Categories
lit tip

Lit / Philip K Dick on building universes

In 1978, Philip K Dick pub­lished an essay called "How to Build a Uni­verse That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Lat­er." The title sort of says it all; it's about how to envi­sion the world of a sto­ry in a way that lasts. He cuts right to chase, too, con­fronting the hard ques­tion that most writ­ing how-to's like to gloss over: What is worth writ­ing about? Where to start? How to make a state­ment that doesn't age badly?

… I ask, in my writ­ing, What is real? Because unceas­ing­ly we are bom­bard­ed with pseu­do-real­i­ties man­u­fac­tured by very sophis­ti­cat­ed peo­ple using very sophis­ti­cat­ed elec­tron­ic mech­a­nisms. I do not dis­trust their motives; I dis­trust their pow­er. They have a lot of it. And it is an aston­ish­ing pow­er: that of cre­at­ing whole uni­vers­es, uni­vers­es of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to cre­ate uni­vers­es, as the basis of one nov­el after anoth­er. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days lat­er. Or at least that is what my edi­tors hope. How­ev­er, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build uni­vers­es which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the char­ac­ters in the nov­els cope with this prob­lem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. 

It just gets bet­ter from there, really.

Categories
baseball flickr

Baseball / Bonds, 731

Flickr photo


After all my trash talk about Bonds and how he should just fess up to the roids, I saw him hit a dinger last Sat­ur­day, and I actu­al­ly cheered. Like, I stood up as it left the bat, and maybe even jumped in the air when it went out, all the while clap­ping my hands. It was irre­sistible. He hit the thing a mile. It was awesome.

Categories
flickr music san francisco street art visual

Music / Peggy Honeywell at Mollusk

Flickr photo

Being car-less keeps me (most­ly) around the south­east­ern neigh­bor­hoods of San Fran­cis­co, but every once in a while I'll ven­ture out to the fron­tiers. Last Fri­day, we went out to Mol­lusk, the arty surf shop on 46th-ish Avenue and Irv­ing, (i.e. WAY Out­er Sun­set), for an art open­ing and a per­for­mance by Peg­gy Hon­ey­well, i.e. local art star and beau­ti­ful los­er Clare Rojas. The surf shop set­ting was infor­mal and cozy; the acoustics actu­al­ly weren't bad; there were dogs walk­ing around; all in all, it makes me wish that I got out there more. This inti­mate set­ting was lots bet­ter than the cav­ernous, loud, obnox­ious-peo­ple-filled place I saw her per­form last, Bar­ry McGee's open­ing in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia a cou­ple of years ago.

Categories
ixd new york web

My New York Times? Not quite.

The NYT just rolled out a beta of some­thing they're call­ing MyTimes. As a dai­ly read­er of both the print and online edi­tions, I'm intrigued by new devel­op­ments and ideas at the NYT, and I've been pleased with their recent site redesign. MyTimes, how­ev­er, strikes me as some­what misguided.First off, the name MyTimes sounds like a por­tal, recall­ing the con­fused era when every com­pa­ny want­ed to make a my-pre­fixed ver­sion of their site. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it also evokes the sub­se­quent real­iza­tion that what peo­ple real­ly want­ed was not con­trol over lay­out and con­tent, but greater sys­tem intel­li­gence — smarter defaults, recog­ni­tion of the things they nor­mal­ly do, a clever way of point­ing them toward relat­ed things. The por­tal-sound­ing name wouldn't even be so bad if MyTimes didn't look and act like por­tal. Alas, it's got all sorts of crap to add and move around and mod­i­fy, allow­ing the read­er to add RSS feeds from any­where on the web, view movie times, weath­er, Flickr images, what­ev­er. To me, the prob­lem is that the NYT isn't "what­ev­er." It's the author­i­ta­tive source. So why all the oth­er stuff?A bet­ter ques­tion: What prob­lem is MyTimes sup­posed to be solv­ing? What is the user goal is it address­ing? One would do research to answer these ques­tions, but — to be self-ref­er­en­tial — my own goals in read­ing the NYT: Get the author­i­ta­tive answer, enjoy great writ­ing, forum­late opin­ions on com­plex prob­lems. A major prob­lem of MyTimes is that the NYT is try­ing to be both the author­i­ta­tive source, and the deliv­ery mech­a­nism of any oth­er source you might want.So, my advice to the New York Times …

