“learning”

As a lapsed gamer myself, Nintendo’s new strategy—simplicity, in several senses—makes a lot of sense and strikes me as a major step in the evolution of our tech gizmos. Since a 1995 Gameboy, the DS^WP is the last handheld console that I remember caring for (and that’s mostly for that intriguing Brain Age^WP game).

As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures¹. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.

My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.

The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li Zhensheng^WP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News Soldier^AM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:

I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.

The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond Age^AM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.

So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.

Whoa, just discovered SongMeanings an hour ago. Excellent idea (add criticism to lyrics), clean interface (several ads notwithstanding), massive execution (Artists: 25,245 | Lyrics: 295,933 | Albums: 11,073 | Members: 228,392 | Comments: 723,538). Can’t believe never heard of it before.

Perhaps most intriguing is how clearly it shows the possibilities (instant participation, individuality, the work is the history, evolution is visible, filtering by time is easy, contributions are isolated) and limitations (signal-to-noise ratio, self-healing’s hard or impossible, the work is the history, lack of structure, lack of pruning, parallelism, unnecessary repetition, digressiveness) of criticism based on sequential comments. Reddit’s comment pages are good examples of how simple voting can advance the medium (because though we lack a name for it, “sequential comments/notes” is a medium, just like comics is the medium of sequential images), but, fuck, for the purposes of criticism my bets for medium still go to collaborative-writing, wiki, (my) WikiCriticism. (If only I could fork myself into better, harder-working, single-minded mes…)

Yesterday I went to the first International Gastronomic Fair in Guadalajara and it was on the whole quite bad, but I did chance on several interesting finds (photoset):

danah boyd’s new essay on digital privacy and intimacy seems to be everywhere right now and yet (or because of that?) I had been studiously avoiding it. It was negligent of me, because it really is that good (and that unsettling).

So again it all comes down to “celebrity”, doesn’t it? I for one didn’t notice that weird, contorted word creeping in but it has become the talisman. It’s what danah is talking about in the above paragraphs: celebrity, painfully confused with intimacy. You can now obsess and lurk Jane Blog as you did Jennifer Aniston through the tabloids—and it will be just as fun and just as empty.

Unless you interact, that is. (And that’s the digital promise and perhaps one possible counter-measure for sanity: to limit your feed to those people you engage meaningfully with.)

I love this description of the design process because that’s exactly how it is for me. (Via Kottke)

Blogging for dollars is the pretty good, pretty interesting cover article from this month’s Business 2.0 about how the mainstream blogs (MSB?^WP) like Boing Boing, Fark, Metafilter, TechCrunch ^ELZR, Digg or Dooce are monetizing their traffic. Thorough and filled with lots of $ data, what surprised me the most about it was how obviously promotional it was. It’s basically an extended infomercial on blog-advertising, which doesn’t take away that it makes several good insights on media and how technology is turning us into one-man-bands^ELZR, but, still, deliberately mislabeling content is just an euphemism for lying.

I believe that an interface that is both modeless and, insofar as possible, monotonous—all other design features being of at least normal quality for a modern interface—would be extraordinarily pleasant to use. A user would be able to develop an unusually high degree of trust in his habits. The interface would, from these two properties alone, tend to fade from the user’s consciousness, allowing him to give his full attention to the task at hand. The psychological effects of totally (or near totally) modeless and monotonous systems is an area of interface design ripe for experimental study.

If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monotony would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product. Its users would find moving to a competitor’s product psychologically difficult. Unlike selling illicit drugs, marketing an addictive interface is legal, and the product is beneficial to its users; in another way, it is just like selling illicit drugs: extremely profitable.

Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface^AM, p68

With modeless he means that “a given user gesture has one and only one result: Gesture g always results in action a.” With monotonous, that “any desired result has only one means by which it may be invoked: Action a is invoked by gesture g and in no other way.”

(It’s surprising how all this can be expressed by saying that we want the relationship between gestures and actions to be a function^WP, and an injective^WP and surjective^WP one at that. In other words, a good interface is a bijective^WP interface. I remember how hard those words were to me my first semester studying Math. Never thought I’d find them again studying interfaces!)

And regarding the quote itself, it’s a tough sell, because it goes against many of my computing prejudices. But Raskin just might be right—in a truly revolutionary way. We’ll find out at Domburi. ;)

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:

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?