Notated notes on learning, design, & life

Why Is American Teaching So Bad? 

Jonathan Zimmerman:

During the buildup to the Iraq invasion in 2003, an Indiana teacher lost her job for telling her class (in response to a student question) that she had driven by an antiwar rally and honked her horn in support. A few years later, an Ohio teacher was dismissed for asking her students to select and read one of the American Library Association’s one hundred most commonly banned books. Most of Green’s examples of great classroom instruction come from math, where teachers are free to pursue a problem wherever it leads. Try doing that in social studies or English, and you might find yourself looking for a new line of work.

Garret Keizer is an English teacher, and a great one at that. In 2010, after a fourteen-year hiatus from the classroom, Keizer returned to the same rural Vermont high school where he had started his teaching career thirty years earlier. He soon put up in his classroom a poster about banned books of the kind that got the Ohio teacher fired. Keizer has more freedom to explore ideas than many other communities allow. But he is hamstrung anyway, not by book-burning censors but by the mind-numbing “accountability” regime that arose in the years following his first period as a teacher. As Goldstein and Green explain, No Child Left Behind and its spin-offs are premised on the grim notion that teachers will work harder—and better—if we can somehow pinpoint their performance and connect it to rewards and punishments.

Convivial Tools in an Age of Surveillance 

Another must-read from Audrey Watters:

In Papert’s vision, and in Kay’s as well, “the child programs the computer, and in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intense contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.” But as Papert wrote in his 1980 book Mindstorms, “In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child.”

The computer programming the child.

The computer isn’t some self-aware agent here, of course. This is the textbook industry programming the child. This is the testing industry programming the child. This is the technology industry, the education technology industry programming the child.

Despite Kay and Papert’s visions for self-directed exploration — powerful ideas and powerful machines and powerful networks — ed-tech hasn’t really changed much in schools. Instead, you might argue, it’s reinforcing more traditional powerful forces, powerful markets, powerful ideologies. Education technology is used to prop up traditional school practices, ostensibly to make them more efficient (whatever that means). Drill and kill. Flash cards. Just with push notifications and better graphics. Now in your pocket and not just on your desk.

Substitution (…and Continued Fractions) 

Sam Shah, with a great mechanism for substituting an expression with an equivalent variable: use a note card with the expression on one side and the variable on the other.

I emphasized that that card itself represented the value of that fraction. The front and back are both different ways to express the same (unknown) quantity we were looking for.

[…]

THAT FLIP IS THE COOLEST THING EVER FOR A MATH TEACHER. That flip was the single thing that made me want to blog about this.

Love it.

Thinking about the math education blogosphere 

I’ve never really been a blogger, despite trying my hand at it on various occasions over the years, but I have been very interested to see the recent crop of new attention to blogging in what I think of as the “meta” blogosphere.

All of these folks are compelling to me in various ways, although I don’t read every word that each of them writes. They all fall in the camp that is meta-focused on the web itself—folks who work on and depend on the web for their livelihoods, who contribute to its well-being, have a strong vested-interest in various foundational aspects of the web, and who correspondingly tend to have strong opinions about how things are going.

I even think all of this is incredibly important to worry about, but it’s not exactly a club that I want to be a part of.

No, I want to be part of the club of math education bloggers. (Even though I can’t because I don’t teach math.)

Years ago, a friend recommended to me Dan Meyer’s TED Talk, Math class needs a makeover. It’s a great and short presentation, where Dan makes a compelling argument about being less helpful and giving students more room to pave their own path to a solution to a problem rather than spelling out the steps. When was the last time you encountered a problem worth solving, where the process for solving it was all completely laid out for you anyway?

Dan, it turned out, has a blog. And over the years, he’s grown in popularity, and through his site I’ve started keeping up with more and more bloggers in this math & education community—folks like Audrey Watters and Michael Pershan and José Vilson. Meanwhile, my career has taken its own turn from focusing my time primarily on making websites to teaching people how to make websites.

And this is really the point isn’t it? I mean, I want to protect the health of the web as much as the next nerd, but to be honest, I’m not sure I ever really see a lot of new thoughts in the “Let’s talk about the web and publishing and technology” circles beyond what I recall from the days of Webmonkey, or A List Apart. Focus on the content, the web is for sharing, writing and linking are the native building blocks of the medium, we all should probably figure out how to write and how to make type work.

Let me be clear: I’m glad that folks are still making those points, and I’m sure that I will continue to try to hammer those things home myself, especially given that I’m now in a role where I’m regularly shepherding new folks toward working increasingly with the web as their means of making ends meet. If I have anything to add to the conversation from the past 15 years, it’s that currency matters and the idea of a stream or a river feels pretty apt when it comes to the web. In other words, the web is living, and it matters that the important pieces are revisited and freshened up for folks who are coming to these ways of thinking about the web now. (Maybe they’ve been doing something more interesting with their lives for the past 15 years.)

But I also want things that are new to me, that I feel like I can engage in. Streams I can jump into and splash around, where people aren’t focused on the nature of water or how it’s flowing.

I want to jump in with the people who are looking for the fish, and are still excited every time they catch another.

I’m confused. 

I want to admit something that I wish more people would admit: I’m confused.

I like to think that I know what I’m talking about, and I believe I put a great deal of thought and care into what I do, but neither of those things keep me from being confused. I don’t have a good idea about what the web is really for, where new technologies are going, whatever on earth is going on with the “tech industry,” or anything of that nature.

And yet I teach. I teach design now, and taught web development in the past. Sometimes I feel confused about why I should be teaching when I myself am so confused about the industry my own students are hoping to become better acquainted with.

But. That is probably why I teach. Because I’m confused and want to continue to work toward a greater understanding, and also because I’m willing to admit my confusion, and hopefully let my students in a little more as a result.

All that said, what I’m always advocating for in class is increasing the clarity of ideas. Maybe I’m talking to myself above all.

Writing in Public 

I’ve been reading more and more musings about the possibly lost “old” web, mostly from people I admire such as Mandy, Jason, and Erin. Young as they are, I feel as they are the generation before me in terms of web time, so when they sputter about what’s going on, for some reason it affects me.

The good news is that there’s also seemed to be a bit of a resurgence of folks attempting to blog more again, to bring back some of the open dialog that was part and parcel to the kind of web that I recall fondly.

I may still continue to try again, but certainly don’t promise anything at all. I do find it amusing that I’m typing these words on an iPad, using the Wordpress app. After all these long years, it does warm my heart a bit that there is this thriving and striving platform at my fingertips, free and wild, but willing to meet me whenever the technology of the day has taken me. This looks nothing like my first version of Wordpress, not by a long shot.

But still, it comforts.

A New Attempt 

I haven’t done anything remotely close to blogging in years, and truth be told, I’m pretty sure it’s because I always want to blog but am just bad at it.

This time, I’m gonna just go with it, warts and all. I’ll write and publish when the mood strikes, and about whatever.

I’m hoping that at this point I may have accrued enough experiences that I actually have something to write about. Whether it will be at all worth reading is a wholly different matter. I guess we’ll have to see.

