February 2012
3 posts
“Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives,...”
– Brian Lam, The Wirecutter. cf. Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of...
The hill approach →
Seth Godin on the hill approach to career development:
Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it...
Itself the revelation →
I’ve become very interested in making a whole object. And providing a window into a memory and a time or a place where I like to be.
That’s Eric Cahan, photographer of “equal parts flat color and limitless space.” Or, skies:
The photos were taken at either sunrise or sunset at bodies of water in California, Florida, and New York. The process of finding the right shades to...
January 2012
10 posts
[A]t 150 years old, this particular rendition of...
I love the wild not less than the good →
Jeremy Denk writing an account of editing during the making of a recording of the playing of the “Concord:”
[W]e find ourselves trying to cobble together a note-perfect devil. Part of me wants to keep the wildest one, with all its imperfections; as Thoreau said, “I love the wild not less than the good.” But Adam [the recording editor] is convinced that we can have the...
The Two Things game →
Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things:
A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”
“Huh?” I cleverly replied.
“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two...
On the patience of looking →
On this snowless winter in New York, I ran across an etymology of “no two snowflakes are alike.” It comes from a 1925 report that predicts, “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.” The author — Wilson Bentley:
In 1885, at the age of 20, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in...
Daylit astronomy →
I have been inseparable from The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds after receiving it as a gift a few days ago. In it, I’ve just learned of “cloud streets:”
Low clouds can line up parallel to the wind to form Cumulus radiatus. Also known as ‘cloud streets’, they’re the Roman roads of the cloud road.
See also: So...
Right noise →
White noise is common. In fact, we seek it out, purchase it, manufacture it. But:
What surprises, and engages, in Phil Julian‘s “Recent Errors” is when, at around two minutes in, the track suddenly shifts states. It goes from grey drone to scintillate whine in a split second. And that subsequent section itself has reveals transformations as it progresses, dipping down in volume, sending out thin...
Happinomics →
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, answers how it’s possible to measure something as subjective as happiness:
See also: A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months.
Measuring subjective experiences is a lot easier than you think. It’s what your eye doctor does when she fits you for glasses. She puts a lens in front of your eye...
Every life thing →
Reminded of Shel Silverstein and his absurdity and disobedience toward childhood:
I think he wanted to give kids a sense of life as a fairy tale, but a dark one. He didn’t want to whitewash things. Or leave kids unprepared to deal with trouble.
That’s his nephew, Mitch Myers, one of the managers of his collection. He and a team are preparing for the release of a new Silverstein book,...
“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1)...”
– C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Sarah, his godchild, on 3 April 1949 via Stan Carey
December 2011
10 posts
A system of irreconcilable regularities →
German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamman, held that music was given to man to make it possible to measure time:
We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not...
“The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is...”
– Gertrude Stein cf. the science of linguistics cf. “A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal. A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second...
Where the borders are →
I contributed part of the Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011 update. I explore the dissolving/ed borders between consumer and producer, collaboration as primary form of interaction in design, and “beautiful seams” as a response.
The updated Icograda Design Education Manifesto and supporting essays — including this one — is available for download. To obtain a printed copy of the...
Sudden rejuvenation →
Everyone has it. For some, it’s a place. For others, a religion. Others, a sidewalk cafe. A cocktail. A best friend. A familiar painting. Or, a vice. For some, a dark place. For me, it’s a text. Specifically E.B. White’s Here is New York. You see, whatever it is; whatever happens in the city — small, large, flittering, scented, sterile, crushing, tragic, magic — that...
Love not help →
A pair of French researchers propose that adding the text “loving” to a collection box almost doubled the amount of money raised:
Some [collection] boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: “DONATING=LOVING”; others had the text “DONATING=HELPING”; whilst others had no further text below the slot. …. The text on the donation...
The visual truth of Barbie →
A group of Swedish neuroscientists determined that the perception of your whole body is affected by the size of your body image. How? By “tricking” people into being Barbie:
A research group at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has managed to make people feel as though they actually inhabited bodies of vastly different size — either that of dolls or of giants. The researchers...
Right as rain →
Research suggests that leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate things from the height of buildings to Michael Jackson tracks (in cultures that count from left to right):
See also: Spatial versus narrative navigators
To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33...
Small pieces, joined →
Stripping out the Gospel miracles and inconsistencies to demonstrate parts he found interesting, Thomas Jefferson created a book representing his own views:
Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John....
