Bobulate

All of the active three-letter airport codes organized in...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:24:38 -0500

All of the active three-letter airport codes organized in alphabetical order. Part of A series of Flight Postcards, a set of postcards curated by Leah Beeferman and published by Projectile Press. For more detail.

"Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives, it is important."

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:24:00 -0500

“Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives, it is important.”

- 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 gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly. Advertisers reward size, and growing fast is expected in most places I’ve seen. Last month I visited Xeni Jardin, my blog-sister from Boing Boing and she said to me, “Only cancer and bullshit websites grow fast.” It’s happened to TV with reality shows, radio with clear channel, and it’s happening to words online. I’ve never seen a world-class sized publication that was founded in the past decade do world class quality work. It’s not because the people running them are dumb–it’s because they don’t have enough time to think their work through because there’s no short term incentive to. There’s an excuse there aren’t enough resources to go around, but that’s bullshit. It just takes a little confidence in the long game. [via]

The hill approach

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:22:00 -0500

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 over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career.

Career wisdom in hill format.

Itself the revelation

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:59:00 -0500

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 bring out the sublime in nature is “very intuitive — the moment I see it, I feel the color that needs to be highlighted, that wants to emerge.”

See also:
Memories of Unknown Cities

Cahan’s most recently work has actually been influenced by James Turrell’s famous project over at the Crater, and as Turrell stated, Cahan also believes:

[L]ight is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

[via]

[Image: Dune Road, Southampton, NY, Sunset 7:33pm]

[A]t 150 years old, this particular rendition of ‘Au clair...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:46:00 -0500

[A]t 150 years old, this particular rendition of ‘Au clair de la lune’ — recorded on a phonautograph, a device created by Édouard-Léon Scott two decades before Edison’s 1877 invention of the phonograph — became the oldest known recorded sound.

Not only that, but super interestingly:

Feaster [a hunter of ancient sounds] has been lifting the veils off of still older “recordings,” if Scott’s phonautograms even deserve the name. The device Scott patented in 1857 uses a stylus to trace a line onto a soot-covered cylinder, producing a visual representation of the sound unplayable by any device, contemporary or modern. But Feaster and his sound-chasing co-hobbyists, who style themselves the First Sounds Collaborative, adapted software to reconstruct the path of the stylus by analyzing images of the sooty trace. As if pulling an earthquake out of the readout from a seismograph, Feaster educes whatever sound is represented by the path of the stylus, playing the trace like any sound wave.

While Feaster is a hunter of sounds stored in recordings, more interestingly, he is a capturist of new reactions:

“I like to think of these [recordings] as the very earliest examples of a new way to use media. Until the phonograph, there wasn’t any equipment out there that was designed to record a person speaking, acting, doing something, and then reproduce that somewhere else,” Feaster said. “Now we take that for granted with television, movies, radio — but they all came after the phonograph.”

Like those letters you wrote to your future self from camp or related apps and services, Feaster is an archivist of the expressions and interactions with tools and devices of future-facing tools. In the past. Unveiled in the present.

I love the wild not less than the good

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:23:00 -0500

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 notes and the wild. There is the vanity of editing yourself to be a perfect version of yourself, but there’s the vanity of loving your imperfections, too. … I reflect with satisfaction that I have drawn him into my insanity.

Ultimately:

[E]diting turns out to be even more nerve-racking than recording. In the moment of playing, the logistics of just hitting the notes distract you from the continuos choices you are making. In the edit you have nothing but choices. And yet you feel helpless, since everything has already been played.

Read the piece in its entirety while listening to Denk’s performance of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze from 2010. Not a needless note.

The Two Things game

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:02:00 -0500

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 things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Since, Glen has been playing this each time he meets someone from a different profession, which is how he gathered The Two Things about the Two Things:

1. People love to play the Two Things game, but they rarely agree about what the Two Things are.
2. That goes double for anyone who works with computers.

Head over to see his collection of The Two Things from binary systems to piloting an airplane, or a talk that wraps up with them. As for me: 1) intrigued, 2) curious if it could be edited down to only one thing.

On the patience of looking

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:38:00 -0500

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 Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film. Despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley.

Dubbed “America’s First Cloud Physicist,” Bentley’s obituary (note that he contracted pneumonia after walking home six miles through a slushy snowstorm) read:

Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.

Seems to me there is no greater goal and no greater compliment: Bentley not only devised a new way to see (transforming early physics of clouds and pioneering an understanding of snowflakes), but demomstrated the patience needed to fiercely look.

[Image: [Bentley] experimented for years with ways to view individual snowflakes in order to study their crystalline structure. He eventually attached a camera to his microscope, and in 1885 he successfully photographed the flakes. This photomicrograph and more than five thousand others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike …]

Daylit astronomy

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:43:26 -0500

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 irregular is their movement that when physicists came up with Chaos Theory in the 1970s, some had been inspired by gazing up at the clouds.

