mus in pice

mus in pice has moved

2010-10-05T19:53:00.002-04:00

“mus in pice” has moved back to viralata.net. Don’t forget to update your RSS subscription.

Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket

2010-09-07T10:06:00.003-04:00

Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some support from the Democrats. Arizona’s Democratic Party has filed a formal complaint with local, state and federal prosecutors in an effort to have the candidates removed from the ballot, and the Green Party has urged its supporters to steer clear of the rogue candidates. …

But Steve May, the Republican operative who signed up some of the candidates along Mill Avenue, a bohemian commercial strip next to Arizona State University, insists that a real political movement has been stirred up that has nothing to do with subterfuge.

“Did I recruit candidates? Yes,” said Mr. May, who is himself a candidate for the State Legislature, on the Republican ticket. “Are they fake candidates? No way.”

To make his point, Mr. May went by Starbucks, the gathering spot of the Mill Rats, as the frequenters of Mill Avenue are known. …

“Are you fake, Grandpa?” he said to Anthony Goshorn, 53, a candidate for the State Senate whose bushy white beard and paternal manner have earned him that nickname on the streets. “I’m real,” he replied.

Marc Lacey, “Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket”
The New York Times, September 6, 02010

How Fox Betrayed Petraeus

2010-08-22T19:51:00.004-04:00

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

…

These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York. All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders just last month. Though many of these ground-zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G.O.P. convention in New York exploiting 9/11, none of them protested that a fellow Republican, the former New York governor George Pataki, so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings, let alone a permanent memorial.

Frank Rich, “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus”
The New York Times, August 21, 02010

Invaders

2010-08-19T08:45:00.004-04:00

[A] geneticist at Oxford University, Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith, and geneticists from China and central Asia took blood samples from populations living in regions near the former Mongol empire, and they studied the Y chromosomes. These are useful in establishing lineage because Y chromosomes continue from father to son. Dr. Tyler-Smith and his colleagues found that an anomalously large number of the Y chromosomes carried a genetic signature indicating descent from a single common ancestor about a thousand years ago. The scientists theorized that the ancestor was Genghis Khan (or, more exactly, an eleventh-century ancestor of Genghis Khan). About eight per cent of all males in the region studied, or sixteen million men, possess this chromosome signature. That’s a half per cent of the world’s entire male population. It is possible, therefore, that more than thirty-two million people in the world today are descended from Genghis Khan.

Ian Frazier, “Invaders: Destroying Baghdad”
The New Yorker, April 25, 02005
(via kottke)

How facts backfire

2010-07-16T00:31:00.001-04:00

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Joe Keohane, “How facts backfire”
The Boston Globe — Boston.com, July 11, 02010

The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm

2010-07-15T19:15:00.001-04:00

If a large proportion of people are evening types, why do most companies insist that everyone come to work early?

Positive attitudes toward morningness are deeply ingrained. In Germany, for example, Prussian and Calvinist beliefs about the value of rising early are still pervasive. Throughout the world, people who sleep late are too often assumed to be lazy. The result is that the vast majority of school and work schedules are tailored to morning types. Few people are even aware that morningness and eveningness have a powerful biological component.

Christoph Randler, “Defend Your Research: The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm”
Harvard Business Review, July/August 02010

What happened to studying?

2010-07-08T10:31:00.000-04:00

“No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class,” Marks said. “To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort.”

The problem dates back to the 1960s, said Murray Sperber, a visiting professor in the graduate school of education at the University of California Berkeley. Sperber, at the time, was a graduate student at Berkeley and was part of an upstart movement pushing for students to rate their professors. The idea, Sperber said, was to give students a chance to express their opinions about their classes — a noble thought, but one that has backfired, according to many professors. Course evaluations have created a sort of “nonaggression pact,” Sperber said, where professors — especially ones seeking tenure — go easy on the homework and students, in turn, give glowing course evaluations.

Keith O’Brien, “What happened to studying?”
The Boston Globe – Boston.com, July 4, 02010

Que Saco!

2010-07-02T12:45:00.003-04:00

All Black's Haka

2010-06-09T21:53:00.001-04:00

The All Black’s Haka: one of the very few things I enjoy about the world of sports.

Annie and Louise

2010-06-07T00:19:00.003-04:00

Portrait of Louise Bourgeois by Annie Leibovitz

“Walking Blocks of Ice”

2010-05-31T13:42:00.005-04:00

William Notman & Son Building encased in ice after a fire
Montreal, 1888 · Albumen silver print

During the night of 22 January 1888, a terrible fire destroyed an imposing stone building on Little St. James Street, east of Place d’Armes in Montréal. The five-storey building with a façade of 165 feet was home to different companies, including several American business firms. The New York Times hastened to report the event, characterising the drama as “one of the worst fires that had visited Montréal for many years.”

According to the article, the fire began shortly after midnight on the second floor of the building; an extremely cold night and westerly winds soon caused the water hoses to freeze, while the “firemen were quickly transformed into walking blocks of ice.”

Canadian Centre for Architecture
“William Notman & Son: Little James Street, Montréal”

Oscar Lhermitte’s “Under Cover” Project

2010-05-23T12:53:00.006-04:00

The Under Cover project looks at the psychological perception of uniforms, its languages and its opportunities. A uniform is a set of standard clothing worn by members of professions such as police, builders and the emergency services. Each uniform tells a lot about the person’s background and its function in the context of use. The police uniform is symbol of authority, power, security and in some cases fear. Every single person working in public space has to wear a high visible outfit, from builders to police officers. It is forbidden to impersonate a policeman, however it is legal for anyone to wear high visibility clothes.

The Under Cover jumper and collar have been designed for situations requiring authority, power, or simple expediency in everyday situations, including catching a bus at ones convenience.

Oscar Lhermitte“Under Cover”
(via designboom who needs to stop inserting line breaks everywhere!)

The Tea Party Jacobins

2010-05-14T17:33:00.003-04:00

Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect.

This, I think, is the deepest reason why public reaction to the crash of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama took a populist turn and the Tea Party movement caught on. The crash not only devastated people’s finances and shook their confidence in their and their children’s future. It also broke through the moats we have been building around ourselves and our families, reminding us that certain problems require a collective response through political institutions. What’s more, it was a catastrophe whose causes no one yet fully understands, not even specialists who know exactly what derivatives, discount rates, and multiplier effects are. The measures the federal government took to control the damage were complex and controversial, but there was general agreement that at some point it would have to intervene to prevent a worldwide financial collapse, and that without some sort of stimulus a real depression loomed. That, though, is not at all what people who distrust elites, who want to “make up their own minds,” and who have fantasies of self-sufficiency want to be told.

Mark Lilla, “The Tea Party Jacobins”
The New York Review of Books, May 27, 02010

Watching the Mind

2010-05-12T23:37:00.002-04:00

Jayoung Yoon, “Watching the Mind,” 2010

Tauba Auerbach

2010-05-09T23:27:00.004-04:00

Tauba Auerbach, “How To Spell the Alphabet”
Ink and pencil on paper, 30 × 22, 2005
(via Staple Design)

Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman

2010-05-07T09:17:00.003-04:00

Susan Rothenberg describes the blend of studio time and ranch work that she shares with her husband, the artist Bruce Nauman, at their New Mexico home.

