“arguments”
34 posts under this tag.
Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.
Restructuring in the paper industry is proceeding at a furious pace. The first thing some paper companies have jettisoned is ownership of forests. International Paper (IP), one of the world’s biggest pulp-and-paper companies which is based in Tennessee, used to be the largest private landowner in America. A year ago the company sold 5.7m acres, or 90%, of its forestland—an area larger than Massachusetts. The $6.6 billion sale was “probably the hardest decision that I’ve had to make since I became CEO,” says John Faraci, IP’s boss since 2003. Most buyers were financial investors, but 5% of the land went to conservation groups.
Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.
It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).
As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.
...one really do wonders what is the point—other than better displays—of that quaint anachronism that is the museum.
And don’t even get me started on DeviantArt.
A fascinating video—both in message and execution—about this new web (2.0) of ours. Digital video vagaries. Blurring techno typing. Interface po-mo poetry. Speechless show-don’t-tell. (Via Mark Bernstein)
Fees in malls’ parking lots are a recent development here in GuadalajaraWP that has been welcomed with the fervent outrage one would have imagine reserved for true wickedness. It is all the more interesting then how quickly the new mode swept the city—I can only think of two malls that remain complimentary, Plaza Acueducto and Plaza Outlet, and it’s clear that they refrain from charging only to attract customers to their rather forlorn premises.
Despite the somewhat frequent calls that something should be done about this, that some new law should be passed to protect us customers from yet another new instance of capitalistic rapacity, I take them as nothing but inconsequential bursts of anger at the inconvenience. I take it as a given that we can all see clearly that mall owners have the obvious property right to charge whatever they want for the use of their premises. We, in turn, have the corresponding right of shopping wherever we want.
So instead I want to discuss here the deeper question of whether or not these parking fees better society. Is the money Parking Lot Operators (PLOs) earn the reward for a valuable service or ravenous plunder hiding under the banner of property rights?
Jaron Lanier’s answer to the 2007 Edge question, What are you optimistic about?, is, predictably enough, post-symbolic communication. But the more I hear about it, the more I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur and sheer magic of the vision. As beautiful a dream as I’ve ever seen.
One extravagant idea is that the nature of communication itself might transform in the future as much as it did when language appeared. This is not easy to imagine, but here’s one approach to thinking about it: I’ve been fascinated by the potential for “Post-symbolic Communication” for many years. This new style of interpersonal connection could become possible once large numbers of people become virtuosos at improvising what goes on in Virtual Reality.
We are virtuosos at spoken language. Adults speak with what seems like no effort at all, even though everyday chats might be the most complicated phenomena ever observed. I see no reason why new virtuosities in communication could not appear in the future, though it’s hard to specify a timeframe.
Suppose you’re enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and
interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today.
Why bother? It’s a reasonable hunch. Words have done so much for people—so alternatives to them with overlapping but distinct functions ought to lead to new ways of thinking and connecting.
An alternative to abstraction might arise—the possibility of expression through a fluid and capable concreteness. Instead of the word “house” you could conjure up a particular house. How do you even know it’s a house without using the word? Instead of falling back on whatever the word “house” means, you might toss around a virtual bucket that turns out to be very large on the inside- and contains a multitude of house prototypes. In one sense this “fuzzy” collection is more precise than the word, in another, less so. It is different.
If all this sounds a little too fantastic or obscure, here’s another approach to the same idea using more familiar reference points. Imagine a means of expression that is a cross between the three great new art forms of the 20th century: jazz improvisation, computer programming, and cinema. Suppose you could improvise anything that could be seen in a movie with the speed and facility of a jazz improviser. What would that mean for the sense of connection between you and someone you love?
The most valuable optimisms are Infinite Games, and imagining that new innovations as profound as language will come about in the future of human interaction is an example of one.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.
Three good, non-obvious answers:
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That we participate in it.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.
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That we can make (some) sense of it at all.
People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs). In some ways I find this the most surprising of all. For years we assumed people had trouble with trees, never mind graphs. And suddenly hyperlinks come along, and as long as there is a Back button, they work.
I would argue that the “back” button is one of the two or three defining constraints of interaction design. I’d even go so far to say that it’s more significant than the hyperlink.
“Back” doesn’t just mean “go backwards”: it stands for the entire paradigm of user-controlled navigation, arbitrary hyperlinking, and back-as-undo that everyone has come to expect from the behavior of software.. The back button is a contract web design has with our users.
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That it is a universal namespace.
The most important thing about the Web is that it is a universal namespace, something that has not been available before, not at this level of precision.
Benny Gustavsson, On the Semantic Web languagePDF
“I’m not saying making money and doing the right thing are mutually incompatible, I’m saying that making money is doing the right thing.”
“You can’t lie your way to the truth; you can’t government your way to a free market.”
Ayn Rand’sWP, ELZR Atlas ShruggedAM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.
The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.
He just can. Many have said it before and I too had glimpsed at it from time to time at his Dilbert blog, but I just read (via 2centsworth) The Little Robot That Could post—a thought experiment against the idea of freewill—and have to say it again: he’s funny, he gets the message across, he’s unassumingly challenging, he’s imaginative, he risks, he’s enticingly (yet humbly) pretentious, he delivers, he’s faithfulELZR, he conveys, he makes you think—he can write.
Of all the controversial topics I’ve raised on this blog, free will is the one that seems to most grab people by the nuts and/or teats and twirl them around. I understand why. Belief in free will is the reboot button for civilization. Don’t read any further until you have saved your applications.
Today I offer a new approach to understanding why you don’t have free will. I call it The Little Robot That Could. I will show that a robot, designed with current technology, could exhibit everything you call free will. Once you accept that the robot has every bit of “choice” that you have in this world, your superstition about your own choices will begin to dissolve. That process will take about a month.
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