Lessons according to salt
In the kitchen where I grew up in a non-popular town in Pennsylvania — the kitchen where my parents still live and cook and all important Danzico Family Conversations take place — there is a saltbox. It hangs just to the right of the stove, a handmade walnut wooden box, made for my grandmother by my grandfather, who himself was a furniture designer.
The saltbox itself as an object is...
Intuition, printed →
It was hard for me to approach even a little old lady. There’s a barrier between people riding the subway — eyes are averted, a wall is set up. To break through this painful tension I had to act quickly, on impulse, for if I hesitated, my subject might get off at the next station and be lost forever. I dealt with this in several ways. Often I would just approach the person: “Excuse me. I’m doing a...
November 2011
8 posts
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one... →
Rorsketch is a project where visual artist and interaction designer Catherine Young draws her interpretations of ordinary objects. This weekend, Catherine reached 100 objects, specifically, clouds:
The first part of the name comes from the Rorshach test, a psychological test in which people’s perceptions of inkblots are recorded and subsequently analyzed. While the Rorschach is used to examine a...
An eightfold path of Sylvianess
With the unexpected news of Sylvia Harris’ passing this summer, David Gibson and Emily Cohen coordinated a memorial service last evening for the many who loved her.
With respect (and without blasphemy to the Buddhists), Chelsea Mauldin presented her “eightfold path of Sylvianess,” what lessons one incomparable woman taught another:
1. Wear bright clothing when you speak to...
How to be a person/novelist →
Murakami on how being obsessed with music helped him be a novelist (emphasis mine):
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz.
Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the...
The poetics of cartography →
Denis Wood challenges landscape students to leave streets off the maps they design to teach them environmental perception. The edges aren’t important:
See also: “These maps remind me of all the radio stories I love most.”
When you look really hard at a neighborhood, it’s impossible to miss how uncertain its edges are. This is because neighborhoods aren’t about being...
Seeing saltscapes →
My salt project started out … as a fascination that something so mundane and overlooked could come from landscapes so amazing.
So mundane that photographer Clint McLean has been photographing salt for four long years. Over on his projects site, he expands:
Salt in its natural setting is visually impressive. Salt in its everyday use is humble at best. This relationship salt has with itself...
Door or less →
Want to remember an experience? Don’t move. That’s overstating it, but a new study shows that just walking through a doorway creates what’s called a “new memory episode,” which makes it difficult to remember the experience in the previous room:
[M]emory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within...
The devil's details →
Lucy,1 a dog,2 is now in Tattly3 format4.
1 This particular dog is a viszla, a small type of pointer.
2 Jason Santa Maria designed the current dog mark, which stands as the mark for my personal website, Bobulate.com. Previous marks can be seen here and here.
3 If you’ve missed it.
4 I have been, for many years, feeding my dog grapes which I thought healthy until recently, in irony found...
Bored by default →
We think a lot about defaults. What should they be? How do they elicit particular responses? What form should they take (pull-downs, checkboxes, opt-ins and outs)? But taken away from screens, what do we assume about defaults? And more, how might we be more mindful of our own default behavior?
I thought of this recently while in a traffic jam: the sort where a two-hour drive took more than six...
October 2011
8 posts
Rewriting in Style →
Writers and editors might review this 1960 F.L. Lucas essay, On the Fascination of Style, brought to my attention by Stan Carey. Much is still relevant, particularly these principles:
First, honesty. In literature, as in life, one of the fundamentals is to find, and be, one’s true self. …. In writing, in the long run, pretense does not work. …. If handwriting reveals...
The business of brown M&Ms →
The list of Richard Stallman’s speaking requests includes:
If I am quite sleepy, I would like two cans or small bottles of non-diet Pepsi.
And much more.
While quite different, the list seems reminiscent of the business value of the Van Halen brown M&Ms.
Van Halen shows were complex. So complex that they would arrive at venues with several tractor-trailers’ worth of...
Histories of the traveling libraries →
Some little-discussed history of the traveling library:
One day in 1905, an Allegheny farmer was hoeing a garden patch near the road of his farm when he heard the sound of wheels and hooves behind him. Turning around, he was amazed to find a large and foreboding black wagon drawn by two horses. He was certain it was a hearse.
Indignantly, the farmer waved it on, shouting, “You...
