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The last day of a conference is always a bittersweet experience.

On the one hand everyone is happy to have gone through such a positive and cathartic experience – an entire week of heightened reality, with everyone representing what they have been doing for the past yea, entire months of preparation going into single twenty minute presentations. In some sense everybody – for one week – becomes an embodiment, a sort of living avatar, of what they have been doing for the previous year, as everything comes together in one intense apotheosis, an affirmation of why we do what we do.

On the other hand the last day has an elegaic quality. Old friends, people who matter to us both personally and symbolically, will soon be going home, perhaps in just another few short hours. It will be another year until we all gradually build again toward such a crescendo of concentrated energy. We hug, we say goodbye, we promise not to wait an entire year to keep in touch.

And now each of us will recalibrate, will renew our own vows to our chosen profession. In the coming year there will be new mountains to climb, entirely new challenges to throw ourselves into.

But first, it would probably be a good idea to get a little sleep.

At a conference this week in New Orleans, I’ve now spent time with two different friends who had originated from these parts. Both now live in northern California. There were some striking similarities to their respective tales of emigration. Both say they left because of the weather – they could not spend the rest of their lives in a place so relentlessly hot and muggy. After spending almost a week here I completely understand this sentiment.

But the other thing they had in common was that both were the only members of their respective families who had never had the New Orleans accent. One of them, in fact, who speaks with something not that far from a generic middle American accent, told me that when he was a child growing up in a small town near New Orleans, people would ask him what sort of accent he had.

So is it possible that children know, subliminally, that they are one day going to leave a place when they grow up? And knowing this, do they subconsciously adopt the accent of the larger world to which they long to escape?

I realize that two data points do not a statistical trend make. But still, it is intriguing.

Wow, I guess I had forgotten that people actually read this blog. Apparently I’ve somehow ended up becoming the voice for the Obama generation. You’d never guess I’m a fan of many (though certainly not all) of the views of Barry Goldwater. I’ll have to be more careful who I make fun of in the future. Elephants have very thick skin, but people don’t. 🙂

On a somewhat less politically fraught note, the answer to the mystery from the other day: The song I hear wherever I go, in restaurants, shops, train stations, and just about everywhere else in seemingly every city of every country around the world is Jobim’s “Garota de Ipanema”, better known in english as “The Girl from Ipanema”.

I was discussing our new president with a friend recently. We found we were both quite pleased with how much he has been managing to get done under very tough circumstances. My friend had some worries though. The more the president achieves, the more he is attacked by the opposition. The worry was that Obama would eventually find himself overly distracted by side-show attacks from a Republican opposition eager to see him fail.

My friend told me that he was reminded of a nature program he had seen on TV. A pride of lions was going after a lone elephant. Of course the elephant was far bigger than any of the lions. Individually it could have easily beaten any one of them in combat.

But the lions’ strategy was to continually pick away at the elephant – a bite here, a swipe of a claw there – until eventually the strength of their victim was worn down, and then they pounced and finished off the job.

I told my friend I thought it was a valid worry, but the situation in Washington is somewhat different. “How so?” he asked. I said, “This seems more a case of a lion being attacked by a pack of little elephants.”

I’ve noticed that there is only one particular song that is played absolutely everywhere I go in the world. I’ve heard it in Tokyo, Mumbai, Stockholm, Berlin, Dublin, Paris and Taipei. Today in a restaurant in New Orleans I heard it yet again. I wonder whether anyone has been officially tracking this – it seems to be, in this sense, by far the most universally popular song in the world. And I wonder whether there is some reason that could be articulated, to explain the immense universal appeal of this one tune.

I’m not going to name the song right now, because I’m curious to see whether anybody can “name that tune”.

I am in New Orleans, back for the first time since 2000. Since before, well, you know.

All I have seen so far is the central area along Canal St. Everything looks shiny and new. In some cases almost eerily new. I am aware, looking at this bustling tourist strip, alive with storefronts and throngs of visitors, that I am seeing something that is a faithful recreation of itself, like a brilliant job of reconstructive surgery undertaken after a terrible accident.