Emergent sky roads or our perception of such couldn’t help but remind me of another example of constellation thinking. These water droplet streets are our stories about structure such that we can make sense of their presence. Most clouds fall into 10 main types, although we typically know the Cumulus, not only because it’s one of the Low Clouds. It, together with the other nine types and varieties, comprises our daylit astronomy. To cloudgazing.

[NASA, Earth Observatory, January 24, 2011]

Right noise

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:09:00 -0500

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 contrasting lines of sound (MP3). These aren’t the last shifts in the piece, by any means. It continues on to include industrial churn and 8bit cicada chirping, among other phases.

How much attention do we pay to white noise? If citizens are indeed being asked to begin to design urban noise — or at least take part in it — we should be paying more attention. To the presences and the absences. What is the ideal white noise state?

Happinomics

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:16:00 -0500

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 and asks you to report your experience, and then she puts another lens up, and then another. She uses your reports as data, submits the data to scientific analysis, and designs a lens that will give you perfect vision — all on the basis of your reports of your subjective experience. People’s real-time reports are very good approximations of their experiences, and they make it possible for us to see the world through their eyes. People may not be able to tell us how happy they were yesterday or how happy they will be tomorrow, but they can tell us how they’re feeling at the moment we ask them. “How are you?” may be the world’s most frequently asked question, and nobody’s stumped by it.

If designing products/services based on subjective experiences is what we do, who else can we learn from? Optometrists are a start. Who else allows us to see the world through his or her eyes?

Every life thing

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:00:00 -0500

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, Every Thing On It, and have been tasked with archiving his “collection:”

One of the things you learn is that “polymath” doesn’t even begin to describe Silverstein. His creativity extended in so many directions that his archivists must be versed not just in turn-of-the-century world children’s literature, but Waylon Jennings’s deep cuts; not just in reel-to-reel tape preservation, but how to keep an old restaurant napkin scribbled with lyrics from falling apart. And you also learn that Silverstein seemed to have a terrific time drawing, rhyming, and singing his way through life.

Where the Sidewalk Ends — if there were books I lived by growing up — was a textbook. Permission for messiness, for non-easy stories, for seeing. I read its poems and drawings such that the pages were dirty and flimsy from study. I feared it, starting with the precarious cover, as much as I adored it. Life could be a fairy tale, a neatly bounded poem — but irreverent. And that was totally okay.

"Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:26:44 -0500

“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing — but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.”

- C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Sarah, his godchild, on 3 April 1949 via Stan Carey

A system of irreconcilable regularities

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:30:06 -0500

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 always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.

Sort of like the strange but extremely valuable science of how pedestrians behave. Differing rates of speed, moving together in the main — or not — toward the same purpose, differently, together together, or together alone. A system of irreconcilable regularities and irreconcilably regular.

"The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing as..."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:40:51 -0500

“The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing as repetition. There is always a slight variation. Somebody comes in and you tell the story over again. Every time you tell the story it is told slightly differently.”

- 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 time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding. We need a lot more failures, I think.” —Seth Godin

Where the borders are

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:00:00 -0500

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 book for a nominal fee, please contact the Icograda Secretariat.

The comfortably crisp borders between creator and consumer have dissolved. As a result of technological, social and cultural advancements in product design, the borders that once separated producer and consumer are no longer recognisable, permanent or possible.

Relying on these traditional boundaries can be a disadvantage for contemporary designers. We carry our social networks in our pockets. We crowd-source our private financial decisions with strangers online. We read a single book across devices on a number of screens. It is critical, then, that designers do not see borders, but design beautiful seams.

By not seeing borders, designers expand their possibilities at a time when websites have migrated off desktops onto streets and computing in public is becoming a behavioural norm. With the blurring of borders between disciplines, and across devices, time zones and communication spaces comes a new mode of collaboration. The changes necessitate a new form of collaborative enterprise — not just with team members, but with the target audience.

As we experience this shift, our collaborative activities must evolve in at least five critical ways:

Collaboration is interactive

Traditional frameworks for production are evolving into interactive activities where the consumer participates in creation. While traditionally a passive role, consumers are more frequently introducing their own stories, values and content into the production process. One-to-one works have become many-to-many works, and the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture is giving way to a do-it-with-others (DIWO) movement.

Collaboration is responsive

With the emergence of tools that allow consumers to take part in product creation, consumers have taken on a new role. No longer passive, they have become co-creators - moved from nouns to verbs. Consumers actively create alongside designers, often through improvisation. Improvising - the act of creating in the moment and in response to an environment, results in the invention of new patterns, practices, structures and behaviours.

