Fun

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 design^ELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy Bliss^WP, 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.

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

My first (self-)published joke. They should lock me.

Never would’ve thought designing calendars was this fun. (PokeCalendario, btw, is a great turn of phrase by James P. Wack)

This really won’t save you any work at all but it’s sure to baffle casual onlookers.

At heart is just the usual distributive^WP algorithm we all use when multiplying arabics^WP, rearranged and visually rewritten using the immediate correspondence of crisscrosses to multiplication: .

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.

Sergio (MdC), one of my best friends, went last sixmonth to Ciudad Juarez^WP for a paid internship he got through his school. He went there with a schoolmate that went for the same reason. This roommate, I learned a couple of days ago, turns out to have Gael Garcia^WP as a cousin. Gael Garcia dated (dates?) Natalie Portman^WP So You → Me → Sergio → Roommate → Gael Garcia → Natalie Portman makes for five degrees of separation. Which is a deep, marvelous fact about the world that you should ponder at length.

(Five degrees is only an upper bound^WP. You, dear reader, could be even closer to Natalie—if so, please detail in the comments. You could even be Natalie herself—if so, my cell number’s on the left. Thanks!)

What was meant to happen, happened. I ended up participating in my own infodesign calendar challenge (where, of course, I’m one of the judges—my mom and a friend being the other two). Rather, I was one of the judges. The challenge’s doing a lot of soul-searching right now, looking for new judges, and even wondering whether it would be better to call itself a cooperation instead of a competition. (Thoughts?)

I started the challenge because while I thought designing a better calendar was a fascinating problem, I had no idea whatsoever of how to attack it. Then a magical thing happened with other people’s submissions: no big idea came, but a myriad minor improvements suggested themselves. So I started building mockups and tweaking them a little here, a little there, to prove minor points to myself. The tweaking got out of control, ate more and more of my time, and suddenly biggish, elegant ideas started coming up.

So I spent the past 5, 6 days drawing calendars over and over (and over). It was part escapism from my grandfather dying in the room below mine, but it was also unbelievable fun designing something and then have it be extruded into atoms by my clunky but trusty HP—how concrete and intricate, how physical!^EEM I felt like a miniature artisan or a clockworker. And it really is wonderful to work in a simple problem you can easily explain to people.

This down here is the current outcome (there’s a Spanish version here). Click on it for detailed instructions (if you need’em), descriptions and critique. It’s the end result of a lot of incremental improvements I’ve painstakingly tried to document in this Flickr set—funny it now looks so glaringly obvious.

What do you think? I’ve fiddled with it for several days now and have returned to it again and again. My tired eyes see no clear way of improving it—how about yours? (Here, btw, is the (Excel 2007) source file—yours to fiddle with and build upon.)

(btw2: I did all my prototypes in my beta-testing version of Excel 2007^ELZR. Thought it would be a good chance to take it for a spin and see what the much-vaunted interface improvements amounted too. Turns out they’re rightly vaunted. It’s as good as they told you and then a little better. It’s just so much easier, so much more pleasurable to use the program when so many options are so neatly displayed. The live previews I thought so little of in the videos turn out to be surprisingly helpful. Goodbye toolbar clutter, welcome ribbon. It’s a revolution worth Vista’s failed one.)