I’ve never been a cheese fan, but in the days before COVID-19 I had the opportunity to visit France, home to some of the best cheeses in the world. So I did my best to adapt and tried all kinds of cheeses while I was there.

Throughout my cheese journey, I came upon the fact that French bakeries carry two kinds of baguettes that look identical but are fundamentally different in composition because of the type of yeast used in each. One is called pain au levain and the other is called pain à la levure. I was taught this easy tourist-y mnemonic for remembering the difference between the two: the former ends in “n” and that means “natural yeast.” The latter means “chemical yeast” which is a more common approach today.

I mean, they’re both just loaves of bread. …

I have straight hair. Extremely straight, spiky hair. It’s super rigid. And because of its rigidity, it sticks up on its own when it’s cut short.

This fact never struck me as noteworthy until I moved from Seattle to Boston for college, and I happened to have classmates who wanted to touch my hair. The common reaction was always, “It feels like a brush!” It’s the kind of thing that I, literally, just brushed off. I also had a roommate who begged to know what I put in my hair to make it do that. When I told him it’s genetic, he wasn’t satisfied and often rifled through my toiletries to locate the secret. Poor fella.

If you look back at the history of computer graphics, you’ll notice how the modeling of hair wasn’t really commonplace when modeling characters because wavy hairstyles weren’t renderable in the beginning. Around the same time of my hair discovery, and when I started to write code, I noticed how easy it was to model my kind of hair with straight lines and a little bit of math. By comparison, it was much more difficult to create anything with curves in it — which is what one would expect from a more common array of non-Asian-centric hairwear. But that didn’t matter because my hairstyle wasn’t representative of what was desired to be a more “normal” view of what a person looks like. After all, how do you sell computer graphic realism with stick figures with hair like COVID-19 spike proteins? Well, that was the 80s so the metaphor didn’t matter back then. …

It’s never easy to figure out what will happen in a new year, but according to what Google’s incognito mode says to me when I search “trends for 2021,” I need to care about tech trends, home decor trends, fashion trends, and food trends to start.

Since Google seems to know everything, I took that initial prompt to lightly dive into these four areas that are of interest to me. I hope they’re of interest to you, and do keep in mind that I’ve editorialized what I’ve read online — so I may have gotten the trend wrong. So trend-grab wisely :+).

Tech

Fast Company gathered expert opinions that cover a broad range that I summarize as follows:

• Safe convening technologies to regain physical intimacy after the vaccine happens.
• “3+2” hybrid work week: 3 Work From Work (WFW) days + 2 WFH.
• Like the disruptive commercial force of the iPhone, C-19’s impact will be lasting. …

I just finished my class at MIT Sloan on digital transformation. Not teaching it, of course. Taking it.

You see, learning is a passion of mine. And I find that some things are harder to learn than others unless you really get your head in the game, which is especially hard when you have a full-time job. I reasoned that if paying for a gym membership can be a motivator to go to the gym, I needed to locate a paid way to learn WTF “digital transformation” means. I’d come into contact with it via the management consultant world and it was bugging me that I hadn’t found a crisp meaning. So I splurged on an MIT-branded experience on the topic, instead of just watching a few YouTube videos like I usually try to do. …

Ever since COVID-19 landed, it’s become impossible for me to fly across the country to visit my mom and dad. On the one hand, my mom is always easy to connect with via regular text messages and calls. On the other, ever since my dad had a stroke he’s never been the same. We’re totally out of touch.

And because writing doesn’t come naturally to him — he left home when he was 13 to work and is functionally illiterate — it’s even harder to make a remote connection to him.

Back in 1985, I took my first computer science course at MIT. We had spent the whole term discussing concepts borne completely in text, numbers, and punctuation marks.

I was so hungry to see something visual. Perhaps it’s because I was one of a handful of freshmen who had brought the new Apple Macintosh computer to campus — and was made fun of because it had pictures on the screen rather than just text. To the upperclassmen and my peers, it all seemed terribly unnecessary.

But then there was a special presentation toward the end of term, where the brilliant, gnome-like instructor, Professor Hal Abelson, slightly aged and slightly balding, figuratively let down his hair. Having a computer science professor with a name reminiscent of the “Hal” computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey always got me in an excited mood for the future. Hal took us through some new animated visualizations of The Game of Life as rendered onto a videotape by a colleague of his. …

When I was first starting to formally study design in the late 80s, I came across a book at the MIT Press bookstore with the weighty title, “Theory and Design in the First Machine Age,” written by the architectural critic Reyner Banham.

It had a handwritten yellow discount sticker atop an austerely designed black cover with big white type and orange-red horizontal lines. Its original publication date of 1960 partially explained why the book cover looked out of fashion and yet it still stood out in a way that spoke to me. The price definitely worked for me too.

My first read didn’t get me anywhere because the book was written in design-ese. At the time I spoke fluent engineer-ese, which made it easier for me to read equations, principles, and anything involving computation. But the book stayed with me throughout the years, and eventually by the fourth read I found myself chuckling at Banham’s droll yet witty prose. I guess that was proof that by then I’d become fluent in design-ese too. …

In the spring of 1993, my experiences as a hardware and software engineer collided with the art world as an installation in Kyoto benefitting from the educational direction of edutech pioneer Nobuyuki Ueda. Having worked for too long in the abstract world of electricity and cyberspace, I hungered to see it made real, in order to understand it better. Thus was born the Human Powered Computer Experiment, which was “performed” by Dr. Ueda’s graduate students in a two-day long workshop where human beings embodied the working components of a computer.