30 November 2011

Off-Key Themes

I set out with this piece to describe to very distinct concerts – a ballet and Lollapalooza – through the use of the sonata form. This is what became of it. -SM

Tiny reflections reflecting from chandeliers flutter against the gilded ceiling. Muted pink flats scuff against ornate patterns. Their owners struggle to escape the cloying gravity of their granite guardians, wrapped in grey peacoats and more austere attire. A flurry of activity in the atrium orchestrated to some unknown rhythm. Children and adult alike imbued with light-footed excitement.A delicate choreography laced between last-minute snack purchases and souvenir shopping.

Serene chimes emanating from the walls themselves vibrate within the bustling hall. Sparkling jewels of eyes lock onto vaulted doors. Their owners navigate toward the yawning portals of the cavernous theater, enthralled in saccharine fantasies and coiled anticipation. A chauffeur guides every guest to their prescribed position. A cacophony of animal calls grumbles ominously from beneath. Faceless musicians, thrown below deck, fearlessly continue their tune-ups despite their imprisonment.

Grey skies beget a drizzle. The crowd draws closer together. Uncertain if from warmth or anticipation, a magnetic draw toward the twin black cabinets. Bluish smoke hangs thick. The crowd hazy from smog and source. Tens of small orange flares scattered in the midst, wafting sickly sweet smells into the air.

Clouds give in to sun. The crowd quiets in anticipation. A man steps forward on the spartan stage, but alas no performance; just a Hawaiian shirt and a sound check. An empty stage again. The crowd presses closer to the edge. Two figures emerge now, applause growing with realization, as the musicians take their place.

A lone note escapes from the pit, first solo, then swelling with instrumentation. The lights of the theater diminish as do the whispers. Ephemeral silence as the cogs wind-up for their release. Their operator, hardly more than a baton and disembodied head, makes a leisurely approach. The sharply honed point rises for the strike. A delicate downward drift signals the overture. Dulcet notes encompass the entire hall in delicate warmth as the intricate scene is set.

No awknowledgement of applause. No orchestrated performance, no, an attack. The first rat-a-tat staccato, a false start, or a prelude to an eruption of sound. Thunder from the ground shakes rain loose. Passion interrupts silence, or the reverse. Two instruments rest on the stage, but with them their caretakers craft an entire orchestra of sound.

Soft feet leap back and forth from prescribed position. Rise and fall in scale mirrors movement. Emotion contained in the sweep of a leg, bend of a bow, placement of a note. No words fall from made-up lips. No segue, non-sequitur, into elaborate song. The body alone, with harmonic accompaniment, the sole device of communication.

Slender fingers brush delicately against synthetic keys. Raven locks swing wildly from frenzied moves in time to tune. Fever pitch of song, not verse itself, conveys unbridled passion of her craft. Her stoic partner more grounded, subdued. Focus enticingly apparent from strumming hands and pedaling feet. Two on-stage characters, juxtaposed in movement and grace, yet exceedingly similar in conveying their art.

The audience slowly drawn forward, entranced. Ballerinas-to-be imagine themselves on stage. Faeries dote playfully on every cherubim desire, a come-to-life Tinker Bell. The crowd wrapped in music’s movement. Each fan roused into independent rhythm. All dancing to the same tune, yet every snowflake twirl and sway, unique.

The performers switch, seamless, from piece to piece. No time for claps after each denoument. No acknowledgement, no respite; intent only on offering up ever greater music. No bows seen from the pit. Applause for the dancers, yes, but none for their accompaniment. Faceless performers, whose only intent is to produce a backdrop for lithe dancers to leap and bound.

Velvet curtain falls on the shimmering scene, peotic prancing finished. The last melodic notes hang in suspense a fraction longer, a final glimpse of Neverland. The audience, silent silhouettes, now erupt, erect and applauding. Curtain pulls back, revealing not characters, but the performers unmasked. One by one they bow, showered with adoration. And yet all the while the musicians go unnoticed, unrecognized, unacknowledged, faceless.

The thunderous bass ends its last trembling reverberations. Hairs, stood on end from an hour of blasting chords, slowly fall flat against stilled arm. Sullen realization dawns on all that the last note has been played. The crowd applauds ever more boisterously. Jumping and pressing forward, clamoring for just one more song. As if recognizing for the first time that the crowd exists, the woman looks out, says “thank you”, and departs.

24 November 2011

Three and Twenty

“For the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it.” – Jean-Paul Sartré

What is it, precisely, that changes in the world, when you realize you’re the luckiest man in the world? Does the world revolve ever so slightly slower, to savor the delight of the moment, or instead does the pace of the world abruptly quicken so as to hasten the end of that luck? Is there some diffuse filter that descends upon the scene, softening all features except the ones that matter most.

But existence does not drag along with it curtain drops, and catchy melodies; existence plods, flows by, just existing, without pause. We don’t even recognize our luck in the moment; it is only later,when we recall our fortune, that we realize just how blessed we were.

To be the luckiest man in the world. To get things, inexplicably, amazingly right on the first try. To have the terrible misfortune to realize it only after everything had gone.

We are either the traveler in our turbulent experiences, or the teller of the fabulous stories that result; we can never be both. Do we decide to live the banal existence, or do we recount our fantastic adventures. There’s no good answer. But I do fear that we avoid lving the banal in order to tell a story that was never ours to recount. Perhaps, too, in some ways we avoid telling our story to live in banality.

In either case, it’s never good enough.

I’ve been blessed to have been given the time to relish in that sublime experience. But I was too young to realize just how meaningful that time was.

Existence always slips away, unknowing. And all we are ever left with is the stories we may one day tell.

23 November 2011

Solving Email

As anyone who receives more than, say, zero emails a day can tell you, getting, writing, sending, sorting, and searching email sucks. It’s absolute shit. Your grandmother grabs a hold of your work address andsends you every cute cat junk mailer she receives from her bridge buddies. Your associates send you critical, last-minute changes (complete with three exclamation marks) expecting you to check your email in the five minutes between it being sent and the critical deadline. Perhaps your social group even uses an email list to talk about whatever is going on in your respective lives.

