On the notion of affordances

Donald Norman used the notion of affordances for how the nature of things in our environment suggest how we can interact with them.

When things suggest how we can interact with them, it changes how we interact with them. If a door suggests that it is opened by pushing it, we are more likely to try opening it that way. And if things have poor affordances, we're likely to try using them in ways that don't work.

Recently, I used the term in a more general way, to refer to how anything can shape how we perceive, think about things or do things. For example, the character limit on SMS messages shapes the kinds of things we write with them, even though it's quite possible to write email length messages but split them up across multiple texts.

I think the importance of this notion is that, in practice, we don't have absolute autonomy, we aren't simply "in control", and don't simply do things "because we choose to or want to". Nor do we make choices based on all the information; we use heuristics and hints, and what things suggest.

I'm not aware of an existing term for this property of things, and I think affordances fits well.

To illustrate this notion of affordances, here are some recent Paul Graham articles that can be seen in this light:

Cities and Ambition - cities have affordances that shape the ambitions of their citizens, and different cities have different affordances.

Disconnecting Distraction - computer setups have affordances that shape your usage of them, and how much time you waste when you're using them.

Another thing I think is an example of affordances is the notion of framing. That the way you describe something shapes the way people think about it.

Exploitation of poor workers is more about poor treatment than low wages

The exploitation of labour in poor countries is a horrible thing.

Companies shouldn't treat workers poorly, they shouldn't make them work in dangerous conditions or harass them, to mention only some of the misdeeds.

But what about low wages? People usually think that giving low-wage jobs to people in poor countries is exploitation. But I think that if companies treated workers properly (with safe working conditions, etc) but still payed the low wages, it wouldn't be exploitation.

As far as I can tell, low-wages is not the negative for the workers that most people think it is.

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A normal auction is aligned to the desires of the buyers and sellers. The buyer wants to get as much money as they can, and the potential buyer who wants the item the most gets it because they will pay the most for it.

With the types of work that goes to poor countries, the situation is similar. The company wants the work done as cheaply as possible, and -- this is the crucial bit -- the people who want work the most get it because they are willing to do it for the smallest amount -- the lowest pay.

The pay rate that the most desperate people are willing to do the job for is too low for all the other people, who don't have as great a need for those jobs. For these other people, the minimum amount that it's worth their while to do the job for is a higher rate of pay. So if the company was to pay more for the jobs, there'd be a larger pool of people who'd be willing to do it. And more than likely, some or all of those most desperate to do the work would miss out.

I hope you agree that that would be a bad thing.

But why do companies have to get the work done as cheaply as possible? Could't they pay higher wages, but still give the jobs to those who are most desperate for it? It would be great if you could find a way for this to work in practice, though I doubt there is one.

Sure, some companies could afford to do it, but most would end up being put out of business by competitors who found other people who were willing to work for low wages. These competitors would thus be able to sell their products at a cheaper price, and would end up winning out in the marketplace. There are definitely more subtleties than this, but I don't think anything else can really override this basic reality.

Seeing software exlusively in functional terms also overlooks affordances

The exclusive focus on the functional capabilities of software doesn’t just overlook usability, it also overlooks affordances.

You can imagine Tim Berners-Lee circa 1990 telling a hypertext-illiterate friend about this World Wide Web thing he'd just invented

"Have you seen my new invention?"

“what is it?”

“There's this special language, called HTML, which you can write documents in. It allows you to put these things called 'links' into your documents, so that when you view them, you can click on bits of the text -- the links -- to load up another document stored on the network.

Oh, and to view these documents, you need to use a separate program called a browser.”

“why would I want to use that? With <my favourite document editor> I can read and write documents, and with the programs I already use it’s easy to load another document off the network.”

The fact is that there's not a single functional capability in the WWW that can't be achieved in other ways; in fact, the web has (and still does, to a certain extent) less functionality than is available by other means.

What it does have is different Affordances.

I was introduced to the notion of affordances by Donal Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things. It’s about the design of the everyday objects you interact with, like door handles, alarm clocks and car steering wheels. Why are some easy to use and intuitive, and others awkward and frustrating? Norman looks at how designs do and do not match with our tendancies, and our capabilities for perceiving and interacting with the world.

I’d highly recommend it to anyone, even if the topic isn’t something you’re specifically interested in. It’s a real eye-opener, and it's subject matter is relevant to everybody’s lives.

A hinged door that just presents a flat metal panel at hand height suggests that it opens away from you by pushing it. While a door with a metal bar in the same position that you can grasp suggests that you grab hold of it and pull it. These designs exhibit affordances – they are suggestive of function.

In general, I’d say you have an afforadance when properties of the object or system shape and influence the ways that you use them. This is a bit broader than the original meaning, but I think the term still fits.

Lets go back to the World Wide Web. Links are easy to embed into documents -- you can embed them seamlessly into the text of the document, rather than having to figure out where to put them in relation to the flow of the text -- and it's easy to use a link. You just point at it, click the mouse and then the linked page appears.

Without links, you'd have to find another way to describe the location of the other document, and then the user would have to either cut and paste that location or remember it, and then go to whatever program they would use to access it. And they won't have any forwards or back buttons.

In principle, there isn't a huge difference between these two alternatives. But in practice there is. We’re all very sensitive to how much effort it takes to do things. It doesn't take much for the effort to exceed the threshold where we just won't bother. Trivial amounts of extra effort can break the camel's back. Yes, “in principle” we could make the extra effort if we really wanted to. But the amount of effort involved means that in practice we don’t want to.

So it encourages linkages and jumping between documents. Blogs wouldn't make sense unless this was easy to do.

Or take SMSs or twitter messages (not that I’ve used twitter myself, I've just read about it). You could in principle write exactly the same way you would in emails or blog posts, and just split the text up into multiple SMSs or tweets, but you don’t. SMSs and tweets have differents sorts of affordances to email/blog posts, so you write in different ways.

That’s the thing about affordances. You can have multiple different systems that, in principle, you could do exactly the same things with, but you don’t, because they have different affordances.

IT people have a tendancy to only compare software in functional terms

Criticism should be a positive thing. Not personal attacks or trying to put people down. It should be about identifying opportunitites for improvement. With that in mind...

IT people have a tendency to think like this:

Pieces of software have a function.
For example. Programming languages are for writing programs.
Utilities like ‘ls’ or ‘dir’ are for giving you information about the file system, as are graphical file browsers like Windows Explorer.

Comparing programs means comparing their functional capabilities.
(Many times, I've head people dismiss programs or programming languages because other programs can already do the same thing.)

But this way of thinking overlooks usability and other "non-functional" (which is a bit of misnomer) issues.

Sure, you may be able to do the same things, but can you do them as easily? If usability wasn’t a factor, people would be happy to write all software using Assembly language.

The notion of a language being ‘easy’ (or ‘hard’ to use) is itself a simplification. Easy or hard for what? There’s always some sorts of tradoffs. Easy for systems programming? Easy for writing simulations? Easy to write? Easy to maintain?

'Easy' or 'hard' is in the context of using a particular program for a specific task a person is undertaking. The can a complex set of factors involved, including the nature of the task and of the person doing it. Here are some basic examples.

Comparing information is easier when the pieces are closer together. The further apart, and the more actions like mouseclicks you need to perform to navigate between them, the tougher it is on your concentration. When you're thinking and your train of thought moves, you want to be able to nimbly adapt the information display, such as changing the ordering of the information from alphabetical to chronological.

Time is an important component. We have limited ability to keep track of things over time. Getting the pieces of information in quick succession is quite different to getting them many seconds apart.

Why are IT prone to thinking of computer systems in this way? Well, in part, it’s nothing specific to the nature of IT people. I think we all tend to see phenomena in ‘functional terms’, and tend to overlook the other aspects to them. And, as I've said before, we tend not to factor in constraints into our conceptualisation of things, and are poor at doing it when we try.