Worry 

Water drips, worrying a crease into stone. Water flows, worrying rivers, creeks, and cracks into the face of the earth.

Cows seek fresh grass, worrying paths for others to follow.

A mother brings new life into the world, and worry sets in. Will the new be the same as the old, will the suffering be the same? Will the child grow to be healthy? Will she find her way in the scary world, find life and joy and peace and happiness?

We meet someone new, we learn a name. A small groove forms in our mind. We are reminded, we form an association. Time passes, more reminders turn association to certainty. We know someone, we feel their being and their essence, almost as a part of our selves. What will he say, what will he do? We have seen him say and do a thousand times before: we know.

Except that we don’t know, not really. Surprises continue, we grow apart and together and apart again. We grow alongside. We meet new people who are like the old and familiar, but different. In some we see better versions of ourselves, others remind us of the parts of ourselves we are ashamed of or wish were different. Some make us aspire, others make us despise.

One day we catch ourselves in the mirror and realize we aren’t the same as we once were: we have changed. We haven’t lost who we once were, there is something of the old there, reminders of a life lived. But the act of living has worried lines into our faces, thoughts into our minds, decisions into our pasts.

Time, however it moves, will continue. Tomorrow comes apace, and our yesterdays pile up one after the other.

—Brooklyn 2013

Searching for Understanding 

There is a great human curiosity that tracks across the ages, across people, a yearning to say what is what and why. But it is nowhere more magnificent than in the individual, in his life.

The young man today, living in a world with millennia of human history, is on a journey from a young age of unlocking not only his own secrets but the secrets of those before him. He wants to invent himself into a world of possibilities, to create his life. But he is not the first, not the second; the origin of his story escapes his memory and his father’s, escapes recorded memory. And yet, the space within which he can do his work of invention is confined. People have shaped, sometimes by design, sometimes by accident, a world in which he must find a way to operate. On some fronts, he must invent against the grain, but on so many his path is pre-arranged. Not in a grand cosmic sense, and not necessarily in the sense that he has no options, no choice.

His wonderful realization, as he goes, is that the boundaries left in place by human time do not really collapse his possibilities. The roads and buildings and plans and books and schools and governments and recipes and songs and poems and tendencies left for him and his fellows were left there by people who, he believes, shared a belief that the messy human struggle toward… something… is somehow worthwhile. These building blocks which may appear as impediments to creativity are imbued, instead, with a sense of focus and purpose. Created by people who in some part of themselves believed that these were the things needed to make their own lives livable. Structures that have, with time, become facts. Man-made raw materials for a future understanding.

Living with the Web 

When I wake up, I check my email and a few websites. Sometimes I listen to a podcast or flip through something on my iPad. Sometimes (rarely) I make an effort to read the news. I often hop on Adium pretty soon after I wake up to see if anyone is online to chat with. I spend the majority of most days with my laptop, and it sits next to me as I fall asleep listening to a podcast or audiobook, and then wakes me up with an alarm in the morning. During the day I sometimes entertain myself by watching a TV show or two. I make a lot of phone calls most days to stay in touch with friends and family on the other coast, and even then I often have the computer open in front of me.

I don’t think this is particularly unusual for people my age, or for most ages at this point in time. Even if I didn’t primarily do my work by making websites, I would probably be on a computer for a good chunk of the day at any other sort of job I could get. And I don’t even consider myself to be that bad with how much I’m in front of a computer and connected to the web. I spend hardly any time at all on Facebook, which I always hear about everyone spending gobs of time checking out. Ditto with Twitter. I have a lot of high-minded opinions about why social networking websites are bad or stupid or whatever name I come up with that day, but the truth is probably more like I just get bored easily with them.

I consider myself lucky to say that I generally feel like a productive contributor to the web, and a productive person in general. I’ve had my hand in a number of websites, none of which have probably changed the world or made it a better place. But there is something to the feeling that I know how to make something on the web, which to me feels like something beyond posting aphorisms to Twitter every so often.

I spend a lot of time on the web, and I think for that reason alone, I want it to be a really great place. I personally started interacting with the web through an AOL account my family got in 1994, when I was 9. I hear about people making interesting contributions to the medium as early as high school or middle school, and at this point I’m sure that means there are a lot of meaningful contributors to the web who grew up in a world where the web has always existed. I’m sure a lot of people who interacted with various precursors of the web would say that I’m already a member of that group. I believe in some ways I’ve watched the web grow from a subculture into mainstream culture. I wonder if there is any remaining doubt that it is probably here to stay and has simply become a part of humanity in the way that books are the primary record of our history. Books aren’t a subculture, they are a part of our culture, and the web seems to be as well.

Managing Change 

Growing up, my grandmother always told me, “Nevan, I’ve lived in a different world.” She was talking about the changes in technology over her lifetime, which made her feel as though the world had changed significantly enough to be as new. This always sparked my imagination, and I often tried to fill her in on what I thought were the remarkable developments going on – often things with which she had little to no first-hand experience. She was born in a log cabin in 1910, rode to school in a buggie, and didn’t have access to telephones. As a young woman starting out as a teacher, she was asked by the principal to spend half her time as secretary because she had taken quickly to the typewriter.

She never used a computer, and it was clear she couldn’t form a coherent understanding of the internet based on my abstract descriptions. I generally lapsed to explanations like the ability to store all of the text of Shakespeare’s plays on a single disk, and the idea that entire libraries of information could be stored electronically in something that could sit on a desk or be accessed over a telephone line by request.

Technology brings with it the allure of greater efficiency and therefore productivity. Some innovations, like the telephone, make possible the previously impossible. Others, like the telegram and email, speed up the previously slow. It’s important to remember that our minds don’t actually work any faster than they used to, and training one’s mind still requires a kind of effort that cannot really be artificially expedited. It is one thing to learn how to use a telephone, send an email, create a user account, publish a web page or blog, type on a keyboard, type on a mobile phone, fill out and manipulate a spreadsheet, use a camera, assemble a slide deck. It is another thing to learn how to reason, how to hold a conversation, how to write, how to express one’s feelings, how to describe ideas, how to watch for special moments, how to give a presentation, how to read. To some extent, learning the former can aid the learning of the latter. It can also distract. Negotiating a balance in a high-tech world is an individual process that depends on an understanding of both kinds of things, and of one’s self.

Roundup No. 5 

Easy A

I can’t think of better way to start than to whole-heartedly recommend the movie Easy A, currently out in theatres. Emma Stone is a pleasure, and the entire supporting cast is fantastic. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are particularly great as two parents clearly in love with their children. The movie plays homage to its roots (Ferris Bueller, Say Anything, etc., but also Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter) without getting too heavy about it, or too meta. Interestingly, the movie is framed with a YouTube confessional, which combined with the new electronic ways that gossip flits about the high school does a great job of showing us that times have changed but teenagers have not. A lot of fun, and required viewing for anyone who needs a bit of escape from the realities of Christian extremism.