Wesley Miller, “Susan Rothenberg: Bruce & the Studio”
art:21 blog, May 7, 02010

Tears

2010-04-25T17:00:00.013-04:00

Update #2: That “one guy” I mention below is Paco Blancas. There’s a small interview of him on “Inside/Out,” MoMA’s blog.

Update #1: There is now a Tumblr blog dedicated to finding and showing those photographs of people crying “with” Abramović: Marina Abramović Made Me Cry. (via kottke)

MoMA has a Flickr page full of photographs of people sitting in front of Marina Abramović for her performance piece “The Artist is Present.” There are a few things one can notice: the occasional (art) celebrities, the predominantly white and asian composition of the audience, etc. One thing that surprised me was the number of people in tears.

Abramović (bottom right, in red) makes people weep.

Among those who wept in front of Abramović is one guy who appears 12 times—thus far … the show runs until May 31—and who seems particularly affected by the experience.

What Does Palinspeak Mean?

2010-04-07T10:29:00.000-04:00

I don’t think Palin’s phraseology is actively attractive to her fans. Rather, what is remarkable is that this way of speaking doesn’t prevent someone, today, from public influence. Candidates bite the dust for being untelegenic, dour, philanderers, strident, or looking silly posing in a tank. But having trouble rubbing a noun and a verb together is not considered a mark against one as a figure of political authority.

John McWhorter, “What Does Palinspeak Mean?”
The New Republic, April 6, 2010

Eno-phile

2010-03-31T23:46:00.006-04:00

Update: The Beeb made YouTube take it down. Booh!

On a hypothetical list of people I’d like to spend a day with, Brian Eno goes very near the top.

Watch all six segments.

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

2010-03-28T15:56:00.002-04:00

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

Frank Rich, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care”
The New York Times. March 27, 02010

Twice in the Morning

2010-03-24T09:57:00.008-04:00

Bad at Sports linked to a Chicago Tribune story about a University of Chicago grad student who has taken it upon herself to document the graffiti at the university’s Regenstein Library.

twice in the morning
(photo Quinn Dombrowski)

Quinn Dombrowski, the documenter/compiler in question, has a blog, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur, and a dedicated Flickr set. The image above is of one of my favorites and proof that whoever is teaching Middle Egyptian is doing a good job.

Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV

2010-03-21T10:43:00.003-04:00

Kill me now

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

Jeremy Page, “Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV”
Times Online, March 19, 02010

Anti-writing and Yukio Ota’s Exit Sign

2010-03-14T13:11:00.011-04:00

exit

In the late 1970s, Yukio Ota designed the “running man” symbol above to mark emergency exits, a symbol the ISO later adopted as the recommended exist sign. As part of a Slate Magazine series on signs, Julia Turner wrote about the details of that story and the slow adoption of the symbol in the U.S. What really caught my attention, however, was the following paragraph about Ota’s grander scheme for a universal pictographic language.

Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe's increasingly industrial economy. Neurath used pictograms—for man, woman, sugar, wheat, gunship, etc.—to produce infographics that he displayed to packed crowds in a convention hall in Vienna, Austria. Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. In 1964, Ota even invented a symbolic language called LoCoS, the Lovers' Communication System, which supposedly took just an hour to learn.…Ota's colleague and fellow icon designer Aaron Marcus recalls that LoCoS was intended to “bring human beings together and … help them love each other a little bit better.”

Julia Turner, “The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man” Slate Magazine, March 8, 02010

After having spent the better part of this (academic) quarter researching anti-writing (or free writing, or asemic writing; “anti-writing” is art historian Wu Hung’s term which he applies to contemporary and historical Chinese calligraphy) I was pleasantly surprised to find this new connection between graphic design and anti-writing. Idiosyncratic pictographic systems like Ota’s are a peculiar form of anti-writing but they do play a part in that visual redefinition of language I was looking at in my research. For instance, Ota’s work reminded me of the work of Xu Bing, a contemporary Chinese artist who has, on occasion, used AIGA transportation and wayfinding signs in conjunction with his “Anglo-Chinese” logograms. Xu’s and Ota’s intentions are not the same but I think it’s fair to see Xu’s work as a comment on both graphic designers’ ambitions of universality—which Ota shares—and our individual expectations of cultural singularity.

You can read it.

Neither Xu’s nor Ota’s writing systems are really asemic though since they do convey a specific semantic meaning. (Xu’s work is sometimes purely asemic, but that one example above isn’t.) In fact, you could argue that Ota’s wish for a universal visual communication system is the opposite of Michaux’s, Twombly’s, or Ferrari’s cryptic, personal scribbling. But all of them share a desire and a capacity to change language through form and that’s what interests me in their works. So while Turner describes Ota’s belief in the “power of symbolic communication” as “romantic,” what I have found in studying the work of anti-writing artists is that Ota is only romantic perhaps in believing that others would join him in adopting his system but that his work is otherwise no more romantic than Ferrari’s or Xu’s.

Harmony

2010-03-09T20:03:00.003-05:00

Ricardo Cabello, whom I do not know but who seems to be a pretty talented web developer, released Harmony yesterday, a web-based (html5 & javascript) drawing pad. I had a few minutes to kill this afternoon so I gave it a try and drew this funny looking bird with it.

Now you try it; it’s fun.

bird

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

2010-03-07T00:41:00.007-05:00

David Cope
(photo Catherine Karnow; reproduced without permission)

Don’t let the dumb title (“Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”!) stop you from reading this story about David Cope’s research on computer musical composition, part of a field called “artificial creativity.” And make sure you listen to the two pieces embedded in the article.

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because [Cope had] managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Ryan Blitstein, “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”
Miller-McCune, February 22, 02010

Cold Cut

2010-03-05T23:26:00.006-05:00

backyard · february 02010

A few weeks ago I came across an article by Peter Stark detailing what happens to the human body when it’s exposed to progressively colder temperatures and, conversely, what happens when it is—and can be—revived. It’s a fascinating read, especially if, like me, you have a slightly morbid fascination for death by exposure to cold.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau's cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it's lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived.

…

But for all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike--and whether it will kill when it does. The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

Peter Stark, “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow…”
Outside, January 01997

How to Wield a(n x-acto) Knife

2010-02-11T16:31:00.006-05:00

Having had two students cut themselves with x-acto knives this week—minor cuts, thank Bowie!—this article by Tom Mylan, a butcher, on how to wield a knife seemed timely. The following bit, which applies to x-acto knives, is first on his list of how to avoid serious injuries:

The most important thing when it comes to cutting yourself (or avoiding it) is awareness of where you and the cutting edge of your blade are in relation to each other. This is not such a big deal for a home cook slicing vegetables, but for a butcher it becomes a matter of life and death.