Email handles practically all use cases – correspondence, instant message, file-sharing, discount coupons, archive – but it handles them miserably. IT’s slow, horribly formatted, and worst of all, it’s misused constantly.

A major problem is the expectations surrounding email. We expect it to do all these things, and we expect it all to go off without a hitch; we are disappointed when the inevitable happens. Worse, we assumes that each and every user, the people we send to, receive from, knows and will conform to our own expectations. We expect different levels of formality, frequency of use, etc. But no one uses email in the same way, because email is so undefined in its use.

So how would one solve email? It isn’t simply a matter of shutting down your Gmail account, because that expectation is so firmly entrenched in our minds: everyone is available through email, if all else fails. And it isn’t a matter of replacing the service with some other, state-of-the-art system, because it isn’t much use if no one else uses the damn thing. So here are some basic criteria:

It has to do everything that email can do.
It has to coexist with current email.
It has to not suck.

Some basics, certainly, that need to be fleshed out more, which I hope to explore further in later posts. I imagine this to be a solution that takes an iMessage-like approach, where users can use the new method with other people similarly entrenched, and switches, without the knowlesge of the user, to normal, plain-old shitty email.

Because it really does suck.

22 November 2011

Sometimes Saying Yes

In the recent weeks, reading Steve Jobs’ biography, and several recent stories about Apple’s [success][Joswiak] in desgining for markets that don’t exist, there’s clear emphasis on one word: No. It’s a mantra in many cases for Apple in how they operate: No, we will not answer your questions; No, we will not make twenty products when one will do; No, we will not ask the customer what’s best for them because even they don’t know what’s best for them.

No, No, No.

I think it’s very easy to get hung up on that lone two letter word and start ascribing special meaning to it. It’s easy to get trapped into thinking that by the mere act of saying “No” you drive yourself toward greater success. It’s easy to say we can’t make this work, let’s try something else. It’s easy to say no let’s not do this because it can’t be done.

In no small part, it is about saying no, but more importantly, it’s about saying no to the things that don’t matter. No isn’t some mystical power; it’s merely a way to avoid compromising on what you believe in.

Sometimes, avoiding compromises means saying yes, too. Because without a yes or too, we don’t create amazing things, we don’t identify what matters most to us, we don’t understand what we can’t do without.

Say no to boring things. Say yes to impossible ones. Never stop asking yourself which is which. Always keep what matters most close to your heart.

21 November 2011

The District Sleeps Alone

It’s never obvious, when it’s going to be one of those nights. No shining star across the horizon. No status update. No headlights in the fog.

No warning.

It all seems innocuous enough at first; the feeling that there’s an itch that you just can’t scratch, or maybe the street lamp outside is just a bit too bright. Nothing helps of course, no amount of scratching, no shade pulling makes it go away. Cures don’t cure,treatments for the symptoms just dont work: everything you do just serves to make it obvious.

And so the seconds start counting themselves, one, two hundred, three thousand, four AM and nothing’s changed except the light from the moon, maybe, waning with your hope from the night.

Five, six now and the morning comes, grey, dreary, and without comes the noise of the morning, drowning out any chance of relief.

Twiddle your thumbs. Maybe brew an extra large pot. It’ll be another long day before it gets to night again. Maybe then your mind won’t get the better of you. Maybe then you’ll stay still for a second longer than you need. Maybe then you’ll get some sleep.

Maybe you’ll lay awake again, listening for sounds you know you’ll never hear.

20 November 2011

Some Thoughts on 2012

With the spectacle that is the Tea Party Beauty Pageant – errr, or is it the Race for the Republican Presidental Nomination? – in full swing now, it’s become almost unavoidable to see adverts, punditry and all other sorts of ballyhooing about some as of now entirely hypothetical face-off nearly a year away. I say almost of course because it is in fact avoidable if you’re willing to forgo television for two years out of every four, a price I think most of us would prefer not paying.

All this political pontificating about which currently occupies the 24-hour newsperson’s hard-core, wet-dream fantasies has got me thinking about the matter at hand, the matter that I think most people at least have on the back of their mind as election day all too slowly approaches:

Just who the fuck am I going to vote for?

A valid question, if at the very least somewhat premature, considering the Republican candidate is far from set in stone, let alone even a single primary vote been cast on the matter. Yet still, despite the so-called “intense primary race” between Romney and a bunch of idiots1 – not to imply that Romney isn’t an idiot, he just happens to have sold his soul to a far less ignorant set of ideologies – the tactic seems pretty clear to the that used by the Democrats in 2004. It’s the so-called “Anybody But [Current Incumbent]”, and it played out well for the Democrats in their subsequent ouster of Bush and election of, wait, who was that guy again?

…

Crickets. As in only crickets could even bear listening to John Kerry speak.

So let’s just assume for a second that the Rupublican candidate is “Anybody But Obama”, since that’s how every candidate seems to be running2. That leaves the Democratic party – sorry, Independents, but I’d like to think my vote at least might count – which means, unsurprisingly Obama.

So the question is Obama, or no Obama? And I think that question itself is a little harder to answer, because I think the answer really depends on how you ask the question. If you compare him to the standard set by most other modern presidents, and account for the context he’s been placed in – struggling economy, unresponsive congress full of bat-shit insane people – he stacks up pretty well, though that’s not saying much.

The issue, in part, is that he came into office with a lot of help from a little four letter word - Hope. And if anything’s disappeared from the White House, Congress, and the American Political Machine in general, it’s hope. Naturally people are disappointed because he hasn’t changed anything. My disappointment is a bit more pragmatic. I wasn’t expecting change; after all,the President can only do so much when he has to rely on a stable full of America’s pompous unintelligent jack-asses to get things done. What’s truly been disappointing in Obama’s first-term is the uninspired manner in which he composed himself. Perhaps he too, understood that just being elected would do little to get things done. But his actions in his four-year term were downright cowardly, especially since the Republicans have taken back some power.