The thing that's different about IT people is simply that they explicitly think about and compare software more than non IT people do.

A contributing factor in the case of systems whose functions it is to present us with information is a simplistic notion of perception. In this view, perception is simply a matter of taking in information, and what we end up with in our heads is simply a reflection of what is out there. The thing is, our perceptual/cognitive systems are highly structured, and constrained in various way.

This is why you can have the same information can be much easier or harder to deal with, depending on how it is respresented and/or how you can interact with it. Our brains look for certain cues, and whether they’re there or not makes big difference. They have all sorts of built in assumptions, expectations and limitations.

Revisiting the question of why IT people see software in this way, there might be one factor that is specific to them. IT people in particular see programs in this way. They're used to thinking of how to use software to solve problems. With a program, as long as it can get hold of the information it needs, the original format doesn't matter so much, as it can then put it in a more usable form, and then solve the problem. The difference with our brains and perceptual systems is that they have more limited capabilities to do this, and to do this fast enough for it to be practical. Our hardware is much more dependent upon the external format.

We don't just compare software that exists. When someone thinks of an idea for a new piece of software, it gets compared with what we've already got. So this issue of how we compare software applies to developing new software. If we can be aware of the problems with only doing functional comparisons, we won't be so eager to shoot down new software, for even the best new software rarely does anything new in functional terms.

Assuming that every bit counts is a recipe for failure, whatever your goal is (including helping the environment)

When you have goals you want to achieve, being satisfied as long you're doing something that's working towards them is a recipe for failure.

Unless you think about priorities and how much tasks will really contribute, it's easy to just feel good about doing something, and it's always tempting to do the easier or more urgent things. Every little bit helps, right?

But not really. You have to have the right priorities. What matters is how much a task contributes. Tasks will differ in how much they contribute to the goals, and there's almost always an unlimited number of trivial tasks you can occupy all your time with. Time can easily fly by, without you having achieved anything of substance.

Sometimes tasks may seem to meaningfully contribute, but in fact really not at all. They might just be addressing symptoms of a deeper problem. As long as that deeper problem remains, the symptoms will continue to arise for you to work on, and you'll end up on an endless treadmill. Really tackling the problem means going for its deeper source.

This doesn't only apply to individuals and their personal, study or work goals. It applies anytime there's any goal to be achieved. Consider the goal of helping the environment. How many times do you hear it said that “every little bit counts”?

Yes, in some trivial sense every little bit is doing something. But is it doing anything really useful? Is it just addressing symptoms, and putting us on an endless treadmill?

The point is, it's really important for us to consider what our priorities should be. We need to think about what actually does and doesn't help, and to what extent things help, so we can know how we should distribute our time.

But I feel that thoughts about the environment don't really get into considering such matters, and tend to be mired in a warm and fuzzy "every little bit counts" view.

Perhaps you think that this is all well and good when it comes to governments and companies, but for the person on the street, all they can do is the little things, so for them it truly is a matter of ‘every little bit counts’.

If you think that, then by all means, have a look at what the person on the street might be able to do, and the relative values of these options. And if you find that there truly aren't any real diffrences between the options, and every little bit really does count, let us know. It's an important question, and a proper answer -- whatever it is -- would do us all good.

'Recent Folders' in Windows Explorer Navigation Pane

Mockup:


Not infrequently, I'll be doing some task that involves jumping back and forth, or copying files, between a number of different folders. In Windows Explorer, these directories are often not close to each other, so I have to scroll up and down all the time.

Perhaps it'd be useful if Windows Explorer could (optionally) display a cache of the folders you've recently nagivated or moved/copied files to. Then you could drag files to them, or click them to see their contents in the right-hand pane.

A similar 'Recent Folders' section would also be handy in save and open dialog boxes. So often I have to constantly navigate back to the same directory, each time I save or open something. Some save/open dialogues do provide a button for obtaining a list of recent folders, but why not just include a few those folders there in a section within the default listing?

Transparent fridge

Out of sight out of mind, as they say. You’re in the kitchen or walk past it, and the fridge is just this big white opaque box. You don’t see the food - only when you open the door. And even then, items can be hidden behind other items. But if the fridge was transparent, you could walking past, or in the kitchen and happen to see the fridge contents. You’d be more aware of the food being there.

I always end up wasting food because I don't see it and then forget about it. A transparent fridge might help me waste less (especially if I also stored things in transparent containers). And I think there’d be something slightly less artificial about your life if the food you’ve brought home and stored away wasn’t so out of sight.

On the downside, food would be exposed to more light, and there's a question of if you could make one that is as well insulated. With the food more visible, it could also tempt you more to snack. I'm not sure if you'd get condensation fogging up the surface, but if there was it could ruin the transparency. Also, if you didn't keep the fridge tidy, it could be messy - but then again, perhaps that would be a motivation to keep it tidy.

Here's a pic of transparent fridge from some sort of Japanese trade show (see the article accompanying the pic). I don't know if it's something that is actually sold or not.

Here's a suggestion for a transparent fridge from back in 2006. As they point out, it might also help save power, if you didn't have to open the fridge door to see what was inside.

Pics of spectaular ice structure on Lake Huron in Michigan

Being able to explicitly reason about a concept is a skill

This is just an initial, hasty attempt to write about this stuff. I'll try and revise it a bit tomorrow.

Often, we’ll have a view about a topic without having actually given it explicit consideration. We obtained the view pretty unconsciously. Without explicit consideration, we’ll just feel there’s something shifty about Terry, or that technology is a bad thing.

Our brains were designed so that we don’t need explicit deliberation to form judgements about other people’s character, so our intuitions on that score tend to be fairly reasonable. But our brains weren’t designed with the capabilities required to automatically draw sound judgements on concepts such as technology; though our brains still try to automatically develop views on them.

‘Technology’ is a very abstract concept. It covers so many things that, in concrete terms, differ in so many ways. Technologies span the four corners of the globe, many thousands of years of history, and all aspects of our lives and societies. They can be used with all sorts of intent, and have sorts of consequences (and the intents and results don’t necessarily match – good intent can lead to bad results, and vice versa). Technologies include writing, asprin, glass, bridge construction, computer games, and guns.

If we want to draw reasonable conclusions when thinking about topics like ‘is technology a good or a bad thing?’, we need to have to override our natural intuitons about it, and start thinking explicitly about the question.

Our natural intuions have a powerful grip on us. We might have a negative impression of technology because of various things we’ve heard where bad things happened because of it. If connotations start to accrue around a concept, it tends to snowball. Thereafter, the things we’ll take note of as ‘technologies’ are more likely be things that fit our existing preconception of it – as ‘high-tech’ things that have negative concequences. It’s more likely that each example that fits that view will end up reinforcing it, while, when we come across cases that don’t fit it, we probably won’t think to reevaluate our notion of technology.

The ability to think explicitly about a concept is a skill, and has to be developed like any other skill. When your brain is unconsciously building up a picture of something, it can build a picture of depth and subtlty. But as I’ve said, it can only do this in certain sorts of cases that suit the in-built mechanisms for doing this. When you’re explicitly reasoning about a topic, you have to build that depth and subtlty manually.

Initially, we can only explicitly think of the concept in simplistic, somewhat stereotyped ways. And it simply takes a lot of work in order to draw out and refine that skill – the ability to think explicitly about technology and its nature. Reading things about that concept helps, but I think that can only get you so far. To really develop the skill requires linguistic work. You could try thinking about it in your head, but that’s very difficult to do. What’s more suitable is to talk about or discuss it, or trying to write about it.

