Week 33

When one opens the news media today, the state of human civilization looks very dire - we are in the middle of the global pandemic, polarized politics, social unrests, and economic volatility. Yet, in the middle of these calamities, human beings still showcase ingenuity to invent and the power of collaboration to build. This week I have found out about ITER, a fusion reactor being built as a collaboration between 35 countries. (if you want some quantitative information to be impressed:

* it is a $65+ billion project;

* the temperatures in ITER’s tokamak will reach 150 million°C—or ten times the temperature at the core of our Sun;

* designed to produce a ten times return on invested energy 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW

Fusion is the nuclear reaction that powers the Sun and the stars, is a potential source of safe, non-carbon emitting and virtually limitless energy. The goal behind the construction of ITER facility is to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion power to feed our ever-increasing energy needs.

In the heart of ITER is a tokamak is a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine hot plasma in the shape of a torus. (The term “tokamak” comes to us from a Russian acronym that stands for “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils.” тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками) and was initially conceptualized in the 1950s by Soviet physicists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov. By the mid-1970s, dozens of tokamaks were in use around the world, but they have not reached practical fusion for large scale production. ITER facility is a promising facility to get us to promising new stable sources of clean energy.

And while I do think that updates on elections and state of the virus are important, I wish that we talked more frequently about our high aspirations of human civilization and the ability to collaborate to keep on pushing boundaries of new innovative approaches. To the future!

Further Research: The website - [ITER - the way to new energy] is super comprehensive

Watch: [ITER - the world’s largest puzzle (2020 version) - YouTube] - just to grasp the scale of the project

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dørstokkmila “doorstep mile” - meaning that the first mile away from your front door is the hardest of all. The doorstep mile expresses the hesitation and perceived difficulty to start something (frequently something we have not done before).

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Here are two works by the master at humor, allegory, and pointing out the follies of humanity, Peter Brueghel the Elder. They are similar in execution and style. But both showcase different food for thought and symbolism. The artist’s intention for the first work is more serious than simply to compile an illustrated encyclopedia of children’s games. Bruegel shows the children absorbed in their games with the seriousness displayed by adults in their apparently more important pursuits. The second painting presents the contrast between two sides of contemporary life, as can be seen by the appearance of the inn on the left side—for enjoyment, and the church on the right side—for religious observance. A lot of Bruegel’s paintings are rich in allegories and symbolism. To appreciate them the viewer has to pay attention for longer than usual ‘museum walk-through’ scanning.

Children’s Games by Peter Bruegel

The Battle Between Carnival and Lent by Peter Bruegel

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When we see something beautiful, it seems like the first reflex is the desire to own it. Hence frequently contemporary conversations about art involve price and ownership. These days augmented reality (AR) technology is getting so good that I can get the above mentioned Peter Bruegel’s painting into my living room without paying a dime or traveling to Vienna. Hence, is art acquisition relevant?

Google’s Arts and Culture App - Art Projector function: [How to Use Your Phone to Virtually Display Art | The Getty Iris]

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Chair flying: is a very effective ground-based learning technique that has long been advocated by flight instructors. The student, sitting in a chair or perhaps in the cockpit of an aircraft on the ground, mimics the control inputs for a maneuver to reinforce the connection between knowledge and motor skill. No special equipment is needed to practice chair flying — all you need is a comfortable seat, an open mind and a willingness to learn!

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Roger Caillois was a French intellectual who had developed theories on cultural and anthropological effect of games. He had declared that games are a a cultural product and see play as the “civilizing element of culture.” He outlines four types of games and below are the examples how each type translates into social activities, institutions and corruption. The left column shows the controlled version of the game while the right shows another extreme manifestation of the same game.

Further Reading: [Games, Videogames, and the Dionysian Society]

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Week 32

I remember well when I got captivated by Richard Halliburton. The owner of a cute NYC Store that specialized in unique umbrellas has recommended to me the book by the name “The Royal Road to Romance”. I found the title to be too cheesy, but I ordered it anyway. However, after reading the first paragraph I knew I was hooked. I finished the book in a day.

His other titles are unfortunately can be considered as kitch as his first one: ’’Glorious Adventure”, “New Worlds to Conquer", "Seven League Boots". But don’t let the titles fool you. San Francisco Examiner wrote that “Richard Halliburton does make Marco Polo seem like a mumbling porch sitter”. At some point his books were bestsellers, topping the lists. Today you have to scout eBay and used bookstores for some rare reprints. But the hunt is worth it. Few people currently write so optimistically and passionately about the world full of romance and adventures.

My obsession with R. Halliburton led me to the Princeton Rare Books Library, where I had to obtain a special permit to view his archive. His family has donated manuscripts, photographs, and letters that fill 12 large card boxes. When the assistant rolled out the card containing folders, each dedicated to only one page, that contained his handwritings, annotations, and notes, I felt the gripping fluttering in the stomach that people frequently describe after exciting dates.

My obsession with Richard is so great, that for this year’s birthday my sister custom ordered for me a 3D printed bust of Richard. Yet, for a while, I have hesitated to read his biography. I wanted to cherish the myth of a daredevil adventurer and opening the closet, anticipating it is filled with mammoth skeletons. This week I have finished the biography of Richard by Jonathan Root. No, it did not damage my infatuation. To quote Rudolf Erich Raspe ("Travels of Baron Munchausen), “A traveler has a right to relate and embellish his adventures as he pleases, and it is very impolite to refuse that deference and applause they deserve”.

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It is summer 2020, and strolling through streets of New York City it is rare for you to encounter a passer-by without a mask. The masks have become a fashion statement, political affiliation, and even a sign of respect. They seem like a new phenomenon, but they are not. Until the early 19th century, before germ theory was accepted, diseases were explained by Miasma theory. Miasma or bad air explained all of the epidemics and masks were worn from China to France over centuries. The image below shows masked commuters during 1918 influenza in California.

More pictures here: The 1918 Flu, Masks and Lessons for the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New York Times

Rail commuters wearing white protective masks, one with the additional message “wear a mask or go to jail,” during the 1918 influenza pandemic in California.

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Until recently our feet were our search engines. We wandered through stacks in libraries and bookstores in search for something specific but managed to stumble upon surprising discoveries. We call it *Serendipity Browsing*. Sometimes we would take wrong turns and would discover whole sections of human knowledge that we did not have exposure (like the architecture wing I have stumbled upon in Vancouver Public Library). Sometimes we would be struck by our ignorance, just by visually sizing the volumes of work (like when I got overwhelmed with cybernetics section in Powell Bookstore that occupies a whole block in Portland Oregon ). Some will argue that Serendipity Browsing is better online since we are unconstrained by limitations of physical space, especially when one is not as lucky to be browsing in New York’s City’s Strand or NYPL. This might be true, but I still hold a view that there is something magical sitting on the floor of a library or bookstore, browsing books you did not even know existed. The intellectual wandering just seems to be catalyzed by the bookshelves and smells of printed pages.

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DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ, /LAS MENINAS/, 1656, FROM THE COLLECTION OF MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO IN MADRID.

Futher reading: [Why Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas Is One of the Most Important Paintings in Art History]

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Week 31

This week I have opened my mailbox to find a delightful delivery from the printers of the zine that I wrote. This year I have spend the whole June at NYU ITP camp - a summer program for creative technologists to learn and experiment. Being over saturated with inspiration I decided to consolidate my ideas in a print form. Here is the introduction from the zine that explains the rationale for writing and printing it. If you want a copy, you can just respond to this email with a physical address and i would email you a copy.  

On the information highway, it seems that writing is a good way to speed-limit your brains. There were so many sessions and so many things I wanted to make. But in between so many sessions, it was hard to stop and to just thinking. Typing and editing this notebook has forced me to consolidate my notes, try to figure out the key ideas, and really shape the plans for future projects. This notebook is a summary of the sessions I have attended. 

This notebook is the forced slow-thinking. 

Another selfish reason for this notebook is to amuse my future self. Frequently we dote on our ideas and rarely track their evolution. This document would serve as a time marker for future aspirations and a reference point for progress. 

But in the end, I am writing this down because I want to experiment with the techniques, read the recommended readings, and build those ideas. Because building things is more enjoyable than acquiring things. Because we make progress by implementing ideas. 