Write a Letter

I used to write letters to friends in high school, and I have recently taken up doing so again. This subject matter probably deserves some more extensive consideration, but I wanted to plant the seed with anyone who may be reading. Writing a personal letter for an audience of one gives me a great feeling that is impossible to justify, but clearly exists. My writing feels sharper and more focused in letters because I know exactly who I’m writing for, and the pressure to write well is gone because a genuinely caring friend will be the only one with an opportunity to criticize.

There’s also something really soothing about a bit of written communication going out to a friend that isn’t leaving digital traces all over a bunch of servers in God knows how many places in the world. Letters can be intercepted, but they give me a feeling of privacy. I’m not one to crave privacy in the sense that I don’t want others to know what is going on with me. But I do relish that privacy of shared intimate moments, and as odd as it may sound, a letter is one of those moments.

So I encourage you to write someone a letter. If you feel so inclined, you can even write me a letter. I just might write back.

The Fork Test

My friend Rebecca has started a new food blog called The Fork Test. In her first post, she writes:

Cooking, for me, isn’t just a necessity anymore. It isn’t something I have to do because I don’t make enough money to do otherwise. It is now an active choice, something I want to do, time to myself I truly and utterly enjoy.

I have personally never developed any passion whatsoever for cooking, and am capable of making only two dishes: chili and pasta. I will be reading.

David Foster Wallace, Continued

In November 2003, The Believer published an interview with David Foster Wallace which is a really great read on the whole, mostly about his book Everything and More. This one part in particular is probably one of my favorite points I’ve come across yet in Wallace’s writing:1

…The big difference is that things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There’s no way we’d expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks–if only because math, philosophy, and theology weren’t coherently distinguishable for them. Same for the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, and etc. etc. (This is a very, very simple answer, of course, maybe right on the edge of simplistic.) By the time Cantor weighed in on ∞ in the 1870s, it was part of an extremely specialized technical discipline that took decades to master and be able to do advanced work in. For Cantor and R. Dedekind (and now this is all just condensed way down from the book (sort of the same way the question is)), the math of ∞ is derived as a way to solve certain thorny problems in post-calc analysis (viz., the expansions of trig functions and the rigorous definition of irrational numbers, respectively), which problems themselves derive from K. Weierstrass’s solutions to certain earlier problems, and so on. It’s all so abstract and specialized that large parts of E&M end up getting devoted to unpacking the problems clearly enough so that a general reader can get a halfway realistic idea of where set theory and the topology of the Real Line even come from, mathematically speaking. The real point, I think, has to do with something else that ends up mentioned only quickly in the book’s final draft. We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it’s next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life. Where even people in two closely related sub-sub-specialties have a hard time communicating with each other because their respective s-s-s’s require so much special training and knowledge. And so on. Which is one reason why pop-technical writing might have value (beyond just a regular book-market $-value), as part of the larger frontier of clear, lucid, unpatronizing technical communication. It might be that one of the really significant problems of today’s culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization. That sounds a bit gooey, but I think there’s some truth to it. And it’s not just the polymer chemist talking to the semiotician, but people with special expertise acquiring the ability to talk meaningfully to us, meaning ordinary schmoes. Practical examples: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius–which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise…. Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I think your question is nibbling at the edges of, and it’s interesting as hell.

I think Wallace was tapping into something we all feel a need for. Listen to this stuff: “clear, lucid, unpatronizing technical communication.” I certainly could use more of that myself.

Annals of Type

I finally picked up an English translation of The New Typography, Jan Tschichold’s attempt in 1928 to descibe recent movements in typographic and design practice to illustrate the need and way forward for a new approach to typography, taking into account technological changes in typesetting and printing. The translation seems to pick up what I imagine must even in the German be Tschichold’s intense and engaging style. In some ways, his mode of describing the past, present, and future in The New Typography remind me of some of Nietzsche’s writing on what he called the “new philosophers” and “philosophers of the future” in Beyond Good and Evil. For example:

Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces to purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not only be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future, they may even make a display thereof as their special adornment– nevertheless they will not want to be called critics on that account. It will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that “philosophy itself is criticism and critical science–and nothing else whatever!” Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of all the Positivists of France and Germany (and possibly it even flattered the heart and taste of Kant: let us call to mind the titles of his principal works), our new philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics are instruments of the philosopher, and just on that account, as instruments, they are far from being philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Konigsberg was only a great critic.

Tschichold himself was a cultural critic:

At the same time, new kinds of publications made possible by the new inventions, such as magazines and newspapers, emphasized the confusion in typographic design. When finally the process line-block was invented, and reproductive wood engraving, then at the highest point of its development, had to give way to it, confusion was complete. This state of affairs in printing was however only parallel with a general cultural collapse.

Germany especially, emerging victorious from the Franco-Prussian war, was flooded with machine-made substitutes for craftsmanship, that suited its megalomania which the victorious end of a war brought with it, and were enthusiastically taken up - indeed, people were actually proud of this tinniness. Like the profiteers of our own postwar period,2 people of that time had lost all sense of what was genuine; like us, they were blinded by the phoney glitter of those horrors.

The whole era is characterized on the one hand by a slavishly and entirely superficial copying of every conceivable old style, and on the other by a capriciousness in design without precedent. A town hall, for example, might be built to look like a pseudo-Gothic palace (Munich) or a “Romanesque” villa.

Sometimes it is nice to realize that technology, design, and culture have gone hand in hand (in hand) since well before computers or the web were really even imagined. How many pieces of modern software or websites can you think of that could be “characterized on the one hand by a slavishly and entirely superficial copying of every conceivable old style, and on the other by a capriciousness in design without precedent”? This text is still very much alive. See Khoi Vinh talking about bringing magazines to the iPad only days ago:

The Adobe promise, as I understand it, is that publications can design for one medium and, with minimal effort, have their work product viably running on tablets and other media. It says: what works in print, with some slight modifications and some new software purchases, will work in new media. It’s a promise that we’ve heard again and again from many different software vendors with the rise of every new publishing platform, but it has never come to pass. And it never will.

  1. From Dave Eggers’ intro: “Below is an email exchange with Wallace, though it wasn’t quite that. Questions were emailed to Wallace, who then took them home, answered them on his home computer–which is not connected to the Internet–printed those answers, and put them in the mail.” 

  2. Beyond Good and Evil was published in 1886, seventeen years before Tschichold was born. The Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871. The contemporary postwar period Tschichold refers to is following the First World War, during which time the German economy was in an enormous state of collapse. Explosive inflation ensued. 

Roundup No. 4 

General Education

I’ve been reading Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. So far my favorite part is this:

Historical and theoretical knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge that liberal education disseminates, is knowledge that exposes the contingency of present arrangements. It unearths the a prioris buried in present assumptions; it shows students the man behind the curtain; it provides a glimpse of what is outside the box. It encourages students to think for themselves. Liberal educators know this, but sometimes they make the wrong inference. They think that showing the man behind the curtain subverts the spectacle. But merely revealing the contingency and constructedness of present arrangements does not end the spectacle, and subversiveness is not the point. The spectacle goes on. The goal of teaching students to think for themselves is not an empty sense of self-satisfaction. The goal is to enable students, after they leave college, to make more enlightened contributions to the common good.