Tom Mylan, “How to Wield a Knife”
The Atlantic, February 10, 02010

Furor Uterinus

2010-01-24T17:32:00.004-05:00

The population of Western European countries has been aging rapidly, and that is likely to continue over the next several decades. The basic reason: European couples aren't producing enough babies. … Why are there fewer babies? One key reason is that European attitudes toward sex have evolved sharply. One-hundred fifty years ago, it was considered a sin to enjoy sex, the only legitimate purpose for which was procreation. But today, young women believe that sex is mainly a recreational activity.

Robert Fogel, “$123,000,000,000,000”
Foreign Policy, January/February 02010

So there you have it: Nobel laureate Robert Fogel finally isolates the cause of Europe’s demographic decline: the unchecked lust of young women.

Impressive.

Corporate Personhood

2010-01-23T01:09:00.004-05:00

I don't know if yesterday's Supreme Court ruling is really going to lead to the apocalypse predicted by so many … [b]ut I find myself having the same naive reaction to the notion of “corporate personhood” that I've always had when it's come up: If corporations are persons in the eyes of the law, why has no one pursued the argument that we can do to corporations what we routinely do to persons, namely imprison and execute them? …

We may never again see in America a trend toward progressive legislation, but on the off-chance that it can happen someday, shouldn't some legal theorists be thinking about corporate personhood in ways that subvert the idea as it exists now — i.e., corporations have all the privileges of personhood and run none of the risks?

Steve M., “Taking Corporate Personhood to Its Logical Conclusion”
No More Mister Nice Blog, January 22, 02010

fantasy

2010-01-19T23:22:00.007-05:00

ladder?

i’ve always fantasized about what it would be like to be robinson crusoe. seeing this photograph of a “halley VI” module in the latest entry of momus’s click opera—“dream away an elastic day over siberia”—captured my imagination in exactly the same way. extreme solitude fascinates me.

many years from now, when i’m too old, too cranky, and too tired to put up with society, i’ll buy one of those modules and have it and me shipped to antartica. i’ll live in it for as long as i can stand it, and then one day i’ll open the door and let myself freeze to death.

Merry Miedinger!

2009-12-24T15:15:00.006-05:00

Max Miedinger, the (co)designer of Helvetica was born on December 24, 01910.
Merry Miedinger to all!

“Works Great Around the House”

2009-12-20T15:54:00.003-05:00

Came across this review when looking for noise canceling headphones:

This is an AMAZING product. I purchased them because while trying to listen to my classical music around the house, my wife kept NAGGING me to do the dishes or take out the trash. I kept telling her that these are part of her womanly duties and that I would have no part in this. Even after explaining this to her, she kept demanding that I do these chores. Since purchasing these headphones I can now enjoy my music and while I can see her mouth moving, I can not hear a word. These are god's gift to men everywhere. I strongly encourage you buy them!

Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper

2009-12-20T13:08:00.003-05:00

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

Richard Rodriguez, “Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper”
Harper’s Magazine, November 02009

The Chinese Room Argument

2009-12-14T17:17:00.003-05:00

The Chinese Room argument, devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese characters, such that to those outside the room it appears as if someone in the room understands Chinese. The argument is intended to show that while suitably programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principle. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. Searle's argument is a direct challenge to proponents of Artificial Intelligence, and the argument also has broad implications for functionalist and computational theories of meaning and of mind. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Chinese Room Argument”

Men turn tables on regime by donning headscarves and dresses

2009-12-14T12:43:00.005-05:00

Hundreds of pictures of men in women's clothing have been posted online by Iranian opposition supporters in mockery of what they say is a crude attempt by the authorities to humiliate and discredit a reformist student leader by photographing him in a head scarf and chador.

“Men turn tables on regime by donning headscarves and dresses”
The Independent, December 14, 02009

The Ridges · Sunday, December 6, 02009

2009-12-06T18:00:00.004-05:00

to my left: empty (5:51pm)

to my right: empty (5:51pm)

What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

2009-12-02T00:46:00.002-05:00

For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste.

Tony Judt, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?”
The New York Review of Books, December 17, 02009

Bored New World: How the Zach Braff Prototype Is Slowly Killing American Music

2009-11-20T22:30:00.004-05:00

The music sounds like it has nothing to prove because the kids making it have nothing to prove. It enacts leisure because its authors come from a background of leisure. And the kids performing onstage don’t care about earning your attention or respect because they’re not accustomed to earning anything. It’s an entire artistic movement of, for, and about the bourgeoisie at a time when everyone in America is living anything but the lifestyle of the rich, famous and bored.

Chris Milam, “Bored New World: How the Zach Braff Prototype Is Slowly Killing American Music
Pop Matters, October 26, 02009

When It Comes to Photosynthesis, Plants Perform Quantum Computation

2009-10-17T14:18:00.002-04:00

Plants soak up some of the 1017 joules of solar energy that bathe Earth each second, harvesting as much as 95 percent of it from the light they absorb. The transformation of sunlight into carbohydrates takes place in one million billionths of a second, preventing much of that energy from dissipating as heat. But exactly how plants manage this nearly instantaneous trick has remained elusive. Now biophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that plants use the basic principle of quantum computing—the exploration of a multiplicity of different answers at the same time—to achieve near-perfect efficiency.

David Biello, “When It Comes to Photosynthesis, Plants Perform Quantum Computation”
Scientific American, April 13, 02007

Gossamer Silk, From Spiders Spun

2009-09-27T19:48:00.003-04:00

The other day in a fourth-floor storage area deep within the American Museum of Natural History, two women wearing blue rubber gloves carefully pulled back a plastic covering to show what Mr. Peers and Mr. Godley — along with more than a million spiders and a dexterous team of intrepid Malagasy spider handlers — had accomplished. It is an 11-foot-long, brilliantly golden-hued cloth, the first recorded example of a hand-woven brocaded textile made entirely from the silk of spiders, according to experts at the Museum of Natural History, where beginning on Thursday it will go on display for six months in the Grand Gallery.

Mr. Peers has worked for years to revive the weaving traditions for which Madagascar was once famous, and pieces made under his direction have found their way into the collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. In his research into textiles, he had long been intrigued by the alchemical, almost occult tales of attempts over several centuries to harvest spider silk for weaving, an endeavor that, as he has written, always seemed to be “imbued with metaphor and poetry, with nightmare and phobia.”

Randy Kennedy, “Gossamer Silk, From Spiders Spun”
The New York Times, September 22, 02009

Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’

2009-09-19T23:56:00.006-04:00

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Anita Singh, “Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’”
telegraph.co.uk, September 11, 02009

What’s worse: the fact that so many Americans are so uneducated they’ll believe anything they hear in church, or the fact that movie and other media distributors are so timid they’ll anticipate the morbid demands of religious extremists to suppress anything that will undermine the cretinous fairy tales they use to manipulate their illiterate countrymen?

Is Quantum Mechanics Messing with Your Memory?

2009-09-06T15:41:00.004-04:00

[W]hile our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant”—they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards—most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse.

We have a statistical law that describes these everyday phenomena called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law tells us that the “entropy” or degree of disorder of a closed system never decreases. Roughly speaking, a process in which entropy increases is one where the system becomes increasingly disordered. Windows break, thereby increasing disorder, but they will not spontaneously unbreak. Gases will disperse but not spontaneously compress.

