August 31st, 2009
The miniature worlds of small-scale sculptor Thomas Doyle:
My work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past—whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life.
August 28th, 2009
With Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard update shipping today, one can’t help but wonder what’s next.
Thanks, World Famous Design Junkies.
This interview with Penguin designer Coralie Bickford-Smith, done in the style of Layer Tennis, led me to her designs for a series of hard bound classics and her design for Penguin’s new translation of Arabian Nights.
To quote Alan:
Note for possible future misery memoir: Coralie designs books so nice that touching them makes me feel inferior.
Damn straight.
There’s this: a well linked story at the LA Times about Jani, a six-year old girl suffering from schizophrenia. And it’s worth your time. But there’s something better too.
Jani’s father maintains a blog, and his perspective, his voice, gives you more insight, understanding, and heart-ache than any journalist ever could.
Here he is talking about his daughter, and her struggle to ignore the delusions of her disease:
She surveys her environment and you can actually see her trying to find something, anything, that will shut out whatever it is she is hearing. She will pick up a few toys and put them down, then look up at nothing in particular, with what looks like a sad, wistful smile on her face. And then she will walk around listlessly, head raised, sometimes shaking as if she is disagreeing, staring up at something we can’t see. We watch her, in those moments, give up. It is the most awful thing I have ever seen in my life and it breaks my heart. And I grab at some toy and call her over, desperately trying to engage her. I keep talking to her, playing with her, working every second to keep her here.
The title of the piece is “I wish you’d never learnt to weep.”
August 27th, 2009
You should be reading Magic Molly:
Three women, one a Diane Keaton lookalike and the others, like her, pretty but not too pretty. Women look best alone or in trios. Each wears a sleeveless top and earrings, drinks iced coffee and discusses work. They are graceful in an unassuming way, as though talking underwater. It’s a kind of trio specific to Manhattan. Unworried enough to worry about little things, lightly. Off to work at ten AM and out to dinner afterwards.
On break she sits at the counter facing out, earbuds in and one hand smashed against her cheek. I know that feeling. Time never went by so quickly as it does on a twenty-minute break under the manager’s eye. I want to slow it down for her.
John Talbott’s former career as a Goldman Sachs investment banker is objectively fascinating, but it wouldn’t have been fascinating to HIM. How did he gather the patience and conviction to write a book about something that must have seemed ordinary and de rigeuer? How did he recognize the details that would be interesting to laypeople? How did he see his own work through fresh eyes while simultaneously writing about it with the wisdom gained through experience?
I could spend every minute of my day reading posts like these.
Jeffrey Veen makes two great points in this video. First, he compares the iPhone interface knock-off sensation that swept cell phones over the last year to cargo cults (which you should read up on). It’s a near perfect analogy.
Second, that stealing ideas is fine, so long as it’s intentional, thoughtful and informed theft.
John Scalzi, writing about the numerous design flaws of the Star Wars universe, pointed out something I’d never considered about light sabers:
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent’s fingers.
Note taken.
August 26th, 2009
It may very well be Constitutionally legal to execute the innocent:
Twenty years ago, off-duty police officer Mark McPhail was shot and killed in a Savannah, Georgia parking lot. Based on information provided by Sylvester Coles, the police sought Troy Davis for the murder. He was found guilty and sentenced to death based on the testimony of eyewitnesses.
Since then, however, nearly all of those witnesses have recanted, claiming in affidavits that they were pressured by police to name Davis as the perpetrator. Meanwhile, additional evidence has been found indicating that Coles, the prosecution’s star witness against Davis, was the actual killer … neither the Georgia courts nor the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board has seen fit to stop Davis’s execution.
Last week, the Supreme Court offered Davis a ray of hope. In response to his petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the Justices ordered that a federal district court in Georgia “should receive testimony and make findings of fact as to whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis’s] innocence.”
The Court’s order in Davis was not unanimous, however. Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented. Justice Scalia said that even if the district court were to find Davis to be innocent, there would still be nothing unlawful about executing him.
I’ve always been oddly attracted to the weird disconnect between our laws and common sense; the legal grey areas surrounding what should be stark black and white. This is no different.
David Pierson on the strangeness of Ikea in China:
Every weekend, thousands of looky-loos pour into the massive showroom to use the displays. Some hop into bed, slide under the covers and sneak a nap; others bring cameras and pose with the decor. Families while away the afternoon in the store for no other reason than to enjoy the air conditioning.