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Before we invented VR,AR, XR,  TV, Phones, tablets, fablets, we have invented books. They were the first “mind escape” mechanisms. By reading we could escape present moment  to anywhere in the world. It is still incredibly baffling how a page with black and white characters works as the best teleportation device. 

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While reading H.P Lovecraft I have stumbled upon the reference of works of Nicholas Roerich. Since I can appreciate any painting that has mountains in it, I have spend a significant time browsing through his dreamy mountain landscapes (note to self: thankfully we have internet that lets me access work of any artist in a matter of seconds. How amazing is that?). However, I was completely baffled to discover Nicholas Roerich Museum in NYC! Delightful discovery and new museum bucket list item for when the museums will reopen. 

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How much energy do we produce? How much do we consume? Where it comes from? (Fun fact: “Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth*. That’s 430 with 18 zeroes after it!”) My recent discovery is the works by Vaclav Smil. The book “Energy: The Begginers Guide” provides an incredible survey of how humans have evolved production and consumption of energy over the past millennia. It reminds us how exponential increase in energy production has allowed urbanization, invention of sedentary lifestyle, high mobility and occupation other that “search for energy” such as hunting, gathering and farming. 

“First and foremost, they raised average food availability far above subsistence needs, and assured the provision of adequate health care. These were the two key factors behind the steady increase in average life expectancy. Second they produced the worldwide trend towards increased urbanization, and the cities that they have provided unprecedented occupational and intellectual opportunities. Higher average wages have made the middle class the dominant income group in all affluent countries and allowed it to buy an unprecedented variety of good and services. Third, the new techniques have increased personal mobility to levels that were hard to imagine even just a half a century ago, and transformed international trade into a mass scale and truly global affair. Finally advances in electronics have multiplied the availability of information to a such an extent that any owner of a PC or smart phone can - instantly and inexpensively - access information equivalent to a library of millions volumes.” 

Ironically, the current pandemic has amplified these factors. On one hand, the pandemic has disrupted mobility and some services. On the other hand, sedentary lifestyle and information access remained undistrbed and maybe re-I forced by the pandemic (all online information-intensive jobs are more busy and demanding than pre-pandemic. In our desire to come back to “normal” it is easy to overlook that “normal” has only been achieved recently and the majority of these achievements have been barely touched even in spite of high uncertainty. 

I loved that in the final chapter Professor Smil makes zero effort to make “perishable forecasts”, reminding us that uncertainty of the future is what makes our life so interesting: 

“This closing chapter offers no forecasts; there is no need to add to the large and growing, volume of that highly perishable commodity. Reviews show that most long range (more than ten to fifteen years ahead) energy forecasts - whether at sectoral, national or global level, and no matter if they were concerned with the progress of individual techniques, the efficiency gains of a particular process, overall energy demand and supply,, or the price levels of key commodities - tend to fail in a matter of years, sometimes months. [...] Even if some individual numbers come very close to the actual performance, what is always missing is the entirely new context in which these quantities appear. Imagine that in 1985 (after the collapse of crude oil probes and a sharp drop in global oil production), you accurately forecast global oil production in the US. Could anybody in 1985 have predicted the four events that changed the post-1990 world: the peaceful collapse of the U.S.S.R (first leading to a rapid decline and than to an impressive resurgence of its oil output); the emergence of China as the world’s largest (in terms of purchasing power parity) economy (and also the world’s largest importer of oil); September 11, 2001 (with it’s manifold consequences and implications for the world in general, and the Middle East in particular) and the worst post-World War 2 global economic downturn in 2008-2009?” “Energy” by Vacaville Smil

Further Reading: 

•  Anything by Vaclav Smil 

•  About Vaclav SmilMeet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy | Science | AAAS

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This week I have discovered the works of Neal Boezi - the king of NYC Streets. King of the New York Streets - The New York Times

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“But history makes it clear that the train of human ingenuity is not about to stop”

“Energy” by Vacaville Smil

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Week 30

About 3 years ago I gave my sister the book “The Society of Mind” by Marvin Minsky. The book was annotated inside with my notes and had a sheet with a new game I came up with that I called “On the Margins”. The goal of the game was simple - each one of us reads the book and while reading annotates, inserts comments, drawings. The goal of the game was to collaboratively read the book and exchange our thoughts on the margins. The output of the game is the living memory of our thought process and growth as humans. Once you read/reread the book, it is considered a game “round”. The game can have infinite numbers (as long as there is a space on the margins) of rounds. This week the book has arrived from Canada. We are on the game round 5 of “On the Margins”, Marvin Minsky edition. In my opinion, “On the Margins” is a perfect game for a pandemic. Here are the rules I wrote in 2017:

** If you want to play with me “On the Margins” with an exciting book, I am totally down.

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Sword of Damocles’s head mounted display created by Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sprouli.

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“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words” Philip K. Dick

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It is hard to represent our spherical world on a flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a “projection” to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection. Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection, Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger.

Here is a handy app “The True Size” that showcases the true geographic sizes. It was inspired by an episode of The West Wing (this is really good!).

Futher Reading:

• True Size of Africa: http://kai.sub.blue/images/True-Size-of-Africa-kk-v3.pdf

• [All Maps Lie - 2020 | Course Website: https://all-maps-lie-2020.netlify.app/#/)

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Week 29

This week I have finished the book “Grădină din Sticlă” by Tatiana Țîbuleac. It has always impressed me how books can teleport us to places within seconds. The combination of paper and imagination trumps Virtual Reality. Tatiana Țîbuleac took me to Chishinau. Her minimalistic and concealed style has impressed me. So much was said in so few words. No, it’s what was not said. Her sentences are like clues on a murder mystery scene that require focused attention to stitch the complete picture. But once you uncover the next plot development, you feel elated from puzzle-solving the story. And while I could not relate to the characters, I could smell my hometown from the pages of the book.

So where will books take you this summer?

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People to be inspired by. Chien-Shiung Wu is widely considered one of the most influential scientists in history.worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University and developed a process of enriching uranium to produce large quantities as fuel. Wu’s work was termed the most important development in the field of atomic and nuclear physics to date; a 1959 AAUW press release called her experiment the “solution to the number-one riddle of atomic and nuclear physics.” Her male co-workers Lee and Yang received the Nobel Prize for disproving the Parity Law. In a move that makes you mad just reading it, the prize committee overlooked Wu. Nevertheless Chien-Shiung Wu led a life of many firsts: the first woman president of the American Physical Society, the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton, the first female recipient of the National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize.

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While reading “The Three-Body Problem”, a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin I was wondering “why 3 body problem has not been solved?” The issue can be summarized as: /how to predict the motion of 3 bodies interacting with each other through gravitation?/ The problem had been solved since Newton for 2 bodies : the gravitation law allowed one to find the position vectors. But the N-bodies (with N >2) problem happens to be much more complicated.It has been proven that there are not “usual” (integral) solutions for the problem. So lots of research has been done during the XXth century to find more useful numerical solutions. Physicists have discovered interesting and practicable solutions, but research is still going on to find “better” solutions.

Futher Reading:

* Responses on Quora

* Three-body problem 3D on Vimeo

“A Remarkable Periodic Solution of the Three-Body Problem in the Case of Equal Masses on JSTOR” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2661357?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents) alain chenciner and richard montgomery

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“along the river during the qingming festival” (1085–1145)

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Week 28

Richard Hamming invented a lot of cool stuff. He also wrote a book sharing advice on inventing cool things. In his book “The art of doing science and engineer: Learning to Learn” he paints vivid images of greatness and it’s unapologetic pursuit. Not only it allowable to aim for greatness, it is cowardly not to. The book is made extra special as he frequently refers in the book to the year 2020, trying to anticipate marvelous inventions. While he has missed the mark on a lot of his forecasts, I find the foundations that he cites to be timeless. Here are my favorite take-away conclusions:

1. “Luck favors the prepared”, indeed a quote that is the main theme of this book.

2. Throughout the book he reiterates that it is important to polish and develop “style”. He suggests benchmarking on great scientists. Having a style becomes critical, because he considers promoting and presenting ideas as important as the idea and research itself.

3. There are no shortcuts to the top - no hacks can compete with learning and work.

4. What is technologically feasible and economically better, is restrained by legal, social and economic conditions. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be or will be done. (Hence promoting your ideas and collaborating becomes crucial for the ideas to succeed”.

