Ken's Blog

Here I am, safe and snug inside, listening to the howling winds and pounding rains of Hurricane Irene as it vents its fury. And I am reminded once again of the strange irony of storms.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved to lie safe in my bed at night during a summer storm, seeing the flashes of lightning out my window, listening to the powerful crashes of thunder as they rolled majestically across the land. I used to marvel that the thunder sounded exactly like God bowling.

The fiercer the storm, the louder the lashing rain against the window, the more I liked it. I think there was something about experiencing this while snug and warm in bed, protected by the powerful shield of my parents’ house, that made it clear how fortunate I was to be loved and safe and protected.

I know that not everyone is as fortunate, and that by the time this day is done Hurricane Irene will have taken her victims, as hurricanes do. Yet as odd as it must seem, there is a part of me even now, listening to the ebb and flow of the raging storm, feeling the power of the elemental forces just outside my window, that journeys back to that time long ago, and becomes a child who is warm and safe, and loved.

The other day I was in a conversation in which somebody wondered whether camera chips would keep increasing in resolution. After all, when you can already take a picture with 20 million pixels, why bother to go higher?

At which point it occurred to me that an affordable sensor element with 100 million pixels, or even more, would be very useful. Not for taking pictures of higher resolution, but for changing the nature of cameras in a more fundamental way. If I had a sensor with a vast number of pixels, I would put an array of little lenses over it. with each lens having just a modest number of sensor elements behind it (say, a million or two).

There are two important things about this scenario: The first is that each little lens is in a slightly different position. Those slight positional differences allow the camera to capture an entire lightfield. Once you have a lightfield, you can reconstruct the 3D shapes of things, or selectively kick various objects out of focus in software, or all sorts of other cool things you can’t do with a conventional camera. This is essentially the magic sauce behind the Stanford spinoff company Lytro.

But the other cool thing about this scenario (and Lytro hasn’t figured this out yet, but they will soon, or else somebody else will), is that you can make a camera that’s totally flat, like a credit card. Because those tiny little lenses don’t need the long focal length of a big lens — they only need to be a small fraction of an inch in front of the sensor element. Just take that flat credit card out of your wallet, hold it up, and you can start capturing rich lightfields.

This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that a whole new class of extremely cheap cameras which can capture reality far better than today’s cameras will be everywhere — on clothing, wallpaper, floor tiles, stick-on decals — anywhere there is a surface.

The bad news? Well, reread that previous paragraph and think about the implications. The good news is the bad news.

One odd thing about a hurricane is the fact that you know it’s coming. The city has emptied out. No flashlights are left in stores anywhere. The weather now, as it often is the day before a hurricane, is warm and calm and clear.

Most memorable events sneak up on you, but not a hurricane. We pretty much know the general outline of what’s going to happen here — the howling winds, the unbelievable amount of rain that will fall in just one day. We know to stay indoors, to stock up on food and water, and to keep all the windows closed.

Of course we don’t know where things will go wrong, or for whom. Most of us will be just fine, but some people will be unlucky — some more unlucky than others.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re pretty fortunate here in New York. The worst of the storm is spending itself down in North Carolina, and up here we will get the diluted version.

But as Mercutio once said: “Tis enough. ‘Twill serve.”

Two days until Hurricane Irene reaches New York City.

It’s so strange that the only hurricane to hit this town in years comes on the heels of our first earthquake in years. It’s as though we are living through an age of signs and wonders. Next thing you know, it’s going to rain frogs.

Although, this being New York, it will probably rain bagels. Which, come to think of it, would be rather nice.

Once we got onto the subject of words, I started thinking about how words can be distinguished not by their meaning, but by their lexical form.

For example, suppose we consider every word in the English language that, when its letter order is reversed, forms a different word. This evening I did a quick computer analysis, starting from a rather comprehensive word list.

To my surprise, I found only 155 such pairs of words altogether (see below).

Somehow I’d thought there would have been more.

When Sharon suggested that I might be referring to a non-existent word — in this case “apological” — I rushed to defend my word suggestion, going so far as to find a reference to it in a dictionary.

But perhaps I am wrong to have been so defensive. After all, Shakespeare himself coined literally thousands of new words, including (it is generally believed): abstemious, accommodation, addiction, aerial, arch-villian, auspicious, bedazzled, belongings, birthplace, bloodstained, bottled, coldhearted, countless, dauntless, dishearten, distasteful, droplet, employer, enrapt, enthroned, eventful, eyeball, fashionable, fitful, flowery, freezing, impartial, inauspicious, lackluster, laughable, lustrous, mimic, moonbeam, motionless, noiseless, perplex, quarrelsome, satisfying, scrubbed, silliness, time-honored, unchanging, uncomfortable, unearthly, unmitigated and well-read.