Welcome to IKEA Beijing, where the atmosphere is more theme park than store.
Frank Bruni, the New York Times retiring and superb food critic, on how to navigate a menu:
Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.
Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.
Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.
Choose among the remaining dishes.
If you’re an NYC denizen, or heading for a visit, the list of restaurants at the end of the article is an excellent place to start.
Also, anyone willing to FedEx me a dozen Shake Shack burgers will have a new bestest-best friend.
August 14th, 2009
Adam Roberts’ Dinner at El Bulli, the “greatest restaurant in the world”, as told in comic book form.
Thanks, Waxy.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a short cartoon by Stuart McMillion comparing Huxley and Orwell.
And yes, I’m on a bit of a theme today.
Thanks, Kyle.
David Ulin, the Book editor for the L.A. Times, is having trouble reading:
It isn’t a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else’s world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.
Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know
It’s apparently completely legal to print your own currency:
Artists in northern Brooklyn are coming together to create their own cash in hopes of uniting the community and encouraging shoppers to spend locally.
Who knew.
Nicholas Carr on the attention span of the web:
The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its imperialistic iron fist, the “ecstatic surfing” behavior on everything and to the exclusion of other modes of experience…
It’s the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of “tracks” at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Just hit Shuffle.
Whether it’s news stories or pop songs, we’re skimmers now. It’s a one-hit-wonder world.
Earlier today, Michael Erard over at Design Observer posted a strange little essay on what he calls the attention economy:
I imagine attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them. All the candy for the human brain — haiku, ringtones, bumper stickers — would be priced like the luxuries that they are. Things requiring longer attention spans would be cheaper — they might even be free, and the higher fixed costs of producing them would be covered by the higher sales of the short attention span products.
The question I’m still pondering: Is the premise of both author’s criticism true? Why are things of depth inherently better than things of breadth?
That I so easily jump to “of course!,” yet can’t explain why worries me.
Danny Treacy’s Them:
They are the figments of his imagination and desire. They are made from recovered clothes, collected from those lonely places - the woods, the wasteland, the car-parks. They are re-stitched and re-fashioned: re-modelled into junk monsters. They are nightmares of the catwalk, prowling around the outskirts of style’s dumb extravagance.
Haunting, in that specific way that only random things can be.
August 13th, 2009
The Man Who Walked Around The World, the story of Johnnie Walker whiskey, narrated by Robert Carlyle.
The University of Washington’s archive of advertising from the West, 1867 to 1918:
Many of the advertisements shed light on the history and social conditions of the Pacific Northwest. (T)he collection touches upon important historical issues such as the Washington state prohibition movement, the 1897 Alaskan Gold Rush and regional railroad construction. It also provides examples of race and gender based stereotypes commonly used by advertisers.
The fact it has a collection of images labeled “Quackery” is particularly awesome.
Thanks, Coudal.
August 11th, 2009
No one can predict the future, but the powers of probability can help. Armed with this knowledge, a high-school mathematics education and £50, I headed off to find out how Thorp, and others like him, have used mathematics to beat the system. Just how much money could probability make me?
The author tries her hand at everything from roulette, counting cards, playing the lottery and beating the bookies through arbitrage. A rather thorough look at the power of probability.
As an admission of guilt, I taught myself how to count cards a few months ago before a trip to Vegas. I’ve always been fascinated by the practice.
There’s a lovely bit in How We Decide about a theoretical physicist named Michael Binger. Now a poker player, Binger got his start counting cards. Thomas describes the method in her article:
The simplest way is to start at zero and add or subtract according to the dealt cards. Add 1 when low cards (two to six) appear, subtract 1 when high cards (10 or above) appear, and stay put on seven, eight and nine. Then place your bets accordingly - bet small when your running total is low, and when your total is high, bet big. This method can earn you a positive return of up to 5 per cent on your investment.
It’s deceptively simple.
The main problem with counting cards isn’t the actual act of counting. Put any person in a quiet room and start turning over cards, and they’ll be more than capable of keeping an accurate count.
Now add some music. Girls in low-cut dresses. Alcohol. A tourist from San Diego who wants nothing more than to talk to you about the great time he had at the craps table moments ago. A dealer calling out numbers every few minutes. Decisions.
