Ken’s Blog

To compute in “The Cloud” sounds to me rather eerie
And there is something about it that makes me feel leery
Instead you might call it The Fog, not The Cloud
Now see how that sounds when you say it aloud
You may find that it gives you a more faithful take
By making it clear that the whole thing’s opaque

This week Tucker Carlson brought a guest onto his podcast, whom he introduced as “perhaps the greatest historian of our day.” The guest then proceded to tell everyone that Hitler was really an ok guy, Jews were never exterminated by the Nazis, and in fact WWII was the fault of Winston Churchill, who was a raging maniac.

Does that make Tucker Carlson a Holocaust denier?

Elon Musk tweeted about the interview, and said that the guest speaker made some good points. A while later Musk deleted the tweet, implicitly denying that he’d ever supported it. Does that make Musk a Holocaust denier denier?

While the White House forcefully condemn the podcast, the Republican candidate for President said nothing. But Vance, his running mate, mostly just said that he doesn’t believe in cancelling people because of who they choose to hang out with.

So I guess in his book it was perfectly ok for Elon Musk to tweet and then untweet support for Nazi revisionism.

Does that make Vance a Holocaust denier denier denier?

Today’s post is in honor of the great Robert M. Pirsig, who would have turned ninety six today.

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I’m looking for the truth, and it goes away.” –R.M.P.

Youth culture represents the perfect human contradiction. When you are young, your particular generation influences the large culture enormously, but only for a short time.

Whether bobbysoxer, beatnik, hippie, emocore, Swiftie or whatever, there is a brief moment in history when your group of young people holds center stage in the culture. And then history moves on.

The cultural dominance you have in your youth is the most ephemeral of superpowers, gone before it has hardly begun. And yet youth culture itself is immortal.

Even in ancient times young people were making an impression. Just check out what Socrates said about the youth of his day, according to Plato.

Since then, the power of youth to make their presence felt has not diminished. I suspect it never will.

When I was a kid I saw Yellow Submarine and loved it. Spending time with my beloved Beatles as animated characters with magical powers was super fun.

But then at some point I found out that the voices of John, Paul, George and Ringo were not actually performed by John, Paul, George and Ringo, but rather by hired actors. The Fab Four had nothing at all to do with the movie other than having supplied the songs it was based on and then appearing briefly over the closing credits.

Learning this felt like a betrayal. Somebody was impersonating my favorite music group, without really having made it clear that it was all a mere impersonation.

I now realize that this was a harbinger of the future. As generative AI becomes mature, we are going to see a lot more of this kind of thing — except this time in live action.

Beloved popular figures will license their voice and appearance to surrogates. We will gradually find ourselves seeing and hearing less of the real thing, and more of the imitation.

Eventually, the only objections will come from senior citizens who remember the old days, when people actually played themselves. Young folks who grow up with this won’t understand what those old codgers are going on about.

autumn dances in
hot angry summer storms off
winter’s cold smile waits

I am trying to work out details of a mixed reality tabletop set-up that I’m designing. As part of that process, I am building a version of it as a 3D model on my computer.

Today I found myself looking at items in the real world, and creating rough models of those same objects in the virtual world. I’m not trying to replicate reality here — I’m just trying to represent parts of it as simple proxies.

There is a kind of head-spinning hall of mirrors aspect to this process. I am looking at my laptop screen while typing on it to create a version of the very screen and keyboard that I am looking at, and even of the table that my laptop computer is sitting on.

At some point in this hall of mirrors the real and the virtual can start to get all jumbled up in my mind. I’m not sure that this is entirely a bad thing — maybe it just means that it’s all working.

I have recently come to understand that everything is an instrument. This includes your house or apartment, your office, your financial assets, the hours in your day.

If you do nothing, and those assets just sit there, then you are losing a little every day. But if you look at them with fresh eyes and ask “What can I do with this?” then the possibilities are endless.

Think of where you want to get to. Then every morning, ask yourself how you can use whatever you have to help you to get there.

You might just surprise yourself.

Today is, for some reason, historically a notorious day for disasters. An oddly large number of notable disasters happened on this day.

On August 31 1420 a huge earthquake in Chile caused a massively destructive tsunami that swept through not only Chile but also Hawaii and Japan. Then on August 31 1886 another huge earthquake in Charleston South Carolina caused many deaths and millions of dollars of damage as far away as Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Cuba and Bermuda.

On August 31 1940 a commercial flight crashed near Lovettsville, Virginia. Ten years lager, on August 31 1950, a TWA flight crashed near Itay El Barud in Egypt, and then on August 31 1972 an Aeroflot flight crashed in Bashkortostan in the USSR.

On August 1986 an Aeroméxico flight collided with a Piper Cherokee over Cerritos California, killing people both on the air and in the ground. On the same day, the Soviet passenger liner Admiral Nakhimov sank in the Black Sea after colliding with the carrier Pyotr Vasev, killing 423.

Exactly one year later, On August 31 1987, a Thai Airways flight crashed into the ocean near Ko Phuket, Thailand, killing everyone aboard. Just one year after that, on August 31 1988, a Delta Air Lines flight crashesd during takeoff from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. On the same day, a CAAC Flight overshot the runway at Kai Tak Airport and crashed into Kowloon Bay.

On August 31 1999 a LAPA Boeing crashed during takeoff from Jorge Newbury Airport in Buenos Aires. Then on August 31 2002 Typhoon Rusa, the most powerful typhoon to hit South Korea in 43 years, killed at least 236 people.

On August 31 2005 the Al-Aaimmah bridge stampede in Baghdad killed 953 people, and on August 31 2019 a sightseeing helicopter crashed in the mountains of Northern Norway, killing everyone aboard.

As many people know, August 31 was also the day of the year that Diana, Princess of Wales, her partner, Dodi Fayed and their driver died in a car crash in Paris.

My advice: Stay home if you can on August 31.

A movie is generally made to speak to its time. It picks up and reflects back to us all sorts of ubiquitous cultural norms of our time.

So what happens when you watch a movie decades after it was made? All of those cultural norms, once so ubiquitous as to be invisible, become glaringly obvious.

An old movie is, inevitably, an anthropological examination of another era. You see the cultural assumptions of another time laid bare.

Although this is never the intention of filmmakers, it becomes inevitably so over time. Maybe this is one of the reasons we love watching old movies.