Ken's Blog

In today’s New York Times there was an opinion piece by David Brooks which contained some oddly unnerving language. He talked about cultural and political tensions in the U.S. between the “educated class” and the “tea party movement”. Essentially he posited that everything supported by the “educated class” is opposed by the “tea party movement”, and that the latter is becoming a growing force in the country.

The article is certainly thought-provoking, but it begs certain questions. Yes, it’s understandable that in hard times people can easily be inflamed to inchoate rage against just about anything. That is simply human nature. But when you try to politicize the difference between, on the one hand, people who are educated (including, for example, David Brooks) and, on the other hand, people who angrily make such self-contradictory declarations as “Government’s should stay out of Medicare” (which translates, essentially, to “Government should stay out of Government”), then what are we talking about? We might as well take Stephen Colbert’s lead and set up a Ministry of Truthiness.

This isn’t a question of Left versus Right, or liberal versus conservative. If some of our citizens are running around furiously bumping into walls out of ignorance, then why don’t we just talk about improving education? A phrase like “the educated class” sets up a weird sort of relativism, in which there is potentially something bad about being educated. But the person who is not educated never has a chance to contribute in any meaningful way. That citizen can never become a scientist, or a doctor, or a leader in business, or an effective writer, or craft any legislation that could make this a better country, or become a judge or lawyer or educator.

The phrase “educated class” should not be some definition of a perceived elite. Rather, the educated class should all of us, in any reasonable vision for our nation’s future. Isn’t this an obvious truth? Or am I missing something?

It would appear that the physical world follows in the path of the cyber-world after all. Today’s actual paper copy of The New York Times had a version of that article about our multitouch interface research — the one the Times reported in its on-line BITS Blog on December 30. The version in the physical paper shows up near the end of today’s Business section, on page B6. It’s much shorter than the BITS version, and there are no pictures. Then again, the gorgeous color pictures in the on-line article — particular that first image of our transparent sensor — would not have shown up very well in the paper version. There is really something to be said for high quality LCD displays.

Soon enough these two media will find a happy medium, when the forthcoming slate computers start to hit the market. The buzz is that the Apple iSlate is showing up sometime in the next three months, at which point I suspect a lot of newspaper and magazine readers will start to switch over. It wasn’t so long ago that we all thought it a fantasy when the people in Harry Potter’s newspaper would come to life and wave to the reader. Now it’s about to happen for real, and I’ll bet the novelty will wear off very quickly.

Although it will be interesting to see whether the manufacturers of slate computers will really make use of those little cameras they are likely to embed in the bezel, using them to see what the reader is up to. Modern face tracking software is easily up to the task of figuring out whether you are looking at the screen, or even which general part of the screen you are reading.

For that matter, face tracking software can now tell who is looking at the screen of a slate computer. So if I put down my slate “newspaper” for a while, the slate should be able to go right back to wherever I was when I next pick it up, even if somebody else has picked up the same slate computer in the meantime to read something different. Maybe the slate can even monitor my facial expression, and show me some happy news when I look sad, or maybe just a good cartoon.

Or maybe it won’t be such a good thing when the newspaper you are reading can read you right back.

It’s not as though it’s such a crazy idea. You would think, in a world where everyone is looking for the next angle, that somebody would have done this already. I’m speaking of course of the Laundromat / Bowling Alley, or Wash’n’Bowl^TM. By all rights these should be all over the place by now, a fixture of our cultural landscape. And yet I look about me and see nary a one.

And it’s not as though our culture avoids hybrid experiences. There are, for example, the ubiquitous café / bookstores. These started out as novelties around the campuses of Harvard and Berkeley, and quickly spread far and wide. Now it’s hard to find a Barnes and Noble that doesn’t nestle a Starbucks tenderly within its bosom.