Even simple things become incredibly hard in the environment of a casino.
Being the complete nerd I am, I decided to train myself using another bit of insight from Lehrer’s book: trained intuition. The idea that what we call “instinct” is little more than repetition mixed with difference. That as we watch events unfold, our mind is making constant guesses and corrections about what will happen next, getting ever better at guessing the outcome. And when something unexpected happens, or something falls outside our perception of what the pattern should be, our “gut” fires up. Warns us that “here be dragons”.
I built a quick simulator in Cocoa that dealt cards from a shuffled six-deck shoe. As each card was flipped over, slowly at first, the background of the application flashed either red, for -1, or green for +1. At random intervals, the application would stop and ask me whether I should bet low or high. If I was wrong, it flashed and beeped like a expensive car in a hail storm. If I was right, it kept going. Over time it randomized its speed, so I’d never fall into an easy rhythm.
The idea was to not just learn to count cards, but to simultaneously train my intuition. To embed a pattern into my subconcious. In theory, even when intoxicated, I would have an instinctual need to bet high when the count is high, and to play it safe when the count is low.
Some days I wonder how it is I have a girlfriend.
I’ve been to Vegas twice since I wrote the app, and both times, walked away up. But just ever so slightly. Certainly not be the hundreds of thousands I envisioned.
So, did my training work? Most nights, I think “yes”. The vast majority of the time I had what I thought to be an accurate count in my head, and bet according to it. But I wasn’t winning every hand, or even spending every hour up. My pot of chips swung with the rest of the table’s. On my first sit, the deck stayed at between +1 and -1 nearly the entire shoe, giving me no real advantage. I lost more than I’d imagined I could. But I kept seated, went back in, with the knowledge, or more realistically, the hope that I knew what I was doing. That the odds would turn in my favor and that I could recover what I’d lost.
And I came back. I doubled, halved, broke even, went up a bit. Got out when the sun was coming up and my bed finally seemed like a better place to be. Over time, it worked out.
Being the skeptic I am, I know two trips isn’t a good enough sample to proclaim “I’ve mastered counting cards.” I’m also a newly-minted small business owner, so more than a few trips a year is probably a terrible idea. And hell, after this post, I’m sure there are quite a few casinos adding me to their lists of personas non grata.
Still, the idea of it, that basic math mixed with a trained gut can turn probability in your favor, is one I’ll have a hard time getting over. It’s a siren’s call, echoing over the treacherous rocks, beckoning me over to sit down; To play.
Michael Shermer on the history and necessity of the skepticism movement:
What’s the danger in me believing in UFOs?
Well, it starts with just, “Are you willing to believe anything?” Because if you believe your astrology column, which admittedly is relatively harmless, what else are you willing to believe?
If you have no critical facilities at all, then you’ll go for the aliens and the ESP and stuff, but then maybe you’ll accept political or economic ideologies that are equally wacky.
It really does begin with the simplest stuff.
Indeed.
Campaign Monitor, arguably the only email marketing tool worth using, was compromised by hackers. From the team’s post:
This is horrible news to have to release, but unfortunately Campaign Monitor has been attacked by one or more hackers, and some of your accounts have been compromised. This has been a deliberate, planned and complex intrusion and we are still in the process of handling the hacks and the impact.
In several cases, the hacker imported their own lists, and managed to send spam to those lists and in some cases the lists already in the account.
Whenever anyone talks about the dangers of cloud services, this is exactly the scenario that plays out in their mind. You trust your data to some third party, and that third party, through no fault of yours, is compromised.
Worse, Campaign Monitor was a shell service: something numerous agencies resold to their clients, unbranded and often masked. More than one designer will wake up to the news that they’ll have to call a client who trusted them, and explain how a service the client may never have realized was responsible for their information is now at fault for damaging their relationships with their customers. I watch my inbox with a certain dread that I’ll be next.
In terms of response, Campaign Monitor couldn’t have handled it better. An honest, “something terrible happened” post, emails directly to the customer’s affected and to every customer, no matter whether their data was touched. A warning; We’re vulnerable. We’re sorry. We’re trying.
Of course, apologies aren’t necessary if you never make mistake.
And while we’re living in fantasy world, I demand Campaign Monitor send me a unicorn.
August 10th, 2009
Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a conversation about the future at Anticipation World Con, every paragraph of which is worth reading.
