Author: admin

The golden key glistened as Jenny held it up to the light from the attic window, turning it first one way and then another. She frowned thoughtfully. It’s one thing to find a key, but quite another to know what it opens — if anything. She wondered whether it was made of real gold. Not that it really mattered. After all, the real value of a key lies in what it can unlock.

She looked about the attic, trying to spot something that might require a skeleton key. Everything was in such a jumble — it had probably been decades since anyone had made a real attempt to tidy up in here. She had gotten the feeling growing in this house up that ever since Grandma had passed, the attic was not a popular place to visit. It wasn’t anything people said, more the way the subject just never seemed to come up. Whatever the reason, clearly Mom wasn’t a big fan of the attic and its secrets.

Still, she could try to ask Mom what the deal was, show her the jewelry box with its mysterious key. No, she thought, that probably wasn’t a good idea. She really wasn’t supposed to be up here at all, and in any case, something told her that it would be better, at least for now, to keep this little secret to herself. Besides, she was already late for school. Jenny tucked the key into the pocket of her jeans and headed on downstairs.

The house had been in their family for about two hundred years, and had somehow managed to pass from mother to daughter. So great was the pull of the old place that successive generations of husbands always ended up moving in.

Jenny had always heard stories about her grandmother’s secret jewelry box, the one that was supposed to be lost somewhere in the attic, and how grandma, when she was a girl, had found it there one day, left by her grandmother. Mom used to tell the story with a wistful look, as though talking about some long lost childhood friend. But it was one of those stories you don’t really think is true. Grandma had died when Jenny’s mom was just a girl, so there was no way to check, and Jenny was rather practical minded about these things.

So she was a little taken aback when she actually came upon the little jewelry box while rummaging around in the attic one day. The inlaid figurine of a ballerina on the top surface was exactly as her mom had always described it, and she knew at once that it was the real thing, with a certainty that she couldn’t really explain.

There didn’t seem to be a key to open it, or a keyhole either for that matter. After a few minutes of fiddling around trying to find a secret door or something, she was about to give up in frustration, when on a sudden whim she pressed down on the little figure of the ballerina. With a click the box sprang open.

The inside of the box was lined with a thick cushion of red velvet. It smelled slightly musty, as though the box had been closed for a very long time, which she supposed it must have been. Other than that the box appeared to be empty, except for a single old-fashioned skeleton key, golden in color, nestled within a matching depression in the velvet cushion.

Yesterday I pointed out that the modern equivalent of the power of invisibility is possession of a universal password. One can take the analogy further. Superhero comics have been with us for a long time. From Superman to Batman to the XMen, the basic premise has been the same — we place our collective hands in the fate of individuals with enormous powers, and we trust in those individuals’ heightened sense of responsibility and ethics, knowing that they will use those powers for the good of humanity.

Even Spiderman — poor misunderstood Peter Parker — courageously fought for good, even in the face of being falsely labeled a villain. What would possibly be more noble than to devote your superior powers to the defense of the very people who falsely accuse you?

Things got more complicated with Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Suddenly the moral equation became tilted — superheroes were just like us, only with better training and colorful costumes. A superhero did not necessarily have a heightened sense of ethics — in fact it could go quite the other way.

We are currently in an analogous situation in the age of Google. I have no doubt that Larry Page and Sergei Brin are good and highly ethical people. But their superpowers will outlive them. One day others will have possession of the universal password — the modern equivalent of the power of invisibility.

And on that day we may find ourselves in the highly ethical universe envisioned by Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster when they created Superman, but rather in the far darker and more ambiguous universe that Alan Moore showed us in Watchmen.

And on that day, we may regret putting our collective fate into the hands of our modern day superheroes.

The first time I ever heard “This American Life” was while I was driving around Austin Texas in a rented car. That day Ira Glass was doing a wonderful riff on the idea of super powers. One bit involved asking people, given the choice between the power of flight and the power of invisibility, which they would choose. Initially the choice was about even, but just about everyone, when given more time to think about it, ended up realizing that invisibility is by far the greater power. Essentially, flight makes you vulnerable whereas invisibility gives you knowledge, and knowledge is the ultimate power.

Some people interviewed were actually afraid of the power of invisibility. One man worried that given so much power over others, he might over time become a monster — unable to resist using the power.

I thought about this again recently, when it occurred to me that these days, in the age of social networks, the power of invisibility translates rather precisely to the power of the universal password.

If you knew that you could hack into anybody’s account — whether Gmail, Facebook, or hard drive — then nothing but your own intrinsic sense of honor would stop you from abusing what amounts to a vast and disturbing amount of power over others.

The worst of it is that you might deeply regret any knowledge illicitly gained through the use of your universal password. The very act of looking into someone’s private email is a terrible transgression. If you found out that some you love had betrayed you, how would you confront them with such knowledge? It would be hard to argue that their transgression was worse than your own.

Fortunately we can say with confidence that the power of invisibility remains a fantasy. Unfortunately, it is not so clear, in the age of Gmail and Facebook, that we can say the same about its modern equivalent: the universal password.

There are questions here. Mysteries. Something you may have conjured in the back of your mind, an idea you once entertained, but can no longer accept. Why did she do it. What was he thinking? Was it really necessary to leave before there was even a chance at reconciliation?

We ask these questions not because we wish to be cruel, but out of an honest desire to know. The truth is never your enemy. You may spend years running away from that moment of final reckoning, but in the end you cannot escape the weight of knowledge, of understanding, of — as hard as it is to acknowledge — acceptance.

In any mystery, there are worlds within worlds. If you do not take the time to question them, to pause, slow down, take a moment, you might very well miss what is most essential.

