Ken's Blog

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.

As you may have heard, that expensive new blue paint has been flaking off the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. The President claims that this is an act of sabotage.

Today I wanted to test his claim. So I asked Gemini a series of questions. Here are those questions, followed by Gemini’s answers:

(1) What was poured into the water of the Washington DC reflecting pool to kill the algae?

Workers poured gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to combat aggressive algae blooms following a multimillion-dollar repainting project.

(2) If you pour hydrogen peroxide into a pool, can it cause paint to come off the pool walls?

Yes, high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide can cause pool paint to soften, bubble, lose adhesion, and peel. While standard 3% household peroxide is generally mild, shocking a pool or using industrial concentrations (12% to 30%+) creates a strong oxidizer that degrades the polymer bonds in pool coatings, especially if the paint is fresh or inadequately cured.

(3) What concentration of hydrogen peroxide was poured into the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to disburse the algae?

Crews poured a 12% concentration of hydrogen peroxide (four times stronger than standard household peroxide) into the pool. The National Park Service manually dumped the liquid from 1-gallon bottles to combat a severe algae bloom following renovations.

Over the last three decades many people have become fans of the 1993 film “Groundhog Day”. On one level it is yet another “single day time-loop” movie — a concept that had already been explored in the 1990 short film “12:01 P.M.” and even before that in the 1947 short film “La vie révoltée”.

But in my mind there is one key plot point that makes watching “Groundhog Day” a uniquely profound experience.

As the same day continues to repeat, the main character of Phil (played brilliantly by Bill Murray) gradually comes to see himself as a sort of minor god. The better he gets to know the intricacies of the day, the more he is able to influence the course of that day.

However, he hits a wall when trying to save the life of an old man (played by the veteran actor Les Podewell). No matter what he does, he cannot succeed in preventing the old man from dying on that day.

To me, this is the only aspect of the film that truly speaks to the larger nature of Phil’s metaphysical journey. Yes, Phil has indeed become a kind of minor god, but we learn here that behind the scenes there are larger forces at work.

The old man dies because it is his time. Phil can affect many things, but he cannot defeat mortality itself. But why?

Because that is not the way the Universe works. In my mind, that revelation elevates the film from an amusing metaphysical comedy to a profound meditation on the human condition.

Today is Juneteenth — a portmanteau for the 19th of June. On this official U.S. holiday we Americans celebrate the end of the institution of slavery in our nation, on and about June 19th 1865.

Juneteenth is, arguably, the most important of all American holidays. July 4th merely celebrates a promise — the assertion, in the words of Thomas Jefferson “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But that assertion, initially made by a handful of wealthy landowners, was a promise left largely unfulfilled for nearly a century. It wasn’t until the abolition of slavery that the nation had found anything like a true moral compass to match its lofty claims.

To be sure, the path to realizing equality in the U.S. has been slow, uneven and inconsistent. But it has generally moved forward, as we travel a winding path toward the angels of our better nature.

Yes, the current president is clearly a racist, but then again he and his enablers are many offensive things, as well as being shockingly incompetent. I am confident that millions of patriotic Americans will realize what we can now all plainly see, and will soon collectively vote to remove that cancerous growth from our republic.

In the days leading up to our midterm elections, let Juneteenth stand as an official beginning of that collective journey back to redemption.

On this day in history, June 18 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace sent Charles Darwin a research paper. That paper made it clear to Darwin that Wallace had reached essentially the same scientific conclusions about evolution and natural selection that Darwin had reached.

Darwin responded by immediately rushing his own version of the theory into publication. The rest is history.

Today we often talk about Darwinian evolution. Not just as a scientific theory, but as a metaphor for everything from business to technology to personal relationships.

But we don’t ever talk about Wallacean evolution. In fact, most people have never heard of Alfred Wallace.

In this case, cultural evolution clearly selected the more aggressive member of the species. Which I guess just goes to show that “publish or perish” is a uniquely human form of “survival of the fittest”.

I had an interesting conversation today. A colleague and I were exploring the following hypothetical question: If you could live forever, due to some new scientific breakthrough, and you could choose whichever age you wanted to be forever, what age would you choose?

But here’s the kicker: You can choose a physical age and a mental age, and they can be different. So, hypothetically speaking, how far apart would be your physical age and your mentally age in your ideal scenario of a forever future?

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses

Happy Bloomsday everyone.

I read today that the world-wide rate of production of toilet paper is about 83 million rolls per day. My first thought was “Wow, that’s a lot of toilet paper!”

But then I took a moment to think about it some more. And I remembered that the current world population is about 83 billion.

Which means that the average person gets access to only one roll of toilet paper every 100 days. Take a moment to let that sink in.

If you are reading this, you are probably not that “average person”. And you might take a moment to reflect on what that really means.

Here in the United States we are mostly shielded from true poverty. Some people here even celebrate billionaires — and now trillionaires.

We fortunate ones can mostly get away with living in an oblivious bubble. But every once in a while, something punctures that bubble, and the terrible truth manages to seep in.

The only political garb in my current wardrobe is a t-shirt that says “Talarico 2028” in big bold print. It’s something that is fun to wear around New York City, but I suspect it could get me shot in those parts of the country where they’ve been taken in by the convicted criminal in the White House.

Stephen Miller, the special advisor to the president, has questioned Talarico’s sexuality. Apparently a human male who is capable of compassion and kindness seems incomprehensible to Miller.

Although I’m starting to wonder whether it is not the male part that is causing confusion, but the human part. To be fair, it is very impressive to try to understand the gender of an individual of a different species, and we have to give Miller credit for trying.

Miller is making a valiant effort, but seems to be venturing into unknown territory here. For example, I would never attempt to make a guess as to Miller’s gender, because I am not a herpetologist.