Ken's Blog

Many of the current visions for mixed reality glasses position them as a tool for a single user. You have your own private view of digital information, superimposed on the physical world around you, and I have mine.

This mirrors much of our use of smartphones. While you are sitting on the subway looking at something on your phone, the person sitting next to you staring into their phone is probably looking at something completely different.

But there is an opportunity for us to do better. If we establish a convention of symmetrical information — that by default, we are all looking into the same digital enhancement of reality — then we might end up with something more powerful.

Of course, as in the physical world, we might see that digital information from differing points of view. Yet we will all have access to it.

Sure, we can also add asymmetrical information to the mix. You might not want me reading your email, and I probably don’t care about pop-up alerts telling you that your mom called.

But the more we allow symmetric digital information into the mix, the more social will be the experience. Let’s take old fashioned restaurant menus as an example.

When a waiter hands us each our menu, we literally cannot see the contents of each other’s menu. Yet we know that we are all ordering from the same menu.

This is because one important goal of a visit to a restaurant is to have a shared social experience. It’s not a question of technology, but of design — and of the purpose of that design.

I think that we need more social sharing in our future, not less. I hope that as we evolve the technology of smart glasses, our default designs will move into that general direction.

One thing that the COVID pandemic changed fundamentally was the way we meet each other. Before 2020, a meeting was generally understood to be something you did in person, not on-line.

Now that has been flipped. In many industries, people meet on-line via Zoom far more often than they meet in person.

And in a way, that is partially saving us, since our current federal administration is acting much like a second pandemic.

For one thing, the administration is doing everything possible to destroy scientific research in the United States. And by extension, its inane policies are rapidly destroying our nation’s ability to compete in the ever evolving technological space of the global economy.

In many cases, my international graduate students don’t dare to go to leading conferences outside the U.S. these days, because they don’t know whether they will be allowed back in to continue their studies at NYU. But because science has now widely adopted Zoom, those students are still able to participate, although not nearly to the same extent.

Of course they won’t get the same opportunities to meet colleagues in person, to find new professional friends and mentors, and in general to advance their careers and their ability to contribute to scientific progress in the way that one would hope.

But because we had the first pandemic, we now have the tools to limp along until this second pandemic is over.

The United States is going through such a strange period in its history that it may be difficult for future generations to understand how truly bizarre things are right now. To that end, I wonder whether it might be useful to describe our current situation in a way that would be comprehensive to small children.

One traditional way to do this is through nursery rhymes. So here is an attempt to start the process.

You might want to try your hand at it as well. For the children.

Trumpty Dumpty said he’d build a wall,
Then Trumpy Dumpty caused our country to fall.
And all of our women, and all of our men
Could not put our country together again.

After a disappointing jobs report, the U.S. president, in a bold and decisive move, fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the bureau of Labor statistics.

His reasoning was simple: The downturn in the nation’seconomy couldn’t possibly be due to his recent punitive trade policies, so it must have been caused by the commissioner manipulating the numbers.

In related news, it rained in our nation’s capital, and the president got wet. In a bold and decisive move, he fired the weatherman.

In other news, an apple fell from a tree. Due to gravity, it hit the president on the head. In a bold and decisive move, he fired Sir Isaac Newton.

That guy in the White House must be very confused by his recent encounters with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil. The general modus operandi of our current administration is to act like a child throwing a tantrum, as a way of getting everyone else to operate on that level as well.

But Lula insists on continuing to act like a grownup. He’s used to dealing with corrupt autocrats, after having dealt with them for many decades.

So the Brazilian president responds by behaving like an adult, speaking firmly but with respect, and not giving in to bullying and grandstanding. It all must be so confusing to his North American counterpart.

The 50% tariff imposed on Brazil is the political equivalent of a five year old sticking out their tongue and going “Nyah nyah”. It’s not much of a threat when the target of your threats has the option of simply shifting their business to more reasonable trading partners.