I’ll repeat: “But merely revealing the continency and constructedness of present arrangements does not end the spectacle, and subversiveness is not the point.”

“Grandaddy Justice”

Back in September, Charlie Rose had on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who I have decided is my new best friend. Some highlights:

Charlie Rose: Why are things that you read like literature important to a judge?

Stephen Breyer: I told a group of undergraduates here in New York a few weeks ago when I was asked that question. And I said it’s like knowing a foreign language or reading a novel. We only have one life. And we only really know our own. But by reading novels and by reading what other people have written about life, and about different ways of living, you can lead more lives than your own. And you can understand how people could have lived a quite different life. And that’s a wonderful privilege to be able to do that as well as I think a necessity for someone who’s going to affect the lives of other people.

[…]

Charlie Rose: So, somebody comes to you and says George Bush was not really elected president. The court simply issued a decree. You would say yes, he was, because the Supreme Court said he was.

Stephen Breyer: I would say better read the decisions, and I would also point out that one of the virtues that we have in this country is accepting decisions even when they’re very important and even when they’re wrong, rather than try to fight with guns to overturn them. And there are a lot of countries where that latter is a real alternative.

And that’s what I see in my office. I said, I’ve said this many times, but I see people of every race, every religion, every point of view. Every point of view and my mother used to say there is no view so crazy there isn’t somebody doesn’t hold it in this country. And these people who have very different points of view, outlook, et cetera, will decide under law. If you are going to decide under law, that means some people called judges will make these decisions. In difficult cases of interpretation, on the borders, all right. They’ll make mistakes sometimes.

So you have to decide you’re going to support an institution that will do things that are sometimes very unpopular. You have to decide that. I have to decide that. Very unpopular. And sometimes the judges will be wrong. And are you prepared to do that? And what I want to show people in this book is why they might be prepared to do it. And that’s – I tell some stories. And I try to explain how these decisions, many of them, current, how they look through my eyes. I can’t say I have the secret. I can say this is how I approach different areas and try to decide them. And I don’t call it politics. And I don’t call it just doing the good. And I certainly don’t call it deciding everything on the basis of some historical fact, you know, history is relevant.

[…]

Charlie Rose: You were willing to give the Congress some latitude.

Stephen Breyer: Uh-huh. Well, I put – this is not a real case. But I’m talking about statutes, I found a French railroad man, because there was a story in a French newspaper. And it said a biology – a teacher in a high school was bringing some snails, live snails in a basket on a train to Paris.

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Stephen Breyer: And the conductor came up and said you have to pay for a ticket, buy a ticket for the snails. And he said what? And the – he said read the tariff. It says you cannot bring animals unless you bring them in a basket and if you bring them in a basket, you have to buy a ticket. He said they didn’t mean snails, he said are snails animals? All right. There you have a statutory interpretation question.

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Stephen Breyer: Not so obvious. And why didn’t he make them buy 20 tickets? There were 20 snails. But I mean …

Charlie Rose: It is a way that you would approach that, so let’s assume that decision facing you.

Stephen Breyer: Right.

Charlie Rose: The way you would approach that is you go back and see what legislative intent was.

Stephen Breyer: That’s right, I try to figure out why did they write this into the manual. What was the purpose of this rule. Didn’t it have something to do with insurance? Did the insurance have to do with snails? I mean, didn’t they really mean house pets?

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Stephen Breyer: And who wrote it and what they have in mind.

I think the subtext of the conversation is, spend 16 years on the Supreme Court and you, too, will be able to speak in paragraph form.

Annals of Type

Hrant Papazian and Nina Stössinger have started a new website devoted to Armenian Type called Armenotype. Looks really promising, and the script is really beautiful. From Stössinger’s “Type and Culture”:

Some Government officials in Yerevan call me their «ambassador» as I’ve been trying to raise the profile of the Armenian alphabet in «type circles» - with some success - and the last two issues of Baseline magazine feature my articles on the Armenian alphabet and type design - subjects never contained within this international journal in thirty years. I’ve assisted with some exhibitions in the UK of achievements in this field and was a judge in 2008 for the first «Granshan» international Armenian type design competition, held in Yerevan. This year the third Granshan was held in Dublin at the ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) conference - the forum for the world’s type designers and typographers since 1957. There is talk of the 2012 conference being held in Yerevan…

Looking forward to more.

Roundup No. 3 

The Social Sciences

Jim Manzi offers an interesting critique of the social sciences:

Over many decades, social science has groped toward the goal of applying the experimental method to evaluate its theories for social improvement. Recent developments have made this much more practical, and the experimental revolution is finally reaching social science. The most fundamental lesson that emerges from such experimentation to date is that our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound. Despite confidently asserted empirical analysis, persuasive rhetoric, and claims to expertise, very few social-program interventions can be shown in controlled experiments to create real improvement in outcomes of interest.

He writes in fairly broad strokes, but I find myself wishing that there was more available constructive public debate over what the social sciences are, how they work, what they can tell us, and what the limitations are.

Sarah Palin

Vanity Fair has published a piece on her by Michael Joseph Gross called “Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury”. Not much new here, but worth the read to get a better sense of how removed she is even from her own neighbors.

Current History

Another September 11th has come and gone, and McSweeney’s has again published John Hodgman’s “Welcoming Remarks Made at a Literary Reading, 9/25/01” by way of remembrance:

Every year, we wonder what might be appropriate on this day, and we can never think of anything more appropriate than this piece, which Mr. Hodgman originally delivered at a literary reading shortly after September 11, 2001.

I hadn’t read the piece before this year, but I’m inclined to agree.

Everything is OK, really.

A gentle reminder courtesy of my friend, Cori.

Annals of Type

I missed this last month: Hoefler & Frere-Jones announced a new font called Forza, based on rounded rectangular shapes. As usual, I love the colors on the specimen page. I’m especially fond of the slanted setting in the 9th frame. Seems like it would be a natural fit as a display face for a magazine. (Actually, it reminds me of Wired for some reason.)

Also, don’t miss the interview with Roger Black on The Big Web Show about web type and templates. Some of the fonts available through his new project Webtype look really great, especially the Clarendon-esque BentonModernRE. It would be nice if the specimens were set at a more comfortable reading width and with more breathing room between lines.

Roundup No. 2 

Education

I’ve been watching and rewatching Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk on creativity in schools. Like most TED speakers, Robinson is very engaging, and blends in a good deal of humor with his commentary. His diagnosis is that our schools are designed with a hierarchy, with subjects like math and language at the top, and the arts at the bottom. Looking to the future, he vaguely points out that creativity is an asset we need to develop, more or less insinuating economic consequences for neglecting creative development. I think he is right that creativity needs more nurturing, but there is probably more to education than creating an economically viable society. We’re also people and individuals who need to navigate the waters of our humanity, and I don’t know a better companion than creativity.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman talk about the realities of teaching creativity in “The Creativity Crisis”, and make some good points. Math and science require a kind of creative thinking as well, and Bronson and Merryman outline a process of creative problem solving:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

The idea of problem solving is an intriguing one, as it applies to creativity, and one common justification for edifying creative education is that all problems worth solving require a great amount of creative effort, whether they be social, political, scientific, or economic. Again, however, I wonder where creative work that is not as obviously about solving problems fits in. A wonderful dance piece may not be intended to solve an obvious problem. In my view, the problem being solved by a choreographer has to do with communicating something to another person.

