Esta va por que por a la mayorÃa de nosotros Jalisquillos al hablar de Guadalajara (pensando en la ZMG) nos da por decir que es una ciudad de 7 millones y pico de personas, y esto, para mi inacabable sorpresa, no es cierto. La Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara (ZMG)WPgeneralmente se considera comprendida por los municipios de Guadalajara, Zapopan, Tonalá, Tlaquepaque, Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, y El Salto. Según el INEGI en su conteo de población por municipio Jalisciense, 2005:
(Y ya de pasada, los Guzmanenses siempre andan diciendo que su ciudad tendra unas 250 o 300 mil personas cuando resulta que ni siquiera llega a 100 mil—el municipio de Zapotlan el Grande del que Guzman es cabecera tiene apenas 96,050 habitantes.)
“I have this great illusion of dying exhausted rather than bored” has become of late something like Andrea’s personal slogan. I love the phrase—wrapped in downbeat words, it’s a souvenir of our own mortality that still manages to resolve in cheerful (maudlin) upbeatness—and so I thought it was time for a personal logo too. This came out after some fiddling and I quite like it, if I say so myself. (You will notice I’m still deep in my Bembo phase.) Tomorrow we’ll see if Andrea likes it.
The girl’s Sandman’s Death, which adds a nice layer of meaning (and copyright infringement for good measure) to the logo.
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 buttonA, that immemorial “knoblike appendageWP 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 RevolutionsWP, 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 factorsWP, 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 18th 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-lineWP interactions followed at first, but thanks to Xerox PARC’sWP bitmap revolution1graphical interfacesWP 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.
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 documentsEE together. So what if Ted NelsonWP 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 CultureAM, p21
For insight into the bitmap revolution see M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream MachineAM, p366-8, and the raster graphics pedia.
2 Among which the worst yet best-known is probably the so-called “desktop metaphor”WP.
4 Notice how of all the buttons showcased only MacOs X’s corner balls break that familiar perspective talked about in the 4th 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.
As you may have noticed, I’m unhealthily and impolitely obsessed with quotes. They easily make for my most popular category and were it not for my negligent restraint every single post of this blog could have its very own quote. Though I doubt anyone actually reads them :(, I love crafting them, specially when I go over the top and quote paragraphs upon paragraphs: I trim that detail, highlight that phrase, color that other, and in general try to make the fragment clear and inviting. Today I’m pleased to announce you that the genre has finally coalesced into what I think I’ll call quote collages. (And in a feat of retcon, there are already 7 quote collages on the blog.)
The first and best example of it was today’s Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese post. A quote collage consists of a big, juicy text extract, color-highlighted and clipped to the point of near-paraphrasing. A Flickr photo is prepended for visual spice.
Do you like them? Do you find the colors useful or annoying? Do you simply skim away and roll your eyes at the sight of (yet) another text monolith?
And while we’re on it, two points (..) inside a quote indicates text was omitted. It’s an elegant OED convention that degrades gracefully (if you don’t know what it means most of the time it’s harmless).
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 viewIY? 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.
Next time you see Gmail,
think,
fn1. Which I downloaded thanks to Firefox’s wonderful Webdeveloper extension.
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, p180EE (emphasis added)
The mouth-wide-open wonder at today’s technologic possibilities that begun with my grandfather’s mosaicELZR, has not subdued—what with my succesful cloning of The EconomistELZR tables or my quick spideringELZR—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 seafaringEE 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).
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 writersEE 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 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.
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
I loved the above composition. Perhaps it’s just that I took Scott McCloud’s Understanding ComicsWP epiphany too seriously, but I feel there’s something deep about it. Space and time are one, do you see? The three small panels on top convey a quick sequence (and I can’t help but hear a zippo clicking open and the smallest of sighs), while the long panel invites us to rest on her at leisure. And we can go back, turn back time and see it all over again. Or stop it altogether and focus on the third panel with its bright flame. Or we can go backwards, make it into an infinitely regressive spiral. Or we can try and take it all in one visual gulp. Present is where you are. And all it takes is looking.
Space is time’s ultimate interface.
There’s also another superb quick-closeup, similar in structure, in AnimatrixWP ’s Final Flight of the OsirisWP. It’s more joltingly impactful, to be sure, but that’s also its greatest shortcoming: it’s gone before you notice it. Our interfaces have evolved and our media player can let us see it slowly, frame by frame, but we can’t readily choose our frame. We can’t try and take it all and dream of synchronicity. That is, we can’t unless we space the frames.
As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiWP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious MindsAM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).
The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.
So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: EnglishWP, GermanWP, FrenchWP, PolishWP, JapaneseWP, DutchWP, ItalianWP, SwedishWP, PortugueseWP, SpanishWP, FarsiWP, ChineseWP, EsperantoWP, and HindiWP.
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the keyboard on the ←left shows the usual, canonical perspective of buttons we’ve grown accustomed to since the late 18th century, and any other perspective, say, the keyboard on the right→, feels immediately awkward.
