“fun”

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?)

I loved Little Miss Sunshine^{WP, IMDB}! Deeply. Hadn’t had this fun with a movie in years. Please do go watch it. Now. (Particularly if you live here in Guadalajara. I doubt it’ll be on theaters beyond this week—there are some 7 people per screening.)

I doubt someone would find this too useful but I smiled today when I found about the guess YubNub command. You feed it text, it gulps the language it’s in. A great way to showcase YubNub’s open-ended fun, courtesy of Xerox research. It would have been a godsend when I was dealing with Imagery’s multilingual rush (Oh, how GMail angered me then! Smart enough to correctly spellcheck anything I gave her, yet coyly keeping the language name to herself!). Hope I need it again soon.

For all of you that aren’t on the YubNub wagon yet, you can play with it here—but it won’t be even half as much fun ;).

And since we already seem to be on a language landslide, some months ago I found out playing with Google Translate that when you translate a website from Chinese to English (which is currently beta), you can hover on a sentence to get the original Chinese fragment in a quick popup. Mighty cool. All the more impressive a feature coming from a website. (Now let’s only hope they plan to add it to the other language pairs too…)

Final language tidbit: translate “Hello, how are you?” to Spanish with Google. Your immediate response is “¿Hola, cómo eres?,” sucking the life out of even the hardiest machine-translation enthusiast.

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.

I bought them New Year’s Eve at Vallarta^WP and they’re ugly and cliché, I know, but they’re uncannily comfy (almost like a second skin or a squishy crust) and I’m still amazed at how happy some silly Naussica-ish shoes can make me.

Techguru Esther Dyson^{WP, EDGE} (who, I just learned, is Freeman Dyson^WP’s daughter) on freedom under communist Russia (and why it was, bizarrely, like bestiality), online smut, intellectual property (long live intellectual process!), failure, and changing the world in a 1996 interview with Virginia Postrel for Reason mag.

I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.

Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.

Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.

I’ve been staring at this strip all day, pasted it on my wall, read all the strips from its parent webcomic (xkcd) —and still it dazzles me. It has got to be among the best I’ve ever read. Quirky, sexy, naive, upbeat—makes me happy every time.

Oh boy, I really love this strip. I’m going to be pasting it everywhere… :)

Dreams comes close after it; Pong, Donald Knuth, M.C. Hammer Slide, Words that end in gry, and Moral Relativity are also keepers; and both Escher Bracelet and Sudoku are almost single-panel-ly perfect in their simplicity.