» http://www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/CompLexicon.html
[via BrainOff]
Consistency vs Coherency, #2
Lots of good stuff in the comments field of my last post on the subject. And this from Jared Spool’s excellent recent article: “The quiet death of the re-launch” [found via ia/]
“Our findings show that consistency in the design plays second fiddle to completing the task. When users are complaining about the consistency of a site, we’ve found that it is often because they are having trouble completing their tasks. On sites where users easily complete their tasks, the users seem to pay little attention to glaring inconsistencies, often telling us in their ratings that the site was indeed very consistent”
Echoes Fiona’s view that: “Consistency is an end, not a means”.
Enough on this for now.
Start ‘em young
Steve Bowbrick reports on the Mizz Magazine Special Flowchart Edition (Guest editors: Edward Tufte, Richard Saul Wurman, Hugh Dubberly and Justin Timberlake)
Robinsonesque
Phil Greenspun does an Anne Robinson:
“After two days of touring Wales, a country that apparently has yet to discover the mixing faucet, it has become apparent that there is better mobile phone coverage in the remotest sheep pasture or coastal outcrop than in downtown Boston. How can such an otherwise backward place be so far ahead of the U.S. technologically?”
Humph
He makes a nice case for the wireless commons, though.
» Phil Greenspun: Wireless Internet in the US = Neo-Feudalism?
[via onlineblog]
Ditty
The scale’s the thing
and so’s the flow
as above
so below!
Which do you value more
Great car-chase, shame about the philosophy.
A.C. Grayling reviews The Matrix Reloaded.
In a nutshell, he digs the action, finds the philosophy “incoherent and shallow”. He prefered the first movie which was lighter on pretensious exposition, and quotes/paraphrases Wittgenstein:
“Showing is better than saying”
Reminds me of Alan Kay’s “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points”. Anyway… Anthony Grayling getting over-excited by car-chases was great to wake-up to.
Imperial March
Proof that the googletruth being ‘swamped’ by blognoise* can sometimes be a good thing. While looking for stuff by Seth Sanders (see previous post) I came across this:
“In the Tarot, there is a guy called The Emperor. This guy is your mega-implementor. He is the guy who gets things done. Other people are standing around thinking of good ideas. This guy is prototyping the shit out of an idea – maybe an idea not nearly as good as yours – but he’s DOING IT… …Of course, all Emperors can look forward to most people in the world hating their guts. “
An oft-heard business cliche is that your place of work might have “too many chiefs and not enough indians”. I reckon I need a few more emperors.
Break out the weapons-grade semiotic technology
This paper by Seth Sanders is being delivered at the University of Chicago’s Digital Genres conference. Snowcrashtastic:
“English speakers generally take the alphabet as a communicative device for granted, but actually the longest-lived ‘information societies’ in history didn’t use it. What difference did that make?
[This] paper will give a very brief introduction to what an alphabet, as a semiotic technology, does (as opposed to other sign systems like the Babylonian Cuneiform syllabary or modern U.S. road signs) and then take a close look at a crucial early moment in the history of the alphabet…
Looking at a single point where several historical paths–traditional law, imperial power, and religious revelation–converged will raise questions about each, and offer some possible solutions.
Decided to try and ferret more of Mr. Sander’s work out… without much success. There are a lot of Seth Sanders in American academia. This however includes an intriging abstract, with a helluva last line [my emboldening]:
“What was the Alphabet For? Textual Artifact, Language Ideology, and Cultural Differentiation in 2nd Millennium Syria-Palestine”
As scribal artifacts, alphabets have complex and reflexive relationships with identity. Indeed, Ugaritic may well represent the first historical instance of the 19th-century nationalist ideal of a single script for a single language, culture and polity. Why? We need to start understanding alphabetic literacy as a second-millennium ideological project.”
“Thought for the day” on BBC Radio4 this morning discussed how the language of business, popculture and war had become interchangeable over the last century. And, how in the recent opening stages of the “war without end”, words from each fuzzily-bordered realm had been furiously-frotting up against each other and cross-pollinating like billy-o.
You know the sort of thing. Fashion reporters relaying the latest on silk tie-up combat pants from their “exclusive position embedded on the front-line of Chloe”. Boardroom-infighting described by jocular nasdaq-backdropped journos as a “blue-on-blue battle” hours after we first heard a military-spokesperson explain the freshly-minted forces slang. “Going kinetic”: could easily be on the battleground or on a basketball court.
Is this the equivalent third-millennium ideological project?
Printer-friendly
BBC reporter Jane Hughes is retracing the steps of the 1953 British Everest expedition on it’s 50th anniversary, and posting daily to the BBC News Online as they go.
This caught my eye:
“In the steep main street, there’s a 24-hour cyber café, and though the region’s too remote for newspapers, an enterprising shopkeeper has pinned up pages of news from the BBC News Online website to keep people up to date.”
Cool.
Petafloptimism 