However, entropy describes what happens with large numbers of particles. We presume that it must arise from what happens with individual particles, but all the laws that govern the behaviour of individual particles are time-reversal invariant. This means that any process they allow in one direction of time, they also allow in the other.

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Michael Slezak, “Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?”
guardian.co.uk, August 27, 02009

Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars

2009-09-02T22:52:00.004-04:00

Such examples don’t exhaust Google’s metadata errors by any means. In addition to the occasionally quizzical renamings of works (Moby Dick: or the White Wall), there are a number of mismatches of titles and texts. Click on the link for the 1818 Théorie de l'Univers, a work on cosmology by the Napoleonic mathematician and general Jacques Alexander François Allix, and it takes you to Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 1983 novel Voice of the Heart, while the link on a misdated number of Dickens’s Household Words takes you to a 1742 Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. Numerous entries mix up the names of authors, editors, and writers of introductions, so that the “about this book” page for an edition of one French novel shows the striking attribution, “Madame Bovary By Henry James.” More mysterious is the entry for a book called The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface, which is dated 1939 and attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones. The only connection I can come up with is that Jones was the translator of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which must have somehow triggered the other sense of the word “mosaic,” though the details of the process leave me baffled.

Geoffrey Nunberg, “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars”
The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 02009

Caster Semenya: The Idiocy of Sex Testing

2009-08-28T19:07:00.005-04:00

World-class South African athlete Caster Semenya, age 18, won the 800 meters in the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships on August 19. But her victory was all the more remarkable in that she was forced to run amid a controversy that reveals the twisted way international track and field views gender.

The sports world has been buzzing for some time over the rumor that Semenya may be a man, or more specifically, not “entirely female.” According to the newspaper The Age, her “physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she may not be entirely female.” From all accounts an arduous process of “gender testing” on Semenya has already begun. The idea that an 18-year-old who has just experienced the greatest athletic victory of her life is being subjecting to this very public humiliation is shameful to say the least.

Her own coach Michael Seme contributed to the disgrace when he said, “We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It’s a natural reaction and it’s only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.”

Dave Zirin & Sherry Wolf, “Caster Semenya: The Idiocy of Sex Testing,” The Nation, August 21, 02009

Kindle and the future of reading

2009-08-22T08:55:00.000-04:00

Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. The company uses an encoding format called Topaz. (“Topaz” is also the name of a novel by Leon Uris, not available at the Kindle Store.) There are other e-book software formats—Adobe Acrobat, for instance, and Microsoft Reader, and an open format called ePub—but Amazon went its own way. Nobody else’s hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon’s permission. That means you can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. (You can, however, read Kindle books on the iPod Touch and the iPhone—more about that later—because Amazon has decided that it’s in its interest to let you.) Maybe you’ve heard of the Sony Reader? The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion, but forget it. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick. Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

Nicholson Baker, “A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book,” The New Yorker, 02009

Dan Brown

2009-08-19T00:02:00.001-04:00

“The famous man looked at the wooden lectern. On May 7, 2005, the horror author Stephen King gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Maine, his home state. In it, he half-joked: “If I show up at your house in ten years from now ... and find nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel ... I’ll chase you to the end of your driveway, screaming, ‘Where are your books? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?’ ” An interesting analogy from a writer who endured a long critical ice age, during which his own books would sell by the million but pass unnoticed in the posh papers’ book sections. In 1982, in an afterword to the anthology Different Seasons, King referred to his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, which makes this a unique case of the burger calling the macaroni cheese junk.”

Andrew Collins, “The Key to Dan Brown’s Success,” Times Online, Aug. 15, 02009

3quarksdaily

2009-08-18T23:32:00.003-04:00

3quarksdaily is one of my favorite blogs. It promises “an ecclectic digest of science, art and literature” and delivers, every day, several times a day. Google Reader in fact tells me that I read more posts from 3QD—as it’s also called—than from any other blog save Make Magazine’s.

A few months ago however, 3quarksdaily started including ads in their RSS feed. Sadly, instead of going with tolerable text ads, they chose to run large Flash ads. To make matters worse, the content of those ads can be surprising and unpleasant. For instance, I’ve recently seen one ad for some Ann Coulter event or book and another for the “church” of Scientology. Not good.

While I won’t unsubscribe from 3QD and will just have to keep ignoring their ads, I won’t be sharing any more of their posts. I don’t want to have to put up with Flash surprises popping up on my Google Reader shared items. Instead, anything I would normally share I will now repost on “mus in pice.”

And so it begins…

Richard Rorty

2007-06-17T13:30:00.000-04:00

The pope recently said: “A culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity.” Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping. The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition – one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. This shift in outlook is, I think, the most important advance that the West has yet made.

Daniel Postel, “Last Words from Richard Rorty,” The Progressive, June 02007

Three Talks on GUIs

2007-06-10T18:51:00.000-04:00

Three different ways of envisioning the future of computer interfaces and data manipulation…

1 – Blaise Aguera y Arcas: “Photosynth”
Data visualization and tag reuse at its best; fluidity and beauty all coming from Microsoft. Who would have thought? Apparently, not even the speaker himself! :-)
7 minutes & 12 seconds.

2 – Anand Agarawala: “BumpTop”
An old idea—the computer desktop as physical space—implemented to mimic aspects of physical reality like weight and momentum.
4 minutes & 51 seconds.

3 – Aza Raskin: “Away with Applications”
The command-line interface meets the desktop and its applications…a long talk but the demos are worth watching.
1 hour, 26 minutes & 30 seconds. Includes two Q&A sections which you can skip. The first one starts around minute 40 and lasts about 15 minutes; the second one starts at the end of the talk proper and goes until the end of the video.

The Table and the Chair

2007-05-13T10:52:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Edward Lear's birthday.

The Table and the Chair

Said the Table to the Chair,
“You can hardly be aware
How I suffer from the heat
And from chilblains on my feet.
If we took a little walk,
We might have a little talk;
Pray let us take the air,”
Said the Table to the Chair.

Said the Chair unto the Table,
“Now, you know we are not able:
How foolishly you talk,
When you know we cannot walk!”
Said the Table with a sigh,
“It can do no harm to try.
I've as many legs as you:
Why can't we walk on two?”

So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town
With a cheerful bumpy sound
As they toddled round and round;
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
“See! the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air!”

But in going down an alley,
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day;
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-quack,
And a Beetle, and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.

Then they whispered to each other,
“O delightful little brother,
What a lovely walk we've taken!
Let us dine on beans and bacon.”
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads
Till they toddled to their beds.

This particular poem is from “Nonsense Songs”. More of Lear's work is available from Project Gutenberg.

(Recovering) Prince fans may also recall this:

“Beautiful Night” by Prince (and Edward Lear).
For the impatient, the relevant bit is at 2:20.

Helvetica – the film

2007-05-05T12:11:00.000-04:00

After months of waiting, I finally saw Gary Hustwit's Helvetica, a documentary film about Helvetica, modernist and post-modernist graphic design and the history of design after WWII seen through one typeface. The film was showing at the Wexner Center on Thursday and Friday this week. It's absolutely brilliant and I recommend it to anyone. Catch it if you can!

