Category: Misc

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The Web That Wasn’t

Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session
The Web That Wasn’t with Alex Wright Information Architect, The New York Times.

For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee’s world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative hypertext systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside. The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown’s Intermedia system. We’ll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in our recent technological past.

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Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users

Homonculous tbLoose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users” with Kathy Sierra, CreatingPassionateUsers.

This has so far been by far the most intellectually stimulating / inspiring session of the show. Sierra has a way of turning on your brain by talking about the brain, and running far afield from the usual web talk while still bringing it all back home to make it relevant. Awesome session.

Neurogenesis – Animals in cages have inhibited brain growth. An enhanced environment allows the brain to flourish. Corrollary: A cubicle environment inhibits brain development.

In studies of people who are really good at something: It’s not about natural talent (for the thing they’re doing) but more about having a talent for practicing. Ability to practice is what makes people good at things (could be anything). This is both encouraging and depressing. But you CAN change your brain in profound ways if you just put in the time.
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Creationist Diorama-Rama

1Stplace Utne Reader, on a Creationist Science Fair that recently took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, including a diorama explaining how a broken motor disproves evolution, plus fossil evidence that people lived at the same time as dinosaurs.

The projects all used classic high school science language: Start with a hypothesis, move on to testing, and then draw a conclusion. The problem was that much of the science was backwards. In good science, you start with a piece of evidence and try to find a truth. With creationist science, you start with a truth (the Bible), and try to find the evidence.

Music: Isaac Hayes :: Going In Circles
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Closing a Few Doors

Humans like to keep all options open. Even when we know some of the options aren’t frutitful. Even when it costs money to keep unfruitful options open (i.e. even when keeping options open is irrational). Interesting summary at nytimes.com of tests conducted on M.I.T. students designed to see just how far we’re willing to go to prevent a door from closing. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says.

Life lesson: Let options go. Simplify. Declutter. Know what’s worth your while, go for it, and don’t sweat the decisions that have already been made. Don’t kid yourself that you can follow every path, investigate every avenue. Know small potatoes when you see them. Keep your eyes on the prize. Obvious stuff maybe, but interesting to see it documented in this way.

Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies…

Music: Billy Harper :: Credence
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PowerShot G1

Powershotg1 Last of the Incas. This old Canon PowerShot G1 from the J-School was dysfunctional beyond repair (not to mention antiquated to the point of unusable), so I brought it home for Miles. Took us 45 minutes to remove nearly every screw, pry apart nearly every surface, snip every wire. Turned out the inverting lens barrel made a very good hat for R2D2. Even when something has no remaining value, feels wrong to tear it apart. Wrong but fun.

Music: Elementales :: Camino De Pan Bendito
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Obsolete Skills

Robert Scoble came up with the idea to make a list of obsolete skills – things we used to be good at but no longer need to be, including:

  • Dialing a rotary phone
  • Putting a needle on a vinyl record
  • Shorthand
  • Using a slide rule
  • Optimizing 640K-worth of memory
  • Refilling a fountain pen
  • Operating a dictaphone
  • Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriter

A wiki sprung up to flesh out the list, and there are now hundreds listed (I added “Cleaning ball bearings in skateboard wheels without losing them”).

Music: Herbie Hancock :: Edith And The Kingpin feat Tina Turner
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Shop the Perimeter

J-School professor and Birdhouse Hosting customer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a new book titled In Defense of Food – a common-sense manifesto for eaters. Fittingly, Pollan is blogging this month at omnivoracious.com. Don’t have time to read the book? Pollan gives away the kernel:

  • Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
  • Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can’t pronounce.
  • Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.
  • Shop the perimeter of the supermarket, where the food is least processed.
  • Avoid food products that make health claims.
  • Eat meals and eat them only at tables. (And no, a desk is not a table.)
  • Eat only until you’re 4/5 full. (An ancient Japanese injunction.)
  • Pay more, eat less.
  • Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.
  • Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.
Music: Herbie Hancock :: Solitude
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Mr. Picassohead

Picassohead Great fun to be had at Mr. Picassohead – seemingly simple Flash-based tools to create Picasso-like paintings easily. Great fun with kids (younger ones need help, but still dig it). I love when simple tools with narrow parameters – married to human creativity – give rise to a zillion fascinating combinations.

Create something of your own first; then page through the gallery for a while to be reminded of all the things you forgot to try.

Music: The Fugs :: You Can’t Go Into The Same River Twice
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Death and Underachievement

Technically a few weeks late for a new year’s resolution, but better late than… whatever. Just stumbled across an incredible essay by Ryan Norbauer of 43 Folders: Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work

Norbauer chips away at the notion that productivity and achievement are pathways to happiness, and in so doing opens up a Pandora’s box of existential questions for the workplace. For those of us driven like rats to sip from the sugar-water spouts sticking through our cage walls looking for one more rush, one more minor achievement to fool our impatient selves into thinking we’ve found a scrap of meaning in our lives, Norbauer says it’s time to step back and take a close look at ultimate motivations:

The essential point that we must confront here is that the achievements which seem so important and for the pursuit of which we perpetually torture ourselves are on the one hand futile and the other utterly insignificant. What is the ultimate summit we expect to reach? And if we can’t answer this question, why do we exert ourselves as if we’re heading towards one?

His observations are in part triggered by the release of The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great, which rests upon these core principles:

  • Life’s too short.
  • Control is an illustion.
  • Expectations lead to misery.
  • Great expectations lead to great misery.
  • Achievement creates expectations.
  • The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
  • Perfect is the enemy of good.
  • The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
  • Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s a powerful piece, and one I needed badly to see. I’ve been feeling all of this for a while now, but blaming it on the wrong things: ennui, exhaustion, a fragmentated work environment, my own stupidity. But maybe the problem is that I’m looking for love satisfaction in all the wrong places.

My (fittingly late) New Year’s resolution is to chill more, back off the treadmill, and to remember to breathe.

via Weblogsky

Music: Sun Ra and the Year 2000 Myth Science Arkestra :: Other Voices