Though a few exchanges caught my mind.
Paul Krugman on the acceleration of change:
(T)here hasn’t been that kind of dramatic change … If you walked into a kitchen from the 1950’s it would look a little pokey, but you’d know what to do. It wouldn’t be that difficult. If someone from the 1950’s walked into a kitchen from 1909 they’d be pretty unhappy – they might just be able to manage. If someone from 1909 went to one from 1859, you would actually be hopeless. The big change was really between 1840 and the 1920’s, in terms of what the physical nature of modern life is like. There’s been nothing like that since.
Charlie Stross on AI:
Dead (Dutch) computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra had a number of pithy aphorisms … One I particularly like is the question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether or not a submarine can swim. The point being Boeing 737’s and seagulls can both fly, however, we don’t try to replicate seagulls when we’re designing a new airliner.
Stross on how little we really know:
Craig Venter came up with an interesting project a couple of years ago to sequence the Pacific Ocean. If you have a bucket of seawater, it contains probably on the order of a billion organisms most of which are viruses, probably single virus particles in that bucket from a number of species. It turns out when they did shotgun sequencing on a bucket of seawater 98% of the genes they discovered were hitherto unknown. There’s a lot of stuff out there that we do not have a clue about.
Stross and Krugman are both essentially in the same field: the prediction of the unpredictable. And each have clearly sat and thought deeply about exactly where they think we’re headed as a culture. And each make great points during this talk.
I’d add more, but I’m still digesting myself.
Thanks, Slashdot.
Updated the link to point to the non-slashdot’d site.
Cuba is running out of toilet paper:
The state-run company that manufactures the island’s supply has warned that the economic crisis and a series of devastating hurricanes has left it unable to guarantee it will be able to produce or import sufficient supplies again until the end of the year.
This is via Foreign Policy Passport, who points out America has its own problem with toilet paper:
Americans like their toilet tissue soft: exotic confections that are silken, thick and hot-air-fluffed … (but) fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.
Great. Now I don’t know whether to feel privileged or guilty.
If you adjust for the cost of living, Eamon Moynihan says, you’ll find New York is the poorest place in America:
Based on data from C2ER, a company that has been producing cost-of-living estimates for years, someone earning $50,798 in Chicago or $62,741 in Washington, D.C. enjoys the same standard of living as someone earning $100,000 in New York City.
Once you apply that cost of living to 2006 estimates of median household income, you realize that New York State ranked last in the nation in purchasing power. The adjusted figure for New York was $38,986; for Mississippi, it was $42,984.
The result is that New York City residents have far less purchasing power than anyone seems to realize.
Moynihan has started the “Cost of Living Project” to help bring more attention to this so-called “problem”.
I’m not sure how much sympathy I have for the denizens of New York City. During my time living there, I found the vast majority of individuals I’d met were transplants. Non-natives. People who chose to move to New York City for whatever wild-eyed fantasy they’d dreamed up in their head of life in the big city. And while nearly all of them would complain about nearly every aspect of New York life, from the costs of rent, to the size of their apartment, the crowded subways, to the garbage-soaked streets, it was always easily outweighed in their minds by the other amenities of the city.
Yes, rent was atrocious, but living in New York was unlike any other city they’d lived in. The pace of it, the atmosphere of Gotham itself, seemed worth the price of admission. And either you agreed or there was something terribly wrong with you.
Jacob Gershman looks into why even neo-conservatives love Jon Stewart:
Conservatives like Stewart because he’s providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks.
“He’s got his perspective, but he’s been fair.” Says (John) Bolton: “In general, a lot of the media, especially on the left, has lost interest in debate and analysis. It has been much more ad hominem. Stewart fundamentally wants to talk about the issues. That’s what I want to do.”
At some point, Stewart is going to have to admit he’s not just a comedian.
August 9th, 2009
Time’s John Cloud on why exercise may not be the secret to weight loss:
The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.
And our bodies weren’t exactly built to lose weight in the first place:
Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live…We have so little brown fat that researchers didn’t even report its existence in adults until earlier this year. That’s one reason humans can gain weight with just an extra half-muffin a day: we almost instantly store most of the calories we don’t need.
As a massively, to a point nearly unhealthy, pale skinny nerd, I generally have a less than easy time sympathizing with the obese. But the more I read, the more I begin to realize just what a terrible hill folks have to climb if they weren’t born with the metabolism of a meth fiend.
