Ken's Blog

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.

Whenever I teach computer graphics, one of the most important topics is learning how to work with 4×4 matrices. 4×4 matrices are the workhorse, not just of computer graphics, but of many scientific fields, including robotics, aerospace, medical imaging and quantum mechanics, to name just a few.

One of the odd properties of matrices is that multiplication order matters. When you multiply two number, say 11×13, you get the same result as when you multiply 13×11. But if you multiply two matrices A and B, the product AxB is usually different from the product BxA.

I needed to find a way to make this intuitive for my students, so I wrote a little visualization to help them think it through. You can try it for yourself HERE.

If Jim Henson were alive, he would be 90 years old today. It occurs to me that the enormity of his influence on our culture is equivalent to that of the Beatles.

Take a moment to think about our modern American concept of humor, of irony, of how we approach serious topics in a playful way. These are built upon ways of thinking that Jim Henson introduced into our culture.

Of the many things that the great man said, I will leave you with just one:

“Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”

I find a striking structural similarity between the current controversy around A.I. and the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11:1–9. Ultimately the story of the Tower of Babel is about the price of hubris.

God saw that people were trying to attain a kind of god-like status by constructing a grand tower all the way up to the heavens. For that they needed to be punished.

Recent efforts to build an ever more powerful A.I. are in some ways similar. We humans are taking upon ourselves the god-like power to create a new form of intelligent life.

We really don’t know yet how that will play out. I just hope we don’t end up as a cautionary tale in some future civilization’s biblical lore.

The president of the United States was recently quoted as saying “Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.” If taken at face value, that would suggest we should ban Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe and Cormac McCarthy and William Styron, among many other fine writers.

On the other hand, it’s hard for any sane rational human being to believe that the president of the United States, of all people, would not understand the concept of free speech in a democracy. So I’m guessing that it was a spelling error. What the president clearly meant to say was “Something is wrong with a country that can’t allow people to write purposely negative stories.”

Admittedly, it is theoretically possible that the president meant exactly what he said. But if that were true, it would imply that he is a complete blithering idiot. So let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt, and just assume that he can’t spell.

Gothic:
      On an evening dark and gloomy
      I did feast upon Halloumi

American Romantic:
      By the shores of Gitche Gumee
      Stood the last piece of Halloumi

Epicurean:
      That aroma! ‘Tis what drew me
      To the fine taste of Halloumi

Ogden Nash:
      oh my tummy was so roomy
      until mummy made halloumi

Borscht Belt:
      I was hungry, ok sue me,
      So I noshed on some Halloumi

Queasy:
      That last one went right through me
      Now I just avoid Halloumi

Ace Attorney player:
      In a game by Shu Takumi
      The witness said “Halloumi”

Passive aggressive:
      If you actually knew me
      You would know I hate Halloumi

Suppose, due to some future technological advances, that everyone had all the knowledge in the world in their head — at least that part of it which is publicly available. Whatever public fact you might be interested in, you would already know.

So any time you now find yourself going to Wikipedia, or looking something up in a book, that would no longer be necessary, because you would already know the answer. How would that change things?

I don’t presume to know the answer, but I think it’s a question worth asking. As technology advances slowly toward making neural interfaces a reality, we should be prepared for exactly what social and cultural impact that might have.

Here’s a comforting thought: Even if you had all of the knowledge of the world in your head, that still wouldn’t tell you the answer to the question I asked at the start of this post.