Author: admin

Every presidential compaign since the era of television campaigning (ie: the Kennedy versus Nixon contest of 1960) has gone to the more charismatic of the two leading candidates. One could argue that the American voter ultimately does not decide on the basis of political affiliation, foreign policy, economic strategy, or any of the ostensible “serious” issues on the table.

No, what the contests between Kennedy/Nixon, Johnson/Goldwater, Nixon/Humphrey, Nixon/McGovern, Carter/Ford, Reagan/Carter, Reagan/Mondale, Bush/Dukakis, Clinton/Bush, Clinton/Dole, Bush/Gore and Bush/Kerry all had in common is this: The one who projected the most charisma during that campaign cycle was the one who got to spend the next four years in the White House.

Of course this may all be mere coincidence…

We usually think of human bodies as being left/right symmetric, and that architecture reflects that symmetry. A house plan can be reversed left-to-right, and the resulting mirrored house will still be perfectly functional, and not seem out of the ordinary.

But recently, when travelling through Europe, I came upon an exception to this rule. All of the spiral staircases in midieval Europe go up in the same direction. I suspect that you would not be able to find a spiral staircase from the middle ages that spirals up to the left – they all spiral up to the right.

I’m not talking here about modern spiral staircases, such as you find in fashionable lofts and bookstores. No, I’m talking about the real deal – the spiral staircases built into the round towers that guard the castles of the kings and feudal lords of old.

The reason is quite simple: human bodies are, after all, asymmetric, in a crucial way. Almost everyone is right handed. And this means that a warrior will fight better while holding his sword in his right hand. An attacker running up a spiral staircase needs to hold his sword in his left hand, because his right hand will be blocked by the large central column of the staircase. Meanwhile, the castle’s defender is able to wield his opposing sword in his right hand. This confers a considerable advantage upon the defender.

Theoretically it would be possible to build a spiral staircase that goes up the other way, but I suspect such a castle would be overrun rather handily by hostile invaders.

Can anybody think of other instances where assymmetry in the human form has resulted in assymmetry in our architecture?

I happen to be a fan of Tom Wilkinson. The name doesn’t really register to most people. They might think they’ve heard of him somewhere, but they’re not exactly sure where. And yet, it is almost certain that he has deeply affected their movie-going experience through the years. Tom Wilkinson is the kind of actor who makes any movie he is in much better, yet people don’t notice him – he operates by stealth, working on you without you quite realizing how.

He first registered in my consciousness when I saw him as Tom Fowler in In the Bedroom, back in 2001. He was so convincing as a man from New England that I was completely taken by surprise to learn that he is actually British. What could have been an eye-rolling melodrama became, through his subtle treatment of the lead, a deeply effecting study of a good man pushed by extreme events to betray his principles.

And he has a way of making other actors look good. If you’ve seen Batman Begins, you most likely remember Killian Murphy’s Scarecrow as a genuinely disturbing and frightening villian. I would argue that what you are probably actually remembering is the moment when Wilkinson, as the arrogant crime boss Carmine Falcone, is suddenly transformed by the Scarecrow into a hapless psychotic, thrown into an imaginary world of unbounded terror. It is Wilkinson who makes this scene – personally I thought it was the only truly transcendent moment in the entire film.

Going back to the theme of a man betraying his principles, think about Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One remembers this as a romance starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, but in fact the story is, at its core, a tragedy centered on the character of Wilkinson’s Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, a man trapped by his own faustian manipulations of fate and memory.

Thinking about what Kaufman has written here, I am reminded of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, an absurdist comedy in which the minor courtiers, little more than a footnote in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are put center stage: The events in Hamlet’s great tragic tale are glimpsed from their oddly limited off-kilter point of view.

Kaufman is up to something similar in Eternal Sunshine, but to more serious purpose. From the somewhat limited viewpoints of Carrey and Winslet’s characters of Joel and Clementine, we witness an immense tragedy, caused by Wilkinson’s doomed Mierzwiak. On paper, the character reads as an unredeemable monster. And yet Wilkinson underplays the part with enormous subtlety and sadness and grace. In the hands of a lesser actor, this character would have been a cardboard villian. But Wilkinson, by playing the role so perfectly, makes you feel the man’s pain, the way he has become trapped by the insane world created by his own misplaced genius.

Nobody thinks of this as a film starring Tom Wilkinson, and yet his performance transforms it, gives it the extra levels of depth it needs to achieve greatness. Kaufman and director Michel Gondry both took home Oscars for this film, and I am sure they both realized what a debt they owe to Tom Wilkinson, its secret weapon.