All that aside, the promise of having a second-term president is extremely appealing, especially in a time like this. Having someone in office who isn’t immediately thinking about re-election presents the genuine possibility of getting some of the issues and trouble spots that Obama initially campaigned on truly resolved. Unfortunately, a large part of the decision has to go down to that. It’s not about choosing between Obama and the “Not-Obama”. It’s about choosing between a leader made ineffectualy because of an upcoming election, or a leader that can no longer be elected.3

Pick your Poison, I guess.

Wait, you mean Ron Paul is running in this primary? Who knew? ↩
Seriously though, are you sure Ron Paul is still running? ↩
If only Ron Paul were still in the running for the Republican nomination… ↩

18 November 2011

Bacon

Or, Heaven Comes in Pairs. As I pick up my set of groceries from the co-operative today, scanning the labels for my name, I delight in seeing the underwritten descriptor – “Bacon”.

I tear open the cool bag, and yes, heaven does indeed await: not one, but two slabs of the full-fat hacked off the hog pieces, two and a half pounds in total.

Why is bacon so great? Hell if I know. Hell if I care.

17 November 2011

Hearing From the Corners of our Eyes

I recently submitted this research proposal to the University of Pittsburgh in order to obtain some funding and the opportunity to present my findings at a University symposium and possibly other, larger get-togethers. I include it here as a roundabout way of describing some of the work that I do as a researcher. -SM

By Sean Moore, Undergraduate Researcher, Sensory Motor Integration Laboratory

When we first learn about the basics of our senses, those five fundamental pathways of assessing our outer world, we learn of their independence from one another. Smell is smell, sight is sight, touch is touch. Each allow us to know and view our world in a fundamentally different way, each gives us a wholly unique experience of interacting with the world, and each pathway distinctive so that our perception can properly influence our decisions. We don’t, as normal, healthy human beings, hear colors, after all; nor do we taste shapes.

However, the cognitive regions of the brain, in all of their expansive and interconnected glory, rarely work as independent systems assessing distinct sensory stimuli. Rather, perception itself is a richly entwined process in which information obtained from one path can be utilized to short-circuit the calculations another route must make. The result is faster, smoother decisions, actions, and updates about the world around us, and we use it all the time: close your eyes for a second and hunt for that beloved mug of coffee on your desk – careful, don’t spill! We are entirely capable of finding the handle, but the action is accomplished in several short jagged burst of motion. But when we open our eyes, and combine our rich visual information, we intercept that steaming vessel with fluidity and pinpoint accuracy.

This integrative ability of the mind is nothing short of astounding. And yet this capacity for cross-talk between sensory centers also gives rise to some fascinating phenomena; cases in which the mind deludes itself, sensing two distinct pieces of information and yet perceiving another that is wholly independent of either. One such phenomenon is known as the McGurk-MacDonald Effect. Discovered accidentally when a videographer in the lab mistakenly produced a clip “in which repeated utterances of the syllable (ba) had been dubbed on to lip movements for (ga), normal adults reported hearing (da).”1 At the time, the implications were enormous: it was entirely unknown that, prior to the film faux pas, that visual processing influenced auditory perception in any way.

While McGurk and MacDonald’s research shed light on a topic that has been explored in-depth about this parallel engagement of sensory processing, little has been elucidated as to precisely what elements of the visual field are altering the speech recognition capabilities of the mind. Is it the disconnect between the micro-expressions of syllable formation and auditory register? Or does the mere sight of the speaker in the corner of your eye, without any conscious ability to read the words on the speaker’s lips induce the effect? It is not clear what fundamental components of the visual stimulus are truly necessary in tricking our mind, and what protions are wholly extraneous.

In analyzing this affect of vision on the perception of sound, subjects will be presented with the visual stimuli in ever increasing ranges of their peripheral vision, and will be asked to relate what they hear. As these tasks arc further into the visual hemisphere, the visual acuity of subjects will be tested by evaluating their ability to discern geometrically similar letters from one another. By comparing one’s relative visual acuity in the periphery to the extent of which the mind is fooled by the trick, it should become clear at what point, if at all, the lack of visual detail extinguishes this audio-visual phenomena.

While the experiment is almost childishly simple, it aims to shed light on some exceedingly intricate neural connections. It may be discovered that this phenomenon is not contained in the higher-level centers of the visual and auditory centers, but may instead be an ingrained connection between vision and speech that arises prior to, and even influences our conscious perception of the illusion. More importantly, this research allows the chance to investigate the underpinnings of one of the many fascinating paradoxes of the mind. It is these things that have in the first place asked to consider “What is it about me that causes this?” Answering these small riddles, in turn, gives great joy in knowing that, in some small way, our understanding of our fundamental existence has been furthered.

McGurk, H & MacDonald, J. “Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices”. Nature, vol. 264, pg. 746-8. 1976. ↩

16 November 2011

Tools

I thought it would be prudent before continuing these recent dialogues about design and the human interface to step back and frame our assessment of these somewhat abstract concepts. What is it that grounds design, that grounds interface, and interaction. I think we are led off track somewhat when we hear these words, because we’ve been told, not completely erroneously, that these higher notions are aesthetics alone, that they are no more forms of art. It’s not much of a stretch after all, to conceive great design as works of art; to equate the two as equals, though, is brutish. The two, when executed properly, express themselves emotionally. Art uses this emotion rhetorically. Design uses this emotion to communicate function. And so the essential piece, the low-order bit of the whole thing isn’t the aesthetic, because design can exist without it (though often it does so poorly); instead it is the function that design cannot exist without. And function is fundamentally contained within the tool.

