Self-referential perfection in information design. (via BoingBoing)
A Couple Good Links from Japan
Very light posting recently – any time I’m not working or sleeping, I’m out in the woods, chasing one thing or another. To confirm my continued existence I offer the following links:
Catching skyfish. I get the strong feeling this is more than a little tongue in cheek; it’s a heck of a lot more interesting than the latest day-trading or real estate millionaire video come-on.
Japanomie – this documentary on hikikomori is interesting (give it time to load) – after making me frown and smile it finally brought out the crabby guy in me. “Kids today! Bah! Nothing there that a goddam haircut and a job won’t fix.” I found the film starting here and wandering around here.
Back to the woods (maybe I can catch a skyfish with my new spoodle)…
Humboldt’s parrot
Very interesting post at the Kircher Society web site – it’s almost impossible to describe without giving everything away, so click through. The story reminds me of a children’s book I just read: The Last Giants. There are similar themes – destruction of the discovered world and the marks it leaves on those that live on. Not the point of the post, but I can recommend Mr. Place’s ‘Giants’ book without reservation – a good story and wonderful illustrations (that’s Monsieur, not Mister).
Update (6/14/09) – The Kircher Society web site is gone; I re-linked above to a snapshot in the Wayback Machine. Just in case, here’s the post:
In 1804, when the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt returned from his five-year expedition to Central and South America, he brought back this poignant anecdote about a dead language once spoken by an annihilated tribe that had been kept alive by a single feathered linguist:
“It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures – bizarrely – there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures.”
Humboldt recorded the 40 words spoken by the parrot, the only remnant of the dead Ature language. In 1997, with the help of a linguist and a bird behaviorist, artist Rachel Berwick painstakingly taught a group of parrots to speak those 40 words, and exhibited them in a cylindrical aviary made of transluscent plastic.
The story of Humboldt’s Parrot is recounted in Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley.
Incidentally, Charles Darwin wrote, “I shall never forget that my whole life is due to having read and reread as a youth” Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799 to 1804.
Reasons to be Fearful (Part 3)
The juice of the carrot, the smile of the parrot
A little drop of claret – anything that rocks
Elvis and Scotty, days when I ain’t spotty,
Sitting on the potty – curing small pox
– Ian Drury and the Blockheads – “Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3)”
Another NPR inspired rantlet… I was listening to W/E Edition yesterday morning and the host, Scott Simon, delivered a commentary inspired by the recent plane crash in New York. His points, if I understand correctly, are that one cannot be fearful all the time and that in spite of fear, life goes on. I’d like to make a couple points of my own in response to one assertion and one unstated assumption.
The assertion I’d like to counter is that objective assesment of risk can’t or shouldn’t inform our actions.
A lot of people try to cite cite statististical arguments to aquit us of fear reminding us that the statistical chances of our lives being lost in a terrorist attack is (sic) small and yet the statistical chance that any terrorist act in a familiar landscape will infiltrate our fears is overwhelming. But statistics can seem an unreal basis in which to live your life. Would anyone get married if they thought too much about the fact that more than 50% of all marriages in the United States end in divorce? Would Derek Jeter ever stride up to home plate if he focussed on the statistical fact that even he stood only a third of a chance of sucess?
To dispense with Mr. Simon’s Jeter question first – I’m sure he would. A .333 batting average in the Majors is, I believe, respectable (I don’t know what Derek Jeter’s batting stats are like – I used ‘a third of a chance’ as my benchmark) and what is the down side? He walks back to the dugout. Does he step to the plate expecting to strike out? I’m sure he doesn’t, but the reason he doesn’t has a lot more to do with sports psychology than it does statistics. A hit one in three times will more than likely continue to earn Mr. Jeter buckets of cash, while a hit less frequently will not change Jeter’s desire to try, but will degrade his chances of being allowed to do so (can you send someone like Derek Jeter back to the minors?). The marriage question is also ineffective as an indictment of statistics – at least as far as I’m concerned. The success rate of marriages in the US can’t be news to anyone and yet folks continue to get married. Is it because they don’t pay sufficient attention to their chances? I doubt it – there are a huge number of reasons to get married – emotional and financial – that overwhelm the risk consideration. The money quote is, “But statistics can seem an unreal basis in which to live your life.” There is some truth to this – people are bad at estimating odds and payoffs, so statistical risk evaluation often tells us things that are counter-intuitive (see this link for Daniel Gilbert on “How to do the right thing every time”). Does this mean that we should reject statistics and objective risk analysis? I’d suggest that that way Truthiness lies – “my gut tells me different” is not a good reason for rejecting information.
