Ken's Blog

Last night a friend turned me on to this astonishing recording. I had always assumed that the Eagles’ version of their song “Desperado” was definitive — the sine qua non of the idea of sad and beautiful “broken romance”.

But then, yesterday, my friend told me about Karen Carpenter’s version. Yes, I know — the Carpenters are not cool. According to the conventional pop-culture wisdom, there is no excuse for liking or appreciating them, blah, blah, blah.

But just listen to what Karen Carpenter does with this — the sadness, the sense of loss, the life never lived. If you can make it all the way through her rendition of this song without feeling the tragedy of missed connections, of life envisioned but somehow never realized, then there is something seriously wrong with you.

In yet another of those seemingly endless nature-versus-nurture discussions about “are boys and girls really inherently different, or do we just teach them to be?” my sister-in-law, who has the experience of having raised three boys, provided what may be definite evidence in the debate.

She told me that, having compared notes with her friends who raised girls, there is a very telling similarity, and an even more telling difference.

The similarity is that whether you walk into a bathroom shared by daughters or a bathroom shared by sons, you find the bathtub or shower overrun by a vast variety of shampoo bottles.

The difference is that in the girls’ bathroom all the shampoo bottles have shampoo in them. In the boy’s bathroom they are all empty.

I often feel anxious when I need to book a flight in advance. What if it turns out I need to arrive a day earlier or a day later? Or I need change my return date by a day?

In the current system you have only two travel options: (1) Lock in a precise flight to get a discounted fare, or (2) pay the far greater full fare, for maximum flexibility. If you chose the first option and then change your flight, the change fee can be significant (generally around $150 in the US).

It seems to me that the needs of travelers would be far better served by reorganizing all of this into a “travel market”. An airline could provide a time window for travel. You are guaranteed a seat on your original flight, but you then have an option to change your travel date by a day or two.

The airline could set up a marketplace for seat-swapping, paying a modest rebate to flyers who are happy to switch to flights that are less full, while charging a most fee (eg: $10 for shifting by one day, $20 for shifting by two days) for flyers who wish to switch to fuller flights that have available seats. A web site could provide travelers with the updated cash “value” of any available flight, which could turn out to be either positive or negative, depending on how full each flight is.

An airline that offers this kind of inexpensive flexibility would be very popular — travelers could get the economy of booking in advance, without the anxiety of being locked in to a specific flight.

Two or more airlines could even cooperate to create a shared market, offering seat swaps between their respective flights, thereby better balancing the aggregate load.

Everybody wins.

[ith·nee·on]
noun, adjective, ith·ne·on, ith·ne·on·ic.

-noun

The fundamental particle of scientific self-importance. Literally, an acronym for “It has not escaped our notice”

Evidence of this particle is generally found near the end of articles in scientific journals, as a way to signal that the authors’ contribution to the field will shake the foundations of reality, utterly change all life as we know it, rip open the very fabric of the Universe itself, and forever establish the authors as veritable Gods, deserving of awed worship by every man, woman and child on the planet.

A single particle of ithneon suffices to convey this message with just the right tone of sincere humility.

Origins and preferred usage:

Ithneon was first discovered in an article by James Watson and Francis Crick proposing the double helical structure of DNA (Nature 171: 737-738 (1953)). Near the end of that article the authors state:

“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

Since then, various ithneon particles have periodically been spotted. For example, near the end of a recent article by Dongying and Martin Wu, Aaron Halpern, Douglas Rusch, Shibu Yooseph, Marvin Frazier, Craig Venter and Jonathan Eisen, the authors state:

“It has not escaped our notice that the characteristics of these novel sequences are consistent with the possibility that they come from a new (i.e., fourth) major branch of cellular organisms on the tree of life.”

Similarly, near the end of a recent article in The American Scientist entitled “The Origin of Life”, James Trefil, Harold J. Morowitz and Eric Smith state:

“It has not escaped our notice that the mechanism we are postulating immediately suggests that life is widespread in the universe, and can be expected to develop on any planet whose chemistry resembles that of the early Earth.”