This actually happened: one day a colleague and I were taking a shuttle bus from the airport to a conference on Lifelike Computer Characters. We had a demo the next day, and were still having software problems. We were so deeply immersed in a conversation about our dysfunctional animated demo character that we hardly noticed the two women who shared the shuttle bus with us, listening with rapt attention.

My colleague and I ran down the list of problems the character was having balancing properly, reaching for things, and tracking the position of moving objects with his gaze. The two women were nodding silently, completely absorbed in our discussion. Then my colleague mentioned one persistent problem with our demo character: Under certain conditions his head would pop off and float in the air about two head lengths above his body.

As he said this, both of the women seemed to jump in their seats, looking completely startled and alarmed. Then they just sat there, obviously very upset, and stared at the two of us as though we were both out of our minds. We stared back, and there were a few moments of uncomfortable silence.

Finally I asked “are you here for the conference on lifelike computer characters?”

The women looked at each other and laughed, obviously immensely relieved. “No,” one of them said, “we’re here for the conference on child autism.”

Manooh and I have had all kinds of conversations about pi. Actually I wrote the song lyrics that I posted yesterday because she and I had been discussing the fact that pi contains, somewhere in its digits, all the melodies that have ever been written or ever will be written.

It’s true for poems too. For example if you write A as 01, B as 02, all the way up to Z as 26, space as 27 and so on for other punctuation, then any poem you can think of (as well as all the poems you can’t think of) will show up sooner or later as a string of digits in pi, if you go out far enough (2515212701180527031205220518). And if you write music as a string of digits, then you can also find all the melodies.

Manooh, quite rightly, felt that a song needs music. Since I had used the first thirty one digits for the lyrics of my little tribute to pi, she responded by using the digits immediately after those for the melody. The result was the following lovely song, which she promptly recorded and posted, and has now graciously given me permission to link to here, for your listening pleasure:

A song regarding pi

 

Returning to the theme of the digits of pi… A while back, just for fun, I wrote a poem regarding the digits of pi for my friend Manooh. The gimmick was that if you count the number of letters in each successive word of the poem, you get 3.141592653589793238462643383279. But what’s reall amazing is the way she responded, and that will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Hey, a song I wrote
regarding pi:
Digits weave and dance,

Unending
accidents,
elegant mischance.

Yet in the serenade
deep within it,
lovely, free,

Are our melodies.
Let us compose
eternally!

Two days ago I received the annual ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. I wouldn’t have mentioned it here, but quite a few people have been asking me to put my acceptance speech on-line. Here it is:

I am going to tell you why I think this is such an unbelievable honor. Because computer graphics is important. Until us the only human medium capable of absolutely infinite possibility was the written word: Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes, Goethe, Austen. But as Lance Williams has said: “Computer graphics is limited only by your imagination.” Only we have the power to enable people to actually see their dreams come alive. And to do this has required a new way of thinking. The late Rich Gold spoke of the four kinds of creator: Artist, Scientist, Engineer, and Designer. Most of the world foolishly believes these are different people. But everyone in this room knows better: each of us must learn to be a synthesis of all of them. And those of us who know this, recognize each other. I think that’s why this field is built on generosity. From the beginning, I had many teachers and mentors, giants who recognized in me, a skinny kid from New York still wet behind the ears, this shared passion to fuse mathematics with art, the beauty of science with the science of beauty. Great visionaries like Jim Blinn, Turner Whitted, Frank Crow, my thesis advisor David Lowe, my mentor at NYU Jack Schwartz, and so many others, who went out of their way, took the time to help and encourage me to see a universe in a marble vase, all for the sake of this shared belief in infinite possibility. I learned from them that it’s important not only to live this synthesis, but to teach it, to inspire and encourage those who come after. So here is what I would like to ask each of you, the young men and women of computer graphics: To make wise use of your extraordinary power to bring dreams to life, to fight against the world’s foolish belief that art and science are irreconcilable disciplines, and to always aim to teach and inspire the next generation, with everything you do. For, as Arthur O’Shaughnessy said: We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. Thank you.

OK, this one is just for fun. Each of the following is the essence of a surprise ending to a well known movie. Please don’t post a comment here saying what those movies are – you wouldn’t want to spoil the movie for anyone else, would you?

Here’s what I want to know: Are there any important surprise movie endings that I’ve missed?