Bronson and Merryman offer an inspiring story of a charter school in Akron, Ohio where students are set on a group project to propose plans for reducing noise in the library, learning about the relevant science and people skills along the way. The results are remarkable:

Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

This kind of work requires dedicated educators, but as I recall it, my greatest learning experiences growing up had similar qualities. I learned material better when I was working on something that required that I understood it, rather than simply memorizing it for a test. The best way to learn Shakespeare is to perform it, the best way to learn programming is to write working programs. The best way to learn about ideas is probably to have to explain yours to someone else.

As far as math goes, Dan Meyer has some good ideas along similar lines: make problems real (for real), and give students less of a framework to solve problems in so that they can build the framework themselves - an important step in solving hard problems is guessing how to break them down into pieces. Meyer calls it “patient problem solving”:

So I hope you can see. I really hope you can see how, what we’re doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but we’re paving a smooth, straight path from one to the other, and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way. That’s all we’re doing here. So I want put to you, if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students, we can have everything we’re looking for in terms of patient problem solving.

Based on his talk, I’d say it’s possible the best way to learn the fundamentals of math (arithmetic, algebra, and calculus) is through explaining physical phenomena.

Vanity Press

I’m performing right now in a nice outdoor production of Susanna Centlivre’s The Busybody, which has been very rewarding so far. (We close this weekend.) Richard Grayson came to last Saturday’s performance, and wrote a wonderful overview and review. My friends Raney Cumbow and Meaghan Cross put together this venture, with Raney directing and Meaghan performing, along with more friends old and new. It has been a delight.

Pleasure Viewing

If you haven’t seen it, “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” is something special. Bradbury himself seems to think so.

Annals of Type

I recently came across this essay on ESPN,1 “The Franchise” by Patrick Hruby. The essay itself is interesting, but I was excited to see a mainstream publisher like ESPN throwing their weight behind web-based editorial design. Outfits like Fray published online this way before the advent of content management systems hit full swing. Efforts have been going to revive it for a few years now, including Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico’s A Brief Message and Jason Santa Maria’s current website. In introducing his new site in 2008, Santa Maria2 said:

We’ve made so many advancements in how we publish content that we haven’t looked back to what it is we’re actually creating. Many of us see the clear separation between things like print design and web design, but I’ve really been questioning the reality of why things are this way.

I don’t believe it has as much to do with time and capabilities–the notion that it takes too long to achieve the same design fidelity we enjoy in slower print endeavors–I think it has more to do with us merely having convinced ourselves it does. We’ve developed so many ways of creating and coding websites faster, but we really haven’t scratched the surface for art directing them in that same light.

David Cole and Tag Savage started Sleepover in the past year as “a very earnest attempt to make the world of online publishing better.” One service they offer is editorial design:

Sometimes content demands new forms, sometimes content is just so special it needs an extra layer of love. Sleepover can design individual articles or serial features to make the most of your content. We’ll work with your publishing system and draw on your existing design to expand the possibilities of your content.

Seeing so many of these art-directed essays (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) under ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” certainly encourages me to think that the “extra layer of love” may not be just a micro-niche of web design work for much longer.

  1. ESPN.com was also one of the first major websites to be built using web standards like CSS for layout. 

  2. The best art direction on Jason Santa Maria’s site is probably to be found in the Candygrams he published for Halloween in 2009. Each piece was written by a guest author - I imagine that the spark of collaboration is what gives these pieces their special flavor. 

Roundup No. 1 

Creep

I’m not a big fan of Facebook, and I haven’t been too interested in the upcoming movie either. However, the trailer grabbed me, I think mostly due to the use of a really great cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”. Thankfully, Zeldman had my back, and found the group that did the beautiful choral cover:

If you’re intrigued, as I am, by the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming The Social Network, and if part of what compels you about the trailer is the musical score - a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep” - you’ll be happy to know you can purchase said song via emusic.com: On The Rocks is the album, “Creep” is the track, and Scala, a Belgian all-teenage-girl choir, are the artists. Highly recommended.

There’s something really wonderful about a song about loneliness and apartness being performed in unison by a group of singers. The sound is haunting in a way,1 and some of the melodic changes create great tension.

This is Nice

Jason Kottke took a vacation for a couple of weeks, and had Tim Carmody of Snarkmarket stand in the past week. (I kind of love that Jason does this.) Tim absolutely tore it up. My favorite recent find, though, was in a guest post the week before by Aaron Cohen. Aaron posted video of a talk Kurt Vonnegut gave at Albion College in 2002. (On Youtube starting here.) The great takeaway line from the speech is a gem of optimism: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

David Foster Wallace

Continuing on a David Foster Wallace streak, “Federer as Religious Experience” and “Host” are both good reads. From the Federer2 piece:

By way of illustration, let’s slow things way down. Imagine that you, a tennis player, are standing just behind your deuce corner’s baseline. A ball is served to your forehand – you pivot (or rotate) so that your side is to the ball’s incoming path and start to take your racket back for the forehand return. Keep visualizing up to where you’re about halfway into the stroke’s forward motion; the incoming ball is now just off your front hip, maybe six inches from point of impact. Consider some of the variables involved here. On the vertical plane, angling your racket face just a couple degrees forward or back will create topspin or slice, respectively; keeping it perpendicular will produce a flat, spinless drive. Horizontally, adjusting the racket face ever so slightly to the left or right, and hitting the ball maybe a millisecond early or late, will result in a cross-court versus down-the-line return. Further slight changes in the curves of your groundstroke’s motion and follow-through will help determine how high your return passes over the net, which, together with the speed at which you’re swinging (along with certain characteristics of the spin you impart), will affect how deep or shallow in the opponent’s court your return lands, how high it bounces, etc. These are just the broadest distinctions, of course – like, there’s heavy topspin vs. light topspin, or sharply cross-court vs. only slightly cross-court, etc. There are also the issues of how close you’re allowing the ball to get to your body, what grip you’re using, the extent to which your knees are bent and/or weight’s moving forward, and whether you’re able simultaneously to watch the ball and to see what your opponent’s doing after he serves. These all matter, too. Plus there’s the fact that you’re not putting a static object into motion here but rather reversing the flight and (to a varying extent) spin of a projectile coming toward you – coming, in the case of pro tennis, at speeds that make conscious thought impossible. Mario Ancic’s first serve, for instance, often comes in around 130 m.p.h. Since it’s 78 feet from Ancic’s baseline to yours, that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you. This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice.

