“original content”

Yesterday:

The window on the plane to Phoenix, the first stop of the trip to SF, showed the most stunning (and varied) cloud vistas I’ve ever seen: puffy, chunky, grape-y over the ocean, specks and daubs, strips and archs… We were very late yet just in time to the most spectacular, glaring sunset I can recall. The terrain was flatter than paved and the rare mountain or wrinkle were surreal, engulfed in a 3d-program plane of flatness or marred by veins that were rivers and lakes. I saw city-piercing highways from above for the first time and they were majestic and car choked. The street grid was perfect and every house had a pool. I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d look at the States in years.

For my sister, Alex, who will start her Economics major this July

Economists are philosophers of human action.

They’re close to psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethicists.

But psychologists focus on the mind behind the human action, neurologists focus on the underlying brain, sociologists on the surrounding society, anthropologists on the enveloping culture. Ethicists focus on the aesthetics of human action, on what human action should be.

Economists, on the other hand, focus on the actions themselves, on trying to understand them in their own terms. They ask questions like:

What patterns does human action follow? What different kinds can we usefully distinguish? Why are these actions taken? What are the goals behind these actions? What would the consequences be of these actions? Why do these actions have these consequences? In other words, what is the interplay between goals, conditions, actions, and consequences? If someone took these actions what actions are others expected to take? How will these actions affect others? What are the best actions to take given these goals? How best to organize and coordinate human action? What are the limits of human action? How to improve human action?

Game: 2 players take turns to say a number between 1 and 9. Numbers may not be repeated. The goal is to be the first to say 3 numbers which add up to 15.

Sounds like fun? Try it with a friend!

Fun it ain’t.

It’s hard to remember the said numbers and “playing” is a chore involving many additions in your head. Maybe it’s fun for the better short-term memory endowed or those who enjoy arithmetic but that ain’t me.

Turns out that game above is none other than the beloved tic-tac-toe. You see:

2	7	6
9	5	1
4	3	8

This is what I love about information design (and what I tried to do in my calendars) this is its art, its magic: it can turn a chore into a game! It recasts our weaknesses —linear, verbal processing— into a form suitable for our talents —gestalt visual processing.

In math words: it finds useful language-graph same-shapes (isomorphisms)!

Rented a bike the other day and rode around San Francisco for the first time. I was as happy as can be. Very physical, dog-like, movement-for-the-sake-of-movement fun. Fell in love with this beautiful city all over again, the place makes much more sense on a bike, distances feel right: pretty much everything is just a couple of minutes away.

But, you know me, as soon as I jumped on the bike I started thinking of ways to make it better. My main beef is in the context of sidewalks: bikes take too much space and are too hard to control at very slow, almost stop, speeds. Also, riding hills is too hard.

So, here a proposal to address these concerns. A bike for the city, for sidewalks, for standing:

What d’you think?

Updates 10/June/2008:

In the spirit of Little Brother I’ll post about a password stealing idea I’ve worried about for a while now: using email addresses as login names. It’s now a very widespread practice among webapps and the reason is they’re a convenient way to eliminate having to come up with and remember a unique identifier and in the process they make you give your email address away, which is a boon for marketing and for easily authenticating you. In itself there’s of course nothing insecure about the practice but the problem is that they make registrations so simple and straightforward that suddenly they’re everywhere and you don’t think twice about them.

And the true problem is that a lot of people use one password everywhere and the chances are high many will choose the same password for the webapp du jour as for their lifelong email account.


So imagine an unscrupulous webapp maker who creates a popular webapp requiring registration and doesn’t hide from himself user passwords (there’s absolutely nothing but his own conscience preventing him). It is now a simple matter of running a script to test each email address password pair for him to coolly break a good bunch of email accounts.

Blaise Pascal famously commented in a letter that it was long because he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Another possibility comes to mind, perhaps more appropriate for our era of small pieces loosely joined, of fragmentation of the units of content (think email, IM, posts, tweets, minute-long YouTube videos, individual iTune songs, Wikipedia articles…): he didn’t have the time to split it into many short letters.

To be is to change
    for how can something that never changes itself or others be said to exist?
    one might as well call it even with nothingness
To change is to die
    for something else always results
    something always is no more
To die is to birth
    for something else always results
    something new always is

This strange text above was inspired by Greg Egan, who has in a few months become my favorite author, and who in all his novels I’ve read—Schild’s Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora—is obsessed by identity in far deeper and more interesting ways than everything I’d found, thought, or imagined before—how to grow up without being replaced by a stranger, asks Tchicaya? how to be immortal without changing to death, asks Peer? how not to unravel without bounding oneself, asks Yatima?

and no one suffers more injuries than sportsmen
and no one bankrupts more than entrepreneurs
and no one hurts more than lovers
and no one cries more than those who seek happiness

no one fails more than those who try

Ah, I’m happy. As I ride the CalTrain from San Jose, I realize that after less than a week I feel more at home here, more at ease, than I’ve ever felt in Mexico. Tuesday I went to a Long Now talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and got to glimpse such legendary people as Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. Yesterday night I went to Google (!) to an Android talk after having spent the morning in the Asian museum and the afternoon studying in the library. Today I just finished the first half of a wonderful (free!) 2-day course on AIR from Adobe. The plan is to cap the day with some Permutation City at the public library. Ah, this is how I want to live!

And it’s not only the flashy things that have me captivated, it’s being alone again, having problems and solving them, meeting strangers every day, waking before dawn effortlessly because there’s so much to do… It’s being able to speak in the same language that I think and enjoying my tongue as it twists and rolls on its own better than I had ever seen it. It’s seeing Lynda.com ads on the bus stop. It’s noticing everyday a new, unexpected way that tasks are streamlined here, automated —small pieces of civilization, like the chord to request for a stop in buses, how their doors open by standing on the steps, or how their stops are automatically both announced by a pre-recorded voice and displayed in an electronic ticker. It’s learning new, cutting-edge technologies and having someone to talk them with (never had felt like a “developer” before until I realized I felt at ease among them). It’s finding a purdy gal everytime you look around (not just lust, the ratio of childfree 20/30-somethings is way up). It’s eating a different cuisine every day (recent finds: chicken tikka masala and thai pancakes). It’s that sense of mastery at turning the new into routine and rhythm.

Now I just have to find a way to hack the law and become a free agent (someone who can work and start a startup) or I’ll have to move sooner rather than later to Canada… any ideas?

I wasn’t expecting such beauty. It caught me off guard today. There was a time, just after midday, as I walked along Ocean Beach, when it all overwhelmed me—the slapping wind, the silly birds, the fellow walkers, the kiting surfers, the full sky, the white rocks, the nature right besides, the glistening, sparkling, glimmering, scintillating water.

Oh, and I just bought an apple for 1.75 dollars.