  • Bring relat­ed infor­ma­tion to me. Focus my atten­tion to the news of the day, but make it easy to nav­i­gate to relat­ed things. These things may be with­in the NYT, or out­side. Use what you know about me — from observ­ing my behav­ior — to point me toward relat­ed things. Think Ama­zon, not Google Home­page or MySpace. Ama­zon remem­bers what you like, points you toward relat­ed stuff, tells you what oth­er peo­ple have looked at, etc. It knows you; you don't HAVE to tell it anything.
  • Don't cre­ate a sep­a­rate place that requires con­fig­u­ra­tion and expect that I will go there and wait for the infor­ma­tion to start rolling in. The estab­lished frame­work works: Start at the home­page, drill to the detail. Why cre­ate anoth­er start­ing place?
  • Inte­grate the good things from MyTimes — the jour­nal­ist pages, for instance, are a cool idea, and they are most appro­pri­ate­ly accessed with­in the exist­ing frame­work. Local­ized con­tent like weath­er and movie list­ings are fine, but I don't under­stand why this needs to be sep­a­rate from the exist­ing frame­work of the NYT pages. Basi­cal­ly: Inte­grate the read­er into the NYT, don't cre­ate a sep­a­rate place for him/her. Learn my zip code, remem­ber it, push rel­e­vant local con­tent to me. End of sto­ry. (And just because Flickr has an RSS feed doesn't mean it's wor­thy of your brand. You're the New York Times! You've got the best pho­to­jour­nal­ists in the world! Get rid of it!)

While I'm on the sub­ject, two addi­tion­al things I'd like to see … 

  • More expo­sure to the Times' excel­lent archival jour­nal­ism. Why not plumb the back cat­a­log, and expose some of it to the read­ers? Many arti­cles about cur­rent events refer to past events. Why not pro­vide a list of relat­ed links to pre­vi­ous arti­cles more often? Of course, I'd expect that this con­tent would be free — not only because I'm a cheap­skate — but because I would think it would pique people's inter­est in see­ing more of it, which would of course cost money.
  • More jour­nal­ist blogs and dis­cus­sion. The Pub­lic Editor's col­umn has become one of my favorite parts of the paper, and he blogs about inter­est­ing jour­nal­is­tic issues as well.Here's a great one about Nicholas Lemann's arti­cle about cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism in the New Yorker.

In any case, there are rough­ly one thou­sand web sites offer­ing up cus­tomiz­able info wid­gets, web-wide RSS feed aggre­ga­tion, and so forth. The NYT should con­tin­ue to focus on the con­tent, and leave the aggre­ga­tion to some­one else.

Categories
new york street art visual

Street art / Swoon

So it seems I'm a cou­ple of years late to this par­tic­u­lar artist, but some recent con­ver­sa­tion on the Book Arts list turned me on to Swoon, a NYC street artist. Her medi­um is the cutout — from paper, wood, linoleum — and she attach­es these to walls all over NYC. The paper ones are the most amaz­ing to me; they're like those snow flakes you make in grade school, but life-sized and real­ly elab­o­rate and of peo­ple. Check out this Flickr clus­ter to get a sense of the way that the paper ages on the wall, and the way that this fragili­ty and sense of imper­ma­nence reacts with the rest of the wall. This inter­view in the Morn­ing News has some good detail about her process:

There's some­thing par­tic­u­lar to the images that make me choose that mate­r­i­al … A lot has to do with the lim­i­ta­tions of the mate­r­i­al. The linoleum you can get so much more detail from. Every­thing that has more nuances, I use linoleum. The wood is rougher, but a good rough­ness. The paper is real­ly hard to think about, and so it tends to be sim­pler. With paper, you'd choose sim­ple sub­jects because it's hard to cre­ate an expres­sion. The chal­lenge is to make the cutout so that it can get on the wall as a sol­id unit in two min­utes or less.