In the end, what you want to do is train unconscious aspects of your mind to have a deep and subtle ability to handle that concept. To have a fluency with it. That’s just like the endgoal of developing any other skill – whether driving a car, using a chef’s knife or playing a rugby.

Why is this important when it comes to thinking about concepts? Because to develop a solid position on a particular topic, you need to be able to evaluate your own position well. You have to be able to spot simplifications or omissions within the statements you’re making. You have to have a good nose for these things. And you just can’t do this well enough until you’ve really absorbed the knowledge well.

And I think that it’s likely to be the case that, once you have developed your skill a fair bit, you’re going to reach different sorts of conclusions than you would have initially. You need to develop the skills in order to draw reasonable conclusions.

And all this has a bearing on not just developing, but presenting arguments to others. That is, it has a bearing on things like how non-fiction books ought to be written, when there’s an need to develop a skill in reasoning about a concept, such as there is when you’re trying to answer the question of ‘is technology a good or bad thing?’. So of course, first you would try and make sure you’ve tried to develop your skill in reasoning about that concept, so that you have an accurate conception of it. As far as I can see, this is very rarely done. Usually people don’t really consider their notion of their conception of the relevant concepts. They usually just take for granted the notion of it they’ve pretty unconsciously developed, and go from there. They might, for the purposes of exposition define their notion of that concept. But that’s usually not much more than putting their existing view of it into words. Usually, what they’re more about is justifying the view they’ve already reached.

If a lot of the work in developing reasonable conclusions is developing skills in thinking about the concepts involved, then if you want the reader to appreciate your viewpoint, part of what you need to do is use your writing to help them develop skills in reasoning about the concepts. I did say earlier that reading things involving the concepts helps a bit in developing skills but was secondary to talking/writing about it. What I’m talking about here is a different type of writing about it, where the focus is specifically on trying to understand the nature of the concepts themselves, rather than just saying things concerning the concepts.

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This fits in with the notion of laddered skills, particularly mental laddered skills

When information is plenty, text with a low information-to-length ratio isn't worth reading

Sometimes you hear the complaint that the internet-users of today don't have the patience to read things online. It used to be that people read relatively long articles in Newspapers and magazines like Time. But not any more. They don't have the attention span and are perhaps lacking in a certain kind of mental depth.

But some of this situation actually reflects a lacking in older styles of writing. They're not informational enough. You have to read a lot of for only a small amount of useful information. That was fine when information was relatively scarce. But when there is so much information out there -- and in truth, a lot of useful information out there -- it's just too costly to read things that have a low information-to-length ratio.

By the way, when I talk about the inforamtion-to-length ratio, I mean the amount of information that people can easily and comfortably derive from the text. It's no good if the text says a lot, but it's bloody difficult to discipher (note, however, that I tend to think that high informational text is likely to be readable. Clever sounding but hard to read text is often just obfuscation).

I think that people will pay attention if the informational payoff is high enough. When it's not they'll skim, and if it's too low, they'll skim a bit then leave.

That's the simple rule for getting people to read stuff on your web-site: give it a high information-to-length ratio. I'm suspect of how well "gimmicks" like highlighting keywords -- so they'll catch readers eyes when scanning -- really work.

So what's an example of a form of writing that has a high information-to-length ratio? The best examples I can think of are Paul Graham's essays.

(and of course I'm not making any claims here about my ability to write this sort of text. and certainly most of the stuff on this blog is just 'trying to get my thoughts together' stuff that doesn't have a high info-to-length ratio).

Intregrating Transinfo and Google Maps

I'd be nice to have some integration between Transinfo and Google Maps. Transinfo is the public-transport journey planner for the Brisbane area.

Some examples of possible integration (Most or all of which I'm sure have been done in various other places around the world). Showing the real-time location of buses and trains on the map. Overlaying bus routes over the map.

Being able to plan a trip, and marking it out on the map. This'd be especially useful when it involves changing between serveral buses, and having to walk to a different stop to catch the next bus.

Being able to search for a location in Google Maps and to feed that in as a 'from' or a 'to' address in the journey planner. Or if you use Google Maps to mark out how to get from one place to another by car, be able to immediately get public transport journey information.

Paul Graham: Lies We Tell Kids

Another excellent Paul Graham article Lies We Tell Kids

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to clear our heads of lies we were told.

I'm using the word "lie" in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. Though "lie" has negative connotations, I don't mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we should pay attention when we do.

Charming picture of a girl and her dog

Disco chickens

Finally - disco chickens. Having grown up with chickens around, I knew they had it in them. Thank you Dominos.

Non-linear relationship b/ween improvements in your understanding of a prob and your ability to address it

In relation to my last post...

I think we also tend to assume that, if you understood a problem better, then your idea of how to best address it would simply be a better, improved version of your existing idea of how to address it.

But I think that's wrong. A better understanding can lead you to a radically different notion of how to address the problem.

A simplified understanding can stop you from striving for a better one

Quick sketching...

It’s easy to be falsely led into thinking that your current understanding of a problem can’t be improved. That's dangerous, because simplified understandings tend to lead to inappropriate solutions.

You can think it can't be improved, if you expect that, should there exist a way for it to be improved, you could personally see

1) how it was possible for a better understanding to exist
2) what it would look like
3) how it would help you better address the problem

It seems to be just how our brains work that,
If we can’t see these things, we tend to think the thing mustn't exist.

But the problem is, if you do only have a simplified understanding of the problem, then this fact itself can stop you from seeing those things. If you could see those things then you wouldn’t have the simplified understanding.

Just becuase you can't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Unless you understand why you understand the problem fully, then you always have to be open to the idea that it's useful to learn more about the problem, and that doing so may radically change your idea of how best to address it.

Enso - a real, practical step forwards for UIs, available now and for free

So far I'm quite impressed by Enso. It provides you with a single 'linguistic commandline' for controlling common operations on your computer, from switching to different applications, to looking up something in google, and spell checking text. It's very slick. It's also free and open-source. Presently windows-only.

Probably the best way to get a feel for it is to watch this overview screencast.




I think this kind of thing is a real step forwards.

News: Cuba lifts ban on home computers

Cuba lifts ban on home computers. Home computers were banned in Cuba?? That's pretty oppressive. I'm not saying that banning computers is anything close to the worst form of oppression, but it is telling of their attitude towards their citizens.

Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

[Update: the article can now be accessed here]

A very interesting –- and very readable -- article by Clay Shirky.

What do Gin, sitcoms and Wikipedia have to do with ‘cognitive surplus’, and how will the technological leverage we’re giving to that surplus re-shape society? That might all sound fairly speculative, but I think he's got a pretty solid point.

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Clay Shiky: website, wikipedia
His book, Here Comes Everybody: amazon; blog;
reviews: guardian, times higher education, boing boing

Gordon Ramsay: How to Scramble Eggs (video)

I don't do scrambled eggs much coz they never seem to come out right, but after seeing this I'm going to get some eggs this afternoon and give it a go tomorrow morning.

A few interesting things from the video: don't put salt in early, as it effects the consistency; scramble the eggs in the pan; alternate the pan on and off the heat.

(Update: had a go at it and it came out pretty good, though I didn't cook it quite long enough, and didn't have any creme fraiche. also, 3 eggs is too much for me, next time I'll try using 2)

Alternatively, if you like omelette's:

(source unkown).

A Wikipedia for data (statistics, listings, etc)

[Update: the article can now be found here]

Bret Taylor suggests that we need a Wikipedia for data. A lot of potential innovation is being held up because it’s so hard to get access to factual data (esp decent quality data). Statistics, listings, and so on. Taylor suggests a Wikipedia-like repository of factual data freely available to everyone. It could really grow if it caught on – the sort of thing that fosters a sharing spirit. You know that if you add/update/correct stuff (and everyone else does likewise), everyone benefits.

