Ken's Blog

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.

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.