Ken's Blog

Today I am on a long flight. I am flying economy class.

If course it is uncomfortable.The seats are too small, there isn’t much legroom, and nobody is really happy to be here.

Perfect conditions, in fact, for getting programming done. The more you want to escape your immediate physical environment, the more motivated you are to escape into code.

I wonder, if you tally the productivity of programmers, and map it to where they happen to be, whether you would find a spike during long flights in the cheap seats.

Maybe, in their own way, the airlines are doing a service for our nation’s knowledge economy.

The act of livestreaming an execution, which the U.S. Pentagon has ordered for Dec 3, is of course beneath contempt. It seems like a deliberate attempt to position our government as a pack of savages, by publicly staging a pointedly disgusting and frankly vomit-inducing display of extreme violence porn.

But why would government officials debase themselves and our nation in this way? After all, this is just the sort of monstrosity that democracies find deeply offensive when it is done in such places as Iran and North Korea.

Maybe that’s the point. By now they realize that they have no chance of holding onto control of Congress in the midterms, given how thoroughly they have screwed up on every front. So their only remaining play is to flex their authoritarian muscles in preparation for what comes next.

The worry is that on November 4 they will declare the election that they just lost to have been rigged, and then begin the process of instituting martial law. By committing outrageous acts of public savagery now, they can signal that they will not let the normal rules of decorum get in their way.

It has often been said that is better to show rather than just to tell. In that spirit, sometimes I find it useful to put together little interactive visualizations on the Web to illustrate an idea.

Just this week I was trying to explain to some colleagues an idea I had about eyewear made from mirrors that lets you see to the left with your left eye, and to the right with your right eye. The question I was trying to address was how big your “visual aperture” can be. In other words, when is it like looking through a little peephole, and when is it like looking through a nice big pair of glasses?

Not surprisingly, the nearer you place the mirrors to your eyes (the “eye relief” of the device), the greater the visual aperture. But at some point the eye relief can become too small — if the mirrors get too near to your eyes it will make you uncomfortable.

The smallest comfortable eye relief is probably about 12mm (about half an inch). I created this little visualization to show how eye relief relates to visual aperture.

It was interesting that yesterday, when the Mayor of New York included sympathy for innocent Palestinians who have died during these last 3 years in his remembrance of those slain by Hamas in Israel on October 7th 2023, he was roundly criticized by Jewish leaders.

Then later in the day, when he attended a candlelight vigil in remembrance of the slain Israelis, he was loudly condemned by pro-Palestinian protesters.

Each side accused him of being a stooge for the other side. It seems that people on both sides were confused by this man. Apparently you are supposed to have sympathy only for one set of innocent victims, and no sympathy for the other set of innocent victims.

To have the courage to express empathy for innocent victims on both sides is so rare that to many people it seems alien, inexplicable, and just plain confusing. I guess we have lost our taste for political leaders who dare to show even an ounce of true moral courage and empathy.

Earlier this week, the U.S. president said, speaking about Iran: “They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay.”

That is an exact quote.

The next morning, the White House’s communications director explained what the president meant by those remarks: “He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.”

Except that’s not what the president said. What he actually said, quite plainly, was that Iran blowing up a few large cities in the U.S. is a small price to pay for America winning the ongoing war between the two nations.

Which leads me to wonder about two things: (1) How many Americans agree with what the president actually said? (2) How stressful must it be to be the White House communications director — a job where you need to keep making stuff up and pretending that nobody will notice?

Most places in the U.S. do not want A.I. data centers in their neighborhood. They consume lots of resources like water and electricity, and they don’t generate many jobs.

Yet Americans continue to use A.I. at an ever increasing rate. More and more industries are starting to rely on A.I. virtual assistance, because it can be so convenient and efficient, and seems to be much cheaper than the equivalent human labor (at least on the surface).

But those data centers don’t actually need to be in the U.S. They can just as well be located anywhere in the world where a satellite dish can be set up for an internet connection.

Which means that those data centers are inevitably going to pop up in the third world. Countries that are already much poorer than the U.S. will find themselves hosting those facilities.

The outskirts of already stressed third world cities will provide the high demands for acreage, water and electricity that data centers require. The resulting computational output will largely be for the benefit of knowledge work that boosts the first world economy.

Colonialism never really goes away. It just changes with the times.

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.