Author Archives: Steve

eReading

This is cool. For many reasons. What I find interesting here is the metaphor or the digital to clay. Data can be shaped in many ways (within the boundary). Also, note how the people in the video use their hands and live around the device.

Vectors

Siddharth Hegde on tangent space:

The u, v, n axis represent the direction in which u, v, n values increase across the face, just as the x, y, z values represent the direction in which the x, y, z values increase in the world space coordinate system.

Learning and Design

Do we design enough for learning? This and the post that follows are linked:

Buildings are more to blame for school failures than teachers, according to new research from Manchester University.

The lack of space in school halls, gyms, canteens and other areas is the cause of many of the problems blighting today’s secondary schools, said Naomi Breen, a teacher studying secondary school buildings for her PhD.

According to Mrs Breen, school design affects the curriculum and encourages gender stereotyping, bullying, antisocial behaviour and alienation.

Mrs Breen, who teachers at Hulme grammar school for girls, Oldham, surveyed 18 secondary schools – nine in Burnley and nine in Berkshire – and analysed historical records and documents. She says these reveal government regulations from the 1940s and 50s lie at the root of today’s problems.

Trends

From the Guardian:

Poor and wealthy households in Britain are becoming more and more segregated from the rest of society as the UK faces the highest inequality levels for 40 years, according to a study published today.

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation provides a groundbreaking geographical analysis of changes in the distribution of wealth over time, and reveals an increasingly divided nation.

It shows that already rich areas – particularly the south-east of England – have become disproportionately wealthier over four decades, while in areas of some cities more than half of all households are now “breadline poor”, on a level of relative poverty with enough to live on but without access to opportunities enjoyed by the rest of society, yet above the level of absolute poverty, or “core poor”.

“Poor, rich and average households became less and less likely to live next door to one another between 1970 and 2000,” says the study, Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain, 1968 to 2005.

Urban “clustering” of poverty has increased, while wealthy households have concentrated in city outskirts. Meanwhile, the number of average households – those categorised as neither poor nor wealthy – has been shrinking.

Forget the Propane

Giving the new grill its first go-round was interesting and tasty. Here’s what it looks like in the showroom. It’s a fantastic grill.

Forget the propane, though. We kept to burning paper in the chimney.

The thermometer read at 450 for a full 40 minutes, which was part of the test. This is pretty typical though.

Anyway, here’s what we did with it.

Tenderloin cut into 1 and 1/2 inch steaks, rubbed with lots of kosher salt and pepper and gooed with olive oil. I seared the steaks over high heat coals in bins on the side then baked the filets in the center of the grill for about 8 minutes. Perfect. Red and firm.

Rosedale corn.

Grilled garlic Naan.

And a bottle of Juan Gil thanks to C.

Touch Screens and Fiction

Now that iPhone has potentially settled the issue of reading and navigating with a generous small screen via touch, it might be good to think about to how to write, design, and export Storyspace, Tinderbox, and other hypertext environment experiences to these and other devices. Peter Brantley reports, in a different context, on the popularity of short-form downloads onto mobiles in Japan, so we know the habit can grow.

I had the opportunity to play with the iPhone a few days ago and in manipulating images it suddenly struck me that the interaction surface of the device will be an amazing place for which to write and design alphabetic and icon-based material. The screen is rich and the size is deceivingly huge and like a book it has an intimate feel. And there have been rare times when I wanted to turn my laptop screen to get a better view of something. There much more to say here, perhaps even the context that Peter Brantley goes into in his piece on reading.

The screen starts with “The” . . .
The user turns the screen to landscape mode and “The” fades and the word “Abrasion” appears creating the potential for an interesting sequence of experiences. Stretch text comes with a separation of the fingers. Reading spaces are tailored for small screen manipulation and experience.

What about poetry? Scroll, tap a link or an arrow, turn the device. Shaking, Wii-like, could scatter or rearrange the stanzas, or not.

This is not a post about quality fiction or poetry, but it encourages serious approaches the reader/writer environment.

Just a Note: I never trusted a Harry Potter effect. I’m hearing a lot about that. Again. The key to less and less novel reading will be about abundance. There’s no scarcity of things to read nor a presumptive “value” to any one form. I always considered reading pretty tough work, anyway, not something associated with pleasure.

Bad Grilling Weather

Today was not good for grilling. The Chipotle chicken was sweat and soft yesterday, but today the hamburgers came off like roofing shingles, well sort of. It was hard to tell whether the grill was cool enough for cooking and the charcoal smoked like mad.

Threats

It seems to me that a meeting like this could happen any time. We should also call a meeting everyday about the likelihood of being creamed by a galaxy within the next 10 billion years or so, or a meteor for that matter. My gut tells me this is going to happen.

Hypothetically, you could gather a few thinkers together and come up with some pretty likely ways for people hell bent on destruction to get at you.

Why are we immune?

Josh Marshall writes:

According to Secretary Chertoff, we’re entering a new period of lurking terrorist danger this summer. In other words, a period of danger similar to every other summer since 2001 and like most periods of low popularity for the president and before elections as well. But perhaps it is a period of increased danger. It really well might be. We’ve known for some time a mix of sagging tide of the war in Afghanistan and the mounting impotence of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan has allowed jihadist groups a relative safe-haven in the lawless Pakistani borderlands like they have not had since prior to 9/11. And if they can train they can act.

It all brings into a rather fierce relief the question of what the hell we are doing in Iraq, a conflict that has made the war we are fighting against jihadism vastly more intractable and dangerous. We can’t leave Iraq apparently because al Qaeda will be emboldened and will do much better at fundraising — a revealing perspective on the part of the White House. But al Qaeda is vastly emboldened in as much as they are actively regrouping in the Afghan-Pakistani border, where all the trouble came from the in the first place. And groups all over the Middle East, who have little if any actual connection to al Qaeda, are adopting the name al Qaeda in vicarious support or sympathy or, perhaps mostly and most damningly, because we’ve managed to make it a strong brand.