He’s really his dad.
He’s actually dead.
She’s actually dead.
They’re all actually dead.
She’s really a guy.
She’s really him, and he’s really her.
They are actually brother and sister.
Her daughter is actually her sister.
His mother is actually him.
The happy ending was actually a dream.
The entire story was actually a dream.
He was just pretending to be crazy.
He was making the whole thing up.
One of them was actually a figment of the other’s imagination.
It’s the sled.

Which brings up an interesting question: If nobody tells you where it’s from, is it still a spoiler?

One day when I was sixteen I decided that I would learn fifteen digits of pi every day. That afternoon I diligently memorized the first fifteen decimal places of pi. It wasn’t too hard, and I remember thinking that this was a piece of cake. All I would need to do was go through the same ritual every day, until eventually I would … well, I didn’t really have a long term goal, but to my somewhat addled teenage brain learning fifteen digits of pi a day seemed like a worthy idea, one that would eventually lead to untold glory, acclamation from my peers and the admiration of pretty girls everywhere.

Somehow I never made it to the second day. But for years thereafter I could recite those first fifteen decimal places of pi. In a way it was cool – I knew ten decimal places more of pi than the usual 3.14159 – but deep down in my heart of hearts it was something quite different – a moment to the folly of, in Robert Burns’ memorable phrase, “the best laid plans of mice and men”. This abortive monument to adolescent hubris, a string of fifteen digits that I could now rattle off at will, became in its way my short-hand for all of the projects through the years that I had started but never finished. Of which, I am sad to say, there have been many.

In time I came to realize that I am a fifteen digit man – prone to set out on vast and ambitious epic voyages of the mind, which turn out to be day trips. And over time I have learned to operate within this limitation, making a virtue of a vice, by developing a sort of shorthand style of rapid prototyping and experimentation, so that there would always be something interesting to show for even that first day of work. Some of these daily experiments are on my NYU Homepage. And of course this blog is very much in the same spirit.

Recently when my friend Ned was graciously driving me to the San José Airport, it came up in conversation that he knew pi to thirty one decimal places. I confessed to him that I knew only the first fifteen. He challenged me to recite them, which I did without even thinking: 3.141592653589793.

Ned told me he was surprised and impressed. He said that many had told him that they knew multiple digits of pi, but I was the first person who could actually recite them when asked. To me there was nothing surprising about it. Over the years I have come to think of them as old friends, three short groups of familiar strings of digits: 3.14159 followed by 26535 and then 89793. The knowledge has become bittersweet, both my glory and my bane, like the phone numbers written on napkins by beautiful girls who would later turn out to break my heart.

Ned then said: “238462”, giving me the next six digits. In my head I found myself breaking them town into three groups of two, like a phone number: 23 84 62. After a few minutes I had those digits fixed in my mind, and then Ned said “64338”, which I pictured in my head as the two digits 64 followed by the three digits 338. I practiced these for a few minutes more, and then he said “32795”. I pictured this as 32 followed by 795. After about ten minutes we had brought my knowledge out to the same thirty one decimal places that Ned knows.

I’ve practiced reciting them every few days since then, and the other day I checked on the web to make sure I was still getting them right, when I happened to notice that the two next digits are “02”. So now I am up to thirty three decimal places, and I find that I can rattle them all off with ease:

3.141592653589793238462643883279502

Such a sense of power – more than doubling my mastery of pi in a single day! Maybe this is the start of a new era for me. Perhaps from now on I shall learn fifteen new digits a day, gradually build up my range, eventually reach a thousand, two thousand, and why stop there? This could be the beginning for me of an entirely new way of thinking, a powerful shift from mere sketch artist to master of the long-form opus. Perhaps I will follow this triumph by producing a novel, an opera or two, a string of feature films.

But somehow I doubt it.

Sally asked for context for my August 7 post, and I received several other emails as well on the subject. The post was inspired by real events, but not in a direct way. Rather, I was following a chain of internal thoughts, based on contemplation of the responsibilities we each take on when we make a serious emotional commitment.

I was reflecting in my mind that this is a very solemn kind of promise, and that to honor such a promise is not a trivial task. Paradoxically, it requires a certain amount of self-protection – a responsibility to never lose sight of our own core principles and necessary boundaries – in order to guarantee that we have the strength to fulfil the commitment.

I realize I didn’t explain any of this on August 7. Sorry about that – I was focusing on the thought itself, and was also a bit distracted on that day. I am reminded of Sonnet 116, in which our old friend Mr. Shakespeare reminds us to love the other for who they really are, come what may:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
      If this be error and upon me proved,
      I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

We are not permitted to define the person we love, and they are not permitted to define us. We can only try to love them for who they are, and insist, as firmly as necessary, that they do the same for us.