Thanks to how­much­longerkill­menow for the photo.

Categories
architecture ixd new york urban visual

Architecture / Daniel Libeskind's sauna

A few months ago, the NYT Sun­day mag­a­zine ran a pro­file of archi­tect Daniel Libe­skind and his Tribeca loft. (Inci­den­tal­ly, check out that link to his web­site; there's some pret­ty hot flout­ing of web con­ven­tions. For exam­ple, when you mouse over a link, almost every­thing on the screen dis­ap­pears, except a few stray words and the oth­er links. Hmm.) Any­way, the most mem­o­rable part of the mag­a­zine arti­cle was a pho­to of the inte­ri­or of his sauna. In it was a very small win­dow, per­haps 18 inch­es high by 4 inch­es wide, and through that win­dow the saun-ee could achieve a com­pact­ly framed view of the Chrysler Build­ing. How cool is that? The image here shows the architect's ren­der­ing of the dif­fer­ent land­marks vis­i­ble from van­tages with­in the loft. Neato.

Categories
ixd

Radio / The best interview ever

NPR recent­ly did a great sto­ry about John Sawatsky, a for­mer jour­nal­ist who now teach­es inter­view­ing tech­niques to edi­to­r­i­al staff at ESPN. High­lights include Sawatsky's obvi­ous dis­like for "hard-hit­ting" inter­view­ers like Lar­ry King, Bar­bara Wal­ters and Mike Wal­lace: "Mike Wal­lace enjoys … hav­ing the ques­tion being more impor­tant than the answer." Oth­er resources with oth­er tar­gets: Poyn­ter arti­cle in which his method is applied White House cor­re­spon­dents, AJR arti­cle skew­er­ing Sam Don­ald­son.

The NPR site has loads of inter­est­ing addi­tion­al resources relat­ed to the inter­view, and in a sec­tion called "What Makes A Good Inter­view," you'll find Sawatsky's nom­i­na­tion for the great­est inter­view of all time. The link is called "CBC Inter­view With Truck­er About Beaver Attack." A sample:

"So … how did you get this beaver off of you, eventually?"

"Well, I hap­pen to have propane in my truck, so I have a sev­en-eighths open box-end wrench, and while he [the beaver] was hangin and chewin back there …"

This piece got me think­ing because inter­view­ing and sto­ry­telling are impor­tant parts of our design process at Coop­er. Ear­ly in projects, we inter­view a lot of peo­ple, includ­ing cur­rent and poten­tial users of the prod­uct we're design­ing, experts in the field we're work­ing in, and any­one who may be able to help us under­stand the back­ground and con­text of the design. The goal is to build an under­stand­ing of the design prob­lem from a human per­spec­tive, and to do this we need to get our sub­jects to open up, to reveal moti­va­tions and needs, the deep, per­son­al stuff that under­lies the things we do everyday. 

Sawatsky's method is pret­ty much exact­ly what we try to use: sim­ple, short, open-end­ed ques­tions, giv­ing space and time to the inter­vie­wee to breathe, think and respond. Poyn­ter has some exer­cizes to get you think­ing about how to con­duct more effec­tive inter­views. Thx to JK for get­ting me start­ed on this.