The most lifelike robot I've ever seen

This video has been around since mid-March, but I've only just seen it.

It's of the 'Big Dog' robot made by Boston Dynamics. Watch what happens when the guy tries to push it over, or when it slips on icy ground. Squint and you'd think you're watching a real animal.

A "workspace setup" tool for Windows?

When I’ve finished a session on my laptop, I always just put it to sleep rather than shutting it down. I only shut it down (or restart it) for a software install or update, or because of performance problems -- basically, when I'm forced to. Closing all the programs down, restarting the system, and then setting everything back up again just takes too long.

For those times when I do have to restart it, I’d like a software tool that could automatically set my workspace back up again, by reloading all the programs / documents I normally use. So far, I haven’t found anything that does this. “Application Launcher” programs are more about being able to quickly access a particluar program or document when you want to load it. I’d like something with these features:

• Once you’ve defined your set-up, and it’s a simple matter to get the program to open all the programs.
  
• What you can define in your set-up
  • what to open
    • programs
      
    • documents
      
    • directories (in Windows Explorer)
  • What order to open them in (so they appear in a specific order on the taskbar, which helps me to organise things).
    
  • Ideally, where to place these windows, and how to size them (when my text editor opens, the window is too wide).
    
  • Support multiple different set-ups.
    I use three virtual desktops, and I have diff sets of apps open in each, so I’d like to have three different set-ups.
    
  • Ideally, a way to specify settings for windows.
    For example, I’d like it to be able to set up Winamp to appear on all of the virtual desktops. Manually, you do this by right-clicking the winamp item on the taskbar, choosing the ‘Virtual Dimension’ option (for the virtual desktop I use), and then the ‘All Desktops’ option. I’d like to be able to set up the program to do this for me.

Is anything out there like this (and preferably not full of other features)? (I could try writing something like this myself, though with all the other stuff I'm working on, I don't think I'd get round to it anytime soon).

Really, I think such functionality should just be a basic, standard component of windows.

Paul Graham: How to disagree

A short-and-sweet look at how to disagree.

What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages.

The feasability of a kick-arse public transport system for Brisbane?

Brisbane is a great place, but one thing you hear over and over again is that the public transport sucks. While it could be a lot worse, and I'm glad we've got what we have (CityCats in particular are nice), I’m equally sure it could be a lot better.

But how much better is feasable? Would an ideal, kick-arse public transport system actually be possible? I don’t know the answers, but here's some thoughts on what would be desirable, and some of the questions I have about its feasability.

I'm thinking of a public transport system with extensive coverage and very frequent services. Where all the services started early in the morning and ran till late at night, and 10 minutes was the most you’d ever have to wait.

Where, wherever you were in Brisbane, five minutes was the most you’d have to walk to get to public transport. Where you can go pretty directly to where you want – perhaps by first travelling to one of a few major hubs, and from there straight out to your destination.

But how feasible would that be? One thing you'd need is people with the right vision and drive to carry it through. I take that as a given; what's less clear to me is the economic feasibility.

What changes or alternatives could be used to work towards these goals? What incremental changes could be made? What sorts of improvements would require new infrastructure or different transport means?

For all of these things, what sorts of costs would be involved? And how much of those costs could you expect to offset (at least in the medium to long term) by increased public transport usage? To what extent could you convince people that the extra costs were worth it (such as by painting a compelling picture of what could be done)?

And how long would the different options take to implement?

If the ideal is not possible, how close to it could you get?

Strawberries, briefly baked with sugar and balsamic vinegar to intensify the flavour

Strawberries with balsamic vinegar

"Don't be put off by the vinegar in this recipe -- once it combnies with a bit of sugar and the heat from the oven, it takes on a wonderfully sweet and complex flavour". From Tobie Puttock's Daily Italian.

This dessert has an elegant simplicity and tastes wonderful.

Serves 2 or 3

(You can bake the strawberries in an ordinary oven-safe container with a lid, or you can make a parcel out of aluminium foil. Tear off about 40 cm of foil. Make the parcel by folding it in half, then sealing up the sides by making a 2cm fold along each side. Later, we'll place the strawberry mix in the parcel then seal up the top edge).

Ingredients

• strawberries, 1 punnet, hulled
  
• castor sugar, 1 tbsp
  
• balsamic vinegar, 1 tbsp
  
• to serve it with: some creme fraiche, masarcapone or custard.

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 200 celsius.
  If using a container to cook the strawberries in, preheat it as well.

• If the strawberries are on the large size, cut them in half.
  
• Combine strawberries, sugar and vinegar in a bowl.

• Place the strawberry mixture inside your container and put the lid on -- or for the foil parcel, close it up by making a fold along the top.
  
• Place the container in the oven and cook for 5 minutes.
  
• Remove from the oven, and let parcel sit, unopened, for a few minutes.
  

• Serve at the table.
  The aroma that's released when the parcel is opened is really something special.
  
• Arrange the warm strawberries in a martini or wine glasses, accompanied by a generous dollop of creme fraiche, mascapone or custard
  

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Puttock says the dish also goes well with other desserts, such as an Almond Custard, or a chilled Zabaglione, though I haven't tried this myself.

Idea for a Full Sub-tree view in Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer provides several different views of your files and directories: as a listing, as a grid of icons, etc. I’d like a ‘full sub-tree’ view. Rather than just listing just the directory contents, it would show the entire subtree of directories and files underneath the directory, like:

   File
   File
   File 
   Subdir name
     File
     File
     Subdir name
        File
        File
        File
     File

I often find I want to be able to see all those details at once, rather than being limited to seeing each directory one at a timne.

Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech

Barack Obama's quite remarkable March 18 speech "A More Perfect Union" (37 mins).



Transcript

Moving files while they're being downloaded

When I'm downloading a file in Windows, it won't let me move the file or rename it. Sometimes I want to be able to move it, for exactly the same reasons I want to move ordinary files. In this case, I realised there was a better place to put it.

Ideally, it would let me move the file, and it'd be smart enough to update the file contents there. I'm not saying it would be a click of the fingers to implement, but it's certainly technically possible to implement an OS that works like this.

When you think about it, this limitation is simply an inconsistency (of the sort that might confuse people who aren't computer literate) arising from a technical detail, and I think these are the sorts of things we should be trying to eliminate.

---

A similar thing goes for files that are open in editors. In this case, you might want the OS to notify you that it is currently open, and confirm that you want to go ahead with the operation. The editor would be notified of the change, and adjust things accordingly.

Reader's Digest: 23 ways to avoid catching a cold or the flu

The seems to be a lot colds going around lately -- I've got one now. Reader's Digest has an interesting list of things you can do to prevent catching a cold or the flu.

Here are some of the interesting ones I hadn't heard of. Some might sound strange, but they make sense after you read the explanation for them.

• Wash your hands twice every time you wash them.
  
• Run your toothbrush through the microwave on high for 10 seconds to kill germs that can cause colds and other illnesses.
  
• Leave the windows in your house open a crack in winter.
  
• Speaking of which, buy a hygrometer.
  
• Sit in a sauna once a week.
  
• Inhale air from your blow-dryer.
  
• Wipe your nose -- don't blow.

Here's another bit from it

3. Use this hand-drying strategy in public restrooms. Studies find a shockingly large percentage of people fail to wash their hands after using a public restroom. And every single one of them touches the door handle on the way out. So after washing your hands, use a paper towel to turn off the faucet. Use another paper towel to dry your hands, then open the door with that paper towel as a barrier between you and the handle. It sounds nuts, but it's an actual recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control to protect you from infectious diseases like cold and flu.

I've always found it strange how many people don't wash their hands... I wonder why exactly?

Amazing landscape scenes made from food (pics)

Some people have far too much time on their hands.