Full of great stuff. “Host” covers a conservative radio host, and as usual Wallace applies an impressively even hand without hiding his personal opinion. Especially interesting considering this is journalistic coverage of another medium, and it would have been easy to fall into a lot of traps. He seems to super-humanly avoid them by being strikingly human.

Life Sucks, Let’s Laugh

From the I Can Relate Department, Owen Morris’s “The 27 Levels of Compatibality I’m Looking For” and Brandon Lueken’s “A Diary of Unemployment”.

I’ve also been working recently with playwright Isaac Oliver on a project. Turns out he has a great blog, He Who Laughs, or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Intimacy. I especially like his dialogue-heavy posts, both real (“New York Moment”) and imagined (“Half-price”). Given my own dislike of Inception, I really appreciated Isaac’s masterful takedown, “Totem-poled”.

I Love Denis O’Hare

He’s playing the power-hungry vampire Russell Edgington on this season of True Blood. It is possibly worth watching the entire show just for his spectacular performance. (He’s up there with my other recent favorite bad guy performance, Hans Landa played by Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds.) O’Hare plays the part with such energy and relish, it is sheer joy to watch him work. The speech he gives at the end of this week’s episode was a special treat worth rewatching.

No Words

This week’s episode of Radiolab, “Words” is pretty great. Up there with “Musical Language”. Definitely some thought-provoking material, although I always find myself wishing they would tie the ideas presented in the shows back to some philosophical or historical or other text, since usually the ideas aren’t what’s new, the evidence is.

Annals of Type

The big news is that Adobe has partnered with Typekit. I’m excited to play around more with Chaparral, Minion, and Myriad in particular. This is definitely a mjor score for Typekit, but there was another big win for them that made smaller waves. Mandy Brown announced today that she is joining the Typekit team. Congratulations to her and to Typekit. (Looks like her site is down as I write this, I imagine she’s swapping out Cufón for the newly-available Typekit-served Chaparral.)

  1. This also brings to mind James Houston’s excellent cover of “Nude” from 2008. 

  2. A nice addition to “Federer” is probably Malcolm Gladwell’s 1999 essay “The Physical Genius”

Obscurity 

Obscurity is far more popular and widespread than popularity. Most, even we, the obscure, will, in a moment or more of popularity, never point this out and probably have a difficult time recalling its truth. But there it is.

To each an obscurity unto herself. Popular ideas can be uninteresting simply because their shared nature has shaved off all the interesting bits. Others are so interesting, and feel so profoundly connected to all of us, that we imagine they are hardly ideas at all, at least not those of individuals. What popular person could have invented forgiveness, passion, understanding? If these ideas came from us, maybe they came from many of us at once, maybe the seeds grew in all of us, maybe they regrow in each of us to this day. Maybe one of us had a bit of a notion, and shared it with a few more who worked and molded and shared with more, who rephrased and reshaped and inserted their own selves before passing it on yet again.

Plato may have described the jewel beneath the rough surface, whose nature we can infer, but I think our attempts to understand only make the idea rougher, exposing new crevices and tributaries, cracks and holes, outgrowths and sharp edges. The beauty is not buried deep within, and we are not digging. Instead each is piling on, adding ugly refinements to the whole.

Magical 

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays. It begins with a storm that shipwrecks a boat on an island and ends with the ship setting sail for a voyage home. We learn that the storm was conjured by an exiled noble turned sorcerer named Prospero; one of the passengers, Ferdinand, falls in love with his daughter Miranda. Prospero has a famous line toward the end which goes “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.” But I think there is an action that speaks louder than these words. Prospero proclaims:

[…] But this rough magic I here abjure; and, when I have required Some heavenly music, – which even now I do, – To work mine end upon their senses, that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.

As he is set to regain his dukedom and, returning from exile, rejoin his world and fellow man, Prospero determines to break his magic staff and drown his book of spells and incantations.


Magic is not an explanation of, but a shorthand for the unexplained or inexplicable mysteries of the world around and within us. Months ago in Los Angeles, I stopped with a friend at a carnival in our neighborhood to ride rides and eat cotton candy and forget about some of the world around us. As we sat on a bench, my friend became reflective and she observed that she missed the magic of her childhood, when going to carnivals like this one she was attended by a sense of wonder and excitement - where now the mechanics of the rides were exposed in her mind and the banal tragedy of the workers of the rides was plain on their faces.

I told her that the magic wasn’t gone. Think, I said, of the odds of you and I being together and finding this fair. The stress of work had been weighing us down in the way it can do to young people, and just when we needed it the most, this carnival presented itself to us, around the corner from the condo we were sharing with its owner. None of this had to be intentional, it probably was unplanned, the best explanation we had for it was sheer serendipity. That is the magic that remains as we age and see some of the workings of the world people before have made for us exposed. Despite the odds, circumstances had convened and here we were, two people, sitting, sharing the last bits of fluffy goodness, part of the world and apart from it. What other magic could one want?

A Writing Device 

Let’s be honest. In the short time that I’ve been a user of Apple’s products, I have always been enthusiastic and excited about impending announcements. I was one of the few people who saw those fake videos of the iWalk and got all excited that a successor to the Newton was imminent. In fact, my excitement about portable computing in particular runs deep and further back than my use of Macs. There was a period in the 90s when I was avidly reading everything I could about what was going on in the worlds of Windows CE and the Palm Pilot. My family can probably recount for you how annoying I was about it. I would talk about small portable computers over lunch and dinner. When we went out, I would want to stop by CompUSA or Best Buy or Office Max, just to play around on devices like the LG Phenom, the HP Jornada 820, or the Psion Series 5mx and Revo.

These devices were not meant for a kid like me. (Or probably any kid.) The potent general idea from my point of view at the time was that these were devices which offered a subset of the functionality of a full-blown desktop, but simplified to the point where they were actually possible to use. This was not long after I had switched from browsing inside AOL to connecting over dialup through AOL, minimizing it, and browsing with either Netscape or IE. I was learning a valuable lesson about feature creep: extra features often come at the cost of usability. The Palm OS, Windows CE, and Symbian OS all boiled down to the same main choices about what users needed and what they could do without. “Productivity” apps like email and calendar were in, other things like games were out. Not a lot of fun for a 14-year-old.

But I wasn’t really all that interested in games. What I cared about was writing. When my parents bought me an iMac in 1998, the first best thing that I noticed about it was how much easier I found it to write on. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you why very specifically. I was too young and writing is an odd experience that is hard to understand any way you do it. I can still remember what the experience felt like, however. It was as though the computer had really just melted away, and all I was left with was the keyboard and a canvas, uninhibited and unencumbered. It was great, and some of my fondest memories of writing took place in front of that lime green iMac.

When I went to the stores to try out the Phenom or the Jornada or the Psion, I was trying out what it would feel like to write on the thing.1 I cared about the keyboard, I cared about navigating the file system, I cared about how my words looked on the screen… hoping that the confluence of the OS, keyboard, and screen would create something that felt right to me. I didn’t need a calendar, contacts, or even email really. I certainly didn’t need PowerPoint or Excel, although I was fascinated that they were able to get something similar to those things working on such small devices. I wanted something that I could take with me to start writing whenever the mood would strike.