The paradox of compliments
At three o’clock, next to some tableclothed snacks, two grown women reunited after 12 years. She spotted me first by the pretzels, and I had to glance at her lanyard — it had been that long. Then this near-stranger said what stopped me. “I just love the work you’ve been doing. I’m so proud of you.” And walked away. A compliment without an ask.
Whatever you...
Counting therbligs
My pencil would be dull. Dull from practicing the possibility of perfect circles. The lead would make the newsprint shiny as I traced the line over and again. Stillness at the kitchen table gave way to the lone movement of cursive practice into a dark afternoon. Worse than eating peas, and certainly more deafening than piano practice, was the friction of a pencil point on newsprint.
My circles...
Love and the leaver-outters →
I had the privilege recently of contributing to the first issue of the thrice-annual The Manual. In addition to it being a tremendous example of design, the content speaks volumes.
Founder Andy McMillan asked authors to contribute a “Lesson” along with each piece. Below, an excerpt from mine:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s...
Pure and complex →
Weather affects the market — how sunny (or not) shades how people trade stocks and buy products. As does the complexity of product names. But complexity has a place, says psychologist Adam Alter:
What complexity does is it acts as a cognitive roadblock. …. If you have a communication that last 30 seconds or a minute or even five minutes, if you know there’s a particular point...
September 2011
9 posts
Toys will be toys →
Chris Dixon on the next big thing:
The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy. Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” their users’ needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading incumbent of the time, Western Union, chose not to...
What do you do? Or, what don't you do? →
Jon Tan on who we are:
I am a web designer. I neither concentrate on the party venue, food, music, guest list, or entertainment, but on it all. On the feeling people enter with and walk away remembering. That’s my job. It’s probably yours too.
Worth remembering.
[via Rob Greco’s delicious]
“Over the past week I’ve twice heard twenty-somethings wonder whether kids...”
– Raul Gutierrez
Four things you should know about time →
Four things you should know about time:
1. “Time” is the most used noun in the English language.
2. The past and the future are equally real.
3. Everyone experiences time differently.
4. I’ll be contributing to the new and fabulous Quarterly, and my theme: time.
Not everyone agrees on time, yet everyone talks about it.
That’s why I’m thrilled to be able to...
The beagle and the F train
There is a beagle who rides the F train. Curiously calm, he (I believe he) moves through the tunnels footless, perched on the slippery seats in his flat-bottom canvas tote bag.
Unfettered by person traffic or delays. Sniffing and blinking at movement. Staring, unafraid to make eye contact with passengers. No one returns the beagle glances. On the F train, beagle passengers are nothing to see.
...
“Shadows are all we have to show us the shapes that light can make.”
– Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York cf. Light painting
The geography of toponyms →
Toponyms (the names given to places) can reveal cultural information through their etymology and patterns of use:
This map shows the distribution of the most popular generic toponyms for streams in the United States. These names vary widely across American in the etymological roots, the types of features they refer to, and their cultural patterns of use. These variations reflect the interplay of...
Behavior of words →
Linguists and lexicographers are turning to a new research area to learn about the behavior of words and the way the language system works — Twitter feeds:
These have the advantage of providing high volumes of very up-to-date examples of language in use. Some of this data is used for what is known as ‘sentiment analysis’, as a way of discovering people’s attitudes on various topics, and tweets...
The telephone solution →
Wise email strategy from Simon Sinek:
Sending one email to 5 people could produce 5 emails back. Overwhelmed by all the emails I would get, I decided to stop sending as many. Now, when I have something to ask or tell someone, I pick up the phone and call them. Not only has it significantly reduced the number of emails I get, but it actually saves me time also. A five minute call replaces the time...
August 2011
8 posts
You are beautiful →
The You Are Beautiful campaign has spread throughout the world:[D]ispersing hundreds of thousands of stickers, and generating countless community based projects to beautify neighborhoods in cities globally. The project itself is made up of an anonymous collective keeping the focus on the message rather than the participants. The project and the message are completely open. Anyone can participate,...
Artifacts of nowhere →
The Sky on Trap Street catalogs an actual place in the sky from an imagined place below. You see:
The Trap Street is a street on a map that does not exist. They are deliberate imperfections that code unique authorship; a deliberate identifying falsehood; an imaginary place proving a person’s unique labor. Here’s what the sky looks like from a few of them.
See also: “It is not down in...