So perhaps I should be sad that “apological” already exists. After all, no language was ever harmed by a little neologism.

An observant comment on yesterday’s post pointed out the link from the Kwalado to Myron Krueger’s creature. In fact the Kwalado has a long and proud lineage, dating very far back. Some of her recent ancestors include Peter Lord’s character Morph (1977), the Id Monster from Forbidden Planet (1956), the intrepid hero of Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck (1953), and all the little playthings that provided such innocent amusement for Chernabog in Fantasia (1940). Not to mention just about everything from the early career of Art Clokey.

Scientists have recently discovered that in addition to the well known geological eras of the Pliocene, the Pleistocene and the Holocene, there was another, lesser known era, when primordial creatures of indeterminate morphology roamed the Earth.

I speak, of course, of the Plasticene.

It wasn’t always thus. There was a time when all creatures were determinate in form. Then came the cataclysmic occurrence that geologists refer to as the “Plasticene explosion”. Nobody is quite sure why the Plasticene era occurred when it did, yet arguably it brought about the most significant apological transformation in geological history.

The Kwalado knows nothing of this. She is all too easily upset, and usually prefers not to dwell on the past. If I were you, I wouldn’t say anything to her about it.

Continuing from yesterday…

Today I discovered my first eccescopic creature. I was attempting to peer into the future, when she unexpectedly hopped right onto my hand. I was able to identify this little gal as a kwalado.

Kwalados are expert climbers. They are also extremely gentle creatures, and rather shy. If you hold your hand very still, they will use their long prehensile toes to clamber up your fingers (see photo).

They also have an unnerving but oddly charming tendency to stare deeply into your eyes. I understand they are quite soulful, and fall all too easily into fits of sadness. Fortunately, all kwalados, being mathemalians, love perfect numbers. If you name any three perfect numbers, they will cheer right up.

I’m very sorry about the quality of the photo. The kwalado is a bit difficult to see, since like all eccescopic creatures it dwells in the future. I’m going to try some image enhancement techniques. With any luck, tomorrow I will be able to show you a better picture.

Today I began some experiments in using old-style media in my research. Ironically, I’m doing this to sketch out ideas for futuristic augmented reality.

In particular, my procedure is to take an image captured from my computer’s camera, print it out on plain white paper, then overlay a fresh sheet of white paper over the printed image.

I then place this sandwich atop an old-fashioned light box. This is quite literally the first time the light box has been used in about ten years — it’s amazing that it still turns on.

Using a #2 pencil, I then sketch lines and figures on the clean top sheet to represent augmented reality concepts. Then I digitize my pencil drawing, and go back to the computer to digitally overlay the drawing onto the captured photo.

I could do all of this in the computer, but it’s just so freeing to be able to use an actual #2 pencil on paper for sketching visual ideas. A pencil is still a far better tool than any digital tablet yet invented.

In any case, when the world for which I’m designing these ideas comes about, digital tablets will all go away anyway. People will be able to go back to sketching with good old paper and pencil like any sane artist would prefer to do — except that the results will be instantly digitized, with all the advantages of computer enhancement but none of the disadvantages.

So you might say that by using tools from the past, I’m getting a jump on the future.

Following on yesterday’s post on the connections between research and philosophy, there is, more generally, an interesting relationship between science and emotion. Science tries to understand what is, in some approximation of objective truth. Yet to conduct science, you need to be motivated. Without passion the mind does not create. In fact, studies of people suffering from severe anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) have shown that such people can have difficulty solving even the simplest of problems. In humans at least, emotion is a precondition for a well functioning intellect.

And so we have what appears to be a contradiction (but in fact is not): To pursue objective truth, we start with emotion. Perhaps people go into different fields of science not because of intellectual proclivities, but because we each feel an emotional connection with certain truths. Some people are drawn to chaos and randomness, and so they choose fields that study inherently chaotic systems, such as meteorology or oceanography. Others are drawn to perfection and harmony, and so they study crystallography or number theory.

In each case, the research itself must be done honestly and without bias, but the excitement that leads to insight and discovery is fed by a pre-existing emotional resonance.