Every time new products came out, or were speculated upon, that might fit what I wanted - a portable writing device - I was excited. I was excited when laptops with full keyboards got smaller and lighter. I was excited when the Visor was doing well and when the Handspring team rejoined Palm. I was excited about the Psion Series 7 and about the creation of subnotebooks. I was excited about the idea of “thin clients,” computers with more limited built-in power that off-loaded most of the work to a remote server over an internet connection. (That one sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Anything that was making computers smaller and lighter, and anything that was making the activity of typing more portable, I watched with baited breath. When Apple introduced Inkwell to Mac OS X, I thought that surely a foray into the tablet format was in the works, with the intention of giving users a pen-based interface and pen-based text entry.

Now that the iPad is here, I’m not sure quite what to make of it from this perspective. I think that it’s because I am still falling in love with my iPod Touch. My iPod is now my portable writing device. I wrote the first draft of my last post in Simplenote while flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In fact, I read the essay I was responding to on the same flight in Instapaper. After getting used to the auto-correction, writing on my iPod feels right to me in the way that I have been looking for. And it is portable beyond what I thought possible for a digital writing tool. I can carry it in my pocket with me everywhere at all times. I never thought that typing with two thumbs on a screen with no tactile feedback on a device that sits comfortably in the palm could feel like writing. But it does. A need that I’ve had unfulfilled for ten years has been met. I will of course be excited to try out the iPad in the Apple Store when they find their way there, running it through my usual motions, trying to determine whether I can really see myself writing on such a thing, weighing the feel of using it against its portability. For now, I couldn’t be happier with my iPod.

  1. My family can also tell you about my habitual purchase of paper notebooks that would never become filled. 

A Pause to Take in Surroundings 

Well I’m sitting here at LAX at a Samsung Mobile Charging Station. So far, I’ve used my Visa to cover magazines and Sudafed from a Hudson News, which didn’t carry Coke. So I bought a soft drink with my Visa from Burger King where using a card was advertised as being “faster than cash”. I had to work a bit to figure out how to get both ice and Coke out of the fountain.

Brand and commercial pollution are nothing new, but I hold out hope that these things are subsiding. The whole idea of large corporate entities just seems flawed in this world. It has served us well in the way of making goods so convenient that people are available to focus time and energy on more specific things… But in many ways, commercialism and new technology have paved the way for a less-informed society that is treated to an incessant barrage of advertisements and other entreatises to spend money. That’s what our current system more or less depends on. Malls and movie theatres and even airports are so full of things that, simply put, overwhelm and confound.

Sometimes, we need a pause.

“SuperFreakonomics” and Climate Change 

Elizabeth Kolbert brings on the snark, and it’s delicious.

Everybody Loves A Smart Aleck 

I enjoy Amelie Gillette’s snark from time to time, and this one didn’t disappoint. The whole situation with the television industry begs the question, “Who’s in charge around here?”

Obama-flation 

George Packer on the shift in Obama’s support:

The most disappointed people I meet are under thirty, the generation that made the Obama campaign a movement in its early primary months. They spent their entire adult lives under the worst President of our lifetime, they loved Obama because he was new and inspiring, and they felt that replacing the former with the latter would be a national deliverance. They weren’t wrong about that, but the ebbing of grassroots energy once the Obama campaign turned to governing suggests that some of his most enthusiastic backers saw the election as an end in itself. The Obama movement was unlike other social movements because it began and ended with a person, not an issue. And it was unlike ordinary political coalitions because it didn’t have the organizational muscle of voting blocs. The difficulty in sustaining its intensity through the inevitable ups and downs of governing shows the vulnerability in this model of twenty-first-century, Internet-based politics.

Andrew Sullivan in response:

This is an ocean liner that was boarded by a bunch of insurgents in a dinghy. You can’t captain the liner the way you did the dinghy. But if you wonder if the liner has changed direction, look at the apoplexy of the old regime. They’re not fools. And they know they’re losing.

Incognito Browsing 

I’ve been finally getting a chance to play around with Chromium the open source branch of the Google Chrome project, and have been really impressed so far. My favorite tidbit is this part of the notice when you open an “Incognito Window”:

Going incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software. Be wary of:

  • Websites that collect or share information about you
  • Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit
  • Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys
  • Surveillance by secret agents
  • People standing behind you

Aftermath 

So, it has been about a year since I decided to leave Sarah Lawrence without a plan or an idea of what the future might bring. I wish I could say that I understand the story of my past year, or that I could turn it into some kind of anecdote for others out there who are struggling to find their way in life.

But I don’t think I can yet. What I do know is that somehow things have improved. Every day isn’t a chore right now, and I’m not consistently scared about what I’m doing or where my life is headed. I’ve been trying to work hard, but I wish I knew more specifically what parts of the effort I have been putting out have helped me to feel like I have re-entered the world around me.

Sure, I’m still usually at home, and I have a hard time going out and meeting new people. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I’m allowed a certain amount of misanthropy and melancholy, without those things I probably wouldn’t be who I am, honestly.

However, I’m now regularly doing things and effectively taking care of myself day after day. That I have arrived here after only a year is no small feat, and I’m grateful for all the help from all the people in my life that I’ve had along the way. It’s cheesy and cliche, but I don’t express my appreciation enough, and I hope you know how much you mean to me. (You all know who you are.)

I don’t expect this to find its way to many people I don’t know, but to anyone who might be listening who is experiencing stumbling blocks that you don’t understand in your life, I hope you can find the heart to reach out to the people who love you (you’ll know them by the fact that they’ll return your phone calls) and ask them for anything that you need, even if you don’t know what that is.

David Pogue: Cleaning Up the Clutter Online 

I believe I agree with the sentiment here regarding ads, especially on pages that are intended for reading.

As for Readability, I wish that it were an unnecessary tool. It is a much more difficult project to try to educate writers and designers and readers about typographic treatment on the web. It is more work for the standards makers and browser builders to devise, agree on, and implement ways for type to be treated far more intelligently on the web. But it’s worth it, because even though there are rules and guidelines to making texts more readable, writing will never be one-design-fits-all.

So, David Pogue, I know you’re listening. Take on this cause! If people are responding to you so well on Twitter, point them in the direction of something by Mandy Brown. The best way to tackle the readability of the web isn’t by trying to automatically reformat it (although it’s a good stop-gap). No! We need to raise awareness to push the community of people who write for and publish online to take the extra care to make words readable.

Thank you for your help. :)

WebKit’s Web Inspector Updates 

These guys really are doing fantastic work building and refining tools that are helping to turn the web into a first-class platform.

Monsters and the Moral Imagination 

I’m a little late on posting this, but it’s still worth a read. Stephen T. Asma wrote a great little piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about our relationship to the idea of monsters and makes the case that even in a liberal world of moral relativism, the idea of the monster is a useful – and accurate – construct. Good stuff touching a lot of ground.