I do not profess to know the answers, to run within these streets with knowledge of the unrevealed word. But I do know this: If you believe in that moment of fate, in the one key instant in which everything changes, because of some crazy thought within your head that became manifest within the world, then you must act. You must grab this moment as your own, and accept that this is your time.

I will be waiting to see what happens.

My post yesterday sort of started in the middle of the conversation. Anyone reading it might be wondering why I wish there were a self-balancing robot built around an iPhone. The larger story has to do with a long-term effort to teach kids to be interested in programming, by having them program robots. The effort is being spear-headed by Mark Guzdial and others at Georgia Tech University.

The basic approach, which I think is wonderful, is to take programming out of the virtual world and bring it into the real physical world. The people doing it have found that kids are a lot more motivated to program an actual physical little robot — which they can dress up and customize, by the way — than something that only exists on a computer screen.

One problem is that the robots they use are somewhat expensive, and all you can do with them is program them for these projects. I was thinking that the whole effort would gain a lot more traction if the “robot” part of things was an attachment on something like an iPhone. A lot of kids already have either an iPhone or some similar device, and these devices all come with a computer, some form of internet connectivity, a camera, and a pretty impressive little processor.

So you wouldn’t have to convince kids why they would want to get this little machine. You’d just be giving them another way to bond with a gadget that they already think is cool, and that they associate with playing and communicating with their friends.

Except once their iPhone (or Android phone) ss upgraded to a robot, they have a lot more reason to learn how to program, to truly bring it life in interesting ways.

So that’s the more complete story behind the story.

I love those self-balancing robots with two side-by-side wheels — the ones that operate on the same inverted pendulum principle as Kazuo Yamafuji’s “parallel bicycle” (and its much-later imitator, the Segway). A few years ago I talked about these little gizmos here.

Given the fact that there are now well over 100,000 iPhone apps and counting, I’m trying to figure out why nobody has yet built a little attachment that will turn your iPhone into a self-balancing robot. The iPhone would be an ideal platform for this. It’s cute, it’s ubiquitous, it’s got a camera so it can figure out where it is, and it’s got a graphic screen so you can give your little self-balancing robot an expressive face.

All you’d need to do is build a little attachment with two wheels, each connected to a geared motor and some auxiliary power control electronics. All of the smarts needed for navigation and self-balancing are right there in the iPhone’s own CPU.

Once iPhones go self-mobile, you and your friends can set them up in the same room so they can wheel around in packs for game play and other real-world activities.

This seems like such an obvious play for a toy company. I’d certainly buy one, if they didn’t cost too much. And of course it would provide a great platform for educational programming.

A number of groups have constructed little self-balancing side-by-side wheel robots, but these devices are mainly one-offs, built from the ground up in order to perform the single trick of getting around while staying upright. If you started with an iPhone it seems to me you’d be getting a lot more bang for your buck.

So where is my self-balancing iPhone? Are we going to be able to get one of these soon? Or am I going to have to wait until after they come out with that flying car?

Come to think of it, and not to take anything away from Apple, it might be poetic justice if such a thing appeared first on Google’s Android.

Yesterday some friends and I were discussing the advantages of working in research (as opposed to working for a company developing products). I said that to me the advantages of working in research are neatly encapsulated within a joke I heard when I was a boy. It goes like this.

A man is walking down the street, and he sees a boy in an alley with a bow and arrow. The boy is shooting arrows at a wall which is fairly far away. The man sees that the boy has already shot a number of arrows into the wall, and each arrow has hit the exact center of a bullseye.

Impressed, the man asks the boy “Could you show me how to shoot like that?” The boy says, “Sure, if you give me fifty dollars.” The man decides this is a good deal, considering how skilled the boy is. He hands the boy a fifty dollar bill, and the boy says, “Watch, I’ll show you how to do it.”

The boy then picks up his bow, and shoots an arrow against the wall. Then he walks up to the wall, picks up a piece of chalk, and draws a series of concentric circles around the arrow head.

And that, my friends, is why I like working in research.

There is something overwhelming about a professional conference, particularly on a day when you give a major presentation. To the people in the audience there is the illusion that the enthusiastic people up onstage have an infinite well of energy, that the speakers are drawing upon some magical elixar of perfect focus and endless enthusiasm.

This is an illusion. This moment of heightened performative reality carries its price. What actually happens in my case is that for the duration of the talk I go into a high adrenaline state, buoyed by my excitement at the message. But then afterward I feel drained, even dazed, as though the Muse has started charging me interest for the time I have spent in her company. It’s all I can do to get through the rest of the afternoon.

But every once in a while — like today — that price is worth it. If you can really tap into something universal for a half an hour or so, and get across a message that is truly important, or at least get people to think and to dream of what might be possible in this world, then maybe, just maybe you have helped to steer the flow of history toward a more positive place.

Spending the day in San Francisco, I am struck by the difference in the general feeling between this place and New York City. NY has a reputation (mostly left over, I suspect, from the wild days of the seventies and early eighties) of being an edgy place, a city of danger. And yet NYC these days is rather staid and predictable. Even the once dangerous strip on 42nd Street, at one time the province of thieves, prostitutes and drug dealers, has become an extension of the Walt Disney Company. Where Ratso Rizzo once stalked the naked streets, parents now take their kids to see “The Lion King”.

But San Francisco, despite its upbeat image of a place out of a Tony Bennett song, retains an edgy sense of danger. Walking down these streets at night, you feel the desperation of people hanging on to reality by their fingernails, of street bums and druggies and shadowy figures who long ago stopped taking their meds.

By day this is simply a lovely place, but by night there is a side to this city that emerges with the darkness. San Francisco, beneath the beauty of its rolling hills and ocean views and lovely houses painted in pastels, can be a dark and even terrifying place. I love to visit this city, but I am not sure I could bear to live in a place where so many people wander the night who seem to be so terribly lost.