Things I'Ve Learned

Because, at times, life will be good. Really good.
And you will need each other to share your happiness, to smile to each other, to rejoice together, to be grateful together.

Because, at times, life will be hard. Really hard.
And you will need each other to keep standing, to cry on each other, to mourn together, to recover your courage together.

Because you will be a purpose, a meaning for each other.
You will go on adventures that you couldn’t even dream alone.
You will force each other out of each other, and be each other the outlet for the other’s tenderness, kindness, selflessness.
As the world around you will change, you will change together.

And because, through all that may come, if you take care of each other, trust, respect and love each other…
...then you won’t be alone.

Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.

At a recent project, I stumbled on another subtle styling that I’m descriptively calling highlows from ignorance of precedents. Here it is, on the left part:

The idea is to highlight the first occurrence of a row value and to lowlight the next occurrences, until a new row value comes up and then the high switch is turned on again.

It’s a simple, useful way to help scan column values in category tables.

Meritocracy used to be simply a more positive word for elitism to my mind. The word comes up frequently in discussions of elite universities and what they should aspire to. I considered it something good, a value, but the “meritless” masses left out were always a big cloud. Why exactly it was worthwhile I had never given much thought for.  

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from Singaporean Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere was his completely different take on the meaning of meritocracy: it’s not about exclusion but about inclusion, about casting your net as wide as you can. It’s the very base of human resource management: to be honest about people.

I lived for 3 months in Spain. I shared a room with 3 other people in a nice, simple flat in the northeast of Madrid. Less than 10 minutes away walking was a big mall with a cheap hypermarket, my gym, and the local public library. I was very happy.

Exactly!

That picture above is from a Japanese upscale convenience store. Yup, the Japanese have so refined the convenience store concept, called combinis in Japan, that they even have upscale ones. The sheer density and quality of combinis throughout Japan just boggles the mind. Did you know Seven Eleven is, since 1991, a Japanese company? And, at least in Japan, it’s the Toyota of convenience stores, of which there are many brands.

Compare with Europe, where, as far as I can tell, they simply don’t have the concept of convenience stores. Here in Spain they only have ugly, pricey, mom & pop dry good stores, called “Chinos” because they’re mostly run by Chinese.

Mexico itself has lots of convenience stores, better than the ones in the States I’d say, and there’s some interesting innovation going on of micro-supermarkets specialized in groceries, or pharmacies that are convenience stores too.

That’s the kind of thing that fascinates me when I travel, the kind of thing you don’t notice until you live with it, and that you never read about anywhere. The kind of mundane things that really change your day to day life, instead of the one-off, impressive, touristy things that you just see and its over.

I’m a strange kind of traveller, like a very slow kind of tourist, a be-ist! I prefer to stay at places for months and not focus on them much, just let them gradually reveal themselves. I like keeping place in the background, how it makes the fringes of my life (like city walking, shopping, eating, bookstore browsing, the new media…) interesting and new. But for the core of my life I really am very happy making stuff, it’s the thing I want to do most. Intensive travelling, where the place (and its people) are the very focus of your life is not that appealing to me, it’s too distracting.

One of the best books I’ve read: Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity.

I went to Lisbon because I got hostel stranded for the weekend in Spain: all the hostels in Madrid and Barcelona were booked and hotels were so expensive that it was cheaper, and more interesting, for me to take a night bus to Lisbon. Of Lisbon I knew close to nothing.

I arrived at downtown just as the sun was coming out, groggy from barely catching a wink, without a reservation because the hostel aggregators showed there were rooms aplenty (were I not recklessness I would not have gotten stranded in the first place). I decided, at a whim, to follow the first pair of backpackers that I saw. Which I did, and ended up at the other bus station.

Obsesionado como estoy con la cuestion de lugar, me he topado en mis busquedas con estas 4 oportunidades internacionales para Mexicanos. Me gustaria fueran mas conocidas y aprovechadas, por lo que las comparto aqui desapasionadamente pues si creo en el consejo es cuando es descriptivo, no prescriptivo, cuando te abre caminos, no cuando te empuja.

From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.

For a while now, I’ve been pleasantly following Very Small Array, an information design graph-blog, but this was the first time I was really enthralled by one of its designs, FRIENDS:

It’s just so stunningly elegant, isn’t it? So skillfully made to appear casual yet imbued with obvious formal beauty, charming yet minimalist—not a word or pixel unused. Labels and graph, typography and information design, come together marvelously, painstakingly.

The thing that most grabbed me, though, was that I had just started making my own similar introspective list of my friends’ attributes, in the spirit of quantified selfhood. While I’m floored by Very Small Array’s commitment (it has been doing this for almost a decade—the chart above is just one of several great graphs and metapgraphs), my brief exercise in self knowledge has already told me two unexpected things: I have a history of liking extroverts and polyglots.