5. He cautions about experts and says “what you did to become successful is likely to be counterproductive when applied at a later date.” He warns that as we accumulate experience we are becoming less open to breakthrough and experiments.

6. Defining what’s to measure sets the outcomes. “Accuracy of measurement tends to get confused with the relevance of measurement. You get what you measure in the end.”

7. Open door policy. Open ideas everything.

The overarching summary of the book can be grasped by reading his essay “You and your research”. However I would highly recommend it to anyone in the search of the meaning of work, research and generally life.

> “Civilization is merely a thin veneer we have put on top of our anciently derived instincts, but the veneer is what makes it possible for modern society to operate. “

Richard W, Hamming “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”

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HTML/CSS drawing in the style of an 18th-century oil painting. Hand-coded entirely in HTML & CSS. More at pure-css.com: [Pure CSS Francine - 🖼 CSS-ART.COM](https://css-art.com/pure-css-francine/)

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Ville Radieuse, or more commonly known as Radiant City was a rational take on urban planning by Le Corbusier

This spring I have finished a book that has been on my reading list for quite some time: Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. I have been procrastinating to compile the notes. However this week I have encountered multiple articles (from The Atlantic to Politico ) that tried to forecast the changes of the cities due to the pandemic. Structurally, streets, avenues and boulevards remain the same, but one can “feel” the change of the atmosphere and pace. In NYC the place of cars is taken by pedestrians, cyclists and electric buses, while gardens, playgrounds and restaurant terraces occupy former parking spots. I anticipate Jane Jacobs would have been thrilled to see these changes since she was. Here are some additional pearls of wisdom about her book, that I think is rarely considered in city planning (unfortunately):

* On engineering social turnaround: “It is fashionable to suppose that certain touchstones of the good life will create good neighborhoods—schools, parks, clean housing and the like. *How easy life would be if this were so! How charming to control a complicated and ornery society by bestowing upon it rather simple physical goodies.* In real life, cause and effect are not so simple.”

* On crowds and morality: “People gathered in concentrations of big-city size and density can be felt to be an automatic—if necessary—evil. This is a common assumption: that human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers… On the other hand, people gathered in concentrations of city size and density… are desirable because they are the source of immense vitality… *a great and exuberant richness of differences and possibilities, many of these differences unique and unpredictable and all the more valuable because they are.*” -> in 2019 The Atlantic wrote an article which made the same conclusion -”tourism” is the other person’s vacation.

* On the ugliness of “order”: “Homogeneity… poses very puzzling esthetic problems. If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is—sameness—it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of *conveying no direction*. In [such] places… you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west… It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented.”

* On designing for humans: “Genuine differences in the city architectural scene express… [Jacobs quoting Eugene Raskin:] /‘the interweaving of human patterns. They are full of people doing different things, with different reasons and different ends in view, and the architecture reflects and expresses this difference…Being human, human beings are what interest us most. In architecture as in literature and the drama, it is the richness of human variation that gives vitality and color to the human setting… Considering the hazard of monotony… the most serious fault in our zoning laws lies in the fact that they _permit_ an entire area to be devoted to a single use. “

Recommended Reading:

• Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning

• Organized Complexity — Strong Towns

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Week 27

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New architect discovery: Cedric Price (1934–2003) has been described as the most influential architect you have never heard of. Rejecting the weighty, earthbound, and monumental brutalism that was prevalent in the 1960s when Price started practicing architecture, he imagined buildings that were lightweight, mobile, and ephemeral. His ideas and images have percolated through architectural culture and beyond, most famously with Price’s Fun Palace providing the visual vocabulary of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre.

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Chindōgu (珍道具) is a prank from Japan, which is done by a person seemingly inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem, but are in fact nothing more than a useless gag. The term was coined by Kenji Kawakami- a former editor and contributor to the Japanese home-shopping magazine “Mail Order Life.” In the magazine, Kenji used his spare pages to showcase several bizarre prototypes for products. He named these gadgets “chindōgu”, Kawakami himself said that a more appropriate translation is “weird tool”. The special category of inventions then be familiarized by Japanese people.

Further reading: Chindogu: Those Viral Japanese Inventions https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/

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New designer discovery: Domic Wilcox. Transforming the mundane and ordinary into something surprising, wondrous and strangely thought provoking. Here is his portfolio for some wield imaginative things:

Further reading: Variations on the normal book of invention drawings by Dominic Wilcox http://dominicwilcox.com/the-book/

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“How to Get lost in IKEA” On 10/26/2019 about a hundred creators had gathered in IKEA in New York to explore the store as a site for newness and imagination. This site-specific experience was a part haunted house, part unconference, part art installation, part choose your own adventure story, based on the true experience of the organizer of her getting lost in IKEA as a child. Sessions varied from Tarot reading with IKEA-specific tarot deck, roaming interior design consultations and fantasy IKEA catalog Drawing workshop.

Full itinerary is here. IKEA Tarot cards were featured in other publications post-event.

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New obsession: “isochrone” maps. This is one of the coolest maps I’ve ever seen: how many days it took to get anywhere in the world from London in 1914.

More maps inspirations here

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Week 26

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On a clear June night in 2018 I was climbing Yanapacha. On the descend me and my guide Alfredo went into a long discussion about Peruvian politics. And by long, I mean long - it took us about 6 hours to base camp and another 3 hours to the road to get transportation to the city. He has recommended the book that is supposed to be high-school requirement “Essays on Peruvian Reality”. I ordered the book but managed to read it only this week. Here is my favorite quote:

“Society strives to organize itself as a society of workers and producers. Therefore work cannot be thought of as servitude; it must be given stature and dignity. The dignity of work should not be interpreted as an egoistic sentiment peculiar to Western civilization. Scientific research enlightens us as much as a spiritual intrusion. Mans’ destiny is to create. Work is creative, liberating. Man fulfills himself in work. “

Jose Carlos Mariategui

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💻 JOMO - joy of missing out.

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A fellow ITP camper has assembled a fantastic body of volumetric art work. It is mesmerizing, meditative and hypnotic. And while these works are better in person, here is the link to enjoy online

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Human performances fall into standard categories, unchangeable for centuries: opera, theater, concert, ballet. Sure, some performances have been creatively incorporating technology for lighting and stage design but the main formats have remained largely undisturbed. For the last couple of years, film festivals tried to incorporate XR (Extended Reality) storytelling as part of the program with a mixed success rate. But in the spring of 2020 with the termination of in-person live performances and global home confinement, the performing arts have changed forever. At first, people stared at the screens to watch nostalgic MET operas re-runs and live performances by artists from there living rooms. Yet, human creativity thrives under constraints and new forms of performances are emerging. On the one hand, the new performances can reach more people, disregarding country borders, space capacity, and time zones. On the other hand, we struggle with audience participation, delays, cut-offs, 2D flat surface, and additive light from the screen. As performances move online what do we gain or what do we lose?

• Zoom(or any other conference tool) as a platform for performances is almost too obvious. A more inventive version of digital plays was produced by the Public Theather, What Do We Need To Talk About? where the play was presented entirely as a Zoom chat. The cast is homebound, performing live and in character, enacting the type of socially distanced get-together that has suddenly become an integral part of 21st Century living.

• But live performances are more than just recordings or broadcasts. Audience engagement is crucial for performance. Platforms like Twitch allow for more engagement and collaboration with the audience. And while digital mediums do not allow for traditional audience-performer relationship maybe we can leverage these new mediums to create new terms of engagements? How do we make people feel close, sense textures, experience the same time, lean forward and focus? How can we leverage on the internet, the keyboard, the mouse, the camera? WebSockets, WebRTC, ml5 (Face Tracking, Hand Tracking) There are no solutions, but the fact that people think about it is truly amazing.

• Some “socially distant” performances did not try to migrate online. Instead, they provided a new alternative: indulging in performance by yourself at home. “Bathtub performance” allows people to purchase sounds and scents to enjoy in their bathtub as a curated performance. In Buenos Aires “Take- out dinner theater” provided a complimentary recording with a take out dinner. Just because it’s 2020 it does not need to be online.

