Ken’s Blog

Today is a Fibonacci day. That is a day in which the month, day of the month, and last two digits of the year are all Fibonacci numbers.

You may never have heard of a Fibonacci day before. That’s because I just made it up.

In the case of today, we are in month 3, day 13, and year 21. These are all found in the sequence of Fibonacci numbers: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,… (The rule is you add the sum of last two numbers in the sequence as the next number. Eg: 5+8=13).

As an exercise, see if you can figure out how many Fibonacci days there are this year.

Here’s an easier one: What is the one date this year that is a successive Fibonacci day? That is a day containing three successive Fibonacci numbers.

And then, when is the next successive Fibonacci day after that? Hint: it’s not this year. That will be an interesting day because it will be the last successive Fibonacci day for a very very long time.

How strange that it is exactly one year since COVID-19 turned life upside down. March 12, 2020 was the first day that I started teaching my classes at NYU over Zoom, and everything has been over Zoom since then.

It has been a very strange and sad year for the world. All we can hope for is that the coming year sees the end of this awful pandemic.

As Joni Mitchell said, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” In addition to the terrible toll in people lost, I think we have all regained a renewed appreciation for the experience of being in the same place with people we love.

Among other things, I will never again take for granted the simple joy of sharing a cup of coffee with friends.

As you scurry, helter skelter
Take some time for rest and shelter
Outside pressures never cease
But inside you need inner peace
Take an hour every day
Just to look inside and say
“This is me, I am here.
If nothing else, that much is clear.”
Always keep your inner view
That’s how you know you are you

I know that it’s a cliché to say “Karma is a boomerang.” On first hearing, it sounds so very fuzzy and far too simple to be meaningful.

Yet there is power in simply giving things away. And that is especially true when you are doing cutting edge technological research.

People often worry that if they simply give something away for free, then they will miss out on a chance to make money. But in many cases — particularly in technological research — the world does not even yet know that what you are doing could be valuable.

Because you are thinking differently from everyone else, you are often years ahead of whatever potential “market” there may be. For one thing, the surrounding infrastructure required for there to even be a market for what you are doing may not yet exist.

But if you give something away for free, people will start to play with it. They will discover interesting uses for it that you probably wouldn’t have thought of. It will become part of new conversations that otherwise may never have taken place.

At that point, you will have been the person who gave this to the world, which gives you an enormous amount of credibility. Eventually the world will indeed catch up to your idea, and somebody with lots of power and money will throw millions of dollars at it.

Entire teams will then be working on it, trying to build that market before their competitors do. And if you are the person who gave that idea away, way back before there was a market for it, those teams will want to work with you.

So there’s nothing fuzzy about it. In fact it’s a very practical idea: Karma is a boomerang.

If you had the option of being able to walk into the movie of your choice, would you do it? On the surface this seems like a very appealing notion.

After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to wander through Oz, or Tatooine, or Hogwarts, or the Shire? For many people these would be childhood fantasies come to life.

Yet part of the appeal of these fictional worlds is that we can keep them at a comfortable distance. We ourselves never need to encounter an Orc or a Dementor.

The perils of such worlds are, to us, merely literary devices. They have been designed to give us vicarious thrills at a safe remove.

Perhaps it is good, on the balance, that we cannot literally actually enter into the world of our favorite movie. The safety and comfort of a proscenium may very well be a necessary part of the experience.

Music visualizers have a long and illustrious history, but we tend to think of them as things we see on screens, not in our daily lives. But that may change in a few years.

When extended reality becomes the norm, will music begin to take on more of a visual component? At that point, it will be technologically possible to see melodies and harmonies floating in the air between us, as ever changing three dimensional objects

Will that change the way we think about music? Will it signal the rise of a new art form?

I am looking forward to finding out!

It was rumored today Apple glasses
Will soon be for sale to the masses
    When our students all wear them
    We will need to prepare them
For some new holographical classes

Now that WandaVision is done, whatever will we all do for great television? It raised the bar so high, I fear nothing else will seem all that compelling now.

It’s like when you have the rare opportunity to eat really great chocolate. It’s wonderful, and you are happy you did it, but it ruins you.

All of the chocolate you eat afterward seems second rate. Chocolate that you used to enjoy now tastes like ashes in your mouth.

But you do not regret. You never regret.

Great chocolate is like WandaVision. It needs to be experienced and savored, and then remembered with all due reference and appreciation.

We learn a lot about a person by looking at their eyes. There is so much subtlety of emotion in the space just around the eyes.

There are seven distinct groups of muscles in the area around the eyes. And even very slight and subtle uses of those muscles can convey a tremendous amount of meaning — whether intended or not.

When somebody is wearing sunglasses, much of that information is hidden. We simply can’t “read” people as well when they are sporting shades.

In the future, extended reality eyewear will likely become commonplace, and it will likely look a lot like sunglasses. Which means that for much of the time, we won’t be able to read people’s faces as well to catch subtleties of emotion and intent.

I wonder whether taking off your XR glasses will end up become a sort of social signal of emotional intimacy. Perhaps you will only show your actual eyes to people you trust, and the ability to hide your naked eyes from strangers will become a fundamental right of privacy, perhaps enshrined into law.

When I am on a particularly boring Zoom meeting, sometimes I multitask. I mute my microphone so that nobody can hear the telltale typing, and I get other stuff done.

Admit it, you’ve done the same thing. Some meetings just have a way too high time to interest ratio, and we all need to get stuff done.

In the future, when people are wearing extended reality glasses, I wonder whether this trend will continue. A person at the front of a meeting might see a sea of ostensibly interested faces, looking up attentively.

But in actuality, many of those people will zoning out by looking at the display built into their eyeglasses. Maybe they will be programming, or surfing YouTube videos, or shopping on-line. There won’t really be any way to know.

This is probably not a good thing. The alienation of people looking at their phones at least comes with a certain amount of social signaling. We can tell when someone is surfing their SmartPhone rather than paying attention in a meeting.

But when the screens move into our eyeglasses, that will no longer be the case. We may not have any idea who in the room is mentally present, and who is — for all practical purposes — somewhere else.