---

Similar: What chefs do when they're bored (pics)

Bruce Schneier on the different mindset security professionals need to have

Bruce Schneier on the different mindset security professionals need to have. It involves “thinking about how things can be made to fail. It involves thinking like an attacker, an adversary or a criminal. “ The person with this mind set “can't walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can't use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can't vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice.”

Funny comic "I met a butterfly the other day."

Funny: I met a butterfly the other day. Sounds a bit twee, but it isn't.

Greek Bean Stew with Feta

Nice greek-style stew. Tomatoes and dill make a great flavour combination, and provide the central focus of the flavours here. (Unfortunately, I can't recall the name of the cookbook I got this from).

• onion, 1
  
• olive oil, 2 tbsp
  
• garlic cloves, 2, crushed
  
• canned chopped tomatoes, 400g
  
• tomato paste, 1 tbsp
  
• bay leaves, 2
  
• parsley, finely chopped, 2 tbsp
  
• dill, finely chopped, 2 tbsp
  
• salt, 1 tsp
  
• pepper, 1/2 tsp
  
• paprika, 1/2 tsp
  
• sugar, 1 tbsp
  
• canned beans, 3 x 400g cans (cannellini, butter or kidney)
  
• feta cheese, 100g
  
• Potential accompaniments: flat bread and a greek salad.
  

• Halve and finely slice the onion
  
• Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan and fry the onion until soft but not browned.
  
• Add the
  
  • garlic
    
  • tomatoes
    
  • tomato paste
    
  • and 500ml water
• followed by the
  • bay leaves
    
  • parsely
    
  • half the dill
    
  • salt
    
  • pepper
    
  • paprika
    
  • sugar

• Bring to a simmer.
  
• Simmer, partly covered, for 20 to 30 minutes until nice and thick.
  
• Drain and rinse the beans, add to the stew, and simmer gently for another 10 minutes.

• Rinse the feta cheese, pat dry and cut into smallish cubes
  (perhaps 1cm to a side - so you don't end up biting into huge peices that'd overwhelm the other flavours).
  
• Add to the pan and simmer for another 5 minutes until the cheese is soft.

• Serve in small bowls, drizzled with a little extra olive oil and scattered with the remaining dill.
  
• Serve hot or at room temprature (it's actually quite good when cool), with some warm flat bread and perhaps a Greek salad.

Impressive shadow puppet routine on Letterman

Pretty amazing performance by Raymond Crowe, who happens to be from Adelaide in Australia.

Recipe: Tuna and Boccincini Pizza

Tuna and Boccincini Pizza

Bit different to the usual pizza, but quite nice. Here's the source for this recipe.

• Pizza base, 1
  
• Fennel bulb, 1, finely sliced
  
• Bocconcini or fresh mozzarella, 75g, sliced
  
• Tuna in oil, 185g can, well drained.
  
• Fennel fronds, 1 tbsp, finely chopped
  
• Parsley, finely chopped, 1/8 cup
  
• Basil, finely chopped, 1 tbsp
  
• Olive oil, 1 1/2 tbsp
  
• Grated lemon rind, from 1/2 lemon

• Preheat oven to 220 degrees.
  
• Brush each pizza base with a little olive oil.
  
• Sprinkle the fennel evenly over each pizza base and top with the sliced cheese.
  
• Bake in oven for 12-15 minutes.
  
• Gently toss together the flaked tuna, herbs, olive oil and lemon rind and season with salt and freshly ground pepper.
  
• Scatter over the hot pizza and serve.

Kevin Kelly: When copies are free, you have to sell what can't be copied

More and more things are becoming digitised, and thus easily copied. The Internet is a big machine for grinding out free copies. And when copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. So argues Kevin Kelly, in his post Better Than Free.

So what can't be copied? He lists eight things, which he gives plenty of examples of:

• Immediacy
  
• Personalization
  
• Embodiment (which is really a subtype of personalization)
  
• Interpretation
  
• Authenticity
  
• Accessibility
  
• Patronage
  
• Findability

Basically, making money from these means making money from capturing attention, which is a different kettle of fish from what we're used to.

I reckon his post presents some pretty deep insights into future technological development.

Here's a few other details about it.

He criticises the notion that advertising is essentially the only means to make money from free copies.

He also generalises his argument from digital copies to "any kind of copy where the marginal cost of that copy approaches zero", going on to say

Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don't want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill.

---

Additional Notes

Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is relevant to these issues, according to one of the post comments: it is "arguably one of the cornerstones of an understanding of multiple media in modern life, and it describes convulsive, revolutionary changes to media distribution really elegantly".

The same comment also recommends Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things for more on the value of "findability".


In relation to technological development as the removal of constraints

I think what Kelly writes fits in nicely with the notion of technological development as the removal of constraints, which I talked about in a 2006 post Scientific and Technological Development = Removal of Constraints.

Briefly, my argument was along these lines:

• Our capabilities are obviously limited, to differing degrees and in various ways
  
• Technologies lessen these limitations (or constraints).
  • It can be two-steps forwards, one step back, but I think there is an overal trend in this direction
• You can think about where technological development may go by thinking about the ways our capabilities are constrained, and the ways these constraints can be lessened.
  • You don't have to do this just to speculate, but to try and figure out how to improve on current technologies.

I think Kelly's post fits in nicely with this. Copying used to be heavily constrained. It took a fair bit of time and effort to make copies of things. But now, technology has removed a lot of these constraints.

The copying constraints enabled you, as the producer of some content (e.g. a song), to charge people for copies. But since that constraint is drastically lessened you have to find other things to sell that people can't copy - things where our ability to copy them is heavily constrained.

But even these other constraints may be lessened by further technological development. For example, it will become easier to personalise content, through higher-level ways to configure things, and through more intelligent software that knows your preferences better and can do a reasonable job of ensuring they're met.


Dimensions upon which to imagine ideals

This bit is sketching...

Another way to look at Kelly's list of eight items, is as a list of eight dimensions along which we can remove constraints, to look at where technological development may head. To think, for example, of ways for making content more immediate, or more authentic.

What I think is actually the most useful thing to do is have a clear idea of what the ideal would be for each of those constraints. For example, the ideal in terms of Findability might be for you to simply want to desire something, and with the most minimal amount of effort be able to get it. Or even better, for technology to be able to (reliably) predict that you'll want something and deliver it to you before you even have to realise you want it.

Removing all the constraints associated with interpretation would mean there is an automatic provision of interpretation -- of what the content means, what you can do about it, how to use it, etc -- suited to you. The ultimate step would be not to have to provide you with this information, but for it to be automatically applied for you.

But so what, right? What's the use if you're just imagining some fantasy ideal, and not thinking about something more realistic, or about how to improve the technology? The answer to this is that we need to think beyond means that directly lead to the improvements. What imagining these ideals can do is help give you higher-standards. And high-standards are crucial for any creative work. Steve Jobs has very high standards. So does Ricky Gervais. So it seems with most people who make good stuff.

You've got a benchmark that keeps you from simply being satisfied with an incremental improvement. You're taking a broader, more fundamental viewpoint. This might lead you to redesign things from the ground up, or at least not simply see an incremental improvement as "good" and stop there, but be thinking about there being more that is possible.

Apple is an example of a company that pushes things more than just 'one step further'.

Article: innovation is the result of hard-work, not flashes of brilliance

Janet Rae-Dupree, in the New York Times:

As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us.

Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

"The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems," explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, "The Myths of Innovation." "Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation."

---

That's a common theme in innovation, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the Claremont Graduate University in California. "Cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume that some kind of information processing keeps going on even when we are not aware of it, even while we are asleep," he writes in "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention."

Though that's hardly surprising once you're aware that most of cognition is unconscious, and that conscious thought is like the tip of the
iceberg.