• * An interesting discovery in digital performance space was Monomyth platform. The platform is currently in MVP, so my description here will be pretty anecdotal. The basic idea is that a playwright can upload a play, select digital characters and the engine will render the performance. No need to learn cumbersome interaction design in Unity. No need to hire actors and rent a stage. And your play is just ready. As I watch the demo I am wondering what would Ibsen or Moliere think about this future way of creating the plays. The video of MVP is available here

VR (Virtual Reality) is zealously trying to position itself as the medium for interactive performances. VRChat(a VR social app used for digital gathering) can be used by actors to rehearse and perform or stage an interpretive dance. Multiple projects showcased imaginative use of avatars with a new twist on futuristic costume design. But all the new XR experiences require a different approach to developing the storytelling techniques since they are experienced by users not from a sit in a theater, but from a more personal embodied virtual world. I anticipate many courses in “immersive stage design” and new theories of non-linear storytelling.

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“Masterpieces are noted for their accessibility; they are not the heritage of chosen few but of all men of good sense. Homer and Cervantes are democratic geniuses: a child understands them. The talents that claim to be aristocratic and incomprehensible to the multitude use abstruse form to conceal emptiness. Look at the great writers who shook men’s souls in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, especially Voltaire, whose prose was as natural as breathing, as clear as distilled alcohol”.

Ibid from “Essays on on Peruvian Reality” by Jose Carlos Mariategui

To write accessibly, clearly and simply is hard. My weekend discovery is the experimental website [Under the Dog Star] that contains writing exercises are intended to help writers explore unusual and unconventional modes of expression, voice, and structure.

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June 2020, NYC. Soho has converted from open-air mall into open-air gallery.

Week 25

Power. Some people have it. Some people have too much of it. Some people don’t have any of it. Some people need more of it. Some people don’t want others to have it. Some people fight for it. And some people work to distribute it.

Quoted from Museum 2020 Catalog. Text is under copyright of Do Good LLC.

This week the catalog from Mmuseum has arrived. Mmuseumm claims that it is the smallest museum in the world. It is hosted in the elevator shaft in the back alleys of Tribeca. I have discovered Museumm in 2013. My sister was spending summer in New York and together we were running around the city trying to visit all of its numerous museums. Currently, the museum is closed (little social distancing can be done in the perimeter of a square meter). On a recent summer night, I walked to the museum through empty back alleys of Tribeca to confirm this. It is closed. However, their ‘new season’ as documented in the catalogue as unexpected as ever. Here is the current and past collections: [Collection — Mmuseumm](https://www.mmuseumm.com/exhibitions)

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The Ready America 70380 Essentials Emergency

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“You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and”. “

- Sufi teaching story

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This week is short and abrupt since I am working on my projects at ITP Camp at NYU. I will share the discoveries next week.

Week 24

“ If you ever need to deal with children aged 2 to 99, get this book” Jeff Atwood.

The magic formula includes: listen, repeat what they say, label their emotions. Redoing it for all humans(not just kids, because everyone wants to be heard and to communicate) :

* Never give people negative labels or labels in general - people will behave as you perceive them.

* Acknowledge feelings: Listen quietly and attentively, acknowledge with one-word answers (“uhm..” “I see”) so the other person has the opportunity to talk. Give the feeling a proper name (“annoying”, “what a shock”).

* Too often people do not want your advice, pity or experience - they just want you to listen how they feel. Indulge them (“If I had a magic wand I’d make a burger appear”, “I wish I could make the rain stop”)

* Safe fall back whenever possible to simply /describing/ things or situations instead of judging or pontificating.

* Communicate rationale behind your actions and ask for the rationale behind other people’s actions. State your expectation, because “no, not everything is obvious”/ Because language is [Best. Invention. Ever.]

* Compassion is always appreciated whether it comes sooner or later.

“How to Talk so Kids Will Listen” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

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Before 2020, if I found myself on Upper East Side in between meetings, events or other weekend tumult, I would frequently dash to Guggenheim Museum to stare at some of my favorites from their core collection. For a while, my favorite was Henri Rousseau, but in recent years they have moved him back into storage (or it may be on-loan somewhere). My new favorite piece by Vasily Kandinsky is cosmic and harmonious [Several Circles]. The pictures don’t do it justice- in person (from what I can remember), the painting is gigantic and absorbing. It’s dark canvas like a black hole of Guggenheims’s permanent collection room, soaks tourist traffic. Few will pass by without stopping for at least a couple of minutes in front of it. I miss Guggenheim, and I miss Kandinsky, so this week as part of NYU ITP camp experience I have decided to practice my p5.js by re-creating Kandinsky. I found the tedious work of recalculating positions on the canvas meditative. Coloring it yet again made me realize that sometimes simplistic expressionistic paintings require more through-trough color palettes and compositions that might seem from the first glance. 300 lines of code later, here is the experiment: (It’s live, so make sure to hover over).

Project url

Project code

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*Embodied cognition* is a topic cognitive psychology. It reflects the argument that the motor system influences our *cognition*, just as the mind influences bodily actions.

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Currently, my Chinese classes are all about travel: using vocabulary to book tickets, describe the trips, and apply for a visa. Due to the current inability to travel it’s annoyingly evocative. However, during classes, I have discovered Jiuzhai Valley, National Park. The pictures showcase the place as an extravaganza of natural wonders and the remoteness makes it an extra appealing adventure. Bookmarking it for the next bucket list destination for an unforeseeable future, but in the meantime, one can salivate virtually over exotic scenery.

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Talking about traveling and remote places. In 2016 I have celebrated my 26th Birthday in the “middle-of-nowhere” on Fogo Island. To get there, we drove for 2 days from St John. This week I saw the screening of Strange and Familiar: Architecture on Fogo Island. “The movie captures a bold architecture project that embraces the excitement of living on the edge, both in relation to nature and to contemporary design.” If you have 54 minutes, watch some stunning landscape and extraordinary architecture. Spoiler alert- it’s very uplifting.

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Side note- for more inspiration Architecture and Design Film Festival will screen online these week movies from their archive: https://adfilmfest.com/site/online20 📽

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Week 23

“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

― Howard Zinn

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I have started ITP Camp at NYU (after business hours - 6pm and during weekends). All June I am hoping to collaborate with fellow creative technologists, to leverage tech to create something new. So while this newsletter can not report on climbs and museum visits, expect strange and random notes about how we interact with technology.

Here is a piece of computer-generated “art” I made with p5.js. I am calling it “overworked”. 👩🏻‍💻

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In object-oriented programming a God object is an object that /knows too much/ or /does too much/. A common programming technique is to separate a large problem into several smaller problems and create solutions for each of them. Once the smaller problems are solved, the big problem as a whole has been solved. In contrast, a program that employs a God object does not follow this approach. Most of such a program’s overall functionality is coded into a single “all-knowing” object, which maintains most of the information about the entire program.

Similar anti-patterns inspired by Italian cuisine:

*Spaghetti code* is a pejorative phrase for unstructured and difficult-to-maintain source code.

*Ravioli code* -describes code that comprises well-structured classes that are easy to understand in isolation, but difficult to understand as a whole.

*Lasagna code* -code whose layers are so complicated and intertwined that making a change in one layer would necessitate changes in all other layers.

*Pizza code*- code refers to code which has very flat architecture.

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This week read a paper about technical debt of Machine Learning. I think a laughed for 5 minutes non-stop when I saw this cartoon. Couple of days later it actually does not look that funny anymore.

Better summary here: [Nitpicking Machine Learning Technical Debt

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Sneakernet is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks (remember those 💾?) , USB Flash drives, or external hard drives between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network.

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These days the frequency of my outgoing paper mail has drastically increased. Upon further investigation have stumbled upon “mail art”:

Mail art (also known as postal *art* and correspondence *art*) is a populist artistic movement centered on sending small scale works through the postal service.

* Further reference and inspiration: Ray Johnson [“Return to Sender”]

* If you have not received mail from me, please request [one here] - I’ll be happy to mail you one.

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The next Industrial revolution? Probably biomanufacturing. How come when we spend a day in nature we feel refreshed and rejuvenated, but when we spend a day in front of a computer, we feel exhausted? As we try to work more in more confined environment, can we rely on new types of materials to make our manufactured environment rejuvenating?

Further reference:

• Talks by Ruthie Nachamany: Instead of putting computers on things, how can we think of things as computers?

• Gist about biomanufacturing also by Ruthie

• MOMA NYC has scheduled in 2020 an exhibit by Neri Oxman - “From tree bark and crustacean shells to silkworm webs and human breath, nature shapes Neri Oxman’s innovative design and production processes”. The exhibit is obviously postponed, but I am highly anticipating to rush to it as soon as MOMA reopens.

