April, 2007
21 posts under this date.
We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form —perhaps the art form of the next century.
Steven Johnson, Interace Culture, p213
“Hello, how are you?” being written in Dasher. (Hit escape to halt animation.)
A text-entry interface for the tetraplegic, it’s like nothing you’ve seen. Not only does using it have the same rush and exhilaration of playing SonicWP, it is also unbelievably efficient. And again, sheer fun.
It will take you some 5 minutes to get the hang of it (not out of difficulty, out of profound weirdness) but believe you me, you won’t regret it. Read the quick, 3-page explanation and try the Java version in-browser or download it. It’s free software and there are localized versions in many languages.
If such deep novelty, such striking unrealityELZR lies in something as mundane as text-entry, what wonders lie yon in the craft of interface design?
Scratch
Visual programming has been a perennial pipe dream of mine and just some three months ago the MIT Media Lab unveiled the best embodiment so far of my vague and unspecified dreams. It’s called Scratch and it’s meant to introduce children to computing by giving them easy, programmatic means to media manipulation.
The brilliant breakthrough has been to Lego-fy programming, making control blocks actually, well, blocks, and turning programming into block stacking. Yes, it’s messy and you have to fumble around for blocks but it’s visual, incredibly intuitive, and—get this—syntax error free (since blocks have shapes and will only fit in ways that make syntactic sense).
It was scary, you know, when I first knew about Scratch, just some days after it was launched, my evangelizing streak came back with a vengeance and I felt this strange calling to go and teach it somewhere, wherever. Here was finally an easy way to show “normal” people what programming was. Here it is.
Some weeks ago water vapor was found on HD209458bWP, an extrasolar planet some 150 light years away. Just yesterday Gliese 581 cWP, E was discovered. With a radius only 50% bigger than that of Earth and within the “habitable zone”WP—”the region surrounding a star where water would be liquid”—of its star, it is the best candidate so far for extraterrestrial life.
The perennial wild card of the discovery of alien life looks ever closer and I’m teetering already—with excitement, with fear, with awe.
What would you give up first, capitalism or democracy?
Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchismWP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.
Timothy C. May’s WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collectionAM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)
Crypto anarchy is the cyber spatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to consensually make the economic arrangements they wish to make..
[It] ensures that men with guns cannot be brought in to interfere with mutually agreed-upon transactions, the only kind of economics interaction possible in crypto anarchy. Some people will of course scream “Unfair!” and demand government intervention, which is why strong cryptography will probably be opposed by the masses, unless of course, they are wise and take the long view. This may smack of elitism, but I have very little faith in democracy. De Tocqueville warned in 1840 that, roughly translated, “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” We reached that point several decades ago..
To put it bluntly, crypto anarchy basically undermines democracy: it removes behaviors and transactions from the purview of the mob. And once crypto is deeply entwined into the fabric of life and commerce, it will be too late to pull the plug.
Timothy C. May, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy
Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.
Here some definitions—some funny, but all out of sadness. «Whimsical» to be (mostly) understood in the not so standard sense of “subject to our whims”—of course.
Reality: that which is not whimsical.
Technology: that which makes Reality whimsical.
Technologist: that who believes Reality can and should be whimsical.
Hacker: a Technology maker.
Body: that which is whimsical and its manifold possibilities.
Health: the body’s actual whimsicality.
Culture: the exploration of Body.
Art: Culture making.
Artist: a Culture maker.
Knowledge: Of Reality—of what else?
Science: Knowledge making.
Scientist: a Knowledge maker.
Good: the creation or exploration of Body.
Evil: the destruction of Body.
Virtual Reality: whimsical Reality; Technology’s ultimate success.
Religion: the belief that Reality is self-servingly whimsical.
Some inspirations and context:
Sunny Bains’s Mixed Feelings is a cool article in last month’s Wired about synthetic synesthesias: using technology to give us new senses by using old ones’ bandwidth. Stuff like using the tongue to see, or, below, using touch to locate.
For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it’s time to build them.
“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, ”I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place1.”
Some intriguing stories here about the brain that will delight anyone who has read Jeff Hawkin’s mind-bendingly good On IntelligenceAM. Another example:
 More than 50 years ago, Austrian researcher Ivo Kohler gave people goggles that severely distorted their vision: The lenses turned the world upside down. After several weeks, subjects adjusted — their vision was still tweaked, but their brains were processing the images so they’d appear normal. In fact, when people took the glasses off at the end of the trial, everything seemed to move and distort in the opposite way.
Of course any true Jeff fan would nod knowingly and immediately quote back with:
Patterns are all the brain knows about. Brains are pattern machines. It’s not incorrect to express the brain’s functions in terms of hearing or vision, but at the most fundamental level, patterns are the name of the game. No matter how different the activities of various cortical areas may seem from each other, the same basic cortical algorithm is at work. The cortex doesn’t care if the patterns originated in vision, hearing, or another sense. It doesn’t care if its inputs are from a single sensory organ or from four. Nor would it care if you happened to perceive the world with sonar, radar, or magnetic fields, or if you had tentacles rather than hands, or even if you lived in a world of four dimensions rather than three.
Jeff Hawkins, On IntelligenceAM, p2
Being a fan of the concept since my soundscape post, however, I was surprised the article doesn’t mention the inspiration for my post and the most widespread example yet of a synthetic synesthesia: the beeping proximity sensor in many vehicles—space as sound. My brain has become so used to it that at times glancing back seems like a distraction.
I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:
1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty.
2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a designELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy BlissWP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century.
3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne WP, “Meditation XVII” of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
.., one of the world’s largest and most influential private-equityWP firms, is planning an IPO of a minority stake, “perhaps 10%.” Appraisals of the company’s total value range “from $20 billion to double that.”
It has some 750 employees.
Talk about leverage.
Maybe the insolent goal is possible after all.
Of course! A 3-legged table wouldn’t wobble! Why? Any three points define a plane. Why did I never think of that?
So you’ve purchased your coffee and chosen to sit at one of those round outdoor tables. As you lean on the table to write comments on a paper, it rocks annoyingly, possibly spilling some of your coffee. You try moving the table slightly on the uneven pavement, hoping to stumble into a stable configuration for its four feet, but several attempts fail. Eventually you resort to shimming one of the table feet with a piece of folded up paper, or a stack of sweetener packets, and this creates at least a metastable condition. Looking around, you notice that many other tables have similar combat repairs, so that the cafe looks like a furniture trauma ward.
Why don’t these tables have three legs instead of four? With three legs, they wouldn’t rock on uneven surfaces because any three points define a plane. You wouldn’t need those adjustable table feet that no one ever bothers to adjust because it’s so awkward to lean down and twist them. While each leg would have to be slightly bigger, you’d have fewer assembly or machining steps to perform. Is a 60 degree angle that hard to produce in this day and age?
Fruits being another perennial fetish of mine this transfixed me. Of course.
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