The second unstated assumption that I’d like to challenge is that this state of affairs dropped out of the sky – there are no groups that benefit from the current Panic of the Month Club. Let’s look at Mr. Simon’s list:
…cancers, treacherous car suspensions, transfats, lasers blinding airplanes, AIDS blighting continents, asbestos, hypertension, drug addiction, drunk driving, bone spurs, swine flu, christmas tree eletrocutions, cholesterol, high speed car chases, category 5 hurricanes, mad cows, choking on chicken bones…
Missing of course is E. coli on spinach >grin<. The kindest word I can think of to describe the list is heterogenous. I mean, bone spurs vs. AIDS? Lasers blinding airplanes vs. Cat. 5 hurricanes? What thread ties most of this together? Wall-to-wall media attention (I admit to missing some of them - the great bone spur crisis of ought two sailed right by me). Crises and panic get attention = viewers = revenue. Rather than try to elucidate this connection and think about what's really worth worrying about and working on (strong Public Health system, anyone?), we're encouraged to accept the whole list as the way of the world, suck it up and get past it to, I guess, resignation. Sorry, I won't play. Scott - A copy of Beyond Fear, and occasional reading of Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram (in the blogroll) might give you a better basis on which to build the next commentary.
treacherous car suspensions, transfats,
lasers blinding airplanes, AIDS blighting continents,
asbestos, hypertension, drug addiction
– Scott Simon “Reasons to be Fearful (Part 3)” aka “A Familiar Chill In New York”
A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
You’re welcome, we can spare it – yellow socks
Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty
Going on 40 – no electric shocks
– Ian Drury and the Blockheads – ibid.
note – I transcribed the quotes from Mr. Simon’s commentaries and am responsible for any errors. In the E.coli paragraph I’m deliberately ignoring another powerful group whose hold on government is tied to keeping the populace afraid (any guesses?).
Epipedobates bassleri ‘Orange’
They’re heeeere! Straight out of Peru (kinda – they’ve been in Canada all summer) via Charing Cross, Ont. and Seattle.
Sphinxes
Updated below.
Another good intersection in my web surfing and book reading travels… I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a history of the silk road. In it was a picture of three sculptures Aurel Stein excavated near Turfan:
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I also noticed in prepping this post that there are digital versions of Stein’s (and other’s) books here! More serendipity! But, to matters at hand – the monsters rang a bell, but I couldn’t figure out why. Cut to yesterday, when I was doing some Pazyryk surfing. I ran across a detail from a felt wall hanging that I’d seen before – in Sergei Rudenko’s Frozen Tombs of Siberia – now I can’t find the color version, but here’s a line drawing of a sphinx-thing battling a griffin-thing:
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Maybe it’s just me, but the critter in the middle of Stein’s trio could be the Pazaryk beastie’s second cousin. In any event – good visuals from parts of the world I’d like to see.
Update – I found a color version of the Pazyryk wall hanging here:
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along with a map (reproduced, I think, from Rudenko’s book). With the map as a reference, I did a little messing around with Google Earth and produced placemarks for Turfan (now Turpan) and my guess at where Rudenko excavated the kurgans. If you have Google Earth installed, you should be able to click the links, open with Google Earth and fly to the placemarks. The Turpan placemark already exists within Google Earth – it just took me some hunting to find it, so I thought I’d tee it up. Pan back and take a look at the Turpan Depression – impressive.
Saturday AM cleanup
Taking a break from doin’ the domestic thing this morning – time to clean up a couple loose ends I’ve been meaning to post about…
First – Saturday morning, regardless of what you’re doing, is always improved by Kathy and Red Eye R&B on our local college radio station: WUNH. You can listen across the net and this is one of those cases where, because you can, you should.