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Week 22

I drew my home-made map of current surroundings. The first one shows my spatial schedule inside my apartment. The second is the same apartment, but color-coded by sentiment. Many many more people draw their worlds during COVID-19 pandemic for CityLab project. All maps show a diversity of experiences. Some are very relatable, some very personal and revealing, but all highly creative. Here are some of my that caught my attention:

My favorite is the “magic kingdom of Quarantine” by Stentor Danielson: “And since some of my friends were confused, the Red and Black God is Netflix.” :) (I also have immediately looked him up, found out that he sells his map drawings on Etsy: Mapsburgh by Mapsburgh on Etsy and instantaneously ordered a couple to send as gifts). Great artists steal, so I replicated his style for my surroundings. Here is my Realm of Quarantine of lower Manhattan.

As I run through the “Silk Road” around Hudson river, surrounded by tall and empty skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, I feel like I live in the fairytale, just written not by Green, but Gehry.

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Speaking of fantasy maps - I have been following game development of the game by Robin Sloan Perils of the Overworld and I am absolutely obsessed with reading about his progress. Following his newsletter, I have discovered multiplicity of very important information:

* Stock phrases for story-starting across the world. My favorite is probably Czech: “Beyond seven mountain ranges, beyond seven rivers . . .”

* Fantasy Map Generator - bookmarking to use in the future

* And more here: Generating fantasy maps

* New books recommendation about writing: “Writing Tools” by Roy Peter Clark

* Oblique Drawing: The Atlas of Oblique Maps, published in 1988, available in its entirety online. (Be careful with that link: it points to a 250 megabyte PDF!)

Favorite quote of Robin Sloan: “I don’t know how anybody writes without a Dictionary of Fairies close at hand…!”

After reading about Robin’s work, I am itching to build something with Ink - scripting language for text game development, but I have to pace myself with other projects that I am currently working on.

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If you feel that the writing style of this week is different - you are right. I have used the Hemingway Editor shared by my friend Jay. The editor promises to make my writing bold and clear. I am not sure if “bold and clear” is my style. Maybe convoluted and fluffy is my style. But the editor is putting a readability grade to the text and so far I am yet to achieve readability of 5th grade.

** This paragraph ranks for Grade 4

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Somewhere during this week trying to improve on web-component construction I have stumbled on Peak of Mt. Stupid and the valley of despair that captures the way I feel every time I learn something new.

/The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority./ > /You don’t even know enough to realize just how little you know./

But then I saw an extended diagram of the original that someone has shared on Twitter and I think it is a better proxy of real life. It definitely captures better my week.

/“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” - Bertrand Russell/

Further reading on Dunning Kruger effect:

* [Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence] 2003

* [Not Knowing Thyself] 2006

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Some beautiful inspiration : [The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice]

* Trust me: There is no “them”.

* Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison.

* Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

* Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

* Treating a person to a meal never fails, and is so easy to do. It’s powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends. *

* Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

* Don’t be the best. Be the only.

* Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

* Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.

* The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.

* To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

* Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.

* Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

* You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

* Be prepared: When you are 90% done any large project (a house, a film, an event, an app) the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

* When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

* Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

* Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

* A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

* Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

* Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

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Week 21

“Just as the intellect can’t be quantified in grades, the measure of a life’s worth and purpose isn’t to be found in remuneration figures.” From “Figuring” by Maria Popova

“History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwreck of judgement and chance” “Figuring” by Maria Popova

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Written in 1948 (!) Dr. Warren Weaver wrote a beautiful essay on the types of problems that science can solve. He has identified 3 core ones:

* Problems of Simplicity - two-variable problems that gave us such discoveries as telephone, radio and automobile

* Problems of Disorganized Complexity - analytical methods that deal with two-billion variables. Probability and statistics fall into this group. “The motions of the atoms which form all matter, as well as the motions of the stars which form the universe, come under the range of these new techniques.” Extend for any latest developments in Machine Learning.

* Problems of Organized Complexity - probably the most fascinating area and the one that is really hard to handle. Economics, anthropology, politics, city planning, group human behavior, biology all fall into this problem. I would argue that slow progress in NLP is probably language falls into this category and can not be tackled by the strategies from “Disorganized complexity”. Dr. Weaver argues that all these problems are “ just too complicated to yield to the old nineteenth century techniques which were so dramatically successful on two-, three-, or four-variable problems of simplicity. These new problems, moreover, cannot be handled with the statistical techniques so effective in describing average behavior in problems of disorganized complexity. These new problems, and the future of the world depends on many of them”

He concludes that *“Science clearly is a way of solving problems-not all problems, but a large class of important and practical ones… Impressive as the progress has been, science has by no means worked itself out of a job. It is soberly true that science has, to date, succeeded in solving a bewildering number of relatively easy problems, whereas the hard problems, and the ones which perhaps promise most for man’s future, lie ahead.”*

“Yes, science is a powerful tool, and it has an impressive record. But the humble and wise scientist does not expect or hope that science can do everything. He remembers that science teaches respect for special competence, and he does not believe that every social, economic, or political emergency would be automatically dissolved if “the scientists” were only put into control. He does notwith a few aberrant exceptions~expect science to furnish a code of morals, or a basis for esthetics. He does not expect science to furnish the yardstick for measuring, nor the motor for controlling, man’s love of beauty and truth, his sense of value, or his convictions of faith.”

Read the original here: “Science and Complexity”

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“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser

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How many famous female modernist architects do you know? *Eileen Gray* is the name to be remembered, not because she was female, but because she was a modernist pioneer. Famous for incredibly futuristic and virtuously constructed furniture, she has also designed a very controversial E-1027 House that became a center for the dramatic feud with Le Combusier

Luckily, Bard Graduate Center Gallery at 18 West 86th Street in New York has retrospective of her work. Scheduled till mid-July it will probably be extended till mid year. So as soon as museums will re-open, this will be the first one I plan to run to.

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“…arrived the way most transformative things enter our lives - through the back door of the mansion of our plans” from “Figuring” by Maria Popova

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Too often we idolize people for their work and ideas, but rarely for their morality. Jørn Utzon was a visionary architect who produced spectacular buildings, but also greatly inspired the people he worked with and was just a beautiful human being. The documentary The Man & The Architect tells a personal and emotional story of the architect who conceived Sydney Opera house, and how many things around the project went wrong, teaching us that it is always so much more than just an idea.

For me, one of his most memorable buildings was Can Lis, where he left a window to trace sunrise across the wall “in order to feel the time pass by”. Bookmarking for future inspiration.

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House of the Century, Mojo Lake, Angleton, TX, United States. 1972 Architect: Antfarm (Doug Michels and Chip Lord) in collaboration with Richard Jost. Further reading: http://hiddenarchitecture.net/house-of-century/

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“In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied”. Abraham Lincoln

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Week 20

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Have you made secret dens and forts out of blankets and pillows? Do you want to relive childhood? Or do you just have too much free time and tired of Netflix? IKEA’s quarantine campaign illustrates six ways to make furniture forts. If you don’t have the IKEA product, you can replace it for one that looks the same.

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I have spent the week watching Abstract - 8 part Netflix Series about (I know I am a bit late, but since I have canceled my Netflix a couple of years ago, I try to drastically reduce my video consumption). Nevertheless, the series is especially uplifting. Each series tackles the old age question of what is “design”? However, instead of trying to defend design, assuming it’s marginalized, the series defends depth of “design” going beyond superficial aesthetics or styling.

> “You’re not changing somebody, you’re making them a more perfect vision than when you started.” Paula Scher

> “Do your homework before each project so the right feeling and connection comes through.” Platon

** Netflix has open the documentaries to public: which I think is highly admirable

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Since 2013, at least once a year I would attend ITP show almost every year. The show was a platform for me to rector people, to research the latest techniques and just enjoy the projects people make just because they can. Since a lot of projects is a mix of digital and analogue, visitors meander through NYU floor, speaking to the creators of the projects and playing with the prototypes. Due to the pandemic, this year unfortunately the showcase in -person was not possible. However, to my delight and surprise, NYU have organized the showcase online, creating video-conferencing room for every graduate, simulating the traditional in-person experience where one can “chat with the creator”. No, it’s not the same as in-person, but it is the best we can have.