Defining the Tool

What, fundamentally, is a tool then? Is it merely that amalgamation of molded iron and plastic that sat in a shiny little box in the garage when you were a kid? If it were as simple as that, one wonders why your dad couldn’t make due with the neon Fisher-Price facsimiles you had as a child when building you that treehouse you’ve always wanted. In fact a tool has little to do with where it’s found, or what it’s made of; it is in fact much more than that, and truthfully, much less.

A tool is nothing more than a solution to some problem we face.

Truly, it’s such a simple definition, but it’s one we often understand experientially rather than consciously. Consider buying a drill. We don’t go to our hardware store because our tool bench isn’t filled up to the brim – we go because we have found that we need a problem solved – in this case, our life needs more holes in it – and so we look for a solution to the problem. But logic dictates that when the person is in the store they are searching for a drill, but that’s confusing cause and effect. People don’t buy drills to make holes, but rather they find that holes are in need of making, and so they head to the store to find a way to make them. The drill itself is superfluous, it merely happens to be the best way of solving a problem.

And so our life is full of tools that represent the current best solutions to current problems. A newspaper, for example, is a tool we employ that solves the problem of knowing what’s out there; if we didn’t have newspapers, we’d have to travel to every inch of the world, everyday, to know the latest goings-on out there. Truthfully, when viewed like this, it solves an even greater problem: getting the most out of our time.

Getting Stuck with Tools

One of the biggest problems we sometimes face isn’t finding ourselves facing a problem with no tools, but rather finding ourselves choosing between too many tools to solve a problem that may not even exist. A beginning artist may walk into an art store to select a few brushes for their latest work, only to come back to the studio, see the blank canvas, and wonder if the few brushes they picked out of the thousands on display were the right ones. Why, after all, do those thousands of brushes exist unless every single one of them were needed. But the truth is that the problem doesn’t lie in the brush; you could purchase every single one from the store and that canvas in your studio would be no less blank because of it. The problem isn’t that you have the right tools to make beautiful works of art, the problem is you don’t know if your art will be beautiful. The real question you want to ask is, “How do I make things that don’t suck?”

As it turns out, we have a tool for that too. It’s called a trash can, and it’s very likely the best solution ever conceived.

14 November 2011

# Occupy

I can’t say I’m either supportive or dismissize of the OWS movement that has seemed to envelop this nation in the last two months. I can wholeheartedly agree with them about some of their concerns of the lending institutions of America – there shouldn’t be companies that both play an integral part in our prosperity, are too big to fail, and can gamble billions of dollars of American money in order to make billions more. It should be like the old engineering adage “Pick Two”, and really, truly, honestly, it should be “Pick One”. No one would be upset if these banks gambled big with their own money and lost it all. No one would be upset if they gambled big and won too, but I guess that’s besides the point. At some point the house always wins.

But what’s troubling, despite it being a major draw of many to the #occupy movement, is the largely unstructured hierarchy of the movement. It’s wat’s allowed the groups in various American cities to grow their encampments. But it may also be their eventual downfall. The movement is characterizing itself as non-partisan, anti-“Fat Cat” bureaucracy, which is really what a talk about the mation’s financial troubles should be – free from party bias, and more importantly, out of the reach of special interest groups. But these same groups have already begun to employ the movement to further their political gains – the right, of the “liberal agenda”, the left of the nation’s disapproval of the right.

Matt Taibbi [urges][taibbi] the protestors to protect themselves from these affronts to the non-partisan nature of the protests. But protection can’t come merely from denial of these labels; nature abhors a vacuum, and as unwholly natural as politcal journalism sometimes feels, they too follow the nature laws and just feel flat-out uncomfortable abouth a story with no buzzwords. What this movement truly needs is a face; a single voice that speaks for the entire campaign. It isn’t necessarily what that voice is saying this early on in the movement; merely that it is saying something, and saying it well.

In much the same way that Dr. King became the face of the Civil Rights movement, and largely shaped the debates at all levels of American life, so too do the OWS members need their own public spokesperson. Without it, #occupy will ultimately serve as nothing more than a tool to manipulate public opinion wrought by the very same people the protestors are unabashedly opposed.

13 November 2011

Reimagining the Human Interface: Part I

This piece is one in a series of pieces in which I hope to explore, and in some ways redefine what we consider to be an interface, what we consider to be interaction, and what the role the human plays in all of this. This is something near and dear to my heart, my studies, my research, and hopefully one day my career. Enjoy.

Defining the Interface

What, fundamentally, is an interface? Were it merely the boundary between two things, our classification would be quick and consise – it may be labeled as nothing more than the “membrane” that separates one thing from another. Just as the cell is surrounded by a membrane between cytoplasm and the external environment, so too can we designate the “membranes” of human interaction – the touchscreen, the keyboard, or even the quill and ink, the hammer and chisel.

A definition that includes this boundary property of the interface is by all means necessary, but it does not adequately describe what the interface is. The cell membrane, after all, isn’t merely a method of segmenting and cordoning off one thimbleful of molecules from the rest of the primordial soup; it serves as a conduit of interaction between the inner and outer partitions. It shapes and defines the characteristics of how the cell interacts with its outside environment. It fascilitates and limits the cells outward expression.

The human interface operates in precisely the same means. The tools – the hammer and chisel, for example – are our “membrane” between inner contemplation and outer thought. But the mere designation of a particular tools isn’t the role of the human interface; instead, it is how we interact with the tools in question, how we use them to convey information, and how effective they are at capturing intent. In our example, it’s the design and ergonomics of our hammer and chisel that effect our interaction, their ease of use in transcripting information that we’ve processed, and our ability to use them to convey what we mean. Understanding each of these aspects is crucial because they define how the human interface becomes useful, and guide use in future undertakings.

Note that none of this relies on knowledge of what we interact with, and what we wish to convey. It’s a subtle point of distinction, but one that certainly needs to be considered. Fundamentally, the user interface should be ubiquitous; it should be able to capture any form of cognition and convey it to the receiver in any form. Practice, however teaches us that this is typically impractical – a hammer and chisel is by no means an effective input method to a computer system, and a touchscreen device is a poor method of capturing complex emotions 1. Trade-offs are inherent in the specific design solutions, but the human interface should strive for ubiquity, or at the very least, have clear boundaries.

