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Happy Birthday Rails! 2
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6
Sep
08

Time is turning yet again: a beloved CIMAT teacher just send me one more of his one-every-24-months email, my 2nd out-of-school anniversary is around the corner (September 14), and today I found, via Joel 1, that Rails just celebrated its second anniversary itself (yup, we were born to the web around the same date).

Letâ€™s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake. And have understanding for those conditioned by past disappointments to classify all that is new and ripe with passion to be uninteresting, to be all hype, no calories.

Weâ€™re past the point of infatuation, this is love, and love is inclusive. Happy birthday Rails, happy birthday Railers.

David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails steps into year three

¹ Who, incidentally, got into a weird, but well-deserved, skirmish with DHH some days ago.

tagged announces, blogs, code, favorites, future, geekery, programming, rails, reminiscing, software, writing

What could be 2
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6
Sep
07

Ellen J. Langer’s Mindfulness was a personal landmark: a wondrous book on human possibilities, their promise, and their everyday annihilation. I’ve already sprinkled several quotes from it in previous posts^ELZR (and will continue to do so) but there is one quote that deserves all the highlighting I can give it—this may rank as the most provocative thing I’ve ever read:

Teaching can be done in a much more conditional way.. Children are usually taught “this is a pen,” “this is a rose,” “this is a car.” It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category “pen.” But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that “this could be a pen”? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child “this is a pen.” What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: “This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass”? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island (when the fork and screwdriver could double as tent pegs for the sheet, near a fire made by the magnifying glass)? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught “a family’ is, a mother, a father, and a child” versus “a family could be…”

Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness^AM, p124

To the jaded eye, most of the paragraph can be easily dismissed as an extravagant, pie-in-the-sky rambling, and I dismissed it so when I first read it—so what if kiddos would make better Robinson Crusoes^WP? Should we realign our education for that?—but then the last lightning sentence comes and in its flash we glimpse the world that could be. Do you see?

tagged cognition, epiphanies, favorites, ideas, learning, mindfulness, psychology, quote collages, scifi, surprises, things I've learned, what could be

The Physical Impossibility of Life in the Mind of Someone Dead 2
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6
Sep
07

tagged aphorisms, art, beauty, epiphanies, favorites, fetishy, flickr, mongrels, nsfw, photos, porn, serendipity, sex, tips, web

The Chance Causality of Talent 2
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6
Aug
29

This time a fascinating little gem from the cover article, The Expert Mind, of this month’s Scientific American: The month you were born plays decisive importance into whether you’ll become a professional soccer player or not. That’s a fact.

A 1999 study of professional soccer players suggests that they owe their success more to training than to talent. In Germany, Brazil, Japan and Australia, the players were much more likely than average to have been born in the first quarter (Q1) after the cutoff date for youth soccer leagues.. Because these players were older than their teammates when they joined the leagues, they would have enjoyed advantages in size and strength, allowing them to handle the ball and score more often. Their success in early years would have motivated them to keep improving, thus explaining their disproportionate representation in the professional leagues.

NOTE: The cutoff dates were August 1 for Germany, Brazil and Australia, and April 1 for Japan.

Philip E. Ross, The Expert Mind

I’m reminded of Steven Pinker’s wonderful, mocking account of how he became a scientist (which appears in John Brockman’s Curious Minds, a book I’ve praised lavishly already).

Don’t believe a word of what you read in this essay on the childhood influences that led me to become a scientist. Don’t believe a word of what you read in the other essays, either. One of the curses of being an experimental psychologist is the habit of scrutinizing one’s own mental processes. Recounting childhood influences is a mental process no less subject to quirks and errors than falling for the visual illusions on the back of a cereal box. Everything I know about the recollection of childhood influences makes me approach this assignment with misgivings..

In a classic 1977 review, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson argued that many of the causes of our choices never enter our consciousness. Here is a simple example. If you present people with an array of articles of clothing and ask them to pick one to keep, they tend to pick the rightmost one. But if you then ask them to list the reasons they chose that article, no one says, “Because it was the one on the right.” They cite only the features of the objects themselves. Not having served in experiments in which the same items were presented in different orders, people have no grounds for knowing that a dumb factor like left-to-right position could be a cause of their behavior. And that’s a major problem for memories of what influenced us: None of us has taken part in the experiments that would isolate the causes of our choices in life.