Categories
bikes ixd

Bikes / Key ingredients for interactive bike maps of the future

Flickr photo

ByCy­cle and Bike­ly both bring bike route map­ping to the web, and not a minute too soon. Find­ing bike routes through cities (espe­cial­ly unfa­mil­iar cities) can be a lone­ly, scary process of elim­i­na­tion. After much exper­i­men­ta­tion, the best route often ends up being a patch­work of qui­et side streets, alleys, and paths that would be impos­si­ble to piece togeth­er in advance on a map. Ide­al­ly, you'd get to share ideas and infor­ma­tion with oth­er cyclists when you're try­ing to, say, get from the Mis­sion to the Explorato­ri­um for the first time. Yeah, straight up Van Ness is prob­a­bly not the best way, even though it looks like it on the map.Online com­mu­ni­ties to the res­cue, right? MySpace and Wikipedia are doing some­thing right; they've both found ways to tap into the moti­va­tions of a par­tic­u­lar group of peo­ple, pro­vid­ing forums to share infor­ma­tion and build con­nec­tions. Exact­ly what each has done right is anyone's guess. MySpace is ugly, con­fus­ing, often annoy­ing­ly incon­sis­tent, and gen­er­al­ly unus­able. Wikipedia is unre­li­able, bad­ly writ­ten and pret­ty much a total free-for-all. So the bike route map­ping thing doesn't need to be per­fect, it just needs to pro­vide the right envi­ron­ment and func­tion­al­i­ty to do the fol­low­ing things:

  • Eas­i­ly post routes. Use the pow­er and knowl­edge of the bike com­mu­ni­ty to record the best routes around the city. Bike­ly does this, and they've built a sim­ple, most­ly straight­for­ward process. I cre­at­ed a route of my Sum­mits of San Fran­cis­co run/ride, and it pret­ty easy, though the are some fair­ly uncon­ven­tion­al inter­ac­tions. Kudos to Bike­ly for get­ting my mind going on this.
  • Edit and anno­tate any route. Lever­ag­ing the knowl­edge of the group requires an approach like Wikipedia's. Each route should be editable, and anno­tate-able by the com­mu­ni­ty. This is the only way to get dis­cus­sion started.
  • Empha­size tag­ging and cat­e­go­riz­ing routes over nam­ing. Bike­ly is very free-form right now, and post­ing routes has quick­ly become a free-for-all. They recent­ly added tag­ging, but it's fair­ly con­strained to a few route attrib­ut­es — recre­ation, com­mut­ing, urban, rur­al. A more Flickr-like mod­el, where one tags can be any­thing relat­ed to the route (marin, tiburon, ocean, gold­en gate bridge, etc), gives peo­ple the abil­i­ty to make their routes find­able by their impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics. Of course, as much tag­ging as pos­si­ble should be auto­mat­ed — the route length, the streets cov­ered, the cities vis­it­ed — all of this should be extractable from Google Maps, right?
  • Dis­trib­ute admin priv­i­leges to local experts. Peo­ple have post­ed routes that are almost iden­ti­cal, named them dif­fer­ent things, and there­fore search­ing for routes brings up lots of repet­i­tive junk. Here's where Wikipedia pro­vides a good way of allow­ing the com­mu­ni­ty to police itself. A ded­i­cat­ed San Fran­cis­co cyclist could ensure that clas­sic routes are estab­lished and maintained.
  • Pro­vide inline dis­cus­sion of routes. An addi­tion­al prob­lem with lots of peo­ple post­ing sim­i­lar routes is that they're miss­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to have an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about that route. There IS knowl­edge out there that can be brought to the fore! Like Wikipedia, each route should be editable, and those edits of course should be revertable, and there should be a forum for dis­cus­sion about the route.
  • Allow peo­ple to sup­port routes. This is the sixth item, but it's real­ly one of the most impor­tant. Peo­ple should be able to join or approve routes, like "friend­ing" some­one in MySpace. This is where MySpace comes in. By "friend­ing" a route, so to speak, you give it your approval as safe, real­ly, and you also begin to build your own profile … 
  • Pro­vide a user pro­file page. It's an essen­tial com­po­nent of MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. Peo­ple love them­selves. They like to aggre­gate stuff. This site doesn't need to be MySpace, but it does need to pro­vide the notion of a pro­file, where a user can share some­thing about them­selves, and view the routes they've joined or friend­ed or whatever.