August 6th, 2009
It started with this:
(A)lot of folks are lobbying their companies, clients, and partners to drop support for IE 6.
My issue is how they’re doing it. The more dickish folks are throwing up an insulting roadblock, patronizing IE 6 users. Those folks should be immediately fired, and smacked upside the head.
Maybe you can think of IE6 as a perfectly viable user agent for consuming content, but cost prohibitive for rendering top-tier experience design. Serve your print styles to IE6 if you don’t want to offer design support. Or serve a basic white-on-black stylesheet. Or no stylesheet.
Essentially, Toby’s point is that cute, crude or otherwise offensive messages relating to the fact the user should upgrade their browser reflect poorly on a website, and possibly the brand behind them. He believes that a much better solution is to either serve up special stylesheets that relegate the visitor’s experience to a less than pleasurable one or serve up no styles at all. Either way, he says, let them in and don’t be mean about it.
And I say, “horse poop.”
While in any sane world Toby would be right, I believe that, as horrible as it may be to pester, poke and prod visitor’s to your website about their choice of browser, the sad truth is that it may be the only way to get the monkey of IE6 off our collective backs.
For context, we have to understand that IE6 is rarely a browser of choice. If a user is continuing to use it as their primary browser, they will fall into one of three delicious categories:
Can’t-Do-No-Better: The user is on an older machine that is incapable of supporting a newer browser, or at least, they think this is case.
Don’t-Know-No-Better: As the vast majority of major websites continue to support IE6, the user has no reason to upgrade their web browser, and no real understanding of why they would even need to.
Not-Allowed-To-Do-No-Better: Corporate users whose IT departments have standardized on IE6 for any number of reasons. It could be a simple matter of stability concerns (stay with what you know), a conflict with internal software that was written specifically for IE6, security concerns (which is absolutely ridiculous) or a cost concern, as even free browsers require costly manpower to implement across even a small organization.
Of these three groups, the only one that is beyond our grasp as developers is Group 1. Older machines can’t run newer software. The world is a cruel and dark place and woe be its inhabitants.
However, Group 2 is very clearly someone we can affect. If our site prompts them to upgrade their browser, maybe they will, and slowly the percentage of folks who fall in this camp will dwindle.
Which brings us to Group 3. The group that everyone says we should cower in fear over, or treat with kid gloves. “It’s not their fault!” they say, “Why be mean to them?”
It’s at this point in the lecture where we talk about basic incentives.
Let’s assume, more than likely correctly, that there is no tangible reason this employee couldn’t use another browser. That the decision is arbitrary, based on either a cost/benefit analysis, a lazy IT department, or that basic fundamental resistance any business has to change. For the business to upgrade their web browsers, some outside force will have to either make the cost equation balance, spirit the IT department to life, or push the company in some other way to consider change.
Let’s also be clear about two things: Everything is about tradeoffs.
What I advocate below I don’t advocate out of some dysfunctional hatred of IE6, nor out of some utopian ideal of HTML5 magically becoming viable by Q1 of 2010. I advocate it because, when looking at where my time as a developer is generally spent, the proportion that inevitably falls to IE6 is almost always out of whack with the revenue associated with supporting those users.
Generally, about 10-25% of my hours spent working on markup are spent either testing, debugging or hacking around numerous IE6 deficiencies. For the cost to work out for the client, the revenue they’d receive from IE6 users has to at least cover my cost of development, and hopefully exceed it. Otherwise, even if the cost were covered, the time spent working on IE6 as opposed to adding additional features or perfecting an existing interaction to better compete is simply not worth it.
There are sites, generally large and established ones, who have no option but to support IE6 for the time being. Even though numerous online businesses specifically don’t support IE6, and do quite well despite, for many sites, the loss of potentially one quarter of their page views or paid accounts is a loss they aren’t willing to bear. Generally, these sites are slower to evolve, and more stable in features and interactions. The sunk cost of any development time supporting IE6 is spread out over several years, and the additional users more than make up for the headaches associated with supporting them.
However, most sites do not have this problem. Just as most sites do not need to spend thousands per month on a server farm, the vast majority of sites do not need to worry about the one-quarter of internet users who continue to use IE6. They need to be more worried about attracting, impressing and retaining new users above all else.