I was told today that outlying areas are not doing nearly so well. The population has dropped to perhaps half of what it once was, and in some places much of the infrastructure for daily living – for simple things like going to the store to get groceries – has not yet come back.

Strangely enough, one of the first conversations I had here today was with a friend who has been working on a “game for the future” – a game predicated on the player navigating through possible futures. Each time the player makes a choice, the set of possible futures changes, to reflect the consequences of that choice. It’s remarkable to have such a conversation less than a day after having talked about “games of the future” on this blog. Maybe it’s just the future having some fun with us.

I was intrigued by Marc’s comment on my post the other day about a game that would let you see into the future (or at least into the future of the game world). His underlying question was very reasonable – what kind of a game would that be?

It seems to me that the essence of any game is to provide a good succession of challenges. Ideally those challenges should be progressive – the game teaches its player a certain way of thinking and problem solving, and subsequent levels of the game build upon what the player has learned on earlier levels.

Any interesting challenge implies some sort of economy – I might have a certain number of fire missiles and health points to fight the marauding zombie invaders, or a certain amount of time to figure out where to shoot to create the space-connecting holes in Portal. In any “game of the future”, the economy would necessarily be about information. Yes, I can see into the future, but it’s going to cost me. And seeing farther into the future is going to cost me more.

It’s easy to design a computer game world in which the game itself contains a magic oracle that possesses knowledge as to what monster will come through the next door, which vial leading to the sacred chamber contains the potion of death, and which contains the power of healing, etc. The question is how to deploy such oracles in a way that makes for an interesting game.

I don’t think there is a single game here, but rather a genre of games that build upon the same essential deal: As a player I get the power of second sight into things that have not yet happened, but I need to pay for that power. Perhaps I’ll need to pay with health points, perhaps by giving up one of my magic scrolls. It doesn’t really matter – the important thing is that I need to learn how to choose, how to manage an economy of precognition.

Of course in a well designed game this economy is designed carefully. The player is taught to recognize certain patterns, to become sensitive to the ways that events are most likely to unfold. The seasoned player becomes good at predicting the future, and thereby becomes able to take on more subtle and sophisticated challenges.

What we’re talking about here is really meta-design: How to think about the patterns of design for such a game. And that is itself a kind of game. One that seems like fun. Anybody want to play?

Finally got around, just last night, to seeing Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 Indie masterpiece “Near Dark”. I don’t use the word masterpiece lightly. In only her second feature film, the writer/director managed to create a lesson par excellence on how it’s done.

Yes, it’s a vampire film, but that’s a little like saying that Bill Gates is a businessman. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. It’s also a dead-on study of southern rural disaffection, a start-to-finish thrilling action adventure film, a perfect ensemble character study, a novel take on Romeo and Juliet, as well as being a truly innovative update of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Every single shot counts, every camera angle and edit cut adds to the character, story and suspense, and – unlike almost most films – each and every character is truly interesting, rounded, complex and surprising. In fact, the dramatic arc of one of the so-called “minor” characters is so surprising, with such a startling yet insightful late-story psychological twist, that you may find yourself thinking about him for years to come.

The whole thing is done on a very low budget, with the simplest of visual elements used to pull you powerfully into an entire unique world. “Near Dark” may just be as near perfect a little film as I’ve ever seen. I recommend you go out and watch it. And when you’ve done that, go right ahead and watch it again. If you’ve ever thought you might want to make your own movie one day, and are looking for inspiration, this is the one to watch.

Suppose we could all see into the future. I don’t mean that just one of us gets some magical insight, like Harry Potter after swigging a vial of felix felicis or Nicholas Cage in that unspeakably awful 2007 movie adaptation of an intriguing story by Philip K Dick.

No, I mean what if everyone could see all of the threads of possibility extending from the current moment in time until, say, twenty minutes forward. We would all be free to choose from amongst these various possible futures. Of course the possibilities would continually change, since everybody else would also be choosing – changing lanes through the traffic of parallel universes, as it were – thereby dynamically changing our own options.