Tiredness is not literally a lack of energy

One of the malaises of our modern world is that we get fat. We eat
too much sweet and fatty foods. Why? Because in ancestoral
conditions, food was a scarce resource and sweet and fatty foodstuffs
were potent energy sources. We've evolved to seek them out. In
developed countries, food is no longer a scarce resource, and this
instinctive craving makes us fat.

Tiredness is another modern malaise. Many of us just don't have much
energy. No doubt overwork, hectic lifestyle and inadequate sleep are
major contributors. And lethargy could be due to mental exhaustion,
though here I'm talking about lack of physical energy.

It is interesting to note that this tiredness must be an intentional
part of the design of our bodies, to make us get some rest, like the
way we need sleep. It is not actually a lack of energy. We have more
energy than ever. Energy is, quite literally, what those fat bellies
we're carrying around are.

Fishmongers at Byron Bay

If you go to Byron Bay, you must try the fish and chips at Fishmongers! It's in a laneway that doesn't get much foot traffic, so you could easily miss it. And that'd be a shame, the food is fantastic. And it's cheaper than most higher-end places in the area -- basic fish and chips are only $10. You'll find the place in the laneway behind the beach hotel.

Clay Shirky on the use of evidence in society (his response to the 2007 Edge question)

Clay Shirky's response to last year's Edge question "What are you optimistic about?". Very good I think.

Evidence. 

As schoolchildren, we learn that different weights fall at the same speed. This simple and readily tested observation, first published by Galileo, refuted Aristotle, who claimed that heavy things fall faster. As Galileo put it in Two New Sciences "I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true..." We are left to wonder how people could have believed what they were told, and for two millennia at that, without ever checking? Surely the power of evidence over authority is obvious. 

Except it isn't. Even today, evidence has barely begun to upend authority; the world is still more in thrall to Aristotle than Galileo. As a simple example, the time-honored advice for those suffering from bad backs has been bed rest. Only recently, though, have we discovered bed rest isn't the best treatment, and isn't even particularly good compared to moderate activity. How did this discovery come about? A researcher in the field of Evidence-based Medicine surveyed multiple databases of trials and results for patients with back pain. (It tells us something about medicine's current form that we even need a term like Evidence-based Medicine.) And why did it take so long to look at the evidence? Same reason it took so long to question Aristotle: some doctor in the distant past reasoned that bed rest would be a good idea, and it became the authoritative and little-questioned view. 

In school, the embrace of evidence is often taught as if it were a one-time revolution that has now been internalized by society. It hasn't. The idea of evidence is consistently radical: Take nothing on faith. No authority is infallible. If you figure out a good way to test something, you can contradict hallowed figures with impunity. 

Evidence will continue to improve society, but slowly — this is long-view optimism. The use of evidence dragged the curious mind from the confusion of alchemy into the precision of chemistry in the historical blink of an eye, but its progress past the hard sciences has been considerably slower. Even accepting that evidence should shape our views is inconsistent with much human behavior. Everything from the belief in supernatural beings to deference to elders pushes against the idea that a single person, if he or she comes to understand the evidence, should be allowed to upend a millennium of cherished human belief. 

It is only in the last hundred years that evidence has even begun spreading from the hard sciences into other parts of human life. Previous platitudes about the unpredictability or universal plasticity of human behavior are giving way to areas of inquiry with names like Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Economics. (That we need a label like Behavioral Economics says as much about economics as Evidence-based Medicine does about medicine.) As reliance on evidence spreads, it takes with it an understanding of how it works. Apologists for religion often bolster their claims by noting that it is impossible to disprove the existence of supernatural beings. This argument assumes that their listeners don't understand how evidence works — it makes sense to believe in things for which there is evidence, and no sense to believe in things for which there is none. As evidence moves out of the lab and into everywhere else, rhetorical tricks like that are going to be progressively less effective. There will still be fundamentalists, of course — probably more of them, as improved evidence requires a heightened ability to shield the mind — but the oxymoronic middle ground of 'religious but reasonable' will become progressively harder to occupy. 

This isn't just about religion, though. Most of the really important parts of our lives ·who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence. We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question. 

Social science is expanding because we are better about gathering data and about understanding it. We have gone from a drought to a flood of data about personal and social behavior in the last generation. We will learn more about the human condition in the next two decades years than we did in the last two millennia, and we will then begin to apply what we learn, everywhere. Evidence-based treaties. Evidence-based teaching. Evidence-based industrial design. Evidence-based parenting. 

There will always be some questions we can't answer, but they will be closer in spirit to "Who put the bomp in the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp?" than to "Why do fools fall in love?" There is an astonishing amount of work going on on that latter question right now, and there's a reasonable chance we'll have a really good answer, to it and to thousands of other questions once thought to be beyond study or explanation, in the coming years.

Spectacular looking construction - pics of big research facilities

A refreshing bit of unfamiliarity: some pictures of the spectacular-looking construction in some big research facilities (along with short descriptions of the facilities).

Recipe: Tuna, Capsicum and Zuchinni Cannelloni

From the San Remo website.

Tastes great!

• Instant Cannelloni Tubes, about a dozen.
  
• Filling
  • Tuna in Brine, 425g can
    
  • Capsicums, 2 medium, finely diced
    
  • Zucchini, 1 small, finely diced
    
  • Plain flour, 2 tbsp
    
  • Butter, 2 tbsp
• Sauce
  • Tomato puree, 425g can
    
  • Ground basil leaves, 1 tsp
    
  • Olive oil, 2 tbsp
    
  • Salt, 1 tsp
    
  • Ground black pepper, pinch
    
  • Cream, ½ cup (optional)
• Topping
  • Chopped parsley, 2 tbsp
    
  • Grated mozzarella cheese, 3/4 cup

• Preheat oven to 200ºC
  
• Make Filling
  • In a large frying pan heat butter, add capsicums and zucchini and cook at a moderate heat.
    
  • When the vegetables are cooked, add plain flour and cook well (until golden brown) stirring constantly.
    
  • Add tuna and brine, stir in with vegetables until the mixture is thick.
    
  • Set aside to cool.
• Fill Cannelloni tubes with mixture (a teaspoon can be used).
  
• Make sauce.
  • Heat oil in a frying pan, add tomato puree, basil, salt and pepper and bring to boil.
    
  • Remove from heat.
• Put it together
  • In a greased baking dish cover bottom with sauce.
    
  • Place filled Cannelloni side by side in dish.
    
  • Cover with remaining sauce, and if desired thick cream
    
  • Top with parsley and then mozzarella cheese.
• Bake in oven at 200ºC for 25-35 minutes (test by pricking with skewer).
  

'Pizdaus, The Pics We Like'

Pizdaus, The Pics We Like.

A bit like reddit but for photos: people upload and rate them. Some pretty spectacular photos there.

Abstinence-only gun control (comic)

Funny comic - abstinence-only gun control.

Using the internet as a broker between data processing projects and volunteer resources

Consider this situation. An institution has some worthwhile project they want to undertake, but it has huge data-processing requirements, and they just don't have the resources to fulfill them. Maybe they'd like to simulate protein folding, for medical research.

In an increasing number of cases like this, the internet is being used as a broker to enable such projects, by providing a pool of volunteer resources, either of people's computers or their own time to perform manual data-processing. There's huge pools of resources out there - a whole world of computers in homes and potential volunteers.

So far, this strategy has been quite successful, as reported in this article in the Economist.

Here's a summary of the details

Automated data-processing

Using the spare processing cycles on people’s home computers (and other devices, like Playstation 3’s).

Folding@home - simulating protein folding and mis-folding -- a cause of diseases such as Alzheimer's.
In September, had combined computing capacity one petaflop--a quadrillion mathematical operations per second--something supercomputer designers have dreamed of for several years.