In fact, an entire culture has grown around these hybrid places, and the clever trick they play upon their customers. The trick goes something like this: Every day the most brilliant minds of our generation can be found comfortably ensconced in these establishments. Each of these customers takes a book off the shelf and reads it for hours. Here’s the good part: When they are done, these customers put the book right back on the shelf, and feel as though they’ve pulled one over on old B&N. Meanwhile, of course, said brilliant minds have spent a small fortune in coffee sold at inflated prices (you know, that weirdly burnt stuff they sell at Starbucks instead of coffee, which everyone pretends is delicious because a cup of it costs as much as an SUV). You can bet that Starbucks shares their profits with the bookstore.

The combination works because overpriced coffee and books go together particularly well. There is something just so perfectly collegiate about reading “Wild Sargasso Sea” while sipping espressos that cost more than your college tuition. The whole experience is pretty much like crack for English majors.

So why shouldn’t some of our more blue collar life experiences get in on the act? What could possibly be more perfect, if you’ve just fed your quarters into a big old washing machine at the laundromat, than to slip into some comfortable bowling shoes and knock off a few frames? It’s not as if you’re going to find a bowling alley at home. In fact, this might even encourage people who have their own home Maytags to wash their tighty-whities at the laundromat. It becomes a social activity, you see.

And why stop there? Through the magic of modern networked computers, the Wash’n’Bowl management can track your bowling score, and use that to give you automatic discounts. Imagine the pride you will feel, upon bowling that perfect game, to be able to tell your friends that you’ve just won a free tumble dry.

It doesn’t get much better than that, does it?

Many years ago I got an idea for a rather unusual art piece. To actually undertake this would take a bit of work, so it occurs to me, at the start of a new year — when all things are still possible — that I can simply describe the project, thereby creating a virtual art piece.

The idea is rather simple: Simultaneously stream the contents of all radio stations within a given geographic area (say, New York City) onto some convenient storage medium. Continue doing this for twenty four hours. The data storage required would be a bit large, but not crazily so — there are, more or less, just 36 FM stations and 22 AM stations that can be heard from Manhattan, and audio doesn’t take up all that much space (especially if you compress it a bit).

The total cost of this data capture, if you were clever about it, would be just a few thousand dollars – not all that prohibitive, in the scheme of things.

Here’s the kicker: At the end of the twenty four hour period, just start recording all over again, overwriting the same data files if you’d like (or not — data storage is very cheap these days). Unless, that is, some major event happens on that day, such as a war breaking out, or a financial meltdown, or some other cataclysmic occurrence.

In which case, you have your art piece. Set up an ordinary looking radio, with a nice old fashioned dial, but with the dial connected to a digital server that streams in those audio files on demand. For each position of the dial, this radio snapshot can be made to play exactly what that actual station was playing on that eventful day, at that exact time of day. As the listener turns the tuning dial, the progression of the day, as told by different voices, can be played back and re-experienced in many different ways.

I have a distinct recollection, on a certain day in September a little over eight years ago, of thinking that it would have been an appropriate day to have had my project running. I also remember thinking that it felt unseemly to be thinking about art projects on such a sad day. Yet perhaps it would have been good to have preserved that day — a day when so much of our nation’s innocence was lost, all at once.

I now have mixed feelings about such a project — in particular the way it seems to be tempting fate. Starting such a project is a little like going into business as an undertaker. You’d like to make a living, but at the same time, you don’t want business to be too good.

A new year, and, astonishingly, the seven hundred and thirty second consecutive entry into this blog. When I started this, I had no idea things would get to this point. I wonder, were I to go over the entire two years since my first post, whether I would find larger patterns, perhaps a general continental drift. Are there measurable changes in our psyches, some shift over time, that we can see from our written words? In what sense am I the same person I was two years ago, and in what sense am I someone new?

We cannot know these things so easily simply from looking into our souls. After all, we all have a strong emotional identification with that six year old child we still hold in our memories. And yet we are indisputably quite different now than we were then.

But a written record of one’s thoughts, day to day over any length of time, provides a kind of archaeology of the soul, fertile ground from which we may unearth the shards of pottery and bits of sacred relics from temples now forgotten, bits of thought that once held meaning for us. We may look at these things now with a bemused or even puzzled expression, wondering at the earlier self who had put such stock in them.