Collaboration is sensemaking

To create patterns is natural not only as designers, but as humans. We make sense of chaotic environments by giving shapes and concepts meaning and form that we can categorise - poster, website, building, typography, interactive, stone and so on. Creating categories gives our experience boundaries.

Collaboration is continuous

Collaboration is both discipline-respectful and discipline-agnostic. It is a historically rich creative process that has influenced artistic mediums from music to dance to theatre. As a method it is evolving from a bounded behaviour that is a useful tool in specific cases to a life-long process that calls on various disciplines to work spontaneously, harmoniously and holistically.

Collaboration is personal

People should be fiercely passionate about good ideas so that their collaborative efforts are a natural extension of themselves. Confidence can bridge a gap between desire and outcome if our integrity of thought and authenticity of creation remain intact. We have the ability to both do good work and to make it personal. Confidence is good’s natural extension.

Finally, as we consider these shifting borders, we must consider the areas where those border lines meet — the “beautiful seams,” a term coined by Mark Weiser, chief technologist of, at the time, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre. Weiser intended for users to explore systems and to find moments of beauty within them. If our role as designers is to create platforms and frameworks, we must be conscious of developing recognisable seams for others, so that they can play, discover and configure in those spaces.

As borders continue to shift, designers and users overlap, time zones matter less and boundaries blur, it is at these beautiful seams that designers have the most opportunity to create, to present possibilities, to demonstrate beauty, to teach and to learn.

Apropos of borders, in NYC, I am at 40˚34”N 74˚00’W.

Sudden rejuvenation

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:59:00 -0500

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 thing. E.B. White has somehow made sense of it, there, Here Is New York.

Recently, I moved — all of 2.2 miles. After 11 years in one Brooklyn neighborhood, I moved just over 11,000 feet to the north. For Brooklynites, for all New Yorkers really, who know we live and breathe by the people and services and sights on a single city block, we know that moving this far is just as well moving countries. Changing currencies. Time zones. Allegiances. But without the sympathy of the crowd. Because it is, after all, still New York.

However, as White wrote:

Although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness it seldom seems dead or unresourceul; and you always feel that either by shifting your location then blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirt depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of moral. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation — a shift in weather, perhaps, or something in the mail. But in New York, the chances are endless.

However I feel about this place: this strange land where the currency is ever so slightly foreign. This Brooklyn territory where sidewalk rules are askew just enough to make me relearn all walking patterns. However I feel, the chances are endless.

Love not help

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:35:16 -0500

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 boxes made a profound difference. On average, almost twice as much money was raised daily in boxes with the “donating=loving” text, as compared with the “donating=helping” boxes and the boxes with no additional text.

Why?

Guéguen and Lamy think that the word “loving” acts as a prime, activating related concepts such as compassion, support and solidarity, and thereby encourages behaviour consistent with those ideas. Such an explanation would fit the wider literature showing how our motivations and attitudes can be influenced by words and objects without us realising it.

If you recall, researchers who analyzed conversations of 154 middle-aged and older married couples about points of disagreement found:

[T]hose who used pronouns such as “we,” “our,” and “us” behaved more positively toward one another and showed less physiological stress. …. Couples who emphasized their “separateness” by using pronouns such as “I,” “me,” and “you” were less satisfied in their marriages.

Pronouns=loving?

The visual truth of Barbie

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:09:05 -0500

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 showed that this fundamentally changed the way people perceived the physical world. Those in smaller bodies felt as though they were in a world populated by giant hands and pencils the size of trees, while those in giant bodies felt the same objects to be tiny, toy-sized versions of the real thing.

And, similar to the left-leaners:

This research also adds to a growing body of literature that demonstrates that the world we perceive is not an identical copy of the physical world. Hills appear steeper when we are wearing heavy backpacks, objects appear closer when we desire them, and, as shown here, the world appears larger when we are in a smaller body. Although the world does not actually physically change in these ways, our mind seems to be constructed in such a way that allows a surprising degree of flexibility in perceiving the physical nature of the world.

On this, David Byrne makes a segue from Barbie to politics to economics:

We instinctively want to believe that a merit-based world exists — that with some hard work, focus, time, effort and perseverance, you too will be rewarded with the body you see on the billboard. The same also applies to our notions of economic well-being. As a result, you have Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich (among many others) implying that poor people are poor simply because they aren’t trying hard enough.

From the neuroscience of Barbie to the neuroscience of vowels, the more that is revealed on perception, the less it appears is visible. What next?

Right as rain

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:18:31 -0500

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):

To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while stood on a Wii-console balance board. A third of the questions were asked while the volunteers were perfectly upright. The rest of the questions were asked when — unbeknownst to the volunteers — the board was altered so that it would give a “perfectly balanced” readout only if volunteers tilted slightly to either the left or right.

If it’s true that the left is underestimated and north is farther, curious what this suggests for a delight for and propensity toward the lower-right quadrant.