So what, then, is an interface? With this definition in mind, the designations expand almost endlessly. Interfaces can be input-oriented; the size, typography, style guide, and even fruequency of printings are all aspects of the human interface of a newspaper, nearly everything but the content itself. The dialers, receivers, speakers and microphones of a telephone, but not the transmittance, or the voices on either side, are part of the human interface. In short, it’s all aspects which collect, convey, or convert human inputs and outputs. And I think the future lies in refining and enhancing our capabilities within these constraints.

I would argue that printed word, and to a lesser extent, even spoken word are ineffective means at conveying true emotion. We are blessed that biology has spent many thousands of eons perfecting this interface through facial expression. ↩

11 November 2011

Spoke & Wheel

There are few companies that can even function in such an organized way, and even fewer that can get it right. Disney, when Walt was at the helm, was one of them. Apple, prior to Steve’s resignation was another. I think it’s clear that the effectiveness of these companies wasn’t so much the fact that the spokes existed. It was that there was an incredibly solid axle to spin around. Both men put themselves into every aspect of the companies they built. The spoke and wheel wasn’t so much a structured decision as an organic one; bureucracy was certainly limited as these men had the need to reach all corners of their respective companies. It was more out of convenience than of true usefulness.

So is the spoke and wheel truly effective in management? Can Apple continue to spin true without their axle? Will they even remain organized the way they are? Should they? And can companies operate effectively organized like this, can they be constructed radially rather than just bloom without attentive cultivation?

These are questions that need further examination.

10 November 2011

Revisited

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetics, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” – Steve Jobs, on designing the Mac

I wanted to revisit what I wrote earlier about Walter Isasacson’s biography on Steve Jobs. I really do think, when you consider just how private Steve was in his life, that anyone could get him to sit down for an extended of series of interviews; that Isaacson was able to retain control over everything within the book (Steve thought the initial cover design looked like shit) is nothing short of amazing. It’s true that Steve did initially commission the book, and that he willingly gave up editorial control over the work, and yet, knowing Steve, actually being able to follow through on the hands-off approach is still a feat to be admired.

My thoughts, especially in the first half of the book, mostly consisted of being astounded by all the unique – really, truly unique – parts of Steve’s life that I’d never been exposed to – though their documentation has been previously published in other tomes. What’s disappointing, really, is the drastic decline in detail as we get closer to the present day, especially the last fifteen years and the return to Apple. Here was a man who did something inconceivable not just in the Tech world, but in any company, and it feels brushed aside, or rushed, or just not quite right. I have the feeling that Isaacson felt that really delving deep into this side of Steve would skew the book into too positive of a territory. I wonder, and worry, honestly, that this part of his life was played down so that the book reads more balanced, more “fair”.

It’s unfortunate that this need to convey objectivity, this need to prove that there is no emotional attachment to the subject, no sympathy, only the facts. But that’s exactly what Steve was about. The emotional connection, the intuitive relation, the superceeding of logic in favor of a much more humanist relation. How could you not be moved by this man’s story? It really is a shame that the book feels as though it has cast aside this powerful bond in favor of mass-market acceptance.

It should feel like a book about Steve. Instead, it reads like a book by Isaacson.

But maybe that’s what Steve wanted after all.

09 November 2011

The End of Quick Lunches

Paleo is hard. It’s hard moving from a diet abundant with grains to one completely bereft of them. It’s hard throwing out such a fantastic staple of the Western diet, the pasta, the bread, the baked goods, the quick carb, and replacing it with alternatives. It’s harder to get real serious about it, especially with an active lifestyle, throwing out slow-carb sources such as potatoes and rice, in favor of caloric intake almost exclusively from protein and fats.

And it’s made all the more difficult being a college kid. No more late night pizza runs, the lifeblood of post-dinner meals. No more ramen, the staple in kitchens and beat-up apartments near campuses all across the country. Gone, too, is the a far larger chunk of your wallet1 spent on healthier options and fresher food.

But most disappointingly, gone is bread.

Not just the fresh-baked delight of a baguette, golden-brown and crispy on the outside, and delicately airy and soft within. It’s the Sara-Lee, the wonderbread, the nine-grain, the pre-sliced, pre-saran-wrapped down-to-earth stuff that’s truly the challenge to live without. Because without it, it means no more quick-to-prep lunches – no more sandwiches. It’s really something to be taken for granted, how simple and efficient the sandwich really is. Two minutes, and probably less if your good at it, and you have a travel-ready meal that can be consumed, if need be, in less than half the time.

So how do you replace it? That was honestly my greatest concern when starting Paleo, and it’s still not a question I’ve completely answered. But I have found two things that work, albeit to an extent:

Cooking to make leftovers: One phenomenal part of Paleo, to it’s great credit, is that I’ve learned to cook protein – fish, chicken, beef, etc. – simply, quickly, and for the most part, deliciously. Mostly out of necessity, or perhaps more accurately, impatience, I’ve cut down cooking times on many meals without comprimising on flavors. Extending this further, and merely cooking a little more than I need, and I have a ready-made meal for lunch the next day. When this works, it works great – who wouldn’t love a fantastic home-cooked meal over dining hall food? Two big questions remain though - What if I don’t cook an evening meal? And what if I cook something that isn’t big enough to split up?
Pre-cooking lunches: In searching for an answer to these questions, I started attempting to make big, crock-pot meals; meals that would last a week both satisfying my stomach and surviving the fridge. Chilis, stews, taco meat – and again, it was fantastic when it worked. The problem is, and is only becoming more exacerbated over the semester, is when am I going to have time to make these meals? It’s hard to step aside and devote several hours of time to cooking when papers, tests and homework are constantly looming.

