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After an afternoon of sumptuous, unrestrained culinary indulgence, bursting at the seams, a friend of Ureña, one of dad’s best friends, liked to say, in fantastically black humor: ”Ojala hubiera muerto de niño—para no sufrir tanto.” (“I wish I’d died a child—to save myself from so much suffering.”)

”Trabajo que no da para levantarse a las 11[AM], no es trabajo.” (“A job that doesn’t pay enough for sleeping after noon is no job.”) Used to say another, rather too fond of the good life, friend of Dad’s.

People usually said goodbye to my grandgrandmother Aurora—who is now just over a hundred—with a formulaic, yet earnest, “Take care!” To which she promptly responded, ”You take care! I’m over ninety years old, what I want to do now is die!”

”Que puedes esperar Parra,” (“What can you expect Parra”) used to say Ureña jokingly to my father, ”yo me crie con tortillas de sal y chile. Yo no comi pescado, ni leche, ni jamon.” (“I was raised on tortillas with salt and chile. I didn’t get to eat fish, nor milk, nor ham.”)

My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.

• Susan Stepney’s Homepage. Swim around her factoids or her myriad book reviews—sci-fi and non-fiction being the two categories. And boy does she read good nonfiction. Check her rated non-fiction index for a good glimpse of it and notice how her book reviews tend to grow organically into full-fledged bibliographies [example].

• Luis Pabon’s Entropía blog (in Spanish). If you can only read one thing from him, let it be El hombre que hablaba al reves (The man who spoke the wrong way round)—it’s positively brilliant. Positively.

  There’s also a letter to his future self; oblique strategies; an elegant fable: El pez que se bebió el océano (The fish who drank the ocean); obscure calendar erudition: La abreviatura de los miércoles (Wednesday’s abbreviation); original music; a scanning of a (terrifying) dictation from a Spain under Franco: Libertad Dictada (Dictated Freedom); a reflection sparked by GTD^WP: Conocerse a sí mismo (Knowing Oneself); an absolutely amateur, yet interesting, physics experiment: Acústica de fluidos; and a beautiful, infinite poem. Even his profile is writing of the highest order.

  He has infodesign talent to spare, as he showed with his proposal in my calendar challenge, and he can sometimes use it for most amusing purposes. Like these two graphs here, perfectly illustrating why sometimes to go forward it’s better to get some distance first:

  
  

  Most intriguing is when he combines this graphic inclination with his (prodigious) verbosity to create amazing, longwinded plays with the ridiculous (think of that famous bathroom-tissue-distribution-units passage from Snow Crash^WP). There’s for instance the Messiah Project, his compendium of priorization strategies, and his “simple graphical and mathematical model for the analysis and assessment of situations according to a person’s capacity, responsibility, and will.”

  “Luis… estás como un cencerro!!!” says a legendary comment. Correctly.

Fuck, I keep thinking and thinking and thinking. And instead of stopping for a moment and writing some of it in this rather forlorn weblog, I keep reading and reading and reading—keep stoking the pyre.

This is getting scary. One of these days either I burn or I firework.

They say that as you grow old you should stop idealizing your parents. Grow out of seeing them as mighty heroes and realize they’re flawed human beings like everyone. And it’s true. And it’s good advice. But it’s a pretty big world out there. And it has its heroes. And there must be at least some of them who have kids. There are.

If I have always within me this silly joy that cares little for justifications. If welded to me is this naive faith in people, in reason, in conversation, in love, in truth—in human possibilities. If I’ve never lacked wonder. If I’m so unfettered I’ve always lived in the future. If I believe in me. If I never look back. If I dare.

It’s because of my parents. I’m thankful. Tonight. Tomorrow.

A better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card.

It all started because my 48-year-old mom, blessed her, can’t read small type very well. She has trouble using little calendar cards because the day numerals are so small and last time she complained I paused and empathized with her travail. The problem, it was suddenly obvious, was not only the marketing debris that encroaches upon every poor card but rather the quite wasteful scheme we use for representing a year—the same table with the same thirty-something numbers over and over.

Take a fancy flight, don’t assume anything, not even numbers, as long as you keep these things in mind:

• The bigger the type size (or meaningful features) the better.
• The smaller the design the better. The original goal was for it to fit comfortably (you can use both sides of the paper) within 86 by 54 millimeters (3.370 by 2.125 in) of paper (your standard business card^WP) but something slightly bigger could be just as useful. We are going for useful. (Thanks Dave Pawson!)
• Immediately understandable (or pretty darn close).
• Should span an entire year.
• On any given “date” of the year, be able to easily tell what its name, its month, and its month number is.
• Instant: The less steps you need to know before knowing a date’s data the better.
• Contextual: You should be able to easily “walk” from a date to another one close by, thereby counting the days between them. People do this all the time.
• Markable: You should be able to easily mark (circle, cross, check) holidays and special dates.