Next – a couple new interweb vocabulary words: crowdsourcing and sockpuppet. Crowdsourcing is the strategy Neuros is using with their OSD box – release the hardware, open-source the software and let the hacker community take it from there (with the crowdsourcing company continuing to develop high priority applications and attempting to influence the direction the crowd is taking). A sockpuppet is an identity assumed by a blog author in order to comment favorably on himself, esp. on his own blog. Watch the comments on this post for an example.
Finally – search terms. I run a log file analyser on my little web server; one of the things it shows me is what search phrases bring people to the blog. Number one with a bullet is ‘litel man’ – I have no idea what folks are trying to find, but at least some of them (not many) end up here. Another ‘what are they trying to do?’ phrase is ‘netware hezbollah’. I know there’s a lot of information out there about fourth generation/open source guerilla warfare (see John Robb’s Global Guerillas in the blogroll), but this is crazy. Seriously. The last term I want to throw out there brought a smile to my face – ‘knicker critter’ – yes, at times my sense of humor is not particularly sophisticated.
Back to work…
Making Light & Mike Ford
I’ve followed links in to Making Light twice in as many days. Today I thought I’d read around a bit and found that I’d arrived a bit too late. They are marking the passing of their friend John M. Ford who died Monday. I thought I’d quote two of the things he wrote (in comments!) on the site – just because I like them so much.
Against Entropy
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
—John M. Ford
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By John M. Ford, from the Infernokrusher thread:
[From Verona Total Breakdown (Liebestod), a forgotten early Infernokrusher work by Bill “Hoist This Petard†Shakespeare …
Ro-Mo. Your windows are still mirrored; taunt me not,
But show your colors, dare to challenge me,
These lips are two shaped charges, primed and hot,
That wait the go-code for delivery.
J-Cap. The flag is to the deadly, not the loud,
Yet aim as well as posing shows in this;
The worthy throwdown’s always to the proud,
And hammer down is how the hard girls kiss.
Ro-Mo. My draft is stopped; I struggle toward the clutch.
J-Cap. And would a charge of nitrous make thee run?
Ro-Mo. Too much; but what else is there but too much?
Let me take arms, and elevate the gun.
J-Cap. Small arms but hint what demolitions say.
Ro-Mo. Then, gunner, gimme one round.
J-Cap. On the way.
Card tricks to spread spectrum radio…
I read an article in today’s New York Times and started thinking – dangerous stuff. I managed to get from card tricks to spread spectrum radio by connecting five people. Here they are – I’ll use birth names so it’s not too obvious:
Richard Potash -> Joseph Pujol -> Melvin Kaminsky -> Harvey Kormen -> Hedwig Kiesler
The article in the NYT concerned a dispute between magicians Eric Walton and Ricky Jay (born Richard Jay Potash). I’m a big fan of Mr. Jay’s – he fits my mental model of a perfect sleight-of-hand artist – well read, raffish, incredibly good at what he does. On the dispute itself, I’ll yield the floor to Teller (he’s the small, silent crazy one as contrasted with Penn’s large, loud crazy one).
Outright ownership isn’t at stake, he added, but Mr. Jay’s act constituted a painstaking and innovative revival of some little-practiced classics, and a certain code of courtesy should apply.
“If an act hasn’t been prominently performed for a long time, and someone takes the trouble to bring it back from absolute death and put it into his act with fine touches, and which at least hasn’t been seen by a current generation,” he said, “the gentlemanly thing to do is say, ‘That’s his for now.'”
That said, he added, “magicians are not unique in their absence of creativity.
I have a couple of Ricky Jay’s books (I covet Cards as Weapons, but a used softcover copy of that tome starts around $200) and in one of them, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, Mr. Jay introduces us to:
Le Petomane (Joseph Pujol). Le Petomane was a performer at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s and he was, it’s safe to say, sui generis. I believe the best way to describe Le Petomane is as a fartiste. It’s pretty obvious that:
Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky) knew all about Mr. Pujol before he made Blazing Saddles. Aside from the bean scene, there’s also the name of the Governor Brooks plays in one of his roles – William J. Le Petomane. The Gov’s conniving henchman, played by:
Harvey Korman (born Harvey Kormen – go figure) is named Hedley Lamarr. This won’t be news to anyone, but an ongoing gag is confusion of Hedley’s name with that of:
Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Kiesler). If all you know about Hedy Lamarr is that she was a movie star, I encourage you to click through to her Wikipedia entry. An eventful life, to say the least – in 1942 she received a patent for a very early version of frequency hopping – in this context, to make radio guided torpedoes more difficult to defend against.
