Bobulate

From Safire to Zimmer on language

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:42:00 -0500

The New York Times announced today the venerable Ben Zimmer, linguist and lexicographer, will take over for William Safire in “On Language,” a standing column from 1979 through 2009:

Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. The column is a fixture in The Times Magazine and features commentary on the many facets — from grammar to usage — of our language. “On Language” will appear bi-weekly beginning March 21.

“It’s an honor and a privilege to be welcomed in the space that William Safire called home for thirty years,” Mr. Zimmer said. “I look forward to continuing this fine tradition with my own take on how language shapes our past, present and future.”

Zimmer is a handsome contributor to VisualThesarus, an outstanding publication, and it’s worth heading over to review his multifarious lexicographical activities in the Times’ press release directly.

Chunk of print frightens nation

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Chunk of print frightens nation:

The American public this week:

Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

You may want to avert your eyes a bit if you must click over to read in its entirety. Still larger chunks of print lie ahead.

Relaxing the no-applause rule

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0500

Relaxing the no-applause rule :

Alex Ross on the unnatural etiquette that guides applause (emphasis mine):

In the eighteenth century listeners often burst into applause while the music was playing, much as patrons in jazz clubs do today. The practice seems to have died out in the course of the nineteenth century, although audiences almost always applauded after movements of large-scale works. Then, in the early years of the twentieth century, the idea took root that one should remain resolutely silent throughout a multi-movement piece. …. The work itself should dictate our behaviour, not some hard-and-fast code of etiquette.

Ross recommends:

Perhaps concerts should become, in a way, more old-fashioned — more local, communal. … [I]nstitutions might work on strengthening the bond between performer and public — remarks beforehand, gatherings afterward, and, certainly, a relaxation of the Rule.

Applause makes me uncomfortable. And I’m not alone. Rarely, am I truly moved by a piece, a performance, a sound, a talk, that I burst into clapping. Moved sure, but hand clapping? Is it the natural reaction that our body wants?

[via]

States of perfection

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:44:00 -0500

States of perfection:

The state of perfection for 1954 refrigerated food:

Like Greek statues, orders of architecture, the golden ratio and Vitruvian man, these ads from LIFE Magazine in 1954 measure a sort of highest-attainable-state, though directed at middle class America. The ads are for refrigerators, but the interest really is in what is displayed inside of them: they offer an insight into what was seen to be the greatest level of sophistication, the highest stage of want for the most important/essential daily need, and then turned into luxurious accommodation.

The “archeology of meat” is what’s so striking across each refrigerator, as its organization is anything but average. Of course, these are refrigerator ads, so perhaps there’s a bit of home staging going on. Head over to see more States of Perfection from the 1950s.

[via]

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:45:00 -0500

“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.”

- Alfréd Rényi cf. “Dodgson [better known as Lewis Carroll] most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland … He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field. In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense.” —From Algebra in Wonderland

The face-time theorem

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0500

As I sprint through my inbox toward Austin later this week, I have an observation about how issues get resolved:

Note:
This is by no means a prescription (or a real theorem for that matter), but an observation and a nudge for more people to meet in person more of the time.

If distance among people is greater than X miles + question Y cannot be resolved by email, than email results in more email.
(Cost of time: medium-high, emotional cost: high. Duration: endless)

If distance among people is less than X miles + question Y cannot be resolved by email, than email results in in-person meeting.
(Cost of time: medium, emotional cost: low. Duration: short)

Variables

Additional people in CC
Additional people in BCC
Standing meetings
Inertia

Theorem

If, after multiple threads, issues are unresolvable via non-face means, meet in person. While the hurdle of meeting face to face seems higher, the time and emotional costs are ultimately lower. Face-time saves time.

Cartography for an audience of one

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:15:00 -0500

Cartography for an audience of one :

Paul Stiff, a reader in typography and graphic communication, has been studying wayfinding — not in the maps from professionals — but in the handmade maps that people draw for one another:

Stiff believes that we amateurs have something to teach the pros. Our maps are efficient — they edit out unnecessary information. They often include what Stiff calls “an error detector, something that tells you something’s gone wrong.” (If you see the red barn, you’ve gone too far.) They adhere not to mapmaking norms but to the user’s particular needs.

More than boxes and arrows, they’re conversations:

The maps we draw for one another also have a certain ephemeral beauty. Each map is the product of a conversation. While most professional maps serve “countless numbers of people who have countless purposes,” Stiff says, maps like these are “made for an audience of one.” Examining these bits of personal cartography — studying the ways “we edit, we twist, we rearrange, supportively” — can teach us how humans really perceive and understand maps.

This from Slate’s ongoing six-part series on Signs: How They Tells Us Where To Go.

Marathon by memory

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:08:00 -0500

Marathon by memory:

Simon Pope, artist and expert walker, walked 26 miles to build a collective memory of the Olympics:

[He] walked 26 miles through the five east London boroughs that will play host to the 2012 Olympics. Along the way he talked to over 100 local residents about their memories of the Games, and from that made a new film, Memory Marathon…

He didn’t walk alone. Each of the 100 London residents walked with him:

Each resident walked a 400-metre section of the 26 mile route with Pope who asked them to talk candidly about a moment from Olympic history that had affected them personally. Each memory reveals not only feelings of hope, excitement and disappointment, but also the way in which our collective memories are so often held together through shared experiences of moving images.

