lab never got beyond the brainstorming stage.

Which may be a good thing. I guess history will decide. 😉

You wouldn’t think that programming languages could provoke a feeling of nostalgia. After all, programming code is the epitome of machine-like expression. Its coldly logical construction is in some ways the very opposite of natural language’s focus on mood, feeling, human connection and frailty.

Yet today I found myself looking at some code written in a computer language I had not encountered since college, and was swept back in time to an earlier era of my life, remembering people, places, sounds, smells and feelings that had long been dormant.

I suppose that on some level the mind treats code like any other textural experience — like the intricate veins of a leaf, the sunlight that glistens through a snow frosted window, the smell of fresh mown grass on a summer morning. Anything you’ve experienced can be a trigger for deep memories.

It just seems strangely ironic when that trigger turns out to be, of all things, computer code.

After arriving back home last night from the airport at round 2am, and then needing to jump right into my first meeting this morning, I have been in a bit of a fugue state. It’s not that I haven’t been able to function, but that at any given moment today when nothing is going on, I fall asleep — sometimes for just a few seconds — and then wake back up again as needed.

The apotheosis was my subway ride from a meeting on 59th Street this afternoon. On the local R train, I feel into what felt like a deep and restful sleep between every two subway stops — between 59th St/5th Avenue and 57th/7th Avenue, then again before every subsequent stop: 49th Street, Times Square, 34th Street, 28th Street 23rd Street, 14th Street/Union Square. Finally, at 8th Street I woke up from a deep slumber that had apparently occurred in the three or four minutes since we had stopped at Union Square, sprang out the doors, and went on to my meeting at NYU.

All in all, a bit of a crazy day, and I am sure I will sleep very soundly tonight.

But what I want to know is this: How did my subconscious mind handle all of this? At what level was there cognitive processing? Clearly it couldn’t have been a very high level, or my subconscious would just have let me sleep for the entire journey from 59th Street down to 8th Street.

I was invited today to a meeting of a philosophy club. Every week the club picks a topic of conversation. This week the topic happened to be “childhood”. The discussion around this topic was thoughtful and far-ranging, roaming from thoughts about earliest childhood memories to the question of when childhood ends.

Another distinguishing quality of this club is that all of its members are between the ages of seventeen and eighteen (I was invited by a seventeen year old friend — these people are clearly not ageist).

One thought I came away with, after this experience of deep and thoughtful conversation, is that by the time you have reached the age of seventeen, you have already, in many ways, completed the journey from childhood to adulthood.

Those three years seem to make a world of difference. The distance that separates, say, fourteen and seventeen can be vastly greater than the distance that separates seventeen from any other age of adult.

Today I was talking with some Canadian friends about what is now in Canada called “employment insurance” — insurance in the event one fails to remain employed. In the U.S. this is called “unemployment insurance”.

One of my friends argued that we in the U.S. have this backwards. After all, health insurance is not called “sickness insurance”, and life insurance is not called “death insurance”.

It then occurred to me that couples should be able to take out insurance in the event they have a falling out that leads to divorce. If my Canadian friend is right, this should be called “love insurance”.

Perhaps there could be lower priced alternatives, if you can’t afford the high premium payments for full-on love insurance. One could imagine a descending scale, to insure the maintenance of more problematic relationships.

For perhaps half the rate of the premium policy, you could take out “`You could do worse’ insurance”.

Below that would be “`I am really not going to argue with you about this’ insurance”.

And if you are seriously strapped for cash, you can always get the bargain basement “`What am I, chopped liver?’ insurance”.

This evening I found myself drawn into a conversation about religion. During much of the conversation, I tried as much as possible to maintain a respectful silence, knowing that we were wading into dangerous waters.

Yet I came to understand, as I navigated the dangerous shoals of someone else’s fraught and intense description of their lifelong spiritual journey, that there was a deep schism between the intellectual and the emotional sides of what I was hearing.

You can make all the intellectual arguments you want for or against a particular religious view of the world around you. And there’s nothing wrong with that. One could easily build several worthwhile and intellectual exciting university courses around this very topic.

But the hold of a religion upon the minds of those who were raised with it is something else entirely. It is not a question of right or wrong, of logic or of deductive inference.

No, it’s much wilder than that, both fiercer and more intense. As far as I can tell, people carry with them the religion of their childhood — seared into their minds at some deep level — even long after they may have renounced that religion. We can argue all day about God, but the bedrock emotional truth is this:

You do not possess the religion you grew up with. It possesses you.

Quite often my students will come to me and say “I have a really cool idea for an algorithm”. Most of the time, after hearing the student out, I will make suggestions about something similar but different to try.

The only reason I can do this is that, in most cases, I’ve already tried something similar to what the student is proposing — sometimes quite a few years earlier. Rather than make the student go through a month or six of pain, frustration and failure, I draw upon my own past experience to steer the student toward an approach that is much more likely to produce a positive initial result.

None of these experiences upon which I am drawing are publishable. You won’t find them in the literature under my name or under anybody else’s name. These are the research failures, the approaches that at first seem plausible but which prove, after hours of hard work, to be dead ends.

It’s a shame that there is no academic forum for sharing this valuable lore. You don’t get published for reporting things that do not work.

On the other hand, the very fact that you cannot find out these things on your own means that we professors are a valuable part of the process. I don’t know if this is good in the larger sense, but it certainly helps me to feel useful.

The other day I was walking along the street and I passed a shop that was playing one of my favorite songs. I wanted to stop and linger, just to enjoy the rest of the song, but I was on my way to meet some people, and I didn’t want to keep them waiting.

Yet I thought to myself “Why can’t I take the song with me?” I know there is software that can recognize a song from just a few bars, so there is no technical barrier that would prevent, say, a smart phone from “picking up” any music in the vicinity.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you were walking down the street, and whenever you heard a song you like, you could just pick it up and take it with you, so that it continues to play on your own portable music player?

Of course this defeats the goal of the store owners, who are playing that yummy music precisely to entice you to go into their store and linger a while. But somehow I think they would survive. 🙂