Or perhaps we should simply let these sleeping relics lie where they are, entombed in cyberspace for future archaeologists to ponder, and focus our energies toward building new temples that celebrate the future, and all we have yet to become.

I get the NY Times delivered home every morning, and so do a lot of people I know. Lots of other people — a rapidly growing number — read the on-line version. Yesterday, just in time to herald the dawn of a new year, and our young century’s second decade, I realized how much of a disadvantage are those of us still clinging to our sad twentieth century ways.

Like most days, I woke up in the morning, grabbed the copy of the NY Times that was waiting outside my door, made myself a nice fresh mug of hot coffee, and began to read about the day’s events (well, actually, the previous day’s events). But then something funny happened. I started receiving emails — at first a trickle, but then a barrage (a very nice barrage) — of congratulatory messages from friend and colleagues, for having been written up in The New York Times. Yet the story they were all talking about appeared nowhere in the paper I was holding in my hands.

It turns out that these friends and colleagues (who have all decisively made the transition to the twenty first century) were reading Nick Bilton’s on-line BITS Blog. “BITS”, rather cleverly, stands for “Business, Innovation, Technology, Society” — hmm, maybe that would be a good name for a programming language (just kidding).

His post yesterday was about our new start-up company Touchco (an outgrowth of some of our research at NYU), which has developed a very cool new kind of pressure-sensitive multi-touch input technology called IFSR — basically a better mousetrap for multitouch. Not only do IFSR devices provide an unlimited number of touches, but you can also use them to write or draw (or erase!) with the same subtlety that you now only get with a real pen or pencil.

Friends as far away as Paris were sending me congratulations on the article, and Touchco’s website began to get flooded with inquiries. I realized for the first time that the on-line version of the NYTimes might very well have a larger information footprint among the technorati (who are, after all, the people you hope will read such an article) than the old dead trees version used by troglodytes such as myself. I suspect I will be switching over soon, so I guess this is the high-tech version of peer pressure.

Or maybe it should be called “peer-to-peer pressure”. Hmm.

In any case, by the time I do switch, I hope The New York Times itself will be available on some portable platform that uses our IFSR technology, because then I’ll be able to keep on doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, with my morning coffee.

Happy New Year everybody!

I realize it’s been more than a year since the release of “Rachel getting Married”, but I just now got around to seeing it, so for the first time I feel qualified to talk about this remarkable film. If you haven’t seen it, you probably know it as that movie where Anne Hathaway plays a slightly crazy sister of the bride whose presence almost derails a wedding. At least that’s the way it’s generally billed. But having seen it, I was pleasantly surprised to discover something far more — a first-rate detective story.

At the core of it all is the brilliant screenplay by Jenny Lumet, without which the wonderful direction of Jonathan Demme, or the performances in a stellar cast led by Anne Hathaway (whose performance deservedly won a gazillion awards) would have come to naught.

All great detective stories are built from two essential elements: The obvious secret, and the secret nobody knows (and which the detective must discover). Think of the Maltese Falcon. There is the secret of the bird itself — obvious and not all that interesting. But then there is the secret of the betrayal, the real core of the mystery. The key moment of Hammett’s novel occurs when Sam Spade uncovers the true killer of his partner, and must make the hard decisions that come from that bitter knowledge.

Likewise “Rachel getting Married” is a detective story with two secrets. The first one — the obvious one — is a family tragedy, a secret that everyone knows but nobody dares discuss. What makes this story interesting is that our stalwart detective, our Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes all rolled into one, is a fragile and narcissistic former junky, a jittery wreck of a refugee from rehab. On a superficial level we are led to assume she is the nearest thing there is to a villian of the piece. But Demme makes sure, with every brilliant close-up and framing shot of his handheld camera, that we know that this character is not our bad guy, no matter how thoroughly she and everyone else on screen may believe she is.