My first thought was: a different take on a “memory palace.” Not only are residents remembering, but I’d argue the spatial relationships of each 400 meters becomes a map for each story, supporting viewers in remembering the collective whole. Yet, taken another way, it’s simply, and quite beautifully, a 26-mile-long interview.

Public park presence in absence

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:30:00 -0500

Public park presence in absence:

Rob Holmes uncovers that for six months in 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered” while engineers surveyed the falls’ rock face for erosion. But it didn’t stand idle:

For a portion of that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom of unwanted mosses and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed a mere twenty feet from the edge of the dry falls, and tourists were able to explore this otherwise inaccessible and hostile landscape. …. A riverbed, in other words, became an ephemeral public park, though as by-product of a potentially colossal geo-re-engineering project. The authorities even installed temporary interpretative signage explaining the Fall’s geology to inquisitive visitors.

So:

See also:
A delightful but purely unrelated, aesthetic aside, take note that mammoth also uses sidenotes.

Without consideration of the practicalities: lower the Hudson for a month, and hold a rock-climbing festival along new cliffs, the competitors scrambling up Hartland Schist in the mist of spray-emitters stabilizing the rocky banks. Let loose the dammed power-lakes of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and hold Bonnaroo on the muddy bottom of Harrison Bay, temporarily un-flooded.

Instead of recognizing rivers as voids, we perceive them them as public park possibilities, rich with potential in another context. As Treib pointed out, disturbances allow us to see the value in what is there. The value of presence is sometimes in its absence.

When every minute is constructed

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0500

When every minute is constructed:

70 workers are building a wooden display of time that mimics “digital” time in real time over 24 hours. From Mark Formanek:

Standard Time is a performance lasting exactly 24 hours and recorded on film. However, this film is much more than just the recording of an action, the recording of something that has taken place in the past; it is also a clock. A clock for use right now and in the future which, as each day goes by, extends further into the past, but is still up-to-date and punctual

”Since I don’t have a clock in my room yet I thought well how cool would it be to have your Standard Time project just on loop on a TFT.”

Now we can too.

[via]

[Image: Standard Time pictures]

Bound provocations

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:56:07 -0500

Bound provocations:

Mickey Smith, photographer, and her process:

The act of hunting for and photographing bound periodicals and journals is fundamental to Mickey Smith [sic] process. She does not touch, light, or manipulate the books and words — preferring to document them as found in the stacks, created by the librarian, and positioned by the last unknown reader. Her work focuses on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear to create conceptual, language-based, anthropological works.

The result, not unlike an anthropological hunt in the stacks.

MBA is for Monday

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:19:00 -0500

MBA is for Monday:

If you haven’t been following along with Fred Wilson’s MBA Mondays, the day’s not over yet:

I’m making up the curriculum for MBA Mondays on the fly. The end game is to lay out how to look a businesses, value it, and invest in it. We started with the time value of money and interest rates, we then talked about the corporate entity. Now I want to talk about how to keep track of the money in a company.

Review for some, new to others. Useful.

How to read more books

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:43:00 -0500

How to read more books:

Aaron Swartz on how to read more books:

I’ve read a hundred books a year for the past couple years. Last time I mentioned this, a couple people asked how I could read so many books. Do I read unusually quickly? Do I spend an unusual amount of time reading? I did a simple calculation: The average person spends 1704 hours a year watching TV. If the average reading rate is 250 words per minute and the average book is 180,000 words, then that’s 142 books a year. To my surprise, I wasn’t reading nearly enough books. So I’ve taken some steps to read more:

1. Block your favorite blogs.
2. Order lots of books at the library.
3. Alienate everyone close to you.
4. Keep the temperature low.

I’m an advocate for constraints in support of reading more (last summer, for instance, I tested out a book a day after learning Clinton read two a day while in office). None of mine have lasted, but I’ve yet to alienate everyone close to me. There may be hope yet.

Visual funnels

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:47:00 -0500

Visual funnels:

All things that can be organized, will be:

At the shop where I work we just toss loose screws, bolts, nails and other bits and pieces of hardware from the workbenches and the floor into a bucket and, every couple of years when the bucket gets too full, somebody has to dump the whole mess out and sort everything back to where it belongs. When that job fell to me this Spring, I decided there had to be a better solution. So I designed a bin that would help to at least divide things by type to make the final sorting easier.

Because:

I wanted to make the openings as big a target as possible for those handfuls of hardware, so I made each wider at the top like a funnel. And I cut the shape of each as a visual reminder of what to put where. (This actually works really well — no thinking on the job required!)

Brilliant.

[via]

Obama requests Tufte transparency

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:44:00 -0500

Obama requests Tufte transparency:

Obama appoints Edward Tufte as part of a panel to track stimulus transparency. Tufte on the appointment:

I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds … I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something.

Maybe we’ll learn something too.