Discussion:

Ithneon is clearly a powerful particle in Nature. Its trajectory is capable of describing, among other things:

• how all life replicates and evolves;
• a fourth fundamental branch of life we never even knew about;
• life on other planets.

Not bad for a particle.

Playing around with the Kinect, I realize that it’s only a matter of time (and not that much time) before a 3D camera will be built into something like the iPad — although it might not be an iPad, but rather some roughly equivalent tablet by Samsung, Toshiba, HP, or whomever.

Such a 3D camera will be able to do far more than detect multiple finger touches. It will be able to see the entire position of your hands and your fingers — not just touches upon a surface but gestures in the air above your tablet, or perhaps over the tabletop in front of your tablet.

And when that happens, the laptop computer as we know it may no longer serve any purpose. After all, an input system that detects not just touches but the actual movement of your fingers in the air can be far more responsive than any mere mechanical keyboard. Such an input device could even correct errors by figuring out from your finger movement which key you had intended to type.

Tablets sporting 3D cameras might be just around the corner. And the days of the laptop computer may be numbered.

Last night near Le Pont Mirabeau
While I was in a fitful sleep
You came to me within a dream
      And spoke as though you were alive.

You looked thin but not too bad
That is, all things considered. And
We talked a while of nothing much.
      It was good to hear your voice.

Conversation turned to visions,
Ruins of cities yet to come,
For what we love must go away
      And what we build will fall apart.

I watched in silence, in my dream,
So much sadness in your tale,
For what we love must go away
      But it was good to hear your voice.

Sometime in the not too distant future we will have the technological means to monitor our mood throughout the day. And once that happens, people will start correlating, using the same sorts of analytics currently used by major internet search engines.

And surprises will emerge. These surprises may include the mood changing effects of encountering certain people in the course of the day, eating certain foods, getting particular kinds of exercise, walking through rooms with blue colored walls, or just slipping on a fresh pair of socks.

We’ll all be able to summon up the “Google map” of our own psychic make-up, charting the influences upon that psyche. People will start to be able to fine-tune their day, to soothe their neuroses and optimize their moment by moment personal experience of life.

Which may not necessarily be all to the good. Without those ragged edges, those rude surprises, all the odd little threads of psychic distress that dangle off the buttonholes of our existence, we might find ourselves just a little less creative, a bit less prepared for the unexpected.

Of course, my opinion on this might change later today.

Depending on my mood. 🙂

This week I saw a play by David Ives. A fascinating glimpse into the lives of characters straight out of Molière, the play is very funny, with an air of parody of parody — a farce, and yet it’s very “meta”. If you parse the levels of the humor, in a way you’re seeing two distinct, divergent sorts of play.

This weaving of two levels keeps us guessing, when dialog may be, in fact addressing, not the situation up on stage, but us, the audience. It’s all the rage, this splitting of each character in two. It’s very entertaining — very “new”. But sometimes it came off as sort of rude, like when characters surprisingly said “dude”. The shock of it will clearly make us laugh, and yet it kind of splits the thing in half.

Like Molière, the playwright uses rhyme to keep words flowing, shifting on a dime. The dialog, composed of rhyming couplets, keeps things fast, the mood is very up. Let’s take a moment though to really question whether it’s the power of suggestion that makes us think that making things “poetic” (while keeping all activity frenetic), equates to wit and makes it all seem new. Hell, even a mere blogger’s play review can do the same. Oh well, whatever. Hey, all in all I really loved the play.

Vi Hart came around the lab today and tried out the Kinect-based finger painting program I made a few days ago.

She started drawing shapes, and I soon joined in (it’s not just multitouch, it’s also multi-user). Within about a minute the two of us had created the following evocative image:

Several people told us it looks a lot like sand painting. It’s hard to disagree.

Several people commented that it would be good to have a fast thumb-typing for SmartPhones that can work with a single hand, in case you don’t have two hands free.

The following variant seems to do the trick: The 14 fast characters are the same, but the other characters are “typed” not by chording, but rather by sliding off the original virtual key in one of the principal four directions.

Click on the image below to link to a java applet that shows the idea:

Using this approach, you can pick up a lot of extra speed by using both thumbs, but everything still works (albeit more slowly) with a single thumb.