Here are some projects that caught my attention :

* Bobst - an app for better library experience. Obviously I ❤️ this.

* Happiness- a visualization & exploration of happy moments * Contemporary take on Religion: [God Design](https://www.chenhezhang.com/god-design)

* A Visual Retrospective of Digital Cameras - a nice way to create an interactive visualization of big volumes of historical data

* One hundred days of future sketches: 100 days of future sketches are my way to sketch out ideas of dynamic interactive/psychedelic visuals for web. - although very heavy performance on the browser

* AROUND US- nice data viz of Satellites

Noting that data visualizations are still relevant and popular forms of projects, however they have been morphing into more storytelling and story-scaling formats.

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Week 19

On Monday night I have opened my mailbox to discover a black envelope. (I am intentionally using the verb to “discover”, since these days my incoming mail is highly predictable and the trip to the mailbox almost feels like an expedition). Inside was a painted rock from my friend Sherry Berger. She has painted it after dinner on my roof last summer. The rock is from Emerald Beach in Australia. According to her “it’s a magical place, the dramatic coast ranks in my top 5 for a good morning jog”.

It has been her project to paint rocks and leave them around the city. The project has numerous contributing artists. The group is called ‘no name Rocks’ and here is the website. Currently there only 200 of them floating somewhere around the world. If you find one, you are lucky and I hope it will light up your day. Or, if you want to share kindness or have a creative outburst, maybe you want to paint one.

It was an amazing reminder that the world is full of beautifully unforeseen things we make to just see each other smile.

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We, humans, are surrounded by a myriad of objects that we, humans, make. Over the years we have been refining the techniques and evolving the aesthetics. We constantly debate the quantity of objects that is socially acceptable or required. But this does not change the fact that on average we daily use and encounter a lot of objects.

These days, as we are confined to locked spaces with limited opportunities to acquire new things, the objects acquire new meaning for us. I really like the project called Atlas of Everyday objects that functions as an observational lab about the perceived meaning of objects in the time of global social Isolation.

Here are the 9 items that shape my daily reality. Some have been in heavy usage for a while and have cemented their prominence and significance in my life (books occupy around 3%-5% of my living space are a visual inspiration and mental entertainment). Some were newly acquired; I have not owned a coffee maker before COVID-19, as NYC coffee shops have spoiled me with to-go cups- today I am a proud owner of a Bialetti. Some have acquired new appreciation; my laptop is THE main tool of my WORK, communication, and entertainment - it’s value can not currently be assessed; the painting I made 5 years ago, now works as the main background for my conference calls and the conversation starter. And some are completely new accessories (face mask and gloves) and time will tell how permanent they are going to be.

#objectsofmyisolation

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I have been a huge fan of Jeff Atwood (software developer, author blogger), but only this week I finally got the time to cover his full body of written work. Here is a summary of some interesting pearls of wisdom from his blog Coding Horror and the book “Effective Programming”:

• “Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas”

• There is also no correlation between years of experience and skill in programming: because “what software developers do best is learn”;“

• Performance is a Feature

• Vampires (Programmers) versus Werewolves (Sysadmins): both System Administrators and Programmers have different, and perhaps complementary, supernatural powers.

• “The worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs”

• The parallel with users and usability is natural. Either maximize the cheese (make your application compelling), or minimize the shock (make your application easy to use). Note: ” You’ll Never Have Enough Cheese” unless you are providing users free mp3s, or access to pornography”

• Fitts’ Law and Infinite Width: the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Time = a + b log2 ( D / S + 1 ) is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human-computer interaction and ergonomics

• “The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly”

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“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. “

Rumsfeld’s Knowns and Unknowns

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In Arizona, there is the environmental sciences research facility that was home to controversial research in the 1990s - Biosphere 2. Eight people were to be locked inside for two years to test Biosphere 2’s capacity to support life. The new documentary “Spaceship Earth” was released on Friday (May 8th , 2020) traces the journey of people who envisioned and build it against remarkable odds. A fascinating film about “a small, idealistic group trying to reimagine the world”.

** hoping to travel here as soon as air-travel will resume to usual convenience.

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My friend Andrew Ippoliti built this simple and beautiful app : calm.af . It’s simplicity is astounding.

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A Sicilian fresco from 1445. In the previous century, the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population. I am looking forward to see new fresco’s from 2020.

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“Code is our enemy. Code is bad. It rots. It requires periodic maintenance. It has bugs that need to be found. New features mean old code has to be adapted.

The more code you have, the more places there are for bugs to hide. The longer checkouts or compiles take. The longer it takes a new employee to make sense of your system. If you have to refactor there’s more stuff to move around.

Furthermore, more code often means less flexibility and functionality. This is counter-intuitive, but a lot of times a simple, elegant solution is faster and more general than the plodding mess of code produced by a programmer of lesser talent. > Code is produced by engineers. To make more code requires more engineers. Engineers have n^2 communication costs, and all that code they add to the system, while expanding its capability, also increases a whole basket of costs.

You should do whatever possible to increase the productivity of individual programmers /in terms of the expressive power of the code they write/. Less code to do the same thing (and possibly better). Less programmers to hire. Less organizational communication costs.”

Rich Skrenta “Code is Our Enemy”

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Week 18

The smell of strangers

I am pretty certain that the time of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is going to generate a flood of essays. Humans find it essential to express their frustration, nostalgia, ways of pass time, and aspirations. I am no different and here I am trying to express the thing that I miss most. Most of all I miss the smell of strangers.

As we spend time in our confined spaces, the smells that we experience daily become conventional. The smell of grounded coffee, while distinctive occurs regularly every morning, becoming a routine. My perfume, while invigorating, is redundantly familiar and becomes customary in a matter of minutes. My special evening treat - aroma candle, is rapidly losing its appeal. What I miss most is not the pleasurable smells in terms of caliber, but rather the unpredictability and lovely of olfactory experiences. The irritating smell of a stinky gasoline truck. The sweet and sour smell of sweat in the subway. The smell of worn-out leather in the back of a taxi cab. The someone’s “too flowery” perfume as they share an elevator with me. I miss the strange smells that catch me off-guard and make me take notice.

While confinement due to the pandemic has deprived us of multiple unexpected senses like vision and touch, I will argue that smell is the hardest to simulate in our dwellings and hence the most pensive. While I miss the outside noises of my city, I currently have access to most of the music ever produced by humans. Besides, through cinematographic experiences varying from short vlogs to movies, I can encounter most of the sounds I yearn for - the whisper of leaves in the forest, the cringing of snow during winter hikes, the energetic typing sounds in the offices. The same can be said about the visual experience: while my visual range is bound mostly to white walls of my apartment, different mediums constantly entertain my visual senses. I can take virtual tours in the museums, scroll through pictures of friends and strangers across costal media, attend a performance at MET opera. Not to mention the variety of visual stimulation from a myriad of movies from classics to blockbusters. Which makes me to explicitly state the obvious: the enforced lockdown could not have been so good in any other decades. In the times, when people owned either tv with select content and specific viewing times or did not have anything at all (basically pre-19th century) all of the senses would have put humans on a very different kind of trial.

So back to the thing that I miss most. There is no way to easily access foreign smells in the privacy of one’s apartment. Even if you frequently open the windows. The lack of small simulations is caused by the human inability to capture them in the first place. While I can get a new perfume, it is hard for me to capture the smell of the fresh paint in the classroom at the beginning of the school year, upon return from summer vacation; the smell of my favorite bakery right after they produced the fresh batch of croissants or the smell of the forest in that particular part of a mountain range in the middle of Peruvian Andes. Psychologists have shown time and time again the easiness with which smell captures our memories. I frequently choose a different perfume for different prolonged chapters of my like and loathe partying with empty perfume bottles, since even one sniff from the old smell can instantly bring the memories of a particular period. Yet, besides perfume bottles, there is little left for me to re-experience the places, other than to physically return to them, hoping that they have not changed much and still smell the same.

Here is another complication to my reminiscence - on most of my current outings I am required to wear a mask. My mask is a regular dust mask, but its fabric has a very distinct smell. So my mask deprives me of the full of “strange smells” on my rare grocery outings. Since it is my personal belief that the masks will persist as a required outfit for a while (at least in New York City), that makes me crave strange odors even more. Ironically, the smell of my dust mask will be another one of the smells that will capture a specific memory at a particular period of time.

