Author: admin

Today, February 12, is the birthday of many historically influential, famous or otherwise notable people.

Depending on your age and nationality, you may or may not recognize the names of some of today’s birthday celebrants, including Abraham Lincoln, Anna Pavlova, Arlen Specter, Arsenio Hall, Bill Russell, Charles Darwin, Charles Van Doren, Christina Ricci, Cliff DeYoung, Costa-Gavras, Cotton Mather, Darren Aronofsky, Forrest Tucker, Franco Zeffirelli, Heinrich Lenz, Josh Brolin, Judy Blume, Lorne Greene, Louis Renault, Omar Bradley, Peter Cooper, Ray Manzarek and Ray Kurzweil.

Sadly, only one of these people is going to live forever. 🙁

I bit over two years ago I wrote within these pages about my first time watching Lost in Austen, Guy Andrews’ brilliant and pitch-perfect reboot of “Pride and Prejudice”. I am finding it to be even more gratifying upon second viewing, familiar as I now am with the fortuitous twists and turns of the plot.

I also find myself, for the moment, disposed to rejoice in the pleasurable cadences of Andrews’ recreation of Austen’s language, and the many and varied locutions by which the characters express themselves. It is indeed refreshing to visit, if only for the briefest of intervals, a period in the history of our fair English when even the most subtle indications of one’s inner thoughts were able to find expression in one’s words.

On the morrow, alas, I shall undoubtedly revert to our ruinous modern habit of abbreviated communication, of language stripped bare, of grievously monosyllabic utterances endlessly compromised by a sad reliance upon base cliché. Please forgive me, gentle readers, for allowing myself the pleasure, on this occasion, of indulging a rare and joyful celebration of our dear mother tongue, clothed in all her finery.

In 1988 Paul Maritz, then a manager at Microsoft, coined the phrase “eating your own dog food” to describe the practice of using your products in your own work, not just selling those products to the customers.

It occurs to me that in computer graphics research we do this a lot. We don’t just use graphics techniques to make images and animations, we also use them to explain to other people how those techniques work. It’s a wonderful example of graphics as a meta-discipline (a discipline that can be used on itself).

For example, as part of my little game to teach reading, I needed the game to generate a bunch of sentences. I was on my way to a meeting to explain to somebody how this worked, when I realized I could just use computer graphics to pretty much do the explaining for me about how this is done.

If you click here to launch the Java applet, you see an example sentence. Moving your mouse around over the applet generates different sentences.

If you then click on the applet, an animated graphic shows up that explains how it’s done — as a kind of random MadLibs generator. Of course I could have just said “random MadLibs generator”, but (1) not everyone is familiar with MadLibs, and (2) the graphical representation makes it much more clear exactly what’s going on behind the scenes.

This semester I’m teaching a class with about seventy students. It happens to be about a subject I love — computer graphics. We are having a glorious time. Every week we get to explore different aspects of an endlessly fascinating subject, and the students get a chance to dive in and make stuff — original stuff.

This evening I had a conversation with some administrators from our department. They were surprised at the large size of my class, and they were even more surprised that I’m having so much fun. “Some of our faculty,” one administrator said, “believe that twenty students in their class are already too many.”

I heard this, and on some level I even processed it. But frankly, I couldn’t take it in on an emotional level. When you are preaching your own personal religion, talking about the most glorious and beautiful thing you know to people who are ready to go there with you, why in the world would you not welcome in one more fellow traveler?

I mean, isn’t this sort of thing exactly why we are here on this earth in the first place?

I was putting together some simple procedural sketches for games to help kids learn to read, and while showing them to some colleagues we got onto the subject of poetry. Kids love rhymes, and poems have a kind of metrical structure to them, which might make them, in some ways, more useful for learning to read than straight prose.

Of course this is the central conceit behind Theodore Geisel’s Cat in the Hat and other Dr. Seuss stories. When I was a kid I remember thinking that those stories were far cooler in every way than boring old Fun with Dick and Jane.