Presumably the incidence of sudden avoidable deaths would drop dramatically, as would really stupid conversation-stopping comments at parties, inadvertently off-putting pick-up lines in bars, and futile last-minute dashes to airline gates.

Sky divers would no longer start a jump in blithe unawareness of that faulty parachute. Suicide bombers and Los Vegas casinos would both pretty much be out of business. People would generally leave the office and hop on the elevator at just the right time to catch that taxi. Bad movies would sell nary a ticket on opening night.

But those are the obvious things. The subtleties would be far more interesting. The heart-to-heart talk with your girlfriend that could have ended badly, the dear friend you haven’t see in twenty years who just got on the next subway car, the moment when a kind word to a distressed friend would make all the difference. The texture of life would be entirely different – changing even the very way we think about existence, ethical values, relationships.

It’s a shame we cannot experience anything like this.

Except that we can. One could design a sort of computer game to simulate this precise scenario on a smaller scale. In this game everyone would be able to see ahead into the future a limited distance, and everyone would have a chance to modify their choices based on the multiple twisting paths of possibility that lie ahead. I wonder how it would feel to play such a game, to conjure with the very stuff of predestination and free will. It might be fun, but on the other hand it might just completely freak people out – there’s really no way to know.

Unless, of course, you could see into the future.

I mentioned Fred Waring in a post the other day. Today, as it happens, is the twenty fifth anniversary of the great man’s death on July 29, 1984. Seems like a good time to talk about one of human nature’s more delightful anomalies – those rare people who are extraordinarily good – say, good enough to be justly famous -at more than one thing. Mr. Waring was a prime example. He was for many years one of the most famous band leaders in America. In fact, at one point he was considered the most influential man in radio. He was also the backer and successful promoter of a little device invented in the 1930s by Fred Osius – a novel kind of food blender that came to be known as the Waring Blendor – at one time the most popular blender in the country.

Another double threat was Hedi Lamarr. Not only was she a successful Hollywood actress and one of the most astonishingly beautiful women in recorded history, she was also co-inventor (together with George Antheil, the avant guarde composer of the Ballet Mechanique and other key modernist works – a double threat too, come to think of it) of the spread spectrum technique to prevent radar jamming – fundamentally the same technique which today allows you to talk on your cell phone without interference from all the other people who are simultaneously talking on their cell phones.

Not that being an inventor in addition to your day job automatically gets you in the club. I have nothing but admiration for Abraham Lincoln as one of the great statesmen in our nation’s history, but his one and only recorded invention – a device to lift boats over shoals he patented in 1849 – isn’t the kind of thing that people get famous for. The gadget was never actually even built, which doesn’t help his case. On the other hand, Lincoln was the only U.S. president to ever receive a U.S. patent, which gives him some sort of bragging rights anyway.

Judy Holliday is a nice example. Not only was she an Academy Award winning actress, she was also the Hollywood performer with the highest ever recorded IQ. This in itself would not be that interesting, except for the fact that she used her prodigious intelligence to talk circles around the House Unamerican Activities Committee – something nobody else managed to do. She snowed them so thoroughly that she managed to get off scot free, without being blacklisted and without naming any names, in spite of the fact that her own name had been on the masthead of more than one Communist newspaper. You can read the transcript of her testimony here – it’s a real hoot.

I can’t really count Brian May, much as I would like to. Being the guitarist for the mega-rock group Queen definitely counts as “good enough to be justly famous”, but getting a Ph.D. in astrophysics, sadly, does not. Although the man is, as far as I know, the only astrophysicist rock star, and that’s pretty cool.

Double threats are rare, but there are even fewer people who are triple threats. The only one I can think of off-hand is Lenny Lipton. On the one hand he wrote the classic 1972 how-to book “Independent Film Making” – which to this day is considered indispensable by film students everywhere. On the other hand, he has been one of the great innovators in the technology of stereoscopic 3D filmmaking – holding 25 patents on innovations in stereoscopic techniques, in addition to being one of the instrumental forces in the current revival of that genre. On the third hand he wrote the lyrics to a little song called “Puff the Magic Dragon”.

I think he wins the prize.