To do that, sites must be able to quickly adapt, add new features, repair old ones, respond to feedback and improve at the fastest pace possible. Sites must consider that newer browsers generally offer better support of newer Web standards that allow their developers to create increasingly gorgeous, detailed and impressive experiences at a lower cost.
“Supporting IE6 costs you money” is true for every site. “Supporting IE6 will make you money” is true for only a handful.
Returning to previous generalized groupings, the question we have to ask is, if the very existence of Group 3 hurts both our community and the ability of our clients or our businesses to grow, how do we convert them?
The most basic law of nature, human or otherwise, is that, “objects at rest tend to stay sitting right there using their lame old browser and making my life hell”.
Companies need an impetus to change their policy. One of four things will do this.
The company upgrades browsers as they upgrade their user’s machines. This is inevitable, and yes, simply waiting around is a perfectly valid strategy if you’re either in that handful of sites or don’t care. But you’re talking another 2-4 years of supporting IE6.
The company upgrades their browsers out of necessity. Should any major application the company uses ever drop support for a given browser, you can be assured that the company will immediately plan to upgrade their user’s machines.
The company upgrades their browsers out of user demand. As much as employees feel like their IT department is a cold, unforgiving wasteland of condescending, unsupportive social-rejects who like nothing better than to get in their way, those same social-rejects ultimately are there to support their users. And given enough employee demand, especially from the right employees, the department will begin to upgrade user’s browsers.
The CEO’s favorite web site stops working in IE6. Upgrades will happen the next week.
While item 2 can probably be enacted without any snarky messages, I submit that items 3 and 4 will work infinitely faster with snarky messages. Basic human nature dictates that.
If a user sees a single message, from a single site, that their browser is not new enough to visit the site, they might dismiss that site and move on. If they see a site which is merely “broken”, or appears quite flat and lacking in interaction as Toby advocates, they may dismiss that site and move on.
If the user is constantly bombarded with actual dialogs explaining that their browser is out of date, and it’s interfering with their ability to use their favorite sites, you can be assured the IT department will soon be barraged with requests to upgrade user’s browsers.
And the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
What’s more hilarious than anything else about this discussion is that we’ve already gone through this as a community before. Remember the browser wars?
As much as we’d love to repaint history as Microsoft somehow forcing us to upgrade, the truth is that Navigator continued to run on our machines, but developers began to increasingly use IE only technologies and develop only for IE. As time dragged on, the number of users who used IE shrunk, while the speed at which we developed new and better experiences grew, and it happened over the course of maybe two years. There was a collective push towards more modern browsers, a very loud, badged and advocated push, and that push from the development community helped push the user community to come along.
It’s a play we’ve already staged once, and yet numerous people are attempting to rewrite the script. Or pretend it’s a different play entirely.
All of the so-called “business concerns” are concerns I heard raised six years ago when I began to recommend clients ignore Navigator and its ilk. They’re the same arguments everyone heard. And thankfully, back then, a good majority of us saw the benefits of standards and pushed through that concern. We sold the possibility of faster development and newer technologies to our clients, insisted this was the way forward, did so loudly, and sure enough, most people came along with us.
Why this time is so magically different is beyond me.
February 3rd, 2009
Various New York chefs respond to the proposed “Obesity Tax” on non-diet soft drinks:
Pragmatically speaking, if we imposed a tax on the 50 billion places now hawking small plates, handcrafted artisanal cocktails with antique bitters, house-cured salumi, and featuring servers who call the customer “dude” or “bro” while texting on their cell phones, we could probably put enough dough in the state till to end obesity for generations.
I will never fully understand why people drink diet soda, eat low-fat cheese or use anything other than unsalted butter in cooking.
Michael Idov used to run a coffee shop:
You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.
Paul Boag on the hidden costs of a content-management system:
Many think of a content management system as a magic bullet that solves all of their content woes. Unfortunately the cost of a CMS is greater than its price tag. Before making a decision about whether to adopt a CMS, or indeed which CMS to choose, you first need to be aware of the hidden costs.
Beware the off-the-shelf system.
Things you’ll find in the stimulus package that you wouldn’t expect to be there:
$248 million for furniture at the new Homeland Security headquarters.
$75 million for “smoking cessation activities.”
$25 million for tribal alcohol and substance abuse reduction.
$850 million for Amtrak.
$75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI.
