Category Archives: Uncategorized

Rudy’s goggles

Rudy Rucker’s blog is always diverting, which is hardly a surprise: interesting uses of imagery, plenty of SantaCruxian-inflected wondering-out-loud, and the occasional gobsmacking one-liner. Today’s posting carries on a tale of his glasses, lost in an off-trail canyon scramble in Big Basin Redwoods, and staying lost. So he goes looking for new frames, and summarizes his search thus:

Frame styles are finally rebounding from those tiny Benjamin Franklin Urim-and-Thummim type lenses that lamentably have been the fashion for the last ten years. Finally you can get some frames with decent-sized lenses so that you’re not peering at the world through tiny peepholes.

As a longtime connoisseur of the varieties of oracles and scrying media (though not myself a slave to eyeglasses, or a scryer), this characterization delights me.

links for 2007-01-26

  • Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration
    “…records and images of 868 literary illustrations that were published in or around 1862, providing bibliographical and iconographical details, as well as the ability for users to view images at exceptionally high quality.
    (tags: images chronotope)
  • Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox Project
    (with a link to the video) …”this is IT! All of human culture is represented HERE.” It was his research on performance style of which he appeared most proud. Lomax and his team at Columbia University spent years coding thousands of songs and dances from
    (tags: musics whoa anthropology)

Hobbits and Bryan and Gardner and brainpicking

J.R.R. Tolkien filled a yawning gap in the Lexicon by rescuing and repurposing the Old English word maðm (see Michael Quinion’s explication):

Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.
(The Fellowship of the Ring, pg ?)

Many are they who have appropriated the term for their own use, for the very good reason that it’s an efficient descriptor for a universal household problem –indeed, for an information management quandary that is an inescapable facet of ubicomp. A lovely instance of hackerspeak exemplifies:

This file contains mathoms, various binary artifacts from previous versions of Perl. For binary or source compatibility reasons, though, we cannot completely remove them from the core code. (Rafael Garcia-Suarez).

Gardner’s Dispatch from EDUCAUSE has been echoing in the halls of my mind all day:

There is indeed a “delight in social archiving.” A very fine phrase from Dr. Alexander. My reflection: we can all make not only civilization’s library, but civilization’s magic attic, the place where the intimate, uncanny cabinet of wonders stands in the corner, awaiting our exploration.

…but it was a chance encounter with an article in the November 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics
bell1
that nudged me to realize how mathoms fit into the picture. The article is a real hoot of clumsy technologies, which I remember all too well:

Micro-images could also be used to revolutionize libraries as we know them today. With micro-images, an entire library could be reduced to a single filing cabinet of three-by-five cards. These cards are expected to be so inexpensive to reproduce that the reader could afford to keep them. (pp. 109-110)

and I can’t resist quoting the penultimate paragraph for its oystery Cold War ethos:

A good many thoughtful Americans are wondering whether or not we still have the prerogative of proceeding slowly in the area of data storage and retrieval. Allen Kent, associate director of the Center for Documentation and Communication at Western Reserve University, said recently, “The Soviet Union has mounted a massive effort to ‘brainpick’ the world’s recorded literature in order to assure a more effective scientific and technical effort on their part. We, too, must go in this direction, and our ‘brainpicking’ efforts have been desultory.” (pg. 224)

…and how can I possibly resist adding this illustration?
bell4

So hobbits and Bryan and Gardner and brainpicking. Where is all this headed? We are, in our fumbling and semi-conscious ways, building that “intimate, uncanny cabinet of wonders” and figuring out what its uses might be. For me this is an adventure in sorting out a lifetime’s accumulation of STUFF, of THINGS that need to be arrayed, identified, glossed, indexed, tagged, narrated, contextualized, interpreted, juxtaposed …in short, Made Accessible. The tools seem to be at my fingertips, though the overall Scheme still eludes me –or perhaps there doesn’t need to be a Scheme for the Mathom House. And I can’t help but wonder: is there any reason to think that our efforts won’t look just as silly 45 years hence?