Film poster design by Experimental Jetset.

Helvetica features interviews with some of the world's greatest graphic designers—Massimo Vignelli, Neville Brody, Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, David Carson [I'm not a big fan of Carson's work but he's definitely a very interesting guy]— and type designers—Matthew Carter, Hermann Zapf—people who play a major role in shaping our culture but are rarely seen or heard. Hustwit alternates between shots of Helvetica, the typeface, seen absolutely everywhere, on buildings, billboards, t-shirts, posters, magazines, etc. and those interviews which trace the history of Helvetica and its impact on graphic designers and, through them, on just about everything we look at these days. It's never boring; it's in fact often pretty funny and the passion of the people Hustwit interviewed is clearly visible and captivating. The soundtrack is pretty nice too.

The film is not an apology of Helvetica and modernist aesthetics. Some of the designers in the movie actually express strong opinions against its prevalence. For me however, Helvetica is one of the most beautiful creations of mankind and Armin Hofmann and Josef Müller-Brockmann, whether they worked with Helvetica or not, are two of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Whatever your opinion on the subject, even if you have none, Helvetica is a rare look into a side of contemporary culture which, though often acknowledged for its power on consumer society, is often considered secondary to “high art” when it really shouldn't be.

Top left: Josef Müller-Brockmann, Musica Viva March 26, 1957 (1957; 35.375" × 50.375")
top right: Armin Hofmann, Spitzen (1969; 35.0" × 50.0")
bottom left: Armin Hofmann, Kunsterziehung in USA (1962; 35.0" × 50.0")
bottom right: Josef Müller-Brockmann, Musica Viva, January 7, 1958 (1958; 35.375" × 50.375")

Posters, none of which features Helvetica ;-), from internationalposter.com.

Microsoft is...

2007-04-10T14:29:00.000-04:00

…dead!

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they’d positioned themselves as a “media company” instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn’t understand. It was as if I’d told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

[…]

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called “Ajax.” And that was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

“[E]veryone can see the desktop is over.” What does this mean for the “GNOME … and Development Platform”?

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.

Living in a college town, I can certainly relate to this. The number of students toting Apple hardware—iBooks, MacBooks, and iPods—seems significantly greater than that of students carrying Dell or HP laptops around. Whether at the library or in any of Athens’ coffee houses, all tables belong to Apple’s shiny white plastic machines.

Green Biotech Hackers

2007-03-02T21:01:00.000-05:00

Interesting thought from a not-so-interesting article:

[Steward Brand] thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of computers turning into Big Brother. “Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines,” he told Conservation magazine last year. “Where are the green biotech hackers?”

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’, New York Times, February 27, 02007

Life Is Unfair; Graphic Design Is Hard

2007-02-28T21:10:00.000-05:00

Step 1: spend some time designing something nice, for free.

Step 2: watch as someone else tries to reuse your work, fails miserably, and gets paid.

Step 3: sigh.

Piano Phase

2007-02-13T12:26:00.000-05:00

I have a terrible memory so I'm always surprised when I remember events about my childhood. I'm particularly interested in those memories which have stuck with me over the years, events that didn't just come back to me one day but memories I know have always had, permanent memories of certain events.

One of those events is the first time I heard Steve Reich's "Piano Phase." I distinctively remember being absolutely amazed by that piece. It was unlike anything I had ever heard, which already made it interesting, but more importantly it was beautiful.

If you've never heard it, the Internet Archive has a recording of "Piano Phase" by Peter Aidu available under Creative Commons license.

While I'm on the topic of amazing things, you really ought to watch "In My Language," a short film about what language and communication mean to its author.

In other news: I got a pair of screenprints in a juried student exhibition three weeks ago! Quite happy about that.

Michael Dell on Supporting Linux

2006-03-08T23:14:00.000-05:00

Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc. — and Richard Kind's long lost twin brother ;-) — on selling and offering support for Linux:

We love Linux, and we're doing our best to support the Linux community. We see lots of opportunity there. If the Linux desktops could converge at their cores, such a common platform would make it easier to support. Or, if there was a leading or highly preferred version that a majority of users would want, we'd preload it.

Mr. Dell opens up about Desktop Linux, DesktopLinux.com, March 7, 02006

Seth Godin Speaks at Google

2006-03-04T17:14:00.000-05:00

Seth Godin speaks to Google employees about marketing; a video worth watching for all GNOME “marketers” out there.

[I]t's thinking about… not that you deserve the conversation with regards to how good [your product] is but how can you cause conversations to take place.

EU-lympics

2006-02-27T11:38:00.000-05:00

The 2006 Winter Olympic Games are over and I have not watched a single minute of it. What can I say; I'm just not into sports. But I did check the final medal count and the ranking by number of gold medals won is:

                gold      total
Germany          11        29
USA               9        25
Austria           9        23
Russian Fed.      8        22
Canada            7        24
Sweden            7        14
Korea             6        11
Switzerland       5        14
Italy             5        11
France            3         9
Netherlands       3         9
Estonia           3         3
Norway            2        19
China             2        11
Czech Rep.        1         4
Croatia           1         3
Australia         1         2
Japan             1         1
Finland           0         9
Poland            0         2
Belarus           0         1
Bulgaria          0         1
Great Britain     0         1
Slovakia          0         1
Ukraine           0         2
Latvia            0         1

The europhile in me could not resist creating the following revised ranking:

                gold      total
European Union   42        116     wow!
USA               9         25
Russian Fed.      8         22
Canada            7         24
Korea             6         11
Switzerland       5         14
Norway            2         19
China             2         11
Croatia           1          3
Australia         1          2
Japan             1          1
Belarus           0          1
Bulgaria          0          1
Ukraine           0          2

Darwin Day

2006-02-12T00:22:00.000-05:00

February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday — his 197th this year — and your opportunity to celebrate Darwin Day.

Happy Darwin Day everybody!

A Logo For GUADEC

2006-01-27T22:21:00.000-05:00

Quim Gil announced about a month ago that, instead of having a different logo every year for GUADEC, the GUADEC organizing committee wanted to create a single logo for all future editions of the event and that it was organizing a design competition to find that new logo. That competition, which stipulates that the new logo should contain the word GUADEC and the GNOME foot, is coming to an end on January 31st 02006.

Generally speaking, I do like the GNOME logo. But I also find it extraordinarily hard to combine with anything, except perhaps for bold letters. I'm not sure why this is but I believe that it might be 1) because it is non-geometric and hence hard to anchor to external elements and 2) because it lacks a strong center or balancing point and hence is hard to align to external elements. Additionally, it is a fairly large mass of a single color or tone and therefore requires complementary elements to be at least as strong and pregnant as it is. Individually these characteristics are OK but the GNOME logo combines them all which throws me off every time I try to do something with it.