Now I’m playing around with some ideas for a computer game where the goal would be to construct poems in various ways, such as by arranging objects on a screen. Playing such a game might also be a very nice way to study and practice a second language.

Oddity in fiction needs to be handled properly. You can’t just throw it in and expect an audience to respond. It needs to be correctly situated.

For example, the wonderfully inventive screenplay by Jules Feiffer for Robert Altman’s Popeye had gloriously weird and wonderful characters, yet audiences did not respond. Something similar happened in John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano.

In contrast, Tim Burton’s most beloved films, such as Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare before Christmas, made a point of contrasting all of the wonderful oddness with nominal normalcy. The audience was placed in the position of the oddballs, being stared at by the “normals”, and realizing that normal is relative.

The master of this is Joss Whedon. It is a given in the Buffyverse that only Buffy the vampire slayer and her loser friends are capable of saving the world. Anyone who is normal, popular or well adjusted is completely useless. Without the help of Sunnydale’s freaks and geeks, they would all be vampire meat.

Whedon takes this even farther in Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. In this upside-down story world, you can’t be “us” unless you are “them”. The only sympathetic character is the evil genius intent on world destruction. He is beloved by audiences, who find themselves booing and hissing the hero who tries to stop him.

It’s like Richard III retold as Hamlet. Except with better songs.

The present perfect tense allows us to say things like “She has been department chair for two months”, or “I’ve known him for ten years.”

We often see such statements in resumés and biographies. And every time the present perfect is used, the situation it describes is poised to go out of date by the next year or month or day or hour or minute.

Since so much modern text is digital, designed to be seen on-line or in other electronic form, why don’t we have a way of dealing with this?

For example, on-line documents could contain a since tag, enabling statements like “She has been department chair for XXX months” to remain up to date:

“She has been department chair for <since start=”november 2012″ unit=”month”>.”
“I’ve known him for <since start=”2002″ unit=”year”>.”

One of the banes of representative democracy is the practice of gerrymandering — drawing political districts in bizarre ways so as to concentrate the political power of a single party.

It occurs to me that the internet has been performing a bit of its own gerrymandering. It used to be that people with similar political affiliations in different parts of a country (say, New York and Seattle), had only a limited sense of shared community. In order to hang out with far flung members of your political tribe, you needed to get on an airplane and go there.

Now of course we have many and diverse electronic fora that allow us to build and fortify these political coalitions. People can spend their time “hanging out” with likeminded citizens whilst collectively tuning out the voices of those with whom they disagree. For right and left alike, political discourse starts to become ever more of an echo chamber, reflecting back one’s own preconceived ideas.

I wonder whether, in a supreme irony, the very ease of communication afforded by the internet has led to the extreme polarization we’ve recently seen in our country. By creating better bridges of communication that transcend geography, we may have enabled a new form of gerrymandering.

Finally saw The Artist, and was amazed and delighted by how successfully the idiom of the silent film can work for a modern audience, when created with an understanding of the sensibility of that audience. And the sheer depth and beauty of the black and white cinematography!

Silent films are so very physical. The faces and bodies of the actors, and the way the light and camera placement capture those faces and bodies, carry the weight of the emotion of characters and their relationships. There’s just something so wonderfully primal about it, this direct expression of mind through face and body, without the distraction of all those words.

That very physicality makes me wonder — perhaps somebody should try to make a silent 3D movie. I’ll bet the two forms would work splendidly together!

I was talking with some friends last night about Will Wright’s game Spore. Someone remarked that it wasn’t as successful a game as The SIMS. I responded that Spore may have suffered from being ahead of its time.

“Think about it,” I said. “All of those eight and nine year olds who spent countless hours in 2008 making their own creatures. Those kids were not just being players, passive recipients of entertainment. They were being creators. As those young people hit their teen years, they are going to have much higher expectations of themselves.”

If the seed planted by Will takes root, then Kurt Cobain’s despairing GenX cry of “Here we are now, entertain us,” will be replaced by its opposite. Millennial kids, having tasted the power of creation, having been trusted to exercise their own artistic muse, won’t settle for anything less.