Ken's Blog

Today I was on a flight over the U.S., and I used my phone to see where I was. Google maps did a spectacularly good job of locating me as a little moving blue dot upon the Earth.

It was fascinating to see lakes and other features on the map at the same time that I could see them with my own eyes out of the window of the plane. I was impressed by how fast this country is, and how much of it is covered in farmland.

And I am reminded once again, lest I should ever forget, that this world is very large, and we humans are extremely small.

Maya Angelou famously said “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” That makes me curious about the thought process of the people who intend to vote for the Republican candidate for U.S. president in this election cycle.

Are they intending to vote on the premise that they don’t believe the things he is saying? His claim that he will be a dictator on his very first day in office. His creepy promise, if elected, to persecute anyone who disagrees with him politically. His promise to destroy entire sectors of the U.S. economy by deporting the workers that those American industries depend upon.

Do those voters think that he is just joking every time he opens his mouth? And if they really think that, then why exactly are they planning to vote for him?

I loved watching the Kamala Harris interview on Fox. News anchor Bret Baier kept interrupting her and trying to trip her up.

But she kept running circles around him, just as she ran circles around you know who during the presidential debate. Every time she turned the tables on her interviewer, it reminded me what a great president she will be.

Sometimes I feel hopeful about the future.

At the user interface conference this week, I got into a conversation with a researcher at Meta. He enthusiastically told me about his research there on gaze tracking.

Specifically, his research group is trying to analyze where people are looking to figure out what they are thinking. In my mind I found myself turning that into a Black Mirror episode.

In my episode, a large unnamed corporation is able to figure out all sorts of things about people from where those people are looking. At one point the corporation’s A.I. figures out that two people are secretly having an affair.

The corporation immediately proceeds to use this knowledge to blackmail the unfortunate couple. The plot twist: We find out that this practice is the corporation’s major source of revenue.

Is that too dark?

You like to think outside the box,
You’re feeling bold, unorthodox!
It’s not as easy as you think
Because there always is a link
Between new concepts, bright and bold,
And other concepts ages old
Which build upon ideas we know
That people dreamed up long ago.
If you don’t want to swing and miss,
You simply must remember this:
To think in ways unorthodox
First you need to see the box.

Today I attended a workshop at the UIST conference. A random conversation with another participant got me thinking in a completely new direction.

After I left the workshop, I started to build a virtual prototype on my computer. Pretty soon I had something working.

When I get back to NY I am going to print it out on a 3D printer and see whether it all works. Meanwhile, I am feeling very appreciative of conference workshops.

Today I read a recent interview with Danny Bonaduce. He played Danny Partridge in the TV show The Partridge Family. In the show, he was the kid with attitude who was always causing trouble. Man how I had loved that character.

Fast forward to now. At one point in the interview Bonaduce was asked about his school days, which led to this exchange:

“You went to school with Michael Jackson. What was he like back then?”

“He was painfully shy. I remember one day I startled him by saying, ‘Hey, Mike, how come you never say anything?’ And he said, ‘Because I’m in constant remembrance of God.’ I said, ‘That’s cool, but what about girls?'”

Somehow, reading that made me very happy.

Yesterday I had the oddest thought. If I were a god, and I became tired of whatever was going on with my little humans, I could just swipe right.

With that one gesture I would move time forward by 100 years. Every person on the world stage would be gone, and there would be an entirely new set of players for my amusement.

I could just keep doing this until I found a century to my liking. With each wave of my hand, billions of people would simply be replaced by billions of different people.

The humans would never even know that this was happening. Which might be a good thing.

Today I was stuck on the NY Times Spelling Bee puzzle. There were a few words left that I just couldn’t get.

I started wondering if maybe these last few words were things I had never heard of. Perhaps they were the names of exotic South American plants or animals, or items of traditional garb in native cultures.

Then I took a little nap, and woke up quite refreshed. I picked up my phone, looked at the puzzle, and immediately keyed in those missing words. They were common English words after all.

So what was going on here? Was I unconsciously working on the puzzle while I was napping? Or does a good nap just make you smarter?

I guess it is all part of the mystery of naps.

Today is the day of the year, in 1446AD, when the Hongul alphabet, created by Sejong the Great, was first published, as the Hunminjeong’eum. In South Korea, October 9 is known as Hongul Day.

The introduction of Hongul remains perhaps the most radical and effective use of literacy to level the economic playing field for an entire society. Its creation was a very rare instance when someone at the top of an economically stratified society did something effective to make their society more just and less stratified.

Today is also John Lennon’s birthday. I suspect he would be very pleased to know that he was born on Hongul Day.