It started with a short Facebook Messenger exchange with my friend Howard.
He had sent me a reel—one of those mesmerizing illusions that stops your scroll. It showed what looked like a room with real depth, but as the camera moved, you realized it was actually a flat, painted wooden structure. A “room-in-a-box,” designed to trick the eye and the brain. Stunning.[1]
I messaged him back:
“Wow! This guy’s postings are amazing. But AI had a hand in this, no?”
Howard replied:
“My guess is that’s a natural illusion created by a brilliant painting of that wooden pyramid structure.”
He added that if you focused on the four outer corners, you could reclaim your perception and flip the illusion back and forth. Sure enough, it worked.
At first, I thought it was the work of an artist, like the clever street artist David Zinn, who uses sidewalk cracks and wall imperfections to create 3D chalk art. There’s a delightful CBS segment on Zinn you should see.[2]
But then another thought crept in: maybe this was AI-generated. That’s one of the subtler impacts of AI advancement—it has made us more skeptical of wonder. [3]
As I continued scrolling, I came across a second video in the same series—titled “The Best Thing I Saw Today.” This one showed origami dancers twirling as if alive.[4] Equally captivating. That led me to wonder: who was behind these posts? The user turned out to be Brad Meltzer.
Turns out, he’s a University of Michigan alum who gave the 2024 commencement address (I taught there for five years, until 2022). That speech became the basis of his book, “Make Magic: The Book of Inspiration You Didn’t Know You Needed” [5]. I downloaded it on Audible, and it became the next book on my reading list.
What this sequence of events reminded me of was something I heard more than 45 years ago. I was in a systems analysis seminar led by Tom DeMarco, where he used a recurring phrase, “Everything is deeply intertwingled.”[6] He used it to describe the nonlinear, often surprising connections that define complex systems.
Seeing how this short thread of posts—from Howard’s message, to a street illusion, to Meltzer’s book—wove itself together reminded me of DeMarco’s insight. Sometimes, what appear to be random occurrences are anything but. If we stay open to the possibility, we can see the thread. And if we follow that thread, it can lead us to unexpected insight.
There’s a happy ending of this story, in another thread of wonder. The second Brad Meltzer video post of the origami dancers was equally captivating. That led me to search for who is Brad Meltzer, and what has he written? He is mostly a fiction writer of thrillers. But his recent book is Make Magic, the book of inspiration you didn’t know you needed. So I ordered it from Audible. The Preface blew me away. The book is based on a commencement speech he gave at University of Michigan in 2024. As one of the tech seminar leaders said early in my journey: everything is deeply inter-twingled!
|