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. 

Colin Nissan:

Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

Someone’s been watching too much Sunny.

Derek Powazek on “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” 

His thoughts on so-called Search Engine Optimization are spot on. The crux:

Remember this: It’s not your job to create content for Google. It’s their job to find the best of the web for their results. Your audience is your readers, not Google’s algorithm.

It sounds obvious, but there are still too many people contributing to the web who believe that its inner workings are magical. Success on the web, to my mind, is far more predictable than in publishing, politics, movies, etc. The only way to compete on the web is through quality.

Jessica Hische Typography 

Well these are beautiful.

(via Khoi Vinh)

Love Makes You Creative, Sex Not So Much 

Andrew Sullivan in rare form:

I recall one marathon twelve-hour session of passion many years ago now. It was only afterwards that I realized I had barely had a single trace of an analytic thought for the longest period I could then remember. I was never happier. As I finally collapsed into my lover’s arms with the final orgasm that drained every last drop of desire or need from my body and soul, I understood for the first time why the French call coming “le petit mort”. It can be the emptying of self entirely. Which is why sex is so close at times to the presence of the divine, and reflects and incarnates God in ways few other things can so easily. We are more animal and more divine in sex than in any other activity.

John Kricfalusi’s Review Of Meatballs 

For context, John Kricfalusi created The Ren & Stimpy Show. Here’s his take on the new movie based on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs:

I had a tough time sitting in my seat through Meatballs, because what was happening and who it was happening to was not remotely interesting. It’s hard to pace a story around characters with no personality.

But as a cartoonist and designer, there was enough visual interest and unique action throughout the movie that intellectually I found things to stimulate me.

It was an optimistic portent of what could be. It’s basically an undirected film – but one that allowed many of the artists to take nothing scenes and add some kind of cleverness, design and action to the formulaic events being told by the story.

This in itself is so far ahead of an overdirected film (overdirected by executives typically, not by directors that actually have a point of view or style) that stops creativity from happening every step of the way, just so that more stock plot points, filler and bad puns can happen.

I think this kind of thing is enjoyable to read not just because of how harsh it is, but because it touches on something that is really true about the current state of, in my opinion, not just animated films, but most major films. I often find myself settling for the little things in a movie that make it good, rather than expecting something more, maybe in order to seem less like a cynic and an asshole.

But the truth is, there’s a lot of terrible stuff out there, and the industry that has grown around making movies has moved it from an art form into a calculating box office science. I can only remain optimistic by holding onto my belief that the creative juices going into films have stagnated due to lack of competition. Lower production and distribution costs, one hopes, will eat away at the joint monopoly whose long project has been the reduction of creative work to “content.”

Time will tell. Quality endures, but only if it can first find life.

(via Khoi Vinh)

Debunking Dan Brown 

Not really a great read either, but Michael Baigent did get me with this zinger:

An early example comes when the ubiquitous protagonist Robert Langdon arrives in Washington by private jet. In a particularly mundane exchange, he is told that he would look good in a tie. He hates ties. Suddenly the reader is treated to a history of ties involving Roman orators and Croat mercenaries. It is as if Brown wants us to think that he is a great scholar rather than a deft hand at computer searching.

Dan Brown, unfortunately, is not the only person who might be guilty of this.

(via @WolfieGoethe)

On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces 

Ben Fry, introducing a spell-binding visualization of Charles Darwin’s changes over time to The Origin of Species:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.

Built, naturally, using Processing.

Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars 

Geoffrey Nunberg discusses Google Books in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently, Google Books suffers from some pretty shoddy metadata, leading to some humorous juxtapositions and labels. Nunberg’s diagnosis:

It’s clear that Google designed the system without giving much thought to the need for reliable metadata. In fact, Google’s great achievement as a Web search engine was to demonstrate how easy it could be to locate useful information without attending to metadata or resorting to Yahoo-like schemes of classification. But books aren’t simply vehicles for communicating information, and managing a vast library collection requires different skills, approaches, and data than those that enabled Google to dominate Web searching.

The Guts of a New Machine 

Came across this again while digging through the DF archives. Rob Walker profiles the then-two-year-old iPod for the Times:

A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this – it’s about ease of use, it’s about Apple’s great sense of design. But what does that really mean? “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

(Emphasis mine.)

This idea has, I think, taken root since then, and a respect for the relationship between usability, readability, and visual character on the web in particular has really grown. And yet, some companies seem to continue to try to “copy Apple” in all the wrong ways, drawing the wrong inferences, and learning the wrong lessons.

Think about what you’re making, respect the user and the reader, and make informed decisions along the way to the best of your ability. Setting everything minimally against a white background is not the great lesson of Apple’s success. The takeaway is to place an emphasis on the user in the design process and not to underestimate the value of quality.

Enhancements to Georgia & Verdana Typeface Families Announced 

I am super excited about these. Maybe if they add ligatures, lining figures, and proper small-caps to Georgia, the Webkit and Gecko teams will figure out better ways to support these things in their type implementations. Here’s hoping anyway.

Also, is it just me, or does that shot of Verdana Ultra-bold (I assume) look like it has a lot of potential? I could see that finding its way into some of my own work.

(Thanks, Cori.)

The Guts of a New Machine 

Came across this again while digging through the DF archives. Rob Walker profiles the then-two-year-old iPod for the Times:

A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this – it’s about ease of use, it’s about Apple’s great sense of design. But what does that really mean? “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

(Emphasis mine.)

This idea has, I think, taken root since then, and a respect for the relationship between usability, readability, and visual character on the web in particular has really grown. And yet, some companies seem to continue to try to “copy Apple” in all the wrong ways, drawing the wrong inferences, and learning the wrong lessons.

Think about what you’re making, respect the user and the reader, and make informed decisions along the way to the best of your ability. Setting everything minimally against a white background is not the great lesson of Apple’s success. The takeaway is to place an emphasis on the user in the design process and not to underestimate the value of quality.

Tagged. 

If you care about making websites, and you haven’t read this already, I strongly recommend and support Jack Shedd’s point of view regarding the new markup specified by HTML5.

To my ear, this is a much sharper and more clear-minded approach to thinking about the markup changes than those put forward by Zeldman and friends. The difference, I think, is that the “Super Friends” want to improve a standard that is close to being adopted to fit the way they work. Shedd wants to take a step back and say, what is the real problem here?

I respect and appreciate both methods of critique, especially with regards to something as wildly complex as Web Standards, but in this case, I have to say that Shedd is bringing up some very valid concerns, and I hope more discussion comes out of his article.

UPDATE: On further thinking about this, I feel it is necessary to clarify that I don’t mean in any way to impugn the efforts of Jeffrey Zeldman and the other members of the “Super Friends.” (I do think the name is silly, but that is surely the point.) I think it is prudent to point out that the other key difference between the two sets of critiques is that one comes from a group and the other from an individual. Shedd doesn’t have to get anyone else to agree with him before posting the recommendations and critiques that he offers, which is both an advantage and disadvantage.