There you have it – proof positive that I ought to be committed immediately. While you’re getting the paperwork ready, I’ll just drift off a bit and put myself back in the late 30’s – Hedwig and I are getting on a Short S23 flying boat for the trip to East Africa…
Art Gaffs
Another site that blurs the line between gaffs and art – weighted more toward art and less towards the Feejee mermaid side of the house.
Teckelmania
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Going to a Zuchtshau, everybody
Going to a Zuchtshau, c’mon now
(apologies to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles)
Many nice dachshunds were seen, much dog person blatter (I think that’s the right word) occurred.
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Neuros OSD
I saw this post yesterday on Engadget, announcing a beta hardware release of the Neuros OSD media box. The beta is mostly – as far as I can tell – because of the state of software development on the platform. A really interesting box (as many of Neuros’ products are) – it’ll record analog audio/video, transcode same for PSPs and iPodi, play back content, etc. The development model is wild – it’s a Linux-based platform, and Neuros is offering cash money bounties for new code that will implement specific capabilities.
Before you rush to try to buy one – too late. There were 200 units available at ThinkGeek, but they are long gone. I’m not sure how quickly it happened, but getting a post on BoingBoing was, I’m sure the kiss of death (life?).
Regarding the development model – I’ve read a couple reactions that accuse Neuros of stringing along aspiring code-jockeys in order to get software on the cheap. A comment on Engadget:
Let OSS developers do the work for a few hundreds which would cost a few tentousands if the would employ some developers. The OSS developers even have to buy the hardware by themselves. Hopefully nobody will bite the bait. This will just spoil the jobmarket and value of work for professional devs.
Talk to any Industrial Designer and if they have any experience they’ll probably tell you that many design competitions are a deceptive way for greedy companies to get designs at little or no cost. One competition not so long ago offered as a prize a small cash prize and a job. Oh, and all those entries sent in by designers too wet behind the ears to know better? Those concepts belonged to the company as part of their condition for entry.
and later in the post:
And so it goes without saying that when I read on Boing Boing (Link) about PVR manufacturer Neuros’ offer of cash rewards to those programmers/hackers who code features which (big surprise) help them sell more product, I thought of my design compatriots… too naive to see how they were hurting themselves and helping The Man. Instead of hiring a programmer who could use the money to pay off student loans or raise a family, Neuros offers a pittance to entice these people to do the work for what will probably be less than paying them minimum wage (with no health insurance).
I think both sets of observations miss an important point – the hacker authored code development was going to happen anyway. If a platform can be made to run somebody else’s software (and it seems sometimes, even if it can’t), pretty quickly a community of hackers precipitates out around the hardware. Think about the PSP – Sony is in some sense the anti-Neuros – every firmware release seems to have as one of it’s goals breaking user’s ability to run ‘homebrew’. And yet, somebody always seems to find a way to make the PSP run what they want it to run. Neuros is encouraging this – “here’s the hardware and a base OS/set of capabilities – go nuts”. Are they hoping to benefit from a vibrant user/hacker development community? Sure. Are they, by doing so, exploiting that community? There I’m not so convinced.
Further, it seems to me that reBang’s comparison between design competitions and Neuros is inaccurate in one important aspect. From Neuros’ Hacking for Cash rules:
2. All code must be licensed under GPL (or LGPL or GPL compatible licenses as appropriate). You are allowed to use code from other GPL projects, but please obey the wishes of the authors.
The design submissions became the property of the company sponsoring the competition. The code produced for Neuros does not become Neuros’ IP – it’s out there as usable, repurpose-able stuff. Will it run without modifications on a completely different platform? Almost certainly not. But, can it be ported, reused, and looked at with a view towards doing similar things in a wildly different environment? I think so.
Do I believe that Neuros is destined to succeed? I have no idea – there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I do think that to write them off as cynically trying to extract free code from a bunch of dupes is to ignore a sea change that’s happening in the world of ideas, creation and information.