Ken's Blog

Well, we have finally arrived at the second half of 2026. The good news is that I now have an entire half a year to fix all the mistakes that I made in the previous half year.

And the bad news? I only have have half a year to fix all the mistakes that I made in the previous half year.

Every day I look at the day’s Wikipedia entries. And I especially focus on what famous people had a birthday today.

For the longest time I really had no idea why I was doing this. Occasionally I would find out about some fascinating person I had not known about, but I knew that wasn’t really the reason.

Today I finally figured it out. When you go through the birthdays of famous people, you see a recurring pattern.

At first, they are all dead people. Then you get to a transition period where some of them are dead and others are still alive. At last you get to the recent birthdays, where pretty much everyone is still alive.

I think I’ve been looking for someone — anyone — who managed to escape. Has there been even one person who didn’t inevitably leave this earth after living here for some number of decades?

So far I haven’t found anyone. Alas, sooner or later they all end up dying.

But I’m not giving up hope yet. Tomorrow there will be a new Wikipedia entry, and a chance to find out that at least somebody is beating the odds.

I still continue to write all of my computer graphics programs line by line. No vibe coding, no asking an AI to “insert an implementation of this here”.

I do understand that this puts me out of step with the times. Maybe I am holding on to an ideal that will no longer be seen to have meaning.

But creating something on the computer from scratch, with my own manual labor, feels like a value in itself. I feel a bit like Ron Swanson crafting his own chair.

In the long run this may not be seen as practical by society at large. But to me it brings an intangible value that is priceless.

Two notable events today: The NYC Pride Parade and Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday. In my mind they tie together nicely.

The Pride Parade was an hours long celebration, mostly of young people, that marched down Fifth Avenue right outside my window. It was not merely celebratory. It was also a pointed refutation of fascism.

Some participants were actually carrying a giant banner that said “REFUSE FASCISM”. I have rarely been prouder of my fellow New Yorkers.

This is what true patriotism looks like — people standing up to bullies and affirming the only things that are actually great about America: Its ideals of freedom and equality and its celebration of the joyful diversity of our great nation.

Meanwhile, Mel Brooks has spent the better part of a century poking fun at self-important fools who try to dictate how other people should live their lives, and just end up looking like idiots. As you’ve probably noticed, some of those fools are currently taking a wrecking ball to our nation’s capital.

On the one hand, young people just starting out in life, and on the other hand, a 100 year old comic genius. And between them one clear message: Don’t let incompetent idiots succeed in ruining our world.

Most days of your life everything proceeds pretty much as expected. And then there are days when your view of reality changes. The latter is generally prompted by some completely unanticipated event.

Today I experienced one of those unanticipated events. It brought about a realization, a recognition of my own systemic inability to have seen what had always been — in retrospect — in plain sight.

The question, now that I have had this realization, is whether I can effectively act on it. The recognition does not by itself bring about the needed change.

But it’s a good start.

I was talking with a colleague today. Both of us are currently overwhelmed because we are trying to get way too many things done at the same time.

Of course the people who are depending on you in one sphere of your life don’t particularly know or care about your obligations in another sphere of your life. So when things get intense on multiple fronts, it can become a little crazy.

My colleague and I compared notes, and found ourselves agreeing on one thing: When things get really crazy, you find yourself switching into triage mode. Somehow it then all becomes manageable.

The down side is that you can only stay in triage mode for so long. Then you need to sleep.

It as though Orwell, whose birthday is today, foresaw the coming of the criminals in our current U.S. administration. His cautionary writings eerily foreshadowed their methods.

Given that administration’s all-out information war on our right to discuss our own American history with even a modicum of accuracy, this statement by Orwell was particularly prescient:

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

Yet elsewhere Orwell provides a hint as to how we might counter this assault on the American people:

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

As patriotic Americans work to take back our beautiful country from grifters and con artists, we need the wisdom of George Orwell more than ever.

Sometimes bad things happen in life. When that happens, we all look for ways to keep our heads above water.

Some people go into denial. Others engage in self-destructive behaviors of one sort or another. There are certainly plenty of those to choose from.

I find that what works best for me is to go to my computer and start to create new things. Hopefully wondrous and beautiful new things.

I am quite aware that bringing something new into the Universe will not make the bad things go away. But it will hopefully add a little bit of positive energy to help counteract the bad stuff.

And maybe that’s the best we can ever do.

You may have seen the recent announcement by Mars, Inc. that blue M&Ms are not being included in the new special limited edition M&Ms that won’t use synthetic petroleum-based dyes. It turns out that there is not yet any affordable way to create all-natural blue M&Ms with currently available technology.

And that is not the only way that blue is retreating. Blue paint has literally been peeling itself off the walls of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial.

Fortunately, here is where the law of “conservation of blue” kicks in. From all indications (and with a lot of unintended help from our screw-up president) the entire United States is about to turn blue. At least if the midterm elections are not rigged.

Maybe, if we manage to take our nation back from the creepy fascists, we can celebrate by eating some yummy M&Ms. Including the blue ones.

Just around a century ago, actors started speaking in movies. Movie stars like Al Jolson, Dolores Costello, Conrad Nagel, Ronald Colman, John Barrymore and Greta Garbo suddenly had voices.

But many of those old movies are low quality by today’s standards. Between transfer problems, degradation over time, and simply the limitations of technology, the sound and images are very different from what we would expect today.

On the one hand, it would be tempting to use A.I. to upgrade them. On the other hand, I wonder whether that upgraded version would truly be faithful to the original performance.

Using an AI model to modify a performance necessarily relies on training from many other human performances. The “higher fidelity Jolson” might not actually be entirely Jolson, but rather an amalgam drawn from a variety of sources.

Maybe its best to simply watch those old films in their original low fidelity condition. At least then we will know that when Garbo speaks, it will be 100% Garbo.