Ken's Blog

The other day I wrote some software to solve a specific problem. But then I asked myself “what next”?

And I realized that what I really wanted to do was make it generic. That is, I wanted to take the most interesting part of it — the core algorithm — and turn that into a software library for solving lots of other problems.

That meant a bit of rewriting of the code. But once that was done, I had a shiny new toy to play with, which I can now use for lots of different things.

And maybe that’s the best part.

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is nothing at all.

I wonder if
sometime in the future
people will pay good money
for the privilege of spending
large amounts of time
with no access to
the internet

I started my day this morning using one of those fancy automated coffee machines that serves coffee / espresso / Americano / latte / cappuccino at the magical press of a button. Somebody just needs to put the whole beans in the top, and every once in a while remove the used coffee grinds.

As I was taking my freshly brewed Americano from the machine, I turned to a man who was also standing by the machine, and I told him “In the future, these machines will go to the store and buy the coffee beans for you. And whenever necessary, they will even throw out the used coffee grinds.”

The man nodded in agreement. “It is my dream,” he said.

Today in history, exactly 446 years ago, construction began on Pont Neuf in Paris, France, when King Henry III laid its first cornerstone. I have an odd history with this bridge.

The first time I went to Paris, I made a point of walking all the bridges. Some of the bridges seemed relatively new, but it was obvious that Pont Neuf was a very old bridge — clearly older than all the others.

I made some assumptions based on the French I had learned in school. I assumed, given its name, that at the time of its construction Pont Neuf was the ninth bridge over the Seine.

Of course I wondered what had happened to the other eight bridges. And the entire idea of Pont Neuf being the ninth bridge seemed ironic to me, since it was now quite evidently the oldest bridge in Paris.

Eventually I took the time to do the proper research, and I realized that I had not even begun to understand the irony of the situation. From the French, as it was spoken in 1578, “Pont Neuf” actually translates to “New Bridge”.

One thought that came to my mind about today’s verdict is that in order to become a U.S. Citizen you need not to have been convicted of a felony.

So if enough voters remain fanatically devoted to their Befehlshaber, we may end up with a situation where a convicted criminal presides over a system of government that excludes convicted criminals from its citizenry.

Is that irony? Or does it just mean that our nation has completely lost our way?

Now that climate change — in the form of major hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters — has reached the point where it is regularly killing significant numbers of Americans, I suspect that weather modification is going to go through a resurgence. The technology has been around for decades in various forms, but the priority has not been there to make it a focus of large scale spending as part of capital infrastructure.

Just as we have large systems in place to prevent disastrous natural forest fires — mainly by strategically artificially setting artificial fires — we will start to do large scale interventions on weather systems. At some point, as the technology improves, we might even begin to systematically change the temperature of various regions.

I envision a day when someone might visit a city, breathe in the fresh air, and say “I am so glad they turned on the air conditioning.”

One of the central utopian tenets of Star Trek is the development of a universal translator. A technology that instantly and seamlessly translates between spoken languages is clearly good for peace and understanding between peoples.

Last night I attended a dinner between people who did not share a common language, but who were highly motivated to communicate with one another. Everyone took out their smartphones and started typing and speaking into them, attempting to create sentences which conveyed their intended meaning.

The process was not smooth. There are subtleties of meaning and emotional nuance which are well beyond a machine’s ability to understand or express.

While observing this process, part of my mind was imagining a “realistic Star Trek”, where universal translation does not go smoothly, and opportunities for misunderstanding lurk around every corner.

I realize that would not satisfy Star Trek’s prime directive to portray a utopian future. But it sure would lead to some interesting dramatic situations.

If you had the ability to do perfect life logging, would you? In particular, if there were a technology that allowed you to create a holographic 3D movie of you day, from beginning to end, down to the smallest detail, do you think that would be a good thing or a bad thing?

I can see how this would be convenient. You could jot down notes and immediately discard them. You could go back even years later and see whether you took care of any given task on any given day. You could properly monitor your exercise and diet, or really anything else of interest to you.

There are so many useful possibilities here. Assuming, of course, that the technology exists to support all this.

But putting aside the technical hurdles, I wonder how we would deal with the privacy issues. It’s one thing to take a selfie with your phone, it is quite another to have every aspect of your existence existing somewhere as a detailed digital record.

I suspect that in a world where such extreme life logging had become widely adopted, people might need to be a much stronger layer of personal and verifiable data security. And even then, I’m not convinced that this would all be a good thing.

As I am reading through Jimmy Webb’s brilliant book Tunesmith, I am learning all sorts of wisdom — not just about writing songs, but about so many social constructs around songs that I never before thought about.

For example, he points out that composers for the soundtracks of Hollywood movies long ago invented a musical shorthand for Indigenous people in the Americas. Such people were invariably introduced, whether in dramas or comedies, by musical sequences consisting of base notes moving together in parallel open fifths.

Meanwhile, he points out, the same composers developed a different shorthand for people from East Asia — sequences consisting of treble notes moving together in parallel open fourths¹. By now I am sure you have heard both of these motifs many times.

What’s interesting — and disturbing — here is that these two remarkably similar musical motifs really have little to do with the actual people being caricatured. They are musical shorthands invented by White people to immediately evoke a cartoon version of “the exotic other” for an audience of White people.

Why is such a similar pattern used in both of these instances? Do parallel open intervals possess some intrinsic quality which to White folks suggests “Exotic other people who are not like us”?

1) Thanks to DB Porter.