Ken's Blog

Our Town is 1938 play by Thornton Wilder. In a deceptively simple and unadorned way it manages to ask the most profound questions about life.

The main character, Emily, only realizes after she is dead just how precious life is. The key line of the play is when she asks the play’s narrator “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?”

The answer, of course, is generally no. Yet our time on this planet is, in a way, the most profound gift of all.

My takeaway from this is something I call the Our Town principle: Whenever you are feeling down, remember that you are the recipient of an infinitely precious gift.

You don’t need to think about this “every, every minute.” But every once in a while can sure do wonders for your mood.

Somebody told me yesterday that in China they have a giant topographic sand table of all of Tibet. The model is one Kilometer long.

I found myself wondering whether you could see tiny people on that sand table. Here are the calculations to figure that out.

Tibet is 2500 Km long, which means you would need to shrink down a person by a factor of 2500. And if a person is 6ft tall, then they are 1.8288 meters tall, doing the conversion from feet to meters.

So the person will appear on the table as 1.8288 / 2500 meters tall. Which is 0.00073152 meters.

Or about 0.7 mm, which is still visible. Tiny, but definitely visible.

Now I know the answer, and I am happy.

Visiting old friends, after a long time. The best part of the visit is swapping stories.

I sometimes forget how much of bonding with your old friends consists of telling stories about other places and various adventures. There are few things more fun in life.

Especially if there are snacks.

The portrait of President Biden in the White House presidential gallery was replaced by an autopen. This inane and petty act of disrespect raises an interesting question.

When a Democrat moves into the White House on January 2029, what should they put up as the portrait of the current inhabitant? I am thinking we could have a contest.

Is there some image that would truly convey the magnitude of what has been done to our country and to our world in the span since the most recent presidential election? Although I can see a problem.

Any image that would be even vaguely accurate would probably be unsuitable for public viewing. There are good reasons that we have laws in our country against public obscenity.

I know that it is just an arbitrary division on a calendar, but the first day of the month always feels to me like a new beginning. It’s time to turn the page, to start anew, to erase that old whiteboard and get some fresh dry erase markers.

Or maybe just a time to realize that you need better metaphors. 🙂

In any case, happy October 1 everyone!

I was visiting a research lab today, and one of the graduate students told me about his project creating reconfigurable robots. Then another graduate student told me about his project creating DNA that can be folded into different shapes.

After hearing those two projects, I suggested that maybe the student working on reconfigurable robots should use the results from the other student to make very, very small reconfigurable robots. One of the students told me he was surprised that I had connected those two projects.

“Depending on how you look at it,” I replied, “they are really part of the same project.”

He thought about that for a moment. “I wonder,” he asked, “how many projects there are all together.”

“There is really only one project,” I said.

Sometimes you get an idea about something you want to make, and you a pretty sure there is something there. Except you can’t quite get your simulation to work.

You can sort of get it to work, but it doesn’t really do what you want. I find in such situations, the best thing to do is to create a simulation of the simulation.

In other words, I make something that is kind of like the thing I’m trying to simulate, even if the details are wrong. Then I play with that for a while, and try to learn from it.

Usually, that process eventually leads to some insight that lets me build the thing I was trying to build in the first place. But this time I am building it the right way.

Or maybe this is just a fancy way of saying “Fake it ’till you make it.” 🙂

Today I was cc’d on an online discussion in which one person seriously overstepped. It’s not just that they crossed another person’s boundaries. It was more that they took a sledgehammer to the boundary, smashed it up into little tiny pieces, and used it to create a wall mosaic.

I noticed that nobody responded. I also noticed that I didn’t respond.

There comes a point when you realize that you are dealing with a certain kind of social blindness. If a person is actually incapable of perceiving boundaries that everyone else can plainly see, then they are going to continue to smash through them, to the continuing discomfort of everyone else.

I believe we all collectively realized that there was no use in even engaging. As my brother once told me “There is no point in having a conversation if there is nobody on the other side.”

Or as Mark Twain famously never said: “Never wrestle with a pig; you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

One of my favorite musicals is Kismet, which was made into a very entertaining Hollywood movie in 1955. One notable thing about it is that all of the music is actually adapted from the Polovtsian Dances, an unfinished 1887 Opera by Alexander Borodin.

I am surprised that this idea of building upon the canon of classical music has not gained more traction. When I listen now to the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Chopin, I imagine them as the melodies of musicals yet unwritten, with lyrics yet to be discovered.

I for one would love to see an exploration of this idea. Wouldn’t that be better than Jukebox musicals?

One sign of a great movie is how it holds up on repeated viewings. Many films I can watch once at most. After that, it just feels like I am wasting my time.

But then there are movies that have layers of meaning. Therefore, every detail changes when the movie is screened again.

I first encountered this when I was in my early teens. I was home sick from school one week, and my local TV station was showing their “movie of the week” every afteroon at 3pm.

So I saw the 1960 Stanley Kramer courtroom drama “Inherit the Wind” five times. Five times I watched Spencer Tracy square off against Fredric March, and with every viewing the film got better.

I have had similar experiences with Annie Hall, and a few other films as well.

I just watched The Odyssey for the third time (the last two times on 70mm film in IMax), and likewise, with every viewing I saw shades of meaning and depth that I had missed on earlier viewings.

In our rating of mivies, maybe there should be a scale for how a film improves (or not) with repeated viewings.