[Ultimately,] chance must play an enormous role in development. We might be shaped by whether an axon zigged or zagged as our brains jelled in the womb, whether we got the top bunk or the bottom bunk, whether we were dropped on our head, whether we inhaled a virus. Needless to say, few people cite factors like these among their childhood influences..

Steven Pinker, How we may Have Become What We Are

tagged books, droll, favorites, fun, graphs, learning, liberty, little facts, philosophy, psychology, quote collages, quotes, science, selves, sports, statistics, surprises

Why are hyperlinks underlined? 2
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6
Aug
18

The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries..

Steven Johnson, Interface Culture^AM, p110-1

Indeed it is, but then we might as well feel warranted to pose the seldom-asked question of why are hyperlinks underlined. Dull utilitarian answers aside, an intriguing yet plausible historical explanation (or rather, re-interpretation) herefollows.

I believe our answer traces back to the humble clothe button^A, that immemorial “knoblike appendage^WP used on wearing apparel either for ornament or for fastening,” forgotten (as much else) during the Middle Ages, dismissed as vanity by the Puritans, and traded to Native Americans by early settlers.

With society’s mechanization through the first and second Industrial Revolutions^WP, there was dire need to create appropriate interfaces for the control of the suddenly ubiquitous machines and one of the simplest, most versatile methods invented came to be called “button”^WP, owing to its creative resemblance to the former fashion accessory (both were usually round after all).

One subtle point, which shall prove of great importance later, must be remarked now: Owing to human factors^WP, most control buttons are usually seen from a very specific angle. Words fail me to further describe it but perhaps some pictures can help to illustrate the matter: the keyboard on the ←left shows the usual, canonical perspective of buttons we’ve grown accustomed to since the late 18^th century, and any other perspective, say, the keyboard on the right→, feels immediately awkward.

But back to our story: When the turn came for society’s computerization, there was again dire need to come up with suitable interfaces for the novel symbolic devices. Abstruse command-line^WP interactions followed at first, but thanks to Xerox PARC’s^WP bitmap revolution¹ graphical interfaces^WP were envisioned (and, eventually, accepted). The new art form required new metaphors² and prompted a creativity explosion that continues to this day, but few metaphors proved more fertile or intuitive than the visual staple that became the “graphic button”. Beveled out, it’s “push affordance”³ invites interaction (a click, a push, a press) like nothing else we’ve come up with since.

⁴

With the advent of the inter-network, you guessed it, that direst of needs—the interface—made itself felt again. We needed a way to link geographically and semantically far-flung documents^EE together. So what if Ted Nelson^WP himself, hypertext’s father, was thinking in our trusty ole friend, the button, when he came up with his gift to the world?

The hyperlink might just be the latest, abstract, stylized reincarnation of our centuries-old pal, the button.

¹ “The word itself [bitmap] suggested an unlikely alliance of cartography and binary code, an explorer’s guide to the new frontier of information.” Steven Johnson, Interface Culture^AM, p21

For insight into the bitmap revolution see M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine^AM, p366-8, and the raster graphics pedia.

² Among which the worst yet best-known is probably the so-called “desktop metaphor”^WP.

³ See Larry L. Constantine, Lucy A. D. Lockwood, Instructive Interaction: Making Innovative Interfaces Self-Teaching, p8, and also the affordance pedia to understand how the term is used by interaction designers.

⁴ Notice how of all the buttons showcased only MacOs X’s corner balls break that familiar perspective talked about in the 4^th paragraph (usually hinted at through internal shadowing). I finally understand why they felt so jarring when I first saw them: not only are they overcolored for their humble functions, they’re not buttons, they’re weirdly lighted marbles.

tagged computers, criticism, design, droll, epiphanies, essays, favorites, fun, graphs, information design, interface design, lyricism, meaty posts, original content, software, technolyricism, web, whimsicist, wikipedia | 6 Comments

Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese. 2
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6
Aug
16

Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…

I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..

..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.

This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..

It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.

But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.

Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:

Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.

Thomas L. Friedman, A Well of Smiths and Xias (emphases added)

I love Friedman. This is one of his best pieces ever.

tagged america, anecdotes, china, economics, epiphanies, favorites, future, globalization, interesting people, lyricism, memes, migration, mongrels, nyt, patriotism, philosophy, politics, quote collages, readings, thomas friedman | 1 Comment

Gmail Matrix 2
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6
Aug
11

I don’t know exactly when or how the thought came into my mind but this morning the epiphany was there: wouldn’t it be cool to see Gmail’s half MB Javascript source¹ a la matrix code view^IY? Indeed it would, and so for the next half hour I became a man posessed. It was amazingly easy (“ya sabiendo es facil”) to hack it up in JS and it makes for an interesting screensaver.