To be fair to Jimmac — he created the current version of the GNOME foot from tigert's original design — I want to make it clear that those reasons why I find it difficult to work with his logo are obviously subjective and only reflect the fact that my designer skills are limited. Many seem to have no problems (re)using that logo in their own projects.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks of trying to design a logo according to the rules I finally decided that I would leave out the GNOME foot and that I would instead create something that I liked, even if it meant that it couldn't be entered in the competition. At this point it wasn't about the contest anymore but about my completing this project for myself. One of my earliest ideas included a word balloon to represent the exchange of words and ideas taking place at a conference — someone else actually had the same idea. I reworked it to come up with this:

I believe the logo would work well in colors too and could easily be used to create t-shirts, bags and other conference trinkets. It could also be adapted to include, where appropriate, the name of the hosting city. The typeface used for the word GUADEC is FreeSans.

There is no god

2005-11-23T01:39:00.000-05:00

“Sir,” Saint-Savin replied, “the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void.”

The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco

and …

Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That's just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” […] Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

There Is No God, Penn Jillette

… all on the same day.

Fedora's New Logo

2005-10-12T17:50:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, Matt Munoz introduced the work of the Red Hat design team to create a logo for Fedora. Matt's writeup described the development of that logo's concept and the choice of a visual vocabulary to express that concept.

While I like the direction the design team took for the Fedora logo I have to admit that I find the final result a bit too stiff. The “f”—for “Fedora” and “freedom”—looks tentatively italic but stands straight and feels oddly symmetrical. The infinity sign “behind” it, by virtue of being so geometrical, absorbs too much of the “f”'s shape and makes it harder to read.

So I tried reusing the design team's concept to create a similar but softer logo to show my ideas for an improved version. The logo on the left is Red Hat's; the one on the right is mine.

My logo has its own problems of course: 1) it does not match the Fedora word mark as closely as the design team's; 2) it weakens the smart geometrical interplay between the overall shape of the logo and the negative space of the “f + infinity” sign. It could also use some fine-tuning, especially in some its curves.

Garamond & the Boys

2005-10-11T17:27:00.000-04:00

Claude Garamond's legacy is rather complex and one which I had been meaning to figure out for myself for a while. After a bit of reading and researching I think I now have most of it down. It begins with Garamond's death in 1561 when his estate was sold and dispersed throughout Europe, to Antwerp, Holland, with Christophe Plantin, to Frankfurt, Germany, with André Wechel and Jacques Sabon, the latter a student of Garamond's, and to Italy with Guillaume Le Bé. These men, together with Robert Granjon, another one of Garamond's students who worked with Plantin for several years, form the first branch of the “Garamond” heritage.

The second branch appears later, in 1621, when a punchcutter and typefounder named Jean Jannon issued a new type, known as the “caractères de l'Université,” inspired by Garamond's work. Twenty years later Jannon's type found its way into the collection of the Royal Printing Office—now National Printing Office—where it would eventually be attributed to Claude Garamond. It remains unclear to me whether Jannon willingly sold his type to the Royal Printing Office or whether his punches or matrices were taken from him, a Protestant living in a Catholic society. Regardless, Jannon's design served as reference for “Garamond” revivals until 1927 when Beatrice Warde set the record straight in an article in The Fleuron tracing the National Printing Office's “Garamond” back to its original designer.

From these two branches come all of the Garamond-like types drawn in the 20th century. From the second branch, that of the mistaken identity, we get ATF's 1917 “Garamond” by Morris F. Benton and T.M. Cleland; Linotype's 1936 “Garamond No. 3” derived from Benton and Cleland's “Garamond”; and ITC's 1977 “Garamond” by Tony Stan who reworked Benton and Cleland's “Garamond.” Others from the same branch include Lanston Monotype's 1921 “Garamont” by Frederic Goudy; Interetype's 1927 “Garamond”; Bauer's 1961 “Simoncini Garamond” by Francesco Simoncini; and “Garamond Classico” by Franko Luin in 1993.

From the first branch, that of Claude Garamond's students, comes a different set of types considered truer to the master's original design including Monotype's 1913 “Plantin” by F.H. Pierpont—which served as the inspiration for Times New Roman; Stempel's 1925 “Stempel Garamond”; Linotype's 1928 “Granjon” by George Jones; Ludlow Typograph Company's 1930 “Garamond” by R. Hunter Middleton; Stempel's 1964 “Sabon” by Jan Tschichold; Linotype's 1978 “Galliard” by Matthew Carter; and finally Adobe's 1989 “Adobe Garamond” by Robert Slimbach.

Many designers following the first Garamond branch worked from the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen printed by Sabon's foundry twelve years after his death—his wife, Judith Egenolff, had then remarried to another typefounder, Konrad Berner. The specimen includes not only Claude Garamond's original roman but also Granjon's famed italics.

GNOME T-Shirt: GNOME XING

2005-09-04T16:17:00.000-04:00

4th GNOME t-shirt; more coming soon. When is the GNOME Store opening again?

GNOME T-Shirt: Stain Fighting Gtk+

2005-08-29T12:03:00.000-04:00

Finished another GNOME t-shirt which should in fact more accurately be described as a Gtk+ t-shirt.

Designing it made me wish Inkscape had diagonal guides. They could be set like orthogonal guides, with a click in and drag from the rulers. To differentiate setting one kind of guide vs. the other, diagonal guide creation could be started with a [Shift] + click or a [Ctrl] + click instead of the regular click alone.

GNOME T-Shirt: The Pirate

2005-08-25T01:24:00.000-04:00

Forget “Seinfeld”, you want to be a pirate!

On The Meaning of “mus in pice”

2005-08-23T16:27:00.000-04:00

I chose “mus in pice” as the title of this blog for reasons I will explain shortly. One thing I did not foresee then was that I would end up with the top hits on Google for this expression. Now I feel responsible for it and I worry that I'm making it difficult for people wishing to know what it means to do just that. This is my attempt at making things right.

“Mus in pice” is a Latin phrase meaning “a mouse in pitch” — the Latin word for “pitch” is pix (picis; f.) by the way. I came across it reading Michel de Montaigne's Essays (complete text in English from Project Gutenberg and in French from the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language). The passage in question is from Book III, Chapter XIII, “Of Experience”:

Men misconceive the natural disease of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and inquire and keeps whirling about, pilling things up, and wrapping itself in its own handiwork, like our silkworms, until it suffocates. “Mus in pice.” It believes it spotted some pretense of clarity and imaginary truth; but as it runs towards it so many obstacles stand in its way, so many difficulties and so many new questions, that they misguide it and confuse it.

The expression itself predates Montaigne and seems to be in fact a classical adage, “getting stuck like a mouse in pitch.” Montaigne uses it in a particular context, that of our endless curiosity, the “natural disease of [the] mind,” but it could just as easily apply to our thirst for material goods.

I have always liked this expression as it describes me pretty well so it seemed appropriate to use it when I was looking for a title for this blog. It's even more appropriate if you think that blogs are by nature one of the worst kinds of information “pitch” there is. I felt then that “mus in pice” applied not just to me individually but also to me as a participant in this giant broacasting mess we call blogs.