When this all shakes out, Brazil will be just fine. But I’m not sure I can say the same for the U.S.

Here’s a fun number game:

For any U.S. president, collect three numeric digits as follows:

— One digit is the number of letters in their first name.
— One digit is the lowest digit of their birth month.
— One digit is the lowest digit of their birth year.

For example, for Abraham Lincoln, the three digits would be 7, 2 and 9 (for Abraham, February and 1809, respectively).

Now try to form numbers by arranging those digits in different ways. For Lincoln, you get six numbers:

      279, 297, 729, 297, 927, 972

You can do this with any U.S. president. For George Washington, the digits would be 6, 2 and 2. So you only get three numbers:

      226, 262, 622

So some presidents produce six numbers, and others produce three. Yet among the 45 U.S. presidents, only one produces a single number.

But that number might say a lot about that president. Can you figure out what the number is?

One scene in The Mortal Storm stood out to me, because it made me curious. It occurse one evening as the Nazis gather around a large fire to burn books.

The two books that we see them incinerate are by Heinrich Heine and Albert Einstein. Each author was chosen for a specific reason.

I understood immediately why Einstein was chosen. Science, being an objective observer of truth, is the natural enemy of fascists.

For example, it is no coincidence that the current U.S. government is defunding science on a massive scale. Of course that is a direct attack on something that is truly great about America — and a key source of our economic power in the World.

But our current administration doesn’t care about any of that. It thinks more along the North Korean model: Keep your people poor and illiterate, and thereby maintain absolute control of the nation that you have ruined.

But what about Heine? I spent quite a bit of time today reading about him, and I highly recommend that you do the same. A good starting point might be his Wikipedia page.

Among his many other accomplishments, Heine coined the phrase “Where books burn, so do people.” Of course such a man would need to be silenced.

I just finished watching The Mortal Storm, a 1940 movie from MGM starring Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullavan and Robert Young. Based on a 1937 novel by Phyllis Bottome, it tells the harrowing and true to life tale of what happens to a sleepy little German town when the Hitler first becomes Chancellor.

I was astonish by how the events of the film parallel events today in our own country. How quickly science is declared to be dangerous, how divergence from the ruling party’s political stance is met with swift retribution, how your friends and neighbors can suddenly be declared to be enemies of the people who need to be disappeared by force.

This movie represented a snapshot of Germany in 1933. We all know what happened there over the following seven years. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen here.

Sadly, one of my heroes, Tom Lehrer, has just passed away. I grew up on his songs, and have always delighted in his acerbic wit and great clarity of mind.

Lehrer once famously said, when asked why he stopped writing songs: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

And yet, we now know that things can get even worse. Much worse. To tell the truth, today’s world needs a Tom Lehrer more than ever.

Some recent news in the NY Times about sports team names (lightly edited):

President Trump urged the Washington Commanders on Sunday to revert to their former name, or else pick another one just as good, and threatened to derail a deal for the N.F.L. team to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., if it didn’t submit to his demand.

The Commanders dropped their “Redskins” name in 2020 amid pressure from corporate sponsors and after lobbying by Native American groups, who argued that the team’s name and logo amplified racist stereotypes.

On Sunday morning, as he played golf at his club in Washington, Mr. Trump posted a message on Truth Social pushing the team to reverse course.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” Mr. Trump wrote, “Or else pick another good name like the Washington Jews Football Team, or maybe the Washington Negroes Football Team.”

In one post, Mr. Trump claimed, without evidence, that there was “a big clamoring for this” and that “our great Indian and Jew and Negro people, in massive numbers, want this to happen.”

Hours later, in another post, Mr. Trump threatened to impose “a restriction” on the Commanders by thwarting the deal announced in April for the team to build a new stadium in Washington.

“I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington,” Mr. Trump wrote. “The Team would be much more valuable, and the Deal would be exciting for everyone.” It is unclear if the president has the authority to block the deal.