Ken's Blog

There were two moments
One passed unnoticed, the other fairly screamed.

Yet each one led to everything that followed.

In time the world forgot this misbegotten wound
As time and distance did their necessary work.

Yet anyone was there could still remember

That there were two moments
The one they talked about, and the one

The other one, never talked about.

You, who will never say the words,
Who can worship only frozen time,

Who believes all has been forgotten,

Are not innocent, any more
Than I.

For there were two moments,

The one seen by the world, and
The other one, seen only in your eyes

And reflected, I confess, in mine.

My sister, who is an expert in geophysics, was talking today about the three stages of rock — igneous (when the rock is fresh out of the volcano), sedimentary (when time and pressure have started forming the rock into layers), and metamorphic (after so much time and pressure have accumulated that the rock is completely hardened). I found my mind wandering to three similar words that could be used to describe the ways we experience pleasure at different stages of our lives.

When we are young and hot headed, our pleasure is intense and immediate, because it comes from not knowing any better. This is our age of ignorant pleasures.

As time passes, and layer upon layer of obligation have begun to accumulate, we find ourselves settling down under the increasing weight of life. This is our age of sedentary pleasures.

Finally, after much more time has passed, we are able to achieve true permanence and solidity. Alas, by that time, all pleasure has become metaphoric.

When I was a very small child there was an ad on TV, I was far to young to know what it was for, that featured a young mother reading aloud to her child. Her voice was beautiful and haunting, and these were the words she said:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
      The moon,
      The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

I did not know the meanings of all the words, but I loved the sound of ‘mince’, and of ‘slices of quince’, and I long pondered the great mystery of how a spoon could be runcible. It was clear, whoever these dancing people were, that they were very happy.

It would be quite a few years before I learned that “they” were an owl and a pussycat very much in love, and that I was hearing the work of Edward Lear, born 200 years ago today.

The feeling I had as a small child hearing these magical words, learning that there can be deep and powerful meaning even in the sound of things, has never left me. I suspect it contributed to my love of poetry, and perhaps even a bit to my love of the moon. I also suspect that the work of Edward Lear has had a similarly profound and lovely effect on the minds and souls of children for many generations.

Happy birthday Mr. Lear, and thank you.

This week my young colleague Yuichiro Takeuchi presented ClayVision: The (Elastic) Image of the City, winner of a best paper award this year at SIGCHI, describes a system that lets you look “through” an iPad screen into an altered world. The image recorded by the back-facing camera is digitally processed, permitting you to see the city around you in interestingly distorted ways. Buildings can grow, shrink or sprout awnings, tall towers can spring from fountains, monuments can sway and dance, crooked streets can become straight.

There is a potential dark side to such an elastic reality, given that it is a lot easier to engineer the virtual than it is to engineer the physical. Think of the wholesale transition in Hollywood movies over the course of the last two decades from model miniatures to computer graphic special effects.

One day, after we are all wearing our eccescopic contact lenses, and the ability to visually transform our world becomes an everyday reality, perhaps civic engineers will no longer bother to keep our cities in good repair, beyond the minimal need to prevent structural collapse.

As long as we are all “wearing”, we will find ourselves sharing a golden age of gleaming towers, graceful airships that soar serenely above candy colored trees, and clear blue lakes that reflect the movements of glittering sculptures in the sky. Needless to say, this lovely cityscape will change every day for our collective pleasure and delight.

But anyone thoughtless enough to pop out their hi-tech contact lenses will be faced with a bleak reality of neglected buildings with shattered windows facing cracked and blackened sidewalks, where piles of uncollected garbage roll through the gray and rotting streets. Not that anybody would ever be so foolish as to take out their contact lenses.

After all, when was the last time, after having enjoyed a great meal at a favorite restaurant, that you demanded to go back to the kitchen to confront the underlying reality?

Now that North Carolina has made it illegal for people of the same sex to love each other, I wonder what might happen, should science develop an effective way to read minds.

I have this image of large numbers of fire breathing right leaning politicians and their supporters being outed. Throughout the state, various scions of their community, having built their entire lives around denial and suppression of their own homosexuality, would suddenly be found out for being that most feared and hated of all creatures — an adult human being capable of feeling love and caring for another adult human being, without first checking to see whether their particular love is politically correct.

Eventually, one presumes, North Carolina will outlaw all forms of caring and affection, such emotions being an affront to God and Jesus and all that is right and holy. Parents found caring for their children will be rounded up and shot like vermin, as bonding and emotional attachment gradually come to be recognized as obscene and un-American.

Especially if this whole mind reading technology thing happens. In that case, the entire citizenry of North Carolina may find itself outed. People who, for fear of being labeled as social deviants, had desperately hidden their love and affection for parents, siblings, children and neighbors, will come to be seen for what they are — human beings capable of love, apparently the ultimate and most unforgivable of crimes.

I am afraid that when this happens, all the citizens of North Carolina will, in the name of simple decency, proceed to shoot each other on sight, until the entire populace lies dead in a collective pool of blood.

Because, if the new law in North Carolina is to be believed, we cannot have something as unforgivable as the simple feeling of love between one person and another. Not among decent God fearing people.

This evening I had the pleasure of wandering through a museum that featured old technologies. I found myself hovering, fascinated, over the exhibits, my mind trying to work out the steps that had led up to each ancient invention.

There is something lovely about revisiting old technological innovations. Every age of humanity is faced with a unique set of challenges, a particular world view, and its own grab bag of prior art from which to draw.

What can be better than to trace this sweet history, the moment when some beautiful thought — perhaps electromagnetism, perhaps the invention of the Calculus — made its way into our culture, and managed to change us forever.

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.