Asus WL-330g and Ubuntu Linux PPC

2005-08-04T11:15:00.000-04:00

A week ago I bought this gizmo: the Asus WL-330g Wireless Access Point and Ethernet Adapter, to use “my” iBook anywhere there's a wireless connection with the least amount of messing with configuration and drivers. The iBook is running Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and I'm happy to report that everything is working well. Since the WL-330g acts as an Ethernet adapter there's really no messing with anything at all; I just used the “Network Settings” dialog to set the iBook's network interface for DHCP.

One very strange thing happened on which I wasted nearly an entire afternoon. The device comes with a USB power adapter so that it can be used anywhere with a laptop. So far, so good. But it took me hours to figure out that I can't use just any of the iBook's two USB ports to power it. Only the 1st port seems to work. When the device is plugged in to the 2nd one, it connects and reboots 2 or 3 times before giving up entirely. Very strange!

The WL-330g comes with a Windows configuration utility which I couldn't use for obvious reasons. There is also a web configuration interface which is quite poor but usable — not the good kind of “usable” though. The documentation is virtually inexistent since it consists of screenshots of both configuration systems with little explanation about how the device really works.

Good News – Bad News

2005-08-04T10:01:00.000-04:00

Tristant Nitot pointed to some of the most recent numbers for Mozilla Firefox's market share: 14.4% in Oceania, 14.1% in Europe, 11.8% in North America (12.3% in the US), 5.8% in Asia, 5.2% in South America and 4.3% in Africa. The good news is that these numbers have been steadily growing for a while and continue to do so to reach significant levels now in certain parts of the world (31% in Finland! Go Finland!). The work done by the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla volunteers is definitely paying off.

This latest study also shows that Firefox is being installed at a higher rate in homes than in offices. In Europe for instance, there's a 2.5 point difference between Firefox usage on week days and on week-ends. Given the way most companies administer their software resources this is not particularly surprising. It does somewhat undermine the idea that software travels from offices to the homes with people installing on their home computer whatever piece of software they're using at work.

The low percentage points in developing regions like Asia, South America and Africa are surprising to me. Free software is usually said to do better in developing countries — since it can be distributed, customized and translated into minority languages freely — but this is not what I'm seeing here. Though I don't really know how to explain this phenomenon, widespread software piracy could be a factor.

In countries where law enforcement resources are limited and where therefore commercial software can be acquired cheap or at no cost, the freedom to redistribute copies guaranteed by free software licenses, arguably the most interesting of all “software freedoms” for non-technical users, is illegally granted to all making the benefits of true free software moot. Moreover, in these conditions, the need for consumers to critically evaluate the price of software vs. its actual worth disappears because the financial cost of using or trying unsatisfactory software is virtually null. And since software prices in developing nations are comparatively higher than they are elsewhere, the gap between price and expectations which could be more significant there than in “developed” nations actually ends up being narrower. This in turns makes for fewer opportunities for free software to spread as an alternative to commercial, and potentially expensive and unsatisfactory, software.

So what's the bad news? Well, nothing really, except that I am impatient by nature and that I can't help but thinking that things are moving too slowly. Firefox is technically better than its alternative, it is one of the best advertised Free/Open Source projects, and yet it is reaching “only” 14.4% of its intended audience at its best (on average, per continent). While this steady progression is good news for Firefox, the relatively low percentage worries me when I think about GNOME, the fantastic Linux desktop. How long before Linux and GNOME have 14% of the computer desktop market share?

Getting Rid of Web Ads

2005-07-26T18:44:00.000-04:00

I recently found out about John LoVerso's Proxy Auto Configuration ad-busting trick and tested it. It's quite efficient and integrates very easily with the GNOME desktop. By using John's file and GNOME's Network Proxy Preferences dialog you could be browsing the web free of annoying ad banners.

In the System menu, choose Preferences, then Network Proxy. Select the Proxy Configuration tab, pick Automatic proxy configuration and enter the path to the "no-ads.pac" file you'll have downloaded from the page referenced above.

If you're using Epiphany, that's it; you're done. If you're using Firefox, you'll need to change your connection settings to Auto-detect proxy settings for this network.

On a different and very anectodic note, if you happen to watch "Me and You and Everyone We Know" — and you should — the kids are using Gaim to chat.

Ubuntu GNOME vs. Kubuntu

2005-07-18T11:31:00.000-04:00

Ubuntu is a fantastic Linux distribution focusing on desktop users and their needs. Because of this focus, it picked GNOME has its desktop environment and several GNOME developers now work for Canonical, the company responsible for Ubuntu.

In a recent visit to ubuntulinux.org however, I noticed that GNOME's name did not appear there much at all. It is in fact eclipsed by a large link to Kubuntu, a project to bring KDE to Ubuntu. While geeks won't really mind — GNOME and KDE have lived side by side for a while — it seemed like a lost opportunity for GNOME at a time when Ubuntu is drawing a lot of attention.

One tiny mention towards the bottom of the page... ;-(

Poster & Handout Source Files Released

2005-07-08T23:30:00.000-04:00

Scribus source files for GNOME posters and handouts are available at /gnome/promotion/source/. All of it is hereby released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Those documents use the following set of typefaces. While some are free, others aren't unfortunately. ITC Mendoza, chosen to be the roman counterpart to Trebuchet—the typeface of GNOME's logo—might be the toughest one to substitute.

Athens, Ohio

2005-04-07T15:03:00.000-04:00

It's been 2 months of travelling and moving but I am finally now in Athens, Ohio, a pleasant liberal town in a sea of rural conservativeness. Things are not as lively here as they were in Belo Horizonte but I can't say I'll miss the air pollution or the idiocy of the Brazilian upper middle class.

First Official #marketing Meeting

2004-12-09T16:23:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the marketing team had its first official IRC meeting on #marketing. The goal was to discuss how to pursue our nascent promotional efforts and I think we successfully did so. The plan for the next few months is to grow the amount of promotional material around one theme: GNOME, software for everyone. The consensus was that we should start relatively small by moving towards a better representation of the project in traditional FOSS circles – LUG members, students. Look for a Super Bowl ad in 2006 but not earlier.

For the time being, “software for everyone” is a theme more than a slogan. But it might stick. Its polysemy – “software designed so that anyone can use it” and “free software available to anyone” – is actually growing on me. That theme is to be developed around three points: freedom, ease of use, and accessibility. Stylistically there is no formal definition of what we’re trying to achieve. Successful designs will survive.

GNOME Identity Posters And A Few More

2004-11-30T23:03:00.000-05:00

The marketing list has been discussing the creation of posters for volunteers to print and take with them wherever they present the GNOME project, typically at conferences and other public events of the same kind. I’ve created a few which I’ll review in more details. What they all have in common is:

They were all designed for A0-size paper. That’s 1189 × 841 mm (46 ¾ × 33 in) which is pretty big. However, since the width to height ratio of ISO paper sizes remains the same within a given series – A0, A1, A2, A3, … – the posters should be usable at smaller sizes too.
All are black and white and therefore cheap to print.
I used the GNOME logo on all of them. This may mean that officially releasing those posters would have to be cleared through the GNOME Foundation. Or it may not; I don’t know. I went for “shoot first; ask questions later” on that one.
All of them would need additional “fine print” information like the URL to GNOME’s site and perhaps the Foundation’s address.