And so the mystery is set up. Something has happened here, a chain of events from which a tragedy was set into motion, a tragedy for which the detective herself long ago took the fall and suffered the consequences. And right under our noses, without our being consciously aware of it, we watch as the detective sets out to solve the deeper mystery, the secret never before revealed, the one that really counts.

It all culminates in a brief scene late in the film of such unexpected emotional violence and feral intensity that it might seem like melodrama, except for the fact that it is in fact the key scene of the film, the pivot point, the moment that everything has been leading up to — the moment when the detective unmasks the killer.

What’s fun about this film is that we don’t expect things to turn out the way they do — heck, for much of the length of the film we may not even realize we are witnessing a detective story. Jenny Lumet is way ahead of us every step of the way, and Anne Hathaway, in her brilliant performance, is right there with her.

Sam Spade, it’s time to move over.

Two times have I been here before
Surveyed this very terrain
Seen the damage done
Only to have kept
My council

But now it has come round again
And I, astonished, as before
By fire soft to the touch
Find the taste of ash
Upon my lips

From the bitterness of moments lost
As empty as these hollow halls
That can echo only silence
Now the slate has been
Wiped clean

Two times have I been here before
I still see, even today, in memory
This room, so different now
Only to find that nothing
Has changed

On the one hand I’ve been working on this programming language that everyone can use. On the other hand I’ve been trying out different names for it. I suppose this might be premature. On the other hand, in some ways it can be hard to work on, or even think about, something without knowing what to call it.

At first we (my students and I) wanted to call it “Patch” — an portmanteau of “Python” (the popular programming language) and “Scratch” (the MIT programming language for kids). But Patch is not really a very appealing name, is it? It sounds for all the world like the name of a sad little rag doll lying abandoned at the bottom of an old toy chest. Not really a name upon which to pin the dawning of a new era of universal literacy.

I tried out a few other names — like “Monty”, to suggest a prequel to “Python” — but most of them were just plain silly.

By far the best I’ve come up with comes from the mantra “Programming is easy”. As an acronym, that spells “Pie”, which has a rather nice ring to it. Pie is a simple name, easy to remember, and slightly whimsical, but not too whimsical. It also emphasizes the analogy between a program and a cooking recipe, which is definitely good.

I particularly like the way it sounds like the beginning of “Python”. In a sense, learning Pie is the beginning of learning Python. Furthermore (switching now into shameless pun mode), Pie is well rounded and flavorful, something you can really sink your teeth into. It’s a peachy name, fresh, yet warm. Quite à la mode, as they say. Possibly half baked, but that’s ok — this is research, after all.

And of course, everyone knows that Pie goes well with Java. 🙂

All in all Pie seems like a fine name for a universally accessible programming language, no matter how you slice it. Does anyone care to agree or disagree?

I feel odd about the year winding down. No, that’s not exactly right. To put it more precisely, I feel odd about feeling odd about the year winding down. I ask myself, why does it matter so much?

As these last days curl off the calendar, one by one, everyone is focused on this coming event, this next turning of the year. It so thoroughly pervades our thoughts that we don’t even quite notice it, so obvious is this particular elephant in this particular room.

It is quite like the feeling I remember as a child on summer mountain afternoons, as storm clouds slowly massed in one corner of the sky, and the darkness gradually spread outward, swallowing the blue sky while a chill filled the air. You could always feel when a storm was coming — that peculiar sudden drop in air pressure, the way even voices sounded different in those moments before the deluge. And then eventually the delicious sound of a million raindrops drawing closer, a veritable wall of water rushing toward you, an event so much larger than mere human scale, and yet somehow so personal.

The New Year is like that. We each bring our memories of other storms in other days, of the friends we were with, and how we felt about them. Even now, with four whole days to go, I can already feel the air pressure drop. People are aligning themselves, choosing where they will be on New Year’s Eve, making their resolutions.

By any objective measure it is just an arbitrary day, a moment, a trick of the calendar conjured by an accident of history. And yet we all feel it just the same. And when it comes, and the raindrops splash upon our upturned faces, every one of us will look up with hopeful eyes, each in our own way, for the dawning of a new year.