“reviews”

Flickr AutoPagination has got to be the coolest Greasemonkey script I’ve seen yet, and, to judge by its code, a really intricate labor of love. It works flawlessly and does exactly what you’d guess: it makes every Flickr page (where it would make sense) “infinitely scrollable”. A cool, handy, and surprisingly stable script.

Remember that wacky koan^ELZR about reading processors (“what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) and how it led to the idea of a text spacer (illustrated at length in this example)?

Well, I just found out about Live Ink by Walker Reading Technologies (via KurzweilAI.net’s newsletter, though it was slashdotted earlier) and realized people have been toying with the idea for over a decade now. Live Ink is clumsy marketese for what they also elegantly and precisely describe as visual-syntactic text formatting and these guys have not only coded it and are now marketing it, but they have already done some interesting homework, carrying on a year-long experiment where it allegedly improved reading proficiency. They offer a 30-day trial program implementing the technology called ClipRead (screencast) and though the interface is positively abysmal (why, god, why, must bad interfaces happen to good people?), it’s still very much worth downloading to play with.

Here below is a (fitting) paragraph from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando for comparison.

Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards—a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for – or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.

Charles Stross, Accelerando

I like how they limited the spacing to linebreaks and indents; it’s a good starting constraint—it simplifies the task enormously and the results are still quite good. Highlighting the verb is also a clever touch—the nuance with the biggest syntactic payoff. Overall, while the simple flaws do stand out (because we’re such effortlessly gifted syntactic parsers), what surprises me is how decently it works, how the formatted text feels more accessible than the monolithic paragraph. At several points—interestingly, at some of the most usefully formatted parts—the algorithm at work seems oddly straightforward: nestedly indent and linebreak prepositions. Ahh… I’m itching to write some regex hack… Probably will write one in a couple of days, together with some handcrafted spacing of the above paragraph, just to see what we’re aiming at.

According to VentureBeat, meanwhile, the company is poised to taking the world any minute now. I doubt it. But they have given spacing (visual-syntactic text formatting) a broad hearing and there’s now a flurry of attention on it and, probably, on the broader idea of reading processors. There are bound to be some intriguing reinterpretations and extrapolations in the coming months.

That multimedia brings subjects “alive” is a painfully false cliche these days. For me at least. Maybe I’m just disappointed by the yawning gap between promise and (often gratuitous) delivery. Maybe I’m still too word-centric.

Thus my surprise with this animation of that most famous embroidered account of the 1066 Norman invasion of England (→), the Bayeaux Tapestry^WP. It’s so simple and yet so stunningly effective. (Though of course I have a sweet spot for animated tapestries…)

I can’t watch it without wondering what its weavers at the turn of the first millennium would say if they could look at their creations now.

(via Very Short List, which neatly sums up the work with a Venn diagram—as is their intriguing custom—, )

Felicitous!

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…

I’m so set in my (fetishy) ways. Again, I feel compelled to say that I’m not on the look out for such pictures. They come my way. Though come on, maybe I should be…

The responsible for the baci saffici is the most talented Alessandro Pautasso.

Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.

Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.

It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).

As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.

I’ve been drooling as much as anyone for one ever since Jobs announced it last January 9 in a brilliant demo (just for some historical fun, compare it with the 1968 “Mother of all demos”), and an interesting, in-depth review of it by Bruce Tognazzi got me thinking more deeply about it and all the possibilities it foretells. But just as I was guzzling the last Kool-aid dregs I started choking: I found out, to my unending disbelief, that it’s going to be a closed platform—meaning one won’t be able to independently develop software for it. This matters. It’s not a chink in the diamond, it’s a rupture—tantamount to forcing you to surf only within apple.com. The web could of course be an innovation lifeline but I’m skeptical of Safari—it’s not a good web 2.0 base at the desktop, I doubt it’ll be one for the palmtop. And my experience with the Blackberry is that mobile-device webapps demand more speed and immediacy (and ubiquity!) than the current web can provide. So no, it will at best be only a partial solution. (The reason given for the apartheid, security, has—to use a commenter’s phrase—the faint whiff of horse manure.)

The young and the geeky. Witness the birth of a new wordchain. It won’t be the last time you’ll hear it.

High-tech jewelry. That’s a beautiful, zeit-geist defining phrase—electronics “becoming… works of art to be fondled in stores before a purchase.”^E

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.