Yes, I know mom could carry some sort of foldable large-type calendar, 12 calendar cards with a month each, or simply start wearing her prescribed glasses (nigh impossible), but that’s off the point right now. Let that true story be our convenient pretext for innovation.

Also note that though the idea arose out of accessibility concerns, everyone would benefit with it, just as we all grip the helping handles in hotel bathtubs.

I think the best existing metaphor for what we would like to accomplish here are modern statistical innovations like the boxplot^WP or the stem-and-leaf plot^WP—proof that novel, almost magical displays of breathtaking elegance are just around the corner. IBM’s thread arcs is a recent example.

Another good metaphor might be the Roman number system^WP vs. the Hindu-Arabic one^WP. For some five thousand millennia the best humanity could produce in its oldest art, reckoning, was the crude, procrustean Roman system—so primitive that it made even multiplication specialists’ labor. Then in a flight of fancy some unknown Hindu stumbled upon the (graphical!) principle of position—it was as far-reaching a discovery as can be imagined, allowing for the development of simple, clear-cut arithmetical rules that became the cornerstone for algebra, itself the cornerstone of modern mathematics. (If the topic interests you, do read Tobias Dantzig’s classic account, Number^AM)

More down-to-earth, the calendar and clock pedias are obvious and essential starting points—history is as good a source of what could be as it is of what has been. Information Aesthetics’ Creative Calendar Design showcase should get your creative designs flowing, and so should a quick search through the site for clocks. Tokyoflash has some interesting interfaces for telling time.

Also, dad showed me an old planner of his that had something called a perpetual calendar^WP: a 5-page calendar that tells you what day it was between 1821 to 2080. Here’s a scanning of it. Perhaps it could help to find useful patterns in the Gregorian calendar^WP.

Finally, don’t let constraints paralyze you. Don’t think a proposal has to be “perfect” or “right” to submit it, the tiniest improvement could turn out to be crucial.

Anyone can submit a proposal. A proposal consists of a picture mock up. To submit a proposal comment this post with your name and a link to your mockup (we’ll put the picture up here in the post in the Submissions section). Submit as many proposals as you wish. Submit in parallel to the Information Aesthetics post on the challenge for extra promotion to your work.

Though you submit proposals through the comments that doesn’t mean your comments need limit to proposals. Not at all. Please share ideas, point to inspirational sources, suggest evaluation criteria, ask, answer, pick your favorites, praise, mock, and critique proposals. Warning, mini calendar making is highly addictive!

I’ll consider today, Monday January 22, 2007, the challenge’s start date. It will be open for a month (we have to give the unconscious time to do its magic), closing Tuesday February 22, 2007. My biotech friend Zamantha, my mom, and me will be the judges. I’ll announce the winner Monday February 26, 2007—my birthday—here in this post.

The challenge will still end by Feb. 22, 2007, but since I’m participating I don’t know who should be the judge or whether there’ll be a judge at all—or even a “winner”. Perhaps we should call this a cooperation instead of a competition?

The judge has spoken (congrats to Adam Sporka!) but the challenge ain’t over friends. Please keep the submissions flowing! Take our breath away with an evolutionary/revolutionary design!

The journey. Of course. ;)

Just imagine if your design works. It would make for an unbeatable showcase to scream your mindboggling information design talent to the world everywhere you go: by definition, it’d be universally useful, universally impressive, portable, and easy to explain (even to your mother!). It would be (literally) the perfect presentation card. People would use your creation many times every year and mutter praise to your name every single time. The eternal gratitude of the presbyope^WP kind would be yours (and with most people over 40 afflicted to some degree, that’s a substantial percent of the global population). Even more far-reachingly, people who use your calendar would mentally represent and understand the year through your design—you would have created a new metaphor for time. Just think about that.

(Plus! It’s still early in the year, The year’s almost over, what better gift for friends and family than a 2007 2008 pocket calendar of your own making?)

Excuse’s user testing went so well I decided to improve it. The original strip had color but it was somehow so distracting that black and white looked better. Then I found about the burn tool in a Photoshop tutorial I chanced on. What a difference it made! There’s a lot more focus! Much better outlines. (No doubt about it, learning Photoshop would be one of the best investments of my time…)

I think the changes are for the better. And so, it’s time for phase 2 of the plan: the metacomic. Print the comic on hard paper and carry it in your pocket, tote, whatever. Next time you’re bored in the subway, bus, wherever, show it to your right-hand neighbor (in the absence of a right-hand neighbor, feel free to substitute your left-hand one). Let it be your excuse. Report on what happened. :)

Here’s a (controversial) idea for a language test inspired by the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence^WP:

The test could be easily constrained to test for more specific capabilities: one could test for written command of language X by only permitting written communications, test only for accent by limiting “communication” to the spoken repeating of the judge’s written sentences, and so on.