When I finished I realized it would be really easy to make my makeshift Matrix code generic and so here’s a quick stab at it. Type whatever text you want matrixified and a new window will (hopefully) popup with it. (Though be warned, it’s pretty rough, unpolished code and it’ll surely be too slow if you don’t have a fast computer.) Anyway, enjoy.

And yet against all that dislocation and overload and multiplicity there is the interface. Most of the time we talk about the graphic interface as though it were a logical culmination of the digital revolution, its crowning glory, but the truth is, the interface serves largely as a corrective to the forces unleashed by the information age. Whenever I find myself being swayed by the fragmentation jeremiads, I like to sit down at my computer and go through the usual routinesâ€”-check my e-mail, rearrange my desktop, log on to the Webâ€”-and concentrate all the while on what is really happening as I do these things. Because what is really happening, not on the screen but down in the innards of the machine itself, or out on the great expanses of the Internet, what is happening in that world is literally unimaginable. What is happening is that billions of tiny pulses of electricity are hurtling through silicon conduits, like an entire planet's worth of digital automobiles making their way across the grid of a single microchip. And all those pulses self-organize into larger shapes and patterns, into assembly codes, machine languages, instruction sets. Some of these ethereal languages then transform themselves into flashes of light, or audio waveforms, and depart en masse from my machine into the sprawling backbone of the Net, where they disperse into countless separate units, and then thread their way through thousands of other microchips, before reuniting at their destination.

But what happens on the screen is this: a window pops open, a dialog box appears, a bright, cheerful voice tells me that I have mail.

No news here, of course, but something profound nonetheless. The great surge of information that has swept across our society in recent years looks genuinely innocuous next to the meticulous anarchy of real bit-space, that netherworld that lurks in our microchips and our fiber-optic lines. But we see almost nothing of that universe because we have built such sturdy mediators to keep it separate from us, translators that make sense of what would otherwise be a blizzard of senselessness. It is undeniable that the world has never seen so many zeros and ones, so many bits and bytes of informationâ€”but by the same token, it has never been so easy to ignore them altogether, to deal only with their enormously condensed representatives on the screen. Which is why we should think of the interface, finally, as a synthetic form, in both senses of the word. It is a forgery of sorts, a fake landscape that passes for the real thing, andâ€”perhaps most importantâ€”it is a form that works in the interest of synthesis, bringing disparate elements together into a cohesive whole.

Seen in this light, all that ranting about the fragmented consciousness of the digital age sounds a great deal less convincing. After all, critics have bemoanedâ€”or championedâ€”the accelerated pace of the present, its dislocations and divided selves, ever since the industrial age powered up in the early nineteenth century. Think of Baudelaire losing himself in the shimmering, half-lit streets of Paris, becoming a "kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness." Think of Joyce's characters bouncing back and forth between biblical references and advertising jingles. Think of Marinetti's poetry, renouncing "the 'I' in all literature" for the speed of the race car and the destructiveness of the machine gun. Conceptual turbulenceâ€”-the sense of the world accelerating around you, pulling you in a thousand directions at once-â€”is a deeply Modern tradition, with roots that go back hundreds of years. What differentiates our own historical moment is that a symbolic form has arisen designed precisely to counteract that tendency, to battle fragmentation and overload with synthesis and sense-making. The interface is a way of seeing the whole. Or, at the very least, a way of seeing its shadow illuminated by the bright phosphor of the screen.

When I think about the gap between raw information and its numinous life on the screenâ€”something I try to avoid doing, because it is a dark and difficult thought, more than a little like contemplating the age of the universe-â€”the whole sensation has a strangely religious feel to it, that sense of the mind trying to reach around a vibrant (and convenient) metaphor to the wider truth that lies beyond. Cathedrals, remember, were "infinity imagined," the heavens brought down to earthly scale. The medieval mind couldnâ€™t take in the full infinity of godliness, but it could subjugate itself before the majestic spires of Chartres or Saint-Sulpice. The interface offers a comparable sidelong view onto the infosphere, half unveiling and half disappearing act. It makes information sensible to you by keeping most of it from viewâ€”-for the simple reason that "most of it" is far too multitudinous to imagine in a single thought.