As the whole world has shut its doors with devastating consequences for the well-being of millions of people, each one of use is planning to take note but this transformative experience, promising to appreciate it more. And while there is no certainty when the streets of our cities will be crowded again, I am hopeful that this July in the crowded card of New York Subway on the hot August afternoon, I am going to be deeply inhaling the smells of strangers and smiling.

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There is something funny about watching a movie that is 20 years old as compared to let’s say a movie from 1920. These movies seem to depart a faraway past, yet, it is recent enough to seem to highlight all kinks without the adorable coating of history. This week I watched the movie Project Code Rush that covers Netscape’s last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open-source project until their acquisition by AOL. A couple of thoughts:

* This is a significant milestone for humanity and it reminds us that open source software is not something that is a natural part of the internet, but rather something that was envisioned, fought for, and executed by a lot of contributors who aspired to build a better “web”.

* Netscape team has produced meaningful legacy as Jeff Atwood points out in [Lived Fast, Died Young, Left a Tired Corpse](: the original popularization of HTML and the internet itself took place and the unlikely birth of the commercial open-source movement.

* wow, those engineers ate a lot of cookies & donuts

Code Rush is ultimately a *meditation on the meaning of work as a programmer* - what is really going to withstand the test of time? No, it’s NOT on Netflix, but you can watch it here: [Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary - YouTube

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I have heard about fashion designer Guo Pei, but never had a chance to familiarize myself sufficiently with her dramatic gowns. Pei, along with her team, been experimenting with and developing embroidery techniques inspired by both traditional Chinese needlework and 3-D embroidery used in European clothing. The research results in striking masterpieces taking on average 2,5 years to produce by hand. The in-depth look into the life of the designer is captured in the documentary Yellow is Forbidden

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Week 17

The catchy expression Crisis = Danger + Opportunity as an interpretation of Chinese characters has become a pervasive opening slide for motivational speakers and therapists around the world. A casual online search turns up more than a million references to the proverb and makes it almost as popular as another “ubiquitous eastern philosophy” - Sun Zi’s Art of War. The inspiration comes from the 2 words:

危机(Weiji) - crisis

机会( Jihui) - opportunity

Both words have character 机 in common and make it easy from the first glance be convinced about the sameness of the two. 机 stands for machine and can be encountered in words like an airplane (飞机) and cell phone (手机).

Professor Victor H. Mair wrote a wonderful essay on debunking this wrongful interpretation of Chinese characters to cater to convenient motivational theories. “A wēijī in Chinese is every bit as fearsome as a crisis in English. A jīhuì in Chinese is just as welcome as an opportunity to most folks in America. To confuse a wēijī with a jīhuì is as foolish as to insist that a crisis is the best time to go looking for benefits.”

There is probably no subject on earth concerning which more misinformation is purveyed and more misunderstandings circulated than Chinese characters or sinograms.”* —Victor Mair

* he would be surprised in the light of what is going on in media currently in regards to COVID-19

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I don’t know why it took me such a long time to research Google Easter Eggs, but I have finally discovered an amazing list of hidden Google’s portals: The Complete Google Easter Eggs List That Will Make You Go Wow. Some of personal favorites are:

* Conway’s Game of Life

* Blechley Park

* Atari Breakout

* “once in a blue moon” ** This is one of the amazing Google easter eggs. If you search “once in a Blue Moon”, Google will guide you to the mathematical equation for the occurrence of a blue moon.

* Loch Ness Monster

* Askew

* Roll a die

* Google Underwater Search

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Doomsday Algorithm: The Doomsday rule is an algorithm of determination of the day of the week for a given date. The algorithm for mental calculation was devised by John Conway in 1973, drawing inspiration from Lewis Caroll’s perpetual calendar algorithm. It takes advantage of each year having a certain day of the week, called the /doomsday/, upon which certain easy-to-remember dates fall; for example, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, and the last day of February all occur on the same day of the week in any year.

Here is a nice explanation in Scientific American

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I have recently finished “Enlightenment Now” by Seven Pinker. The professor makes a point that the Enlightenment helped us escape from superstition and ignorance. It increased our understanding of ourselves through science. The Enlightenment helped to abolish cruel punishments and slavery. Also, Humanism helped bring about an increase in peace. It seems odd to require a defense of reason, science, humanism and progress, but we suffer if we do not understand how far humanity has come by application of these principles.

I was inspired by the book and decided to build a REST-style service. The API was inspired by Steven Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now” and aims to make knowledge and opinions shared in the book accessible in small, but inspiring fragments. I coded the draft today in a couple of hours and have the first request:

`https://enlightenment-api.herokuapp.com/chart`

that returns a .jpeg image of charts used in the book.

This is work in progress and the project as always open to the public and is on GitHub and was a good way to refresh API building and deploy public APIs with Heroku on Sunday morning.

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Week 16

This weekend I have received a present from my friends - a coffee table book about cosmic commits architecture. According to the photographer Frederic Chaubin “It is a collection of exuberant sets oscillating between audacity and folly. Placed in the middle of nowhere, with no context or norm, some of these buildings really stand out. They seem to have no obvious rationale, to ignore all architectural doctrines. They are like orphan monuments, scattered over the planet of collectivism”. He also has a hypothesis that during the last 15 years of Soviet era, the government needed to protect the margins from leaving the Union and hence it should not be a coincidence that a lot of these buildings are on the fringes of ex-USSR: Polish border, The Caucasus, The Baltic and Central Asia. Regardless of the rationale, these bizarre architectural monsters are captivating.

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For those who write software, versioning is extremely important in understanding what was changed and when: the first version starts at 0.1.0 and not at 0.0.1, 2.0.0 means a new major release. Having a universal way of versioning the software development projects is the best way to track what is going on with the software as new plugins, add-ons, libraries, and extensions are being built almost every day. Its simplicity is absolutely exquisite:

Semantic Versioning is a 3-component number in the format of *X.Y.Z*, where :

* X stands for a major version.

* Y stands for a minor version.

* Z stands for a patch.

Versioning helps us keep track of what’s been added/removed at what point and while i. More here: [Introduction to Semantic Versioning - GeeksforGeeks]

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“We have all these random creative thoughts that we don’t know what to do with, which ones are worth acting on, or how to act on them. Notebooks can become graveyards for our ideas”. I am skeptical about Bullet Journal’s way of organization, but I think it makes a nice diagram.

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“All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man — or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. “

Oscar Wilde

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ChartaCloud | Robotteca have re-oriented our business plans to bring the power of robots to the forefront in the fight against COVID-19. I think that these use cases for the first time in the history of robotics make a very compelling argument on why we need robots and why “they would not steal our jobs”. Maybe creativity truly thrives in crisis…

*Disinfectant / Spray

* Disinfectant / UV

* Temperature Detection

* Mask Detection

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Week 15

“People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish alternative motives. Do good anyway. The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll be kicked into the teeth. Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.”

Hedy Lamarr

Chances are that you have seen movies with Hedy Lamar (well-known for her roles in the 1940s Oscar-nominated films ‘Algiers’ and ‘Sampson and Delilah.’ ), but chances are that you don’t know that she was the mind behind secure WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth. Her idea and patent gave us the radio communications to ‘hop’ from one frequency to another, so that Allied torpedoes couldn’t be detected by the Nazis and today it is used for the majority of our information transmission that we use everyday.

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The End of Starsky Robotics: https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5

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“ We have now gone from 996 to 007”

Li Jin

“996” refers to the grind-it-out work culture prevalent in some Chinese companies, which involves employees working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days per week, i.e. 72 hours per week. * “007” is s half-joking extension of that idea, entailing working around-the-clock .

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“ Never delegate understanding”

Charles Eames

The Powers of Ten films are two short American documentary films written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. Both works depict the relative scale of the universe according to order of magnitude and logarithmic scale based on the factor of 10. First expanding out from the Earth until the entire universe is surveyed, then reducing inward until a single atom and its quarks are observed. You can watch the movie here

Watching the movies made me revisit the work of Ray and Charles Eames, going beyond the popular instagrammable chairs. While the story and relationship between Ray and Charles Eames can be controversial in terms of final credit, I have to admit that their creations are an amazing combination of art and engineering and their studio seems like a dream to work.