And by “wouldn’t expect” I mean, “have come to expect and accept as the price of getting laws passed.”
January 30th, 2009
PETA’s rejected Super Bowl ad claimed vegetarians make better lovers. Like many things PETA, that’s not exactly true:
Vegetarianism also may have some negative effects on sexual desire. Vegetarian diets tend to correlate with higher rates of zinc deficiency, which is closely associated with lower testosterone levels and depressed sex drives. Vegetarian women are also more likely to develop amenorrhea (loss of periods), a condition that’s usually accompanied by low testosterone, vaginal dryness, and poor libido. Finally, the notion that overweight people are less sexually active isn’t entirely accurate (for women, at least): A recent analysis published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology shows that overweight women might, in fact, be slightly more active.
This is the same organization that is attempting to label fish sea kittens, under the auspices of bringing attention to the cruelty of eating fish.
Sarah Hartwell on the cultural taboo of eating cats:
Cat flesh only becomes economical where the cat is fed on scraps or where it eats rodents. Otherwise the expense of rearing cats for consumption makes it an expensive delicacy. There is not much meat on a cat unless it has been specially fattened. Stray cats which rely on their own hunting or scavenging skills are generally very scrawny.
Includes a lovely recipe from 1529, “Roast Cat as It Should Be Prepared”.
January 30th, 2009
The ticket sat on my desk for a month.
Purchased in June, the trip was supposed to be my last California event. The one thing I felt I should do, while there, while near Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA.
He died in February of 1989. I was six-years old.
My mother, sister and I were living in Rahway, NJ, in a cramped bedroom that a co-worker of my mother’s, also a single mom, gave us for help with groceries and heat and chores. We’d been moving from home to home ever since he left. We looked for deals: one bedrooms in nice neighborhoods, two bedrooms in bad ones, studio apartments when things got tight. For a few months we lived in the basement of an uninhabited mansion in Teaneck, NJ. Life had a consistency of difference.
The story shifted, nearly every year. He died in a dozen different ways. Plane crashes, car crashes, heart attacks, pneumonia. Too young to know what really happened, I’m sure they thought. My mother and his parents slid around the truth looking for something comforting to tell his son. Nothing comforted, but even when you’re young, you can tell when comfort is just as much about the comforter as it is about you. You play along.
After his mothers’ funeral, his father buried a year earlier, his brother Ken showed me the police report. Too many pills, prescribed for a bad cold, downed with alcohol, ruled a suicide, they’d found his body laying in a hotel room in Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA. Some one hundred and nineteen miles from my apartment in San Francisco. Closer than I’d been to him in a decade, since I last saw his ashes in his parent’s home.
Pretending his death had an effect on me is as invalid as pretending it didn’t. I never knew him well enough to miss him, but knew of him well enough to miss the idea of him. I know other people had fathers. I can imagine what a life with one would be like, but it’s about as distant to me as imagining a life wherein I’m a zerba-riding mercenary on the plains of the serengeti. A passing dream with no relevance to the day to day.
Still, I bought the ticket, was drawn to buy it, was happy when I did.
But there’s also that awkward moment, when someone, amazed at my height, wonders aloud if my parents were tall too.
Well, my mom is six-foot. My grandfather was six-five.
And your dad?
Forgot about him.
Silence and the inevitable don’t really know. Move the topic. Hope they don’t pry. If they do pry, make sure to present the topic as casually as possible. If they see it doesn’t bother you, they won’t feel obliged to say, “Oh, I’m sorry” and there won’t be that weird look that wonders if you’re broken or not.
It was much worse when I was a kid. Sometimes, they’d try to hug me.
I’ve collected stories, stared at pictures as much as I imagine I’m supposed to given the events. I asked questions about him, as my contract states I should. A programmer, just like me. Started young, like me. Loved Macs. Strange how that’s perhaps the only thing I think about. One of the few memories I have of him. His original Mac at that little desk in the alcove of the only home I ever shared with him, him hunched over doing some form of magic to it, being invited to look but not to touch. Strange how all these little facts may mean I am father’s son, how it doesn’t matter, but does. Macs, code as a genetic heritage. How small a bond I have with this memory of a person.
And this back and forth in my head creeps up every now and again and I’m left with an unused ticket to a place I assumed I needed to go, but ultimately never did. And I’m left with these pictures at five in the morning and a keyboard and some cigarettes and that nagging sensation that I’m supposed to be less or more attached to him than I am.