There must be more, right?I got to think­ing about this after read­ing these two inter­est­ing pieces on worldchanging.org: ByCy­cle — Online bike maps and Mak­ing Bicy­cle-Friend­ly Cities.

Categories
ecology flickr outdoors

Food / Lakes and cheeseburgers along the PCT

Lakes and cheeseburgers in Oregon
Lakes and cheeseburgers - California

Dur­ing my hike on the PCT in 2001, my two favorite pas­times were swim­ming and eat­ing. When I was walk­ing — which was most of the time — cool swim­ming holes and siz­zling cheese­burg­ers filled my day­dreams. When my hik­ing part­ner, Nick, and I talked, it was more often than not about swim­ming and eat­ing cheese­burg­ers: How far to the next riv­er, creek or lake? How long would it take to hitch out to get a cheese­burg­er at the next road crossing?As the two attached lists indi­cate, we found lots of chances to fol­low these par­tic­u­lar­ly bliss­ful pas­times. Cheese­burg­er-wise, the best were found in the Cheese­burg­er Belt, which begins as the Sier­ras give way to the Cas­cades in north­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and ends a lit­tle north of Ash­land, Ore­gon. The best of the best in the belt were found at Buck's Lake Lodge near Quin­cy, the Pines Frosty in Chester (which also has kick-ass shakes), and Lake of the Woods Resort north of Ash­land. At the bot­tom of the list was Belden Town, which shouldn't real­ly be sur­pris­ing since they don't seem to like hik­ers too much anyway.The best of the swim­ming was between in north­ern Cal­i­for­nia, between Sier­ra City and Etna. The Mid­dle Fork of the Feath­er (pic­tured below) was spec­tac­u­lar, though Nick pre­ferred Squaw Val­ley Creek, which he found a lit­tle cozi­er.

Flickr photo


Categories
ecology flickr outdoors

Personal history / Pacific Crest Trail five years later

PCT diary entry - August 10, 2001

Five years ago today, I was hik­ing on the Pacif­ic Crest Trail. I spent the sum­mer of 2001 hik­ing through Cal­i­for­nia, Ore­gon, and Wash­ing­ton; on the 12th of August, I was chill­ing out at Crater Lake, Ore­gon. Crater Lake had been a real­ly major des­ti­na­tion for me, not because of its leg­endary, oth­er­world­ly beau­ty or because I'd nev­er seen it or because I was look­ing for­ward to bum­ming beers off retirees in RVs, but BECAUSE I was hav­ing a new pair of shoes deliv­ered to the PO there. My feet, at that point, were thrashed. The trail can be unkind to feet in a vari­ety of ways — extreme heat in the south, fre­quent riv­er cross­ings and snow in the Sier­ras — and it doesn't help when you wear one pair of Asics Gel Tra­bu­co III's for the last two-thirds of the state of Cal­i­for­nia. I take a look at my PCT jour­nal a few times every sum­mer; the entry scanned above rep­re­sents some of the hap­pi­er times on the trail. A lit­tle ear­li­er in my hike, the heat and drudgery of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia would have fig­ured more promi­nent­ly. The words "heat rash" would have appeared, and I also would have men­tioned the fact that my girl­friend was break­ing up with me. Lat­er in the hike, my hik­ing part­ner, Nick Brown, broke his ankle and some reli­gious zealots crashed com­mer­cial air­planes into Amer­i­can land­marks. Read­ing over it now, August 12, 2001 rep­re­sents a dis­tant lit­tle peri­od of seren­i­ty and calm. My days were pret­ty sim­ple: How far should I hike today? Where will I get water? Should I stop and take a swim while I'm there? When should I eat my next snack? Should I take this alter­nate route? Should I stop ear­ly? Should I night-hike? Where will I get my next cheese­burg­er? It amazes me that it ever could be so easy … The pic­ture below was tak­en a few days before.

Flickr photo