So unfortunately I don’t have a catch-all answer yet. If all else fails though, I can make my way to Spain. I hear they like to take their lunches nice and slow.

If you’re serious about Paleo as a college student, I would definitely look into joining a farm co-op of some sort – they offer cheaper prices for better food, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, they deliver either to your house or to some convenient place on-campus. ↩

08 November 2011

The Problem with C++

The typedefs say it all; I’ll stick with Objective-C please. Presented without comment.

#if defined(_MSC_VER)
#pragma warning ( disable : 4786 )
#endif
#include "itkSize.h"
#include "itkIndex.h"
#include "itkImage.h"
#include "itkImageRegionIterator.h"
#include "itkPoint.h"
#include "itkSphereSpatialFunction.h"
#include "itkFloodFilledSpatialFunctionConditionalIterator.h"
#include "itkPNGImageIO.h"
#include "itkImageFileReader.h"
#include "itkImageFileWriter.h"
#include "itkCannyEdgeDetectionImageFilter.h"
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>



int main () {


const unsigned int Dimension = 2; 
typedef unsigned char PixelType;
typedef itk::Image< PixelType, Dimension > ImageType;
typedef itk::ImageRegionIterator< ImageType> IteratorType;

ImageType::Pointer image = ImageType::New();

ImageType::SizeType size;
size[0] = 256;
size[1] = 256;

ImageType::IndexType start;
start[0] = 0;
start[1] = 0;

ImageType::RegionType region;
region.SetSize(size);
region.SetIndex(start);

image->SetRegions(region);
image->Allocate();

double spacing[ImageType::ImageDimension];
spacing[0] = .5;
spacing[1] = .5;
image->SetSpacing(spacing);

double origin[ImageType::ImageDimension];
origin[0]=0;
origin[1]=0;
image->SetOrigin(origin);

ImageType::PixelType pixelValue='X';
for(int i=0;i<256;i++) {
    for(int j=0;j<256;j++) {
        ImageType::IndexType pixelIndex;
        pixelIndex[0]=i;
        pixelIndex[1]=j;
        image->SetPixel(pixelIndex,pixelValue);
    }
}

IteratorType it(image,image->GetRequestedRegion() );

for( it = it.Begin();!it.IsAtEnd();++it) {
    it.Set('O');
}

  for(int strat = 0; strat < 4; strat++)
    {

    typedef itk::SphereSpatialFunction<2> FunctionType;
    typedef FunctionType::InputType FunctionPositionType;

    FunctionType::Pointer spatialFunc = FunctionType::New();
    spatialFunc->SetRadius( 25.0 );

    FunctionPositionType center;
    center[0] = 128;
    center[1] = 128;
    spatialFunc->SetCenter(center);

    ImageType::IndexType seedPos;
    const ImageType::IndexValueType pos[] = {2,2};
    seedPos.SetIndex(pos);

    typedef itk::FloodFilledSpatialFunctionConditionalIterator
      <ImageType, FunctionType> ItType;

    ItType sfi = ItType(image, spatialFunc, seedPos);

    switch(strat){
    case 0:
      {
        sfi.SetOriginInclusionStrategy();
      }
    break;
    case 1:
      {
        sfi.SetCenterInclusionStrategy();
      }
    break;
    case 2:
      {
        sfi.SetCompleteInclusionStrategy();
      }
    break;
    case 3:
      {
        sfi.SetIntersectInclusionStrategy();
      }
    } 

    for( sfi.GoToBegin(); !( sfi.IsAtEnd() ); ++sfi)
      {
      sfi.Set('c');
      }

    }   

    typedef itk::ImageFileWriter<ImageType> WriterType2D;
    WriterType2D::Pointer writer2D = WriterType2D::New();
    writer2D->SetFileName( "PartE.png" );
    writer2D->SetInput( image );
    writer2D->Write();

    typedef itk::ImageFileReader<ImageType> ReaderType;
    ReaderType::Pointer reader = ReaderType::New();

    reader->SetFileName("Tiger.png");

    ImageType::Pointer image1 = reader->GetOutput();

    typedef itk::Image<float, Dimension>    RealImageType;
     CastToRealFilterType;
    typedef itk::RescaleIntensityImageFilter<RealImageType, CharImageType > RescaleFilter;
    typedef itk::CannyEdgeDetectionImageFilter<RealImageType, RealImageType> CannyFilter;

    float variance = 2.0;
    float upperThreshold = 0.0;
    float lowerThreshold = 0.0;

    itk::CastImageFilter< ImageType, RealImageType>::Pointer toReal = CastToRealFilterType::New();
    RescaleFilter::Pointer rescale = RescaleFilter::New();
    CannyFilter::Pointer cannyFilter = CannyFilter::New();

    writer->SetFileName( "filteredImage.png" );

  rescale->SetOutputMinimum(   0 );
  rescale->SetOutputMaximum( 255 );

  toReal->SetInput( image1);

  cannyFilter->SetInput( toReal->GetOutput() );
  cannyFilter->SetVariance( variance );
  cannyFilter->SetUpperThreshold( upperThreshold );
  cannyFilter->SetLowerThreshold( lowerThreshold );

  rescale->SetInput( cannyFilter->GetOutput() );
  writer->SetInput( rescale->GetOutput() );


    writer->Write();

}

07 November 2011

Blackjack

The cracked polyester of the stool. The creak, so slight, so defeated. The broken dreams of former occupants, soaked into the fabric, or the stool itself objecting to bearing witness again. The pushpin leather. The concentric circles, distinguished by their width, rings in a tree that grew with the hot streaks. The clink of three ice cubes – three, three, only lucky numbers for lucky drinks – against the brittle glass. The unsteady hand. The drop, a single drop of golden liquor, now an unfinished varnish on that over-stuffed leather. The beading sweat, slick against the glass. The failing A/C to blame.