SETI@home - analysing data for signs of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilisations

The BOINC platform has been developed to support such processing.

Manual data-processing ("distributed thinking")

Galaxy Zoo - volunteers help astronomers to classify the shapes of galaxies from powerful telescope images. "Thanks to the exquisite pattern-recognition capabilities of the human brain, amateurs with just a little training can distinguish between different types of galaxy far more efficiently than computers can."
Had more than 100,000 volunteers classify over 1 million galaxies in a few months.

Stardust@home - volunteers spot the tell-tale tracks left by microscopic interstellar dust grains in tiles of porous aerogel from a probe sent into space.
Enlisted some 24,000 volunteers, who in less than a year performed more than 40 million searches (about 1500 searches / person).

Herbaria@home - volunteers document plant specimens from images drawn from the dusty 19th-century archives of British collections. Already, some 12 000 specimens have been documented.

Africa@home - volunteers extract useful cartographic information -- the positions of roads, villages, fields and so on -- from satellite images of regions in Africa where maps either do not exist or are hopelessly out of date. This will help regional planning authorities, aid workers and scientists
documenting the effects of climate change.

Distributed Proofreaders - volunteers help to proofread OCR'd scans of pages from old books (not metioned in the Economist article, but in a referring slashdot article).

The BOSSA platorm (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation) has been developed to support such processing.

What if the non-expert volunteers do a poor job at the dataprocessing? This isn't actually a problem, as redundancy is used to ensure quality. For example, a particular image used by Galaxy Zoo is classified by thirty different people, and it turns out that this is enough to get a highly accurate answer.

Some thoughts

Some ideas not touched on in the Economist article.

Will there always be a need for such volunteer resources? Or might Moores Law make computing power so cheap and abundant that even the most processing hungry project easily satisfy its own needs?

Second, I wonder if there might be a time in the future when the idea of such projects is well known in the public mind, and where people would think of them like they would think now of volunteering for a community group or giving money to a charity?

Lastly, the manual data processing projects might be a good way for school children, or members of the general public, to gain a gentle introduction to the world of science, and learn a bit more about how science is done and how the scientific community works? I'm not saying that volunteering on such projects is an education in these things, but it might still provide a little bit of a feel and familiarity.

Dharmesh Shah: Why Some Software Is Not Simpler, Just Suckier

Last year, Dharmesh Shah wrote some posts on the topic of simplicity in software, trying to distinguish between good and bad types of simplicity (as I mentioned here).

The other day, he wrote a pretty good followup. It's main point is that

The goal for software developers should not be to make things simpler just by reducing features. The goal of software should be to make it simpler for the user to do what they are trying to do.

and the post elaborates on what this means in practice.

A climate-change leadership opportunity

 

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States.

That sort of leadership might be what the world needs for tackling climate change.

The leadership to do what needs to be done, and not make excuses. To set the sort of example that'd make the rest of the world follow.

It'd need a brave leader, but they'd be also taking the opportunity for them and their country to be heroes in the eyes of the world.

The more that the rest of the world drags its feet, and the bleaker the future comes to look, the greater the rewards for taking such leadership will become.
 

---

BTW, the text of JFK's speech can be found here.

TextMate text editor, and a screencasting idea

The TextMate text editor looks quite good. I haven't used it -- my laptop runs Windows, and it's only on Mac -- but going by these screencasts, it's got some nifty features and overall seems quite impressive. Looks like it might provide a nice way to edit structured data like XML, while still retaining the free-form feel of a text editor -- see this screencast.

If you watch that screencast, you'll notice that it's often difficult to tell exactly what the person is doing to perform the operations they show, because they're using some sort of keystroke combination to invoke the operations. That made me think that software for recording screencasts could have a feature to add a 'virtual keyboard display' to the video, showing a little display of a keyboard in the video, showing which keys are being pressed as things happen.

That is, user can record their screen cast as per usual, and while they are doing so, the recording software keeps track of what keys they pressed and when. Then, it adds a little animated keyboard picture somewhere in the screencast recording, that shows when different keys were pressed.

How I’d like my mobile to work – sending an SMS

If I want to send an SMS to confirm a lunch appointment, I'd like to be able to do the following. Pick up my phone, unlock it, and say to it: “SMS Joe Blogs, Lunch at 1pm at the usual place, question mark”.

To which it would display the text “Lunch at 1pm at the usual place?” on the screen and present me with the prompt “Send this SMS to Joe Blogs? Yes/No”.

That’d be a much more direct way of doing things.

This seems technically feasable, so I’m wondering if any phones can do this?

Non-screw-top caps on premium beers seem nothing more than pretentiousness

As far as I can tell, the non-screw-top caps on premium beers are simply pretentiousness.

Screw top caps don't make much change to the bottle's look (cap on or off), and don't -- as far as I know -- have any impact on the beer's quality. They can't be more expensive for companies to use, either, as you find them on all the cheaper beers.

Non-screw-top caps seem to be there to convey an air of class. There's nothing wrong with that goal, per se. But I think it's a shallow attempt at class, to forego an alternative with real benefits just to use an older-style of cap mechanism with no real distinguishing features aside from its inconvenience.

---

Related to this, in Mind the Gap, Paul Graham writes:

[...]

Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person.

Cars are a good example of why. It's possible to buy expensive, handmade cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there is not much point. Companies make more money by building a large number of ordinary cars than a small number of expensive ones. So a company making a mass-produced car can afford to spend a lot more on its design. If you buy a custom-made car, something will always be breaking. The only point of buying one now is to advertise that you can.

Or consider watches. Fifty years ago, by spending a lot of money on a watch you could get better performance. When watches had mechanical movements, expensive watches kept better time. Not any more. Since the invention of the quartz movement, an ordinary Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. [13] Indeed, as with expensive cars, if you're determined to spend a lot of money on a watch, you have to put up with some inconvenience to do it: as well as keeping worse time, mechanical watches have to be wound.

[...]

The same pattern has played out in industry after industry. If there is enough demand for something, technology will make it cheap enough to sell in large volumes, and the mass-produced versions will be, if not better, at least more convenient.

Alan Kay's definition of 'technology', and taking things for granted

The article on the Kindle e-book reader I recently referred to starts like this

"Technology," computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "is anything that was invented after you were born."

I like that, it’s nicely put. We are keenly aware of that which is different to the usual stuff we take for granted. We take older technologies for granted, so new technologies seem quite different.

But this is really just an artifact of the way we see the world – of our personal perspective. Objectively, the old and new are both just as much technologies, and a sharp distinction between them is a false one.

If we don't realise that, we end up with an overly narrow concept of ‘technology’ that tends to only include the newer technologies.

The article uses that quote to make a point about not taking books for granted as an example of a technology (and a very successful one at that):

So it's not surprising, when making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, that we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book.

Given their point about not taking things for granted, what they say next is very ironic

It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.)

No instruction manual needed. Unlike computers, or cars (people need to get instruction to learn how to drive) or other modern technology. Except that's a kinda silly statement to make, that takes our reading skills for granted.

They may be able to pick up a book now and read it straight away, but then, I can just load up a computer program and use it, or start a car and drive it. I once had to learn how to use them, but then again, I -- and they -- once had to learn to read too. No one just naturally learns to read. It's an artificial skill, and one that takes a lot of time and effort to learn. It's just that, in developed countries, everyone has learnt it at a young age, so long ago, that it's easy for us to take for granted.

e-books might finally be here - the Amazon.com Kindle reader

Another bit of The Future may be about to click into place. E-books have been talked about for a long time, and we may finally have a viable alternative to printed books: the Kindle e-book reader, about to be released by Amazon.com.

NewsWeek has a – rather wordy – article on it. (The second half of the article goes into how pervasive ebooks might change things. e.g. people might use advertising in books, and books could be updated w/ errata).