And I pace a bit, and I write something to get it all out and it doesn’t make it better or worse.
It just makes it what is.
A few notes Thelonious Monk gave Steve Lacy, as recorded by Steve Lacy:
What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.
How a simple UI change can have drastic effects, part the first:
About 2 months ago Twitter changed the order of your Follower list. It used to list your followers, in order that they joined twitter. Now it lists the people that just followed you.
Soon the users figured out that ‘people that just followed you’ was a gold mine of people that just took the action of following someone. Open up a few profiles, follow the 10 people that just followed them. Repeat until you have 13k followers.
Part the second:
It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year.
Unintended consequences are something of an art form in interface design. Small things can affect behavior, not just in your user, but across an entire community. Everything from button placement, to type size, to what features are exposed where, creates an environment that either encourages or discourages certain types of behavior.
About a year ago, I did a quick consult on a forum UI for a friend. Like many communities, the forum had a simple feature to mark a given user as either a “friend,” someone allowed to message you and whose posts where marked in a special way, or an “enemy,” someone who couldn’t message you and whose posts where hidden.
His first draft exposed the feature in an utterly sane way. Two links, next to any user’s name. “Add friend,” and “Make enemy”. Fast access to a useful feature. I’m sure he didn’t give it too much thought.
My first criticism? Kill the enemy link. Hide the feature somewhere deep in the UI. Get rid of it all together if he could.
It wasn’t just that the feature existed, but it’s prominent placement made knee-jerk reactions too easy. Someone post something you don’t agree with? There’s a nice quick way to get rid of them. Over time, the community would grow increasingly negative, myopic, and exclusive. All because of one link.
This may seem non-sequitur to the examples above, but they all sit in this neat boat of thinking about more than just usability when designing.
Everything is a trade-off. Everything has a consequence.
The first political television ad, ever:
In 1952, there was no precedent in presidential elections for the use of television “spot” advertising—short commercials that generally run between twenty seconds and a minute. Governor Thomas Dewey, declaring spots “undignified,” rejected their use in his 1948 presidential campaign. In 1952, most campaign strategists preferred thirty-minute blocks of television time for the broadcast of campaign speeches.
Like most absolutely evil things, we have an advertising wonk to thank for it:
The idea for the spots came from Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves, who had created the M&M “melts in your mouth, not in your hands” campaign. Reeves convinced Eisenhower that spot ads placed immediately before or after such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more viewers, and at a much lower cost, than half-hour speeches.
The Eisenhower ad is amazingly positive, which led me to wonder when the first negative political ad aired. Daisy, Johnson’s infamous ad from his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, seems to be considered the winner of that race, though I think a few of the ads from 1952 could easily be called negative. Just not, “We’re all going to die!” negative.
While I’m down in this rathole, here’s a fun-fact I did not know:
The increasing use of negative political advertising has been promoted by two unrelated legal touchstones. First, the Communication Act of 1934 made an important distinction between candidate ads and product or service ads. It stated that broadcasters could refuse all deceptive advertising except for political commercials. Second, the 1976 amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act allowed private individuals and political action committees or PACs, to spend unlimited amounts on behalf of candidates.
Ah, laws. Is there nothing they can’t accidentally do?
It may be time to admit that acupuncture is little more than a placebo:
Entitled Acupuncture treatment for pain: systematic review of randomised clinical trials with acupuncture, placebo acupuncture, and no acupuncture groups, [the study] appeared in the BMJ two days ago and was performed by Madsen et al at the Nordic Cochrane Center.
This particular meta-analysis examined studies of acupuncture for pain. The results were thirteen trials, with a total of 3,025 patients between them.
What were the findings?
In essence, zilch, nada, zip.
Well, not quite. Although it is statistically significantly different than zero, it is barely so. Indeed, it’s so small that that it falls below the minimally accepted threshold for a clinically noticeable reduction in pain.
That’s not to say a “just being a placebo” is necessarily a bad thing. The placebo effect is incredibly powerful, and in the right cases, can be harnessed for real benefit to people in pain.
There’s a full chapter devoted to the effect in Michael Brooks’ 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, though, for the lazy or those lacking an Amazon Prime account, a summary is available in the article that inspired the book:
Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
The article is a great read if you have an hour. The book is a much better read if you have a weekend.