The unsteady hands. The signal to the dealer. The crisp note, the note, unseen in the light for who knows how long, the gift of some faceless ATM. The last note; the last chance. The crinkle as it changes hands, reluctance nearly tightens the grip. The bill floats for a second, risks becoming last chance to none. The deposit. The exchange, one small stack, one fortune, one famine. The static attraction of felt to chip. The greedy desire to each face to rest on the green, all painted with precociousness. The riffle, proclaiming with a faint zip the meager amount. The ceramic cling, or was it common sense? The stronger pull to return to the center of the Universe. The thrill.

The beading sweat, the forehead now, no amount of A/C could abate. The push. The little town, untidy, stacked up and corralled. The last call. The little voice. The urge to sweep away the last tokens of a life lived and head towards the light. The thrill. The other little voice. The thought of doubling what little there is.

The first round. The sweep of the ark draws near. The unsteady hands. The look. The strike of the clock. The swoop. The landing. The nervous glance. The spade. The royalty. The scepter, not the sword. The smallest of sighs. The chest draws tighter. The ark continues. The clock strikes twelve. The twin staring back. The one eyed bandit. The doubt. The last leg. The fading hope. The ark begins again. The second round. The chest draws tighter. The unsteady hands. The creak of the chair, the lean forward, the can’t bear to look. The ark sweeps nearer. The chest draws tighter still. The silent pleas. The furrowed brow. The promise that this will be the last time.

The card falls.

06 November 2011

Spectre

There is a well-worn cobblestone road near the center of town, buffed and shined with millenia of use. It’s hard to tell these days where the seam is, where one stone stops and another starts. Even the gutters have faded without the effluent abuse; it’s as if they too aren’t sure if where the edge of the road is, if they should even both to proudly define it. The sidewalk flank that cobblestone path as if the street would wash away with out the embrace, is similarly unremarkable. In fact, where it not for the hewn texture, no one would notice ther even was a sidewalk. The demarcation, after all, had become entirely meaningless. Further out still from the strips of sandstone hue ascend two skyward slabs of granite, obstinate, orthogonal, if only to shout, “This is not my fate!” This is its fate. Layer, by layer slowly peeled backed, polished, pristine with the decades of neglect. No trace of dust, nor litter; no neon script, nor soot, nor errant chalk. No sign of creation, nor destruction, nor being.

Footsteps now; the shrill rat-tat-tat. The gossip runs down the length of the road, a telephone game with the handset unplugged, announcing to all an arrival. The rhythm draws nearer, and the road seems to as well, to restore order, put on the Sunday best. The walls stand erect with claustrophobic closeness, if only to appear for the shortest of moments to be a foundation.

The young man notices none of this. Awash in technicolor, engulfed in sickly sweet patterns and design craving hig every glance. His eyes twist themselves into complex knots – tight, tighter, and tighter still – as they struggle to grant each fantastic perversion a moment’s notice. They beg for his attention, these ghosts in the machine, howling slogans, pushing panaceas,indulgig every whim. The brain struggles to keep up, the body slavishly in tow, being conducted off-tempo and out of key. No tonic too tasteless, no ritual too rigorous. The young man is gone, given in to a world of spectres.

But for a second, the illusion fades. The young man stops. No pixy-dust pallete, just an all-encompassing grey, the man reaches out to feel these supposed virtual textures, only to feel rough-hewn reality. As quick as it vanished, reality returns, uninterrupted, chasing all thought away. Absorbed again, he continues, the scuffed sound of trumpets announcing his passage.

The young man turns the corner, never to return. The street sinks back into melancholia, never to forget.

05 November 2011

Tactics, Strategy, Vision

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results” - General George S. Patton

It’s one thing to realize one day that you have no idea where you’re headed. Quarter life crisis, college stress, too many tests, whatever. It’s scary becoming an adult; it’s scarier making decisions that will affect all aspects of your future life.

But it’s a entirely different matter to realize that you have no idea where you’ve been traveling with no heading for the past two years. You’re lost in the forest halfway between the homestead and your grandmother’s house with no fucking clue how to bring your sweet little nanny her picnic basket, and no idea how to make your way back home.

It’s a failure of tactics – of knowing where the heck your going. You’ve got to college, put your head into your books, and woken up two years later with a bit of drool, suddenly realizing you have no idea what how these courses on philosophy and astronomy are going to do a goddamn thing for you in your future life.

Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.

There’s nothing wrong with being embroiled in the day to day stuf, you know, day to day; being strategic with your life is essential in order to get things done. But there comes a point in time where you need to stop, stand back and ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing getting me to where I want to be?” It’s about being tactical, at least occasionally; like Patton, it’s essential that you tell yourself about the “what”, and worry about the “how” sometime later.

But it’s more than that. It takes vision – not the cruddy, pontificating type – to unite what you’re accomplishing in your god awful psychology class with your maniacal goal to make millions of dollars during your late twenties. It’s about being able to understand how the squad charging on that hill will capture the airfield to establish a beachhead to sweep through Brittany to move past the Sigfried Line on the way to the Reichstag in Berlin. And then continue onto Moscow, if you’re so inclined, like Patton.

Vision is what’s essential. You don’t have to be the best calculator puncher. You don’t have to be the best multi-phase proposal writer.

Success is driven by understanding how you can use one to get to the other.

04 November 2011

Artist, Musician

“Musicians come and go and they’re stewards of the music for a brief period of time … The musicians are there to get their goddamn hands off of it.” - Trey Anastasio, of Phish, on musicians as stewards.

What an incredibly insane idea. Thousands of hours of effort. Countless years of training. Auditions, tux fitting, spending a fortune on the perfect instrument.

To just get out of the way, for a brief moment, and let the audience experience the hallowed work you happening to be performing.

It’s such a strange idea, this concept of stwerdship, and yet it feels so right. What’s amazing is that you’ve done your best when the audience, with that last note still hanging in their air, leap to their feet with thunderous applause – not for you, nor for anyone around you, nor even, despite his ego, the conductor with his gracious bows. They applaud for the music.