links for 2007-01-22

Fragments from the archives

It’s surely true that stuff heard at early ages can influence life’s trajectory. Today I’ve been digitizing some vinyl, and I find myself dipping back into a slough of memories and associations that I’ve not visited in a long time. I found two LPs from my parents’ record collection that were part of my life since they first got them, in (!!) 1949: Pleasure Dome [Columbia ML4259], a record of poets (Eliot, cummings, Moore, Ogden Nash…) reading their own work, and Edith Sitwell’s Façade [Columbia ML2047]. On the former, it was Ogden Nash that I fastened upon at an early age, and these two were especially formative:
The Outcome of Mr. McLeod’s Gratitude [1:11] and
So, Penseroso [1:52](see the text, complete with the parallel to Milton).

I listened to the Edith Sitwell record so many times that I memorized all of the pieces, and it was a great pleasure to discover (as I listened to the record while digitizing) that those bits are still in wetware. Two particularly choice fragments:
from “En Famille” [0:47] and
When Sir Beelzebub [0:48].

Come to think of it, without these I surely wouldn’t be or have become myself…

Another bit, from much later in my personal development, is a wonderful Andy Statman mandolin break [0:54], from Wretched Refuse String Band’s 1978 recording of “Those Wheels of Karma”. My (vain) attempt to find (and so not have to transcribe…) the lyrics to the tune led me to a story from NPR on Citizen Kafka (All Things Considered, April 17, 2001). The Citizen (Richard Shulberg) is co-host of WMFU’s Secret Museum of the Air, one of my most favoritist archives/podcasts.

Use and the User

I’m gonna try to beat Gardner to the blogosphere with this pointer to Jon Udell, but I’ll bet he’ll have more interesting thoughts on the posting. The title, First have a great use experience, then have a great user experience, is pretty eye-catching (and exemplifies Udell’s gift for concise packaging of complexities, yet again), and the opening story (about giving his convalescent dad an mp3 player “to give him an alternative to the in-room TV”) is a nice hook to get the reader involved… but then in paragraph 3 he slugs us with what is for me the real message of the piece:

In the tech industry, though, I think we often pretend that the mop-up operation is the battle. We talk obsessively about the user experience, and we recognize that we invariably fail to make it as crisp and coherent as it should be. But user experience is an overloaded term. I propose that we unpack it into (at least) two separate concepts. One is the basis of the “aha” moment. For now I’ll call it the use experience…

As I read this and the two following paragraphs, my fevered brain substituted education for tech, and thus exposed a grand challenge to those who aspire to Teach:

How do you engineer a great use experience, as opposed to a great user experience?

Context for this substitution is surely Gardner’s pointer to George Steiner on teachers and students, which provoked my purchase of Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters, a book I’m reading with a mixture of awe [of Steiner’s erudition], regret [at my own trail of missed opportunities], and irritation [mostly at Steiner’s Olympian tone]. Steiner and Udell and Campbell are all onto something really profound. One bit of Steiner will suffice as an example:

Computation, information theory and retrieval, the ubiquity of the internet and the global web enact far more than a technological revolution. They entail transformations of awareness, of habits of perception and articulation, of reciprocal sensibility which we are scarcely beginning to gauge. At manifold terminals and synapses they will connect with our (possibly analogous) nervous system and cerebral structures. Software will become, as it were, internalized and consciousness may have to grow a second skin.

The impact on the learning process is already momentous. At his console, the schoolchild branches into new worlds. As does the student with his laptop and the researcher searching the web. Conditions of collaborative exchange and debate, of memory storage, of immediate transmission and graphic representation have already reorganized numerous aspects of Wissenschaft. The screen can teach, examine, demonstrate, interact with a precision, a clarity, and a patience exceeding that of a human instructor. Its resources can be disseminated and enlisted at will. It knows neither prejudice nor fatigue. In turn, the apprentice can question, object, answer back in a dialectic whose pedagogic value may come to surpass that of spoken discourse. (pg. 180)

A lot to chew on for a Sunday morning… and see Wikiquote for some more succulent Steiner quotations.