-Steven Johnson, Interface Culture

Next time you see Gmail,

think,

fn1. Which I downloaded thanks to Firefox’s wonderful Webdeveloper extension.

tagged code, computers, epiphanies, experiments, favorites, fun, google, javascript, original content, portfolio, programming, screenshots, technology, whimsicist | 7 Comments

Google Music 2
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6
Aug
04

Google’s Music Search represents one important future of Google’s “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” mission: digesting the chaotic web and regurgitating it anew, catalog-like, simpler and more standardized (which has worrying implications, but is also a wonderful prospect, provided it’s just one more option). Yes, this is similar to what it actually does through search, but the difference is that this new Google-digested web is browsable, not just a black-box accessible piecemeal only through question & answers. Google wants to become the interface.

tagged criticism, favorites, future shock, google, interface design, music, software, web, webapps | 3 Comments

15k 2
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6
Aug
04

No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought. It can allow a decision maker to do almost nothing but decision making, instead of processing data to get into a position to make the decision.

J.C.R. Licklider, Invited commentary after ”The Computer in the University” talk by Alan Perlis at the Sloan School of Business Administration, April 1961, as quoted by M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, p180^EE (emphasis added)

The mouth-wide-open wonder at today’s technologic possibilities that begun with my grandfather’s mosaic^ELZR, has not subdued—what with my succesful cloning of The Economist^ELZR tables or my quick spidering^ELZR—but it has gradually become an expectation. I’ve thought long and hard about it and am finally ready to accept it.

Because, in the end, disbelief of what we can now accomplish is only laziness by another name. I have a (much cherished) cousin who shuns digital photography altogether because it’s too easy. I say that’s bollocks. If manipulating photos is now mom’s play, that only means the challenge moves to being creative with the tools at hand. And when machines become creative (as they will no doubt do), then our challenge will be to find good things for them to be creative at. And when they figure that out—well, we’d better be seafaring^EE by then.

But after all, civilization is some 15k years old, so what’s the wonder? We should be gods by now (and we are, in a way).

tagged aphorisms, computers, eemadges, epiphanies, essays, favorites, future shock, inspiration, meaty posts, original content, philosophy, technology, technolyricism, the economist, the singularity, what could be

The Secret Lives of Numbers 2
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6
Aug
04

Overview and Detail. The pair keeps coming up whenever you start pondering on interfaces, interface patterns, interface & information design, and well (why won’t be grand?) space, time,^ELZR and thought itself. Achieving both—the ancient dream of simultaneity—is one of the deep purposes of any media creator, from writers^EE to interface designers, and though it may be a humble example, The Secret Lives of Numbers—an interface to the results of a crazy study of the search-engine popularity of every integer between 0 and 1 million¹—is a superb one.

The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.. We surmise that our dataset is a numeric snapshot of the collective consciousness. Herein we return our analyses to the public in the form of an interactive visualization, whose aim is to provoke awareness of one’s own numeric manifestations.

The Secret Lives of Numbers—About (emphasis added)

Click to view a 3.15-Mb PDF critique of the interface (right-click and select Save Link As to download)

The denizens of the number line are not the mere automatons or corporate tools we have made them out to be: each has a personality, talents, communities, and sometimes a little je ne sais quois. They reflect us. This unusual reflection is the focus of this project.

The Secret Lives of Numbers—Statement

As for the credits:

Concept, direction, interface design & programming: Golan Levin
Interface and information design: Martin Wattenberg
Database & CGI programming (2002): Jonathan Feinberg
CGI programming (1997): David Becker
Statistics consulting: David Elashoff
Essay and research: Shelly Wynecoop

The Secret Lives of Numbers—Contact

If you believe in geniuses you’re in for a treat checking out the three URLs above—each of them’s one. Martin Watenberg in particular, has some of the most intriguing information visualizations I’ve ever seen.

¹ Though owing to limitations of internet bandwidth only data for the first 100,000 are provided online.

tagged blogs, criticism, experiments, favorites, graphs, images, information design, interesting people, interface design, math, meaty posts, original content, portfolio, programming, web, webapps, whimsicist

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Favorites

Happy Birthday Rails! 2006 Sep08

What could be 2006 Sep07

The Physical Impossibility of Life in the Mind of Someone Dead 2006 Sep07

The Chance Causality of Talent 2006 Aug29

Why are hyperlinks underlined? 2006 Aug18

Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese. 2006 Aug16

Gmail Matrix 2006 Aug11

Google Music 2006 Aug04

15k 2006 Aug04

The Secret Lives of Numbers 2006 Aug04