Perfection is hitting all the right notes.

Perfection is being unnoticed.

What a strange and wonderful thing, to be a steward. And what a great thing to strive for, to make something worth looking after.

03 November 2011

Reimagining the File System

Yeah. This is going to be nerdy.

The Metaphor

It started with the Mac in 1984. In making the jump from the green-on-black blinking cursor to the graphical interface and the mouse, there was a disconnect that needed to be solved: how can abstract collections of bits by presented visualy? How can they be organized? Ultimately three basic paradigms evolved:

The File: The human accessible “bit”; the container that data, whether a text document, an image, a song, etc., it’s a standard “currency” ofr digital stuff.
The Folder: The central hub of organization was, more or less, the manila folder - iconic, infinitely hierarchical, and uniquely representative of a holder of “files”, especially in the early years when those files tended to be text or images only.
The Application: The fundamental “doer” within the OS, which could operate on files, run standalone processes (like a calculator, or, later, an internet browser), it was representative of the things we have available at our disposal on our desk.

Now of course the metaphor didn’t correlate one-to-one with physicality; after all, no one in their right mind would keep something like a calculator, let alone a typewriter, in a manila folder. Likewise, folder hierarchies in the real-world were more likely to be found in containers, drawers, file cabinets, and the like, rather than a never-ending cascade of folders. And yet the concept more or less adequately suited the needs of the Mac user at the time.

Search Found

Of course the underlying impetus for this representational view of the interface, especially in the organizational paradigms, was that organization was essential for the efficient look-up, retrieval and use of files and applications. “search”, more often than not, was a much more literal term; if a program or file was misplaced, the only recourse was to visually search every dark causeway of the file system. The file system itself was also quite small - data was contained on floppy disks, a relic of an era remembered now only iconically, and perhaps ironically, in program “save” buttons.

Broken

And so this paradigm held for an extremely long time in the Mac OS interface; and, since Windows shamelessly copied everything about their system from one place or another, the metaphor lived on as well. Systems became more robust, programs became more rich and interactive, file types became more diversified and larger, and storage became extremely affordable; and yet this organizational ideology remained nearly entirely unchanged: scraps of accessible data, held in folders (or spewn across the desktop), with applications available to interface with them.

But as internet use becomes more and more ubiquitous, this paradigm becomes more or more convoluted, to the point of becoming a distraction, or even a disruption for the end-user. Files are redownloaded several, or even dozens, of times, because the first version can never be found. Important data is deleted, because it’s believed to be one of many multiples of a copy that in fact has, through attrition or forgetfulness, become the only remaining master. And while search has caught up with our strenuous data demands, organization remains frustrating and nearly impossible.

Association vs. Location

Fundamentally, the current analogy of the computer is location-based: my “stuff” is either in this folder or that one; and yet that distinction is entirely semantical, because those bits are still exactly the same whether they’re filed under “Documents” or “My Terrible Weblog Posts” - the hard drive does not care what naming convention you decide to hold to when organizing. And yet, if you want your data to reside in multiple places, say, in your Work Projects folder as well as in your Pictures it must be duplicated; there’s little way around it. And what’s worse, altering one has no effect on the other; they’re now in all sense of the words seperate entities that happen to display the same output. It makes no fundamental sense - if I want the same bits, why can’t I just group them in multiple places?

The solution is an easy one, I think – keep track of associations, not location. All applications are held centrally 1, so there is no question as to where I need to go to work on something. Files are just in a “soup”, where everything is organizable and viewable at a glance - though it would be an unpleasant experience to dive directly into this sea of data. Instead, the new “folder” becomes an ad-hoc grouping of files based on user-selected similarities – things like origin website, project data, lewd pictures of the queen, etc. – or system similarities like date added, type, author. The system would keep track of these associations to groups, determining how many times they are referenced, and where, withot the need to duplicate any data. If the user wants a duplicate, it would be simple to do; but there is no need to do so in order to group the same thing in multiple places. Associations could have their own hierarchical associations as well, just like folders.

Data would primarily be accessed by applications though, given the decreased reliance on the file system. And instead of hunting for data in the backwaters of umpteen different nested folders, applications would set subscriptions for the type of material they would be able to access, and display these files, arranged in the same ad-hoc maner, without the need to hunt and peck.

Data meant for the trash would likewise be incredibly easy to produce. Remove a file from a group, and the system would dereference the underlying data by one; drop to zero, and it would automatically make it’s way to the trash. Want to immediately delete the data itself? Not a problem – and more importantly, there would be no need to look for any possible extraneous copies because there just wouldn’t be any. Newly acquireddata would have it’s own inbox, waiting for some initial assignment, while the trash would just be a corral to glance through before sending unwanted files out to pasture.

The differences are slight, and subtle, and probably not worth really worrying over. And yet there is something broken with the current implementation; and these slight changes would go along way to vastly improving accessibility for a wide variety of users.

Yes, I am aware that Windows does this by default and it’s one of the few things I like about the system; however, the subsequent hierarchy is all but impossible to fathom. ↩

02 November 2011

Resolve

“Many know the path. Few walk it.” – Dharma

plink!

A cringe, a shudder. Willing the eyes to hone ever so tightly on the white square of a monotone PowerPoint, the ears to completely fill with the drone of some lecture. focus, he thinks. just focus.

plink!

The back of the mind is infinitessimally inconquerable; it knows, knows, that the silence only exists so that the next thundering, intolerable tear into his concentration can occur. It waits, inevitability on its side, knowing that every cymbal crash only further demonstrates the obvious, the willful destruction of its sanity; it waits for the rub-ins, the I-told-you-so.

plink!

Would that he could punture his ear drums to blissfully slip away from the steady drum of agony. Would that he could indulge in the fantasy of returning, nay gleefully shoving, the effluent scum down the hole from whence it came. Would that he could do something, anything, to escape the impetuous dribble.

plink!

Would that he could live in anguish.

plink. plink. plink.