It is simply stated but almost a “thought test”^WP—it could be done, but there would be a myriad practical complications and scaling would be a bitch. What’s important about it, though, is that it is a valid test to demand of (foreign) language learning: passing it should at least be its hypothetical goal.

The problem is that ridiculously few people would pass it if it where applied today. And because it seems impossibly difficult most people turn away, dismiss the test as wrong or irrelevant, and sink their heads in the sand (“what shouldn’t be, can’t be right”). Which only highlights the current sorry state of language education. It is NOT asking too much. It is not asking for exceptional performance—it doesn’t ask of you to be a Nobel-prize, a literati, or a rapper. It’s merely demanding average, pick-a-guy-from-the-street native-speaker capabilities. Why isn’t that a valid goal to ask of language education?

You could say that most people don’t need native-speaker level to start benefiting from a foreign language and that’s entirely true. But it is just as true that not reaching it is a serious, frustrating, even painful hurdle to communication. A hurdle that will plague ever more people the more the world shrinks. Some of the world’s smartest people can’t get their r’s right hard as they try. And we mock them for it. (Soon, we will be the mocked ones for not getting our intonations right.)

Well looked, Turing level is perhaps even a modest goal. We all possess it already in the language we are born into and we all contained within us the same language potentiality at birth. So it should be perfectly achievable and shouldn’t take nearly as much time as starting from zero.

Yes, I know. We are nowhere near knowing how to reach such a level efficiently. It’s too hard and too long a goal—currently. But we should at least strive for it. (And be honest with students on what the status quo of our language technology is: no more “Learn to speak Chinese in 21 days!”—for now.) Languages are some of the most complex and powerful artifacts we have created. It’s only to be expected that their learning is one of the most complex and difficult challenges we face.

But it is also one of our most rewarding (and valuable) experiences. I want to commoditize it.

Chances are we are on the brink of Turing level language translation^ELZR. Why aren’t we even close to practical Turing level language learning? I’d still want it.

It was a very simple idea—a girl and a boy, in the subway—and yet actually drawing it was a nightmare. There are any number of things I would do different for my next webcomic. I guess that means the effort was worth it: much was learned.

So, again, the idea is a girl and a boy in the subway (I used this Flickr photo to “remember” the subway). None of them can muster the courage to speak to each other, none of them can come up with a clever excuse for starting the conversation. Until the girl realizes there’s no bad excuse for meeting someone. And that is her excuse. That’s it.

Reminds me a lot of an elevator sign I scrawled years ago.

Scott McCloud begins Understanding Comics^AM wrangling to create a definition of comics, contrasting it with pictures and movies. Taken individually, a picture is merely that, a picture. Arranged sequentially however, pictures are transformed into something else. If the sequence is temporal—pictures alternating in time, fixed in space—we call that art movies. If the sequence is spatial—pictures adjacent in space, “juxtaposed”—we call it comics.

So that’s that. His is a great book and you won’t regret reading it, but for now hearken back with me to the web before blogs. There was, in such olden times, something called the «personal homepage»: primeval websites where people put their disjointed personal trivia for the world to admire. (See An Exploratory Profile of Personal Home Pages: Content, Design, Metaphors.) They were usually boring, disorienting, and self-flattering (think photo albums) but there had been nothing like that before, not on this scale—you could learn about fascinating people you’d otherwise never meet and there were some unbelievable things out there. But back to the photo album metaphor. Personal homepages were piles of scattered, assorted personal paraphernalia—they were, in a way, photo albums.

Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.

By spatial, we mean that blogs, just as comics, unfold in space. There’s a post and right below it there’s another, further below, another, and so on. It makes as much sense to talk of a “blog strip” as of a “comic strip”—about the only difference is that the former goes from top-to-bottom while the latter from left-to-right (or right-to-left).

And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.

Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.

(Blogs are the web’s poster boy for spatial sequence but they’re by no means the only (or the first) web form to avail itself of it. Comments, within blogs and beyond, are also spatially sequenced, are also comics. So are forum threads.)

What, then, is the equivalent of movies in the web? What web form is temporally sequenced—”pictures” alternating in time, fixed in space? The hard part, really, was coming up with the question. The answer is obvious: wikis.

Consider a popular pedia^ELZR (Wikipedia article). It’s the product of a myriad interventions (most of them rather trivial) from several Wikipedists, but you are only seeing the most recent frame when visiting the pedia’s URL. If you visit in a couple of hours, chances are someone corrected a typo, reverted vandalism, or added a sentence, and you will thus see a slightly different frame—the pedia has “moved”! Unknown to a surprising amount of users, every pedia has a history where a log is kept of even the most minute change—the movie’s celluloid film. Wikis are movies.