Amazon has got the major publishers on board, and 88,000 titles will be on sale at the Kindle store on launch.

The reader’s specs are:

- has the dimensions of a paperback
- weighs 290g (10.3 ounces)
- sharp screen
- as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours
- doesn’t run hot or make intrusive beeps
- can hold about 200 books onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon.

Kindle has wireless connectivity for downloading books, and

you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process. And once you buy, the Kindle does its neatest trick: it downloads the book and installs it in your library, ready to be devoured. "The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos.

You can also
- access newspapers and use it as a web-browser
- search within books
- make make annotations and copy text from books (though it’s not clear exactly how this works).

It’s US $399 (remember that the iPod was quite expensive when it first came out).

A nice information-graphics example – baseball pitches

[Update: the page can now be found here]

Here’s a nice example of information graphics done well.


So you know there's many different types of baseball pitches, but can't tell your cutter from your slider or changeup? Well help is at hand in this visual catalogue, showing each type in a simple graphic that intuitively captures it essential character.

On Schneier's notion of CYA Security

Here's a rather rambling bit of sketching out some thoughts:

Bruce Schneier says:

Since 9/11, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves from terrorist attacks. Stories about the ineffectiveness of many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions of why they are so ineffective.

His explanation, in short:

much of our country's counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from criticism when another attack occurs.

which he refers to CYA (cover your ass) security.

He gives numerous examples of this. Basically, it's safer for agencies to overreact to things that are out of the ordinary, because if something happens, they can appear to be trying. Or to focus disproportionately on threats in the public consciousness (like what terrorists have tried in the past). Even if these measures are ineffective. And they ignore threat possibilities that don't make the news as much, such as against chemical plants. Or doing focusing on overly specific threats, and not focusing on longer-term investment - e.g. more training in arabic language skills.

There's two comments I want to make on his article.

First, this is another example of systems that have kinds of goals or purposes, where there are various constraints/inefficiencies that impede the system's ability to meet those goals/purposes, as I spoke about recently. In fact, in that post I gave an example of CYA-like force at work in the purchasing of enterprise software.

In this case, that the system is held accountable by government/media/public who aren't necessarily that good at evaluating how well they've done their job, which sets up ineffective incentives/disincentives. Have to remember that in these agencies when they are considering measure to take, they are making a cost/benefit analysis.

Moving onto the second reason.

Despite calling it Cover Your Ass security, he ends up giving the following explanation of the cause of it:

It happens not because the authorities involved -- the Boston police, the TSA, and so on -- are not competent, or not doing their job. It happens because there isn't sufficient national oversight, planning, and coordination.

People and organizations respond to incentives. We can't expect the Boston police, the TSA, the guy who runs security for the Oscars, or local public officials to balance their own security needs against the security of the nation. They're all going to respond to the particular incentives imposed from above. What we need is a coherent antiterrorism policy at the national level: one based on real threat assessments, instead of fear-mongering, re-election strategies, or pork-barrel politics.

Sadly, though, there might not be a solution. All the money is in fear-mongering, re-election strategies, and pork-barrel politics. And, like so many things, security follows the money.

That is, he ends up putting it down to insufficient national oversight, planning, and coordination.

I'm not sure I agree. I think he's closer to the mark with his Cover Your Ass moniker. That is, that the problem is of people needing to cover their asses rather than an issue of coordination.

Except I don't like the term "Cover Your Ass" so much because it makes it sound like the problem is with the agencies. I don't think they really have a choice. Edward deBono coined the term 'ludency' to refer to situations where you're basically forced to play by the rules of the game, and even if you drop out, someone else will come into take your place. So all you can really do is try and find some way of changing the rules.

I think the real culprit here is the way "the general population" attributes responsibility. Typically they want to find a single person to assign the responsibility. If something good happened, that person gets all the praise; if something bad happened, they get all the blame. Even if this is utterly unrepresentative of what actually went on.

There's various reasons why they do this... lack of information about the actual situation... but also it just seems like we're wired to do this. ... a quirk of our psychology.

Here's two of his examples that illustrate this:

CYA also explains the TSA's inability to take anyone off the no-fly list, no matter how innocent. No one is willing to risk his career on removing someone from the no-fly list who might -- no matter how remote the possibility -- turn out to be the next terrorist mastermind.

Another form of CYA security is the overly specific countermeasures we see during big events like the Olympics and the Oscars, or in protecting small towns. In all those cases, those in charge of the specific security don't dare return the money with a message "use this for more effective general countermeasures." If they were wrong and something happened, they'd lose their jobs.

Am I just saying this to assign my own blame to "the general population" for having this attitude? No. I think that to address this problem, we need to create greater awareness of the attitude. It seems so common for people to attribute responsibility poorly like this, and no one seem to blink an eye, so we need some consciousness-raising about it.

Some surprises from speed-dating based study of male/female partner preferences

Using speed dating as an experiment, some economists and psychologists examined what males and females look for in a partner (as reported in this relatively brief Slate article). Mostly, it confirmed what they had expected, though there were some surprises.

'Personas' provide requirements that are too vague (comment on a 37signals post)

The 37signals guys say they don't design software to meet the needs of 'Personas' representing 'typical users', they design it for actual people -- themselves, mostly. Read the post for their justification.

If you've now read it, I just want to note that I think it's an example of how central high standards are to ‘creative’ tasks. The problem with the ‘personas’ is they’re too vague, and thus don’t provide stringent enough critiera or standards for judging what you've done and what you should do.

I think success in creative tasks is primarily a matter of having high-standards or strong evaluation criteria (though my point here is mainly just to make a 'mental note' about this example rather than to try and properly justify that larger point).

Distance-based face-perception illusion (pic)

[Update: a copy of the illusion can be found here, from this page containing many examples of optical illusions.  Some details of how the illusion works can be found here]

Have a look at this very cool visual illusion. On the left is the face of an angry man, on the right is the face of a calm woman. But get up, and walk three or four meters from your screen and look at it again -- the image is exactly the same but the faces have swapped positions. Walk back towards the screen and see them magically switch again.

What chefs do when they're bored (pics)

More cool vegetable arrangements like this:

History is all that's happened

sketching...

History includes everything that has happened. But that's not the way we tend to conceive of it. In practice, we tend to see it as something much narrower.

There are three ways we tend to narrow it: by focusing on signficant events in 'grand narratives', which happened sufficiently long ago, and focusing on the facts associated with those events.

We tend to just see it as the events in the grand narrative of nations -- wars, successions, the discoveries of new lands, etc. Or in the narratives describing the development of science, tehnology, religion, ecnomics, etc.

We tend to only include sufficiently distant events. Recent events don't seem sufficiently 'historical'.

And we tend to focus on history as a sequence of events -- "one damn thing after another" as Henry Ford is quoted as saying.

Here are some possible reasons for this narrow view: this is the picture of history that tends to get taught in schools, and those are the features that tend to most strongly differentiate history from other fields, and are thus the ones that stick in our minds.

I think this narrow view of history gives a distorted sense of the value of knowing about history. Seeing it this way, we might wonder what is the value in knowing facts like who-did-what-when.

I think the real value in history is lies in drawing out patterns and higher-level conclusions from all of the things we know have happened. This is not just a matter of facts about significant events, and can also include details from the very recent past.

Patterns in economic and technological development, for example. Or general conclusions you can draw about the psychology and behavior of people and groups of people like societies - conclusions that are relevant to today's world.

Many people seem unaware that many questions can be answered by looking at history. As a contrary example, Paul Graham uses many historical points of justification in his essays.

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Version history

• 14/04/06, 00:18 - original
  
• 08/11/07, 13:10 major revision. changed expression, and added: people excluding recent events; conceptsCategoriesAndDefinitions tag