The online research brought me to the Eames Office website that contains a wealth of rarely seen works both Both Ray and Charles, from Charles’s hand-drawn Christmas Cards for the loved ones to Ray’s paper dolls. Their work is currently in the National Archive and I am contemplating a trip to ruffle through the archives of these original inventors who just made things because they could not do otherwise.

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I am actually extremely surprised how “dark knowledge” 🌚 has not yet become the buzz word on par with AI and deep learning. The premise for dark knowledge is that complex machine learning models are slow to predict and require a lot of memory. Everyday electronic devices have limited storage space. The proposed solution is to train a simpler model that mimics a big complicated model. To make it work, one replaces actual class labels with predictions from the model we wish to mimic, calling it deep knowledge”. This discovery slowly slips into everyday life through on-device Machine Learning (such as in Google Pixel used for image processing and battery saving, yet has very little to do with what currently being discussed as the development of Artificial Intelligence.

/This/*dark knowledge*/, which is practically invisible in the class probabilities, defines a similarity metric over the classes that make it much easier to learn a good classifier./

Geoff Hinton

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Random fact (stumbled upon while reading “Peaks & Lamas”): Milarepa was a Tibetan siddha , who famously was a murderer as a young man then turned to Buddhism to become an accomplished buddha despite his past. He is generally considered as one of Tibet’s most famous yogis and poets, serving as an example for the Buddhist life.

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I have been a huge fan of Dan Perjovchi for years: his almost elementary works overflow with vigilant remarks on contemporary times and sharp-witted sarcasm. Since 1990, the artist has contributed hundreds of witty and incisive observations to literary and political journals. I highly regret the inability to attend his show in MOMA “What Happened to Us”. His [latest pieces](https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/269) try to illustrate the current state of the world .

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Last, but not least, here is a recording to show human collaboration, dexterity and creativity: A Boléro from New York: NY Philharmonic Musicians Send Musical Tribute to Healthcare Workers - YouTube

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Week 14

For the last 2 weekends, I finally got the time and head-space to finish the project. I also used it as a learning opportunity to experiment with polymer project by google. You can see my project at mexitecture.com and see the code on GitHub.

Architecture is the manifestation of the aspirations of societies. Hence, it is captivating to discover how people shape the cities and the buildings they choose to erect. I first got acquainted with the architecture of Mexico City through bright facades that frequent Instagram. Yet, after a more close and deliberate encounter, it saddens me those iconic bright walls do very little to describe the ambiance of the city.

Blessed with the near-perfect climate, Mexico City buildings are a hodgepodge of proud reincarnation of the remains of Aztec, the yearning for Spanish heritage as represented by flower-studded barrack courtyards, the ingenious take on mid-century modernism and eccentric variations on contemporary architecture.

Mexitecture is my effort to compile the most interesting milestones in the architecture of Mexico City: to highlight the ‘crown jewels’ as well as to re-surface it’s ‘classics’. I hope this project will become breadcrumbs for the curious adventurers ready to discover the man-made beautiful environment of Mexico City.

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[An allegory of the British Empire | State Library of NSW](https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/blogs/allegory-british-empire)

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The Turing Test is a deceptively simple method of determining whether a machine can demonstrate human intelligence: If a machine can engage in a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine, it has demonstrated human intelligence. While it is fundamentally flawed it doesn’t mean it cannot be improved or modified further. Here are proposed alternatives that could help us distinguish bot from a human.

1. Winograd Schema Challenge Rather than base the test on the sort of short free-form conversation suggested by the Turing Test, the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) poses a set of multiple-choice questions that have a particular form. Two examples follow; the second, from which the WSC gets its name, is due to Terry Winograd. A human who answers the first questions correctly would likely use his knowledge about the typical size of objects and his ability to do spatial reasoning.

   I. The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too *big* (/small/). What was too *big* (/small/)?

   Answer 0: the trophy

   Answer 1: the suitcase

   II. The town councilors refused to give the demonstrators a permit because they *feared* (/advocated/) violence. Who *feared* (/advocated/) violence?

   Answer 0: the town councilors

   Answer 1: the demonstrators

I. The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too *big* (/small/). What was too *big* (/small/)?
Answer 0: the trophy
Answer 1: the suitcase

II. The town councilors refused to give the demonstrators a permit because they *feared* (/advocated/) violence. Who *feared* (/advocated/) violence?
Answer 0: the town councilors
Answer 1: the demonstrators

2. The Marcus Test: [What Comes After the Turing Test? | The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-comes-after-the-turing-test)

3. The Lovelace Test 2.0 The testers are people who know they’re interacting with an AI, and they give it a task with two components. First, they ask for a creative artifact such as a story, poem, or picture. And secondly, they provide a criterion. For example: “Tell me a story about a cat that saves the day,” or “Draw me a picture of a man holding a penguin.” If the judge is satisfied with the result, he or she makes another, more difficult, request. This goes on until the AI is judged to have failed a task, or the judge is satisfied that it has demonstrated sufficient intelligence. The multiple rounds mean you get a score as opposed to a pass or fail. And we can record a judge’s various requests so that they can be tested against many different AIs.

4. The Visual Turing Test - try identifying the objects and where they are. In this test, the system needs to reason about what it identifies on the image. While currently, computers are getting pretty good at identifying a dog vs cat on the image, the question if it can reason on where the dog is relative to the cat, the chair and the table.

5. The Reverse Turing Test -is a Turing test in which the objective or roles between computers and humans have been reversed.

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This week I spend a lot of time thinking about modularity and final read Atomic Design book by Brad Frost (that has been on my to-read list for a really really long time) Atomic design - a framework developed by brad Frost in order to create and maintain digital design systems, allowing your team to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster. He borrows organizational principles from chemistry and makes an argument that to create the whole, you need to create the parts of that whole.

“By taking the time to organize the parts, you can now create the whole in a more realistic, deliberate, and efficient manner. Creating a library of your available materials allows you to approach the project in a more methodical way, and saves immense amounts of time in the process. Rather than rummaging through a haphazard. The pile of bricks and burning time reinventing patterns, you can create an organized system of components that will help produce better work in a shorter amount of time.” - Brad Frost

“Once we get past a tedium of building the same thing over and over again can focus our energy on more worthwhile tasks like accessibility, performance and iteration. We can work on the fun stuff rather than tedious things.” - Micah Godbolt

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I absolutely love contemporary things made in traditional execution or traditions with contemporary update. And this week I absolutely enjoyed the screening of relatively recent events in a more traditional genre: opera. These days Metropolitan Opera is making it’s recording accessible to public and I have enjoyed the screening of “Nixon In China”. Think about it, an opera about President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. And while NYT critics claim that “nothing really happened during that diplomatic journey”, I find the dramatization of recent living memory absolutely engrossing, as compared to more traditional productions of 16th century typically about love and war and frequently based on myth and legends with fictional characters .

Some other minimalist operas to add to add to “to-watch/to attend list” where characters portrayed in the opera were alive at the time of the premiere performance:

* The Death of Klinghoffer - the opera is based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, and the hijackers’ murder of a 69-year-old Jewish-American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer , who was wheelchair-bound.

* Doctor Atomic-focuses on the great stress and anxiety experienced by those at Los Alamos while the test of the first atomic bomb

* Dead Man Walking - based on Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir about her fight for the soul of a condemned murderer

* Anna Nicole - based on the life of American model Anna Nicole Smith

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Speaking of cultural Entertainment - here are the things to indulge in, that are accessible for free to anyone with internet access. how amazing is it, think about it - even a couple of years ago one could only see this only by purchasing a very very expensive ticket in major metropolitan areas, that was not even easy to acquire. Now it is one click away. For free. Astonishing.

• Plays: Globe Player | Shakespeare’s Globe
• Travel: Google Maps Treks – About – Google Maps
• Opera: Metropolitan Opera | Nightly Met Opera Streams
• Free Courses Online /(450 free courses by Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale)/.
• Free Audiobooks By Audible /(Hundreds of free titles)/.
• NY Public Library* E-Book Central /(300,000+ free e-books)/.
• R&D Papers: ACM Digital Library

Museum Virtual Tours

• Musee D’Orsay* Virtual Tour
• Uffizi Gallery Virtual Tour
• Frick Collection Virtual Tour
• British Museum Virtual Tour
• The Met Museum
• Chateau de Versailles Virtual Tour
• Van Gogh Museum Virtual Tour

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