(thx, Jason)

Outing "it turns out"

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:00:00 -0500

Outing "it turns out":

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over Paul Graham’s use of the phrase “it turns out.” James Somers’ take:

It’s not that pg is a particularly heavy user of the phrase — I counted just 46 unique instances in a simple search of his site — but that he knows how to use it. He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers don’t.

[I]t turns out that “it turns out” does the sort of work, for a writer, that a writer should be doing himself. So to say that someone uses the phrase particularly well is really just an underhanded way of saying that they’re particularly good at being lazy.

Further, Somers believes readers are disarmed by it:

Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter — as though the situation simply unfolded that way. Which is precisely what the phrase “it turns out” accomplishes, and why it’s so useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y. In that sense it’s a kind of handy writerly shortcut.

Ethan Fast did a bit of analysis to find instances where this theory breaks down a bit:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it turns out that these claims of hacks and benign disingenuity amount to something so small that I would call it nothing (albeit, a very clever nothing).

I sat through a number of presentations recently. I couldn’t help noticing the phrase “it’s worth mentioning...” It marks a pivot point in conversation. Whenever it’s mentioned, I stand at attention, assuming everything that came before will pale in comparison to what’s about to be said. It turns out, some things are just worth mentioning.

(thx, Josh)

Leave the light on

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:38:00 -0500

Leave the light on:

Researchers have found that darkness encourages unethical behavior:

In the same way that young kids think they are invisible when they cover their eyes, [the researchers] think the effect they observed occurs as an automatic response to the cover of darkness, even when the lack of light makes no difference to anonymity.

In tests in both dimly lit and brightly lit rooms, people with and without sunglasses, the results were the same: “Darkness appears to induce a false sense of concealment, leading people to feel that their identities are hidden,” researchers said.

Another reason to get outside into the light, especially when making weighty decisions.

Guidelines for meeting the Dalai Lama

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:28:02 -0500

Guidelines for meeting the Dalai Lama:

A photograph of a February meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama sparked some interest:

The subtext of the single photograph of the meeting, released by the White House, was clear to anyone familiar with Buddhist, Asian or Chinese iconography, literate or not: it showed the President speaking to the Dalai Lama with his right hand raised, much as in the teaching mudra used to show the Buddha preaching to his disciples; while the Dalai Lama, like an attentive pupil, has turned to listen, so that his eyes cannot be seen.

You see:

The most famous visual record of any encounter between the Tibetan pontiff and a worldly ruler is the mural in the Potala Palace that depicts the 5th Dalai Lama meeting the Qing Emperor Shunzhi in 1653. The Chinese authorities misread that powerful image in the past: they reproduced it in the 1980s in innumerable postcards and propaganda books because it shows the Emperor sitting on a slightly higher throne than his Tibetan visitor—until they discovered that all Tibetans and any Buddhist could see that the mural shows that the Dalai Lama has his right hand raised and is clearly teaching his imperial disciple.

But, unthinkable:

[E]ven for the most secular Tibetans, the White House photograph is puzzling: it shows the President with his legs crossed, unthinkable casualness for a Chinese or Tibetan leader. And then there’s the tea: the photograph shows a tea-cup and a cookie in front of the Dalai Lama, while the President has neither, an unmistakable sign that the President did not deign to drink with his visitor.

Etiquette: endlessly fascinating; boundless in its ability to baffle.

An active silence

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:33:00 -0500

“White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background,” wrote Jan Tschichold in 1930. And just as you cannot ignore white space, you cannot ignore silence, as it’s the white space of conversations.

We get anxious about silence. It connotes issues. Stress. Awkwardness. Yet, like Tschichold’s white space, silence is often an active element in our day-to-day conversations. It can indicate productive thinking is in progress. But we — twitchy, anxious communicators that we are — forget this.

Faith in silence

If you’ve shipped off an email, transmitted a voicemail, and received no reply: fear not. This does not mean your recipient has not heard, seen, understood, respected, and acted upon your message. I would argue, in fact, that a thoughtful message that receives no immediate reply most likely means the recipient is constructing an equally thoughtful message in return. It just hasn’t reached the “send” state.

White space is an active element.

Thoughtful takes time

Give your recipients time. If you don’t hear back, pester not. If you have a deadline, make it clear. If it’s urgent, make it known. But if you’re simply seeking thoughts, give others time to construct their own. A pause. Some white space.

Give silence a chance to be the active element it needs to be. You might be surprised at what you hear, even when you don’t.

Cities designed for happiness

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:00:00 -0500

Cities designed for happiness:

Enrique Peñalosa, who served as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, believes:

“Economics, urban planning, ecology are only the means. Happiness is the goal,” Peñalosa says, summing up his work. “We have a word in Spanish, ganas, which means a burning desire. I have ganas about public life.”

Because really:

“The least a democratic society should do,” he says, “is to offer people wonderful public spaces. Public spaces are not a frivolity. They are just as important as hospitals and schools. They create a sense of belonging. This creates a different type of society — a society where people of all income levels meet in public space is a more integrated, socially healthier one.”

In other words:

Happiness itself is a commons to which everyone should have equal access.

New York City has some recent happiness of its own thanks to Peñalosa.