Identity posters: these have no other purpose than to communicate GNOME’s presence somewhere. There’s barely any designing here… shame on me.

Augmented identity posters: same as above but with a little bit of text giving the briefest of introductions to the GNOME project. The text is loosely based on wgo’s “What is GNOME?” It could easily be replaced with something better.

“The GNOME project provides two things: the GNOME desktop, an intuitive and attractive desktop environment for corporate and home users, and the GNOME development platform, an extensive framework for building applications. Volunteers, software developers, documentation writers, artists, translators, all work together to make GNOME easy to use, accessible, powerful, innovative and just plain great. Corporations have also joined in the effort and now provide additional resources for the project as well as professional support for GNOME users and developers. Thanks to the GNOME project hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have successfully begun using free software.”

Bonus gizmo poster: Say you’re selling GNOME t-shirts or you have a list of presentations to announce… use a marker and the bonus gizmo poster™ and make your own poster. ;-)

Whimsical posters: These last two I designed for myself more than for public use. It was suggested on the marketing list that posters could have some kind of slogan on them which is not a bad idea except that, as far as I know, there isn’t an official “slogan” for the GNOME project. This didn’t prevent me however from thinking about what more elaborate posters could look like.

The “gentleman’s desktop” idea is something I’ve read somewhere though I cannot remember if it was on a mailing list, in somebody’s blog or in an interview. I really like the idea though I realize of course that it is sexist and unpleasantly plutocratic. Bear in mind then that it is not part of the “official” proposal but merely the result of my indulging my elitist European male fiber. ;-)

The “official desktop of happy people” idea I’m very fond of and I believe it’s a communication avenue worth exploring. It takes the focus away from the technical and political issues to present instead the human and affective aspects of the project. Usability, accessibility, i18n have all been successfully integrated into the development of GNOME at a technical level. That’s an important factor of GNOME’s success and something which should be emphasized because users can relate to it as individuals and as members of a group. Rationally convincing people that using GNOME is a good decision is great. Not having to convince them of the same because they are emotionally drawn to it wouldn’t be bad either.

The text at the bottom of both posters is dummy text by the way. If you’re interested in downloading the PDF versions of all 7 posters, they’re available at www.viralata.net/gnome/promotion/.

Marketing GNOME vs. Marketing GTK+

2004-11-10T16:19:00.000-05:00

Today is a historic date for Free/Open Source software. It is the day Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released to the world. Internet Explorer, its “competitor,” is still the most widely used browser on the net but Firefox, which has already conquered the hearts and minds of web developers, is also slowly making its way into the hard drives of regular people. More importantly I believe that it is also acting as an ambassador for F/OS software. It is showing that F/OS software is alive, relevant, and credible. So while I’m glad that today the world was made aware that it has the option not to use a crappy browser, I’m also especially happy to see the idea that software is not just whatever Microsoft made Dell or Gateway ship with their computers strengthened by this particular event.

And now, on to GNOME stuff. These past few days I’ve had no time to work on the GNOME marketing tasks I had set for myself. But I’ve had time to consider some ways to reach a broader audience and one thing became clear to me while reflecting on Firefox and OpenOffice’s recent good fortunes: the best way to market GNOME is to forget about marketing it.

Like GNOME, Firefox and OpenOffice are useful, functional, well designed, usable pieces of software – with varying degrees of success of course but that’s not the point. GNOME is unique though in that it works on operating systems which, though full of qualities, are minority systems. Microsoft Windows has roughly 95% of the desktop market and Mac OS X 3%. Linux, the BSDs and Solaris – all GNOME systems which I’ll just refer to as Unices from now on – have the rest.

The good news is that much of the market, Microsoft’s share specifically, is up for grabs. Linux has shown that it could occupy a significant percentage of the market in the server space. Many believe that it could do it again with the desktop market. I, of course, believe it too. The bad news… well, I suppose it is that there’s a long road ahead. The bad news for GNOME is that it can’t go anywhere on its own and that it’s dependent on the success of its host operating systems. That unfortunate fact is something the GNOME marketing team cannot ignore and which will always limit it. So what can it do?

I believe that it should shift its efforts from marketing GNOME to marketing GTK+. The “GIMP Toolkit” happens to be one of the elements of GNOME’s technical foundation but it’s also more than that. It’s a complete multi-platform toolkit. Clearly only a very specific segment of the population has any use for a GUI toolkit but what matters is that this segment exists within the full desktop operating system market and not only within the 2% or so of the current GNOME host operating system market. By promoting GTK+ the GNOME marketing team would increase its target audience significantly and instantly. That’s already something to consider. But there’s more.

The GNOME marketing team ought to think about how to best use its limited resources: it could try to market GNOME and find itself selling Unices instead or it could market GTK+ and use that initiative to show off GNOME and draw people to it. Scenario #1 involves getting into the complexities of selling a platform radically different from the dominant one. That means addressing issues like hardware support, switching costs, transfer of custom software, and all that icky stuff. I believe that’s a job best left to vendors. Let RedHat, Novell, or Sun do the heavy lifting since they can’t afford not to do it.

Scenario #2 involves promoting something the team is familiar with and which it can manage. For the most part it’s about developers talking to developers whereas in the first scenario you’d have to address a wide audience – managers, admins, end-users, etc. – on a variety of topics. So not only would the former path require greater sophistication and research, it would also require more volunteers and more efforts. With the GTK+ option, the message is simpler and probably truer to GNOME’s core constituency.

Marketing GTK+ is not only important because of the interest it could create in GNOME; it’s also crucial because it will increase the number of people writing for the platform. While GTK+ is not “the GNOME development platform,” it is the closest thing to it and bridging the gap between the two will be easier than having people making the jump all at once. The importance of GNOME and GTK+ bindings in reaching this goal should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform. That is certainly the case of the Mono guys who have, better than anyone else I believe, understood the necessity to create a GNOME-friendly multi-platform culture. To some they might have made controversial political decisions. To me, they have adopted exactly the right kind of attitude.

This proposal is obviously a bit twisted. I’d be asking people to work on one thing when they’re really interested in working on another. But I’m convinced that it’s the most efficient way to go: GTK+’s target audience is much much much greater than GNOME’s at the moment, it is homogenous, the marketing team is familiar with it, and as for the message to communicate, focusing on GTK+ is probably much more straightforward than dealing with GNOME and the platform issues.

National Desktop League

2004-11-01T19:44:00.000-05:00

I’ve always been attracted to sports imagery. I find it daring – if sometimes brash and tacky – and expressive especially in its typography. It’s a guilty pleasure: large commercial lettering, loud colors… it’s far from what I’m normally drawn to. But I admire people who can design that way and who are not afraid of overdoing it. Stylistically it looks to me like a direct derivative from old-fashion commercial sign painting for which I have a soft spot.

When I was a kid, right across the street from my elementary school, there was a commercial sign shop. It closed down a long time ago but I still remember exactly what it looked like, its dark green façade and its beautiful hand-painted white letters on the window. I also remember my father explaining to me what that guy’s job was and how great it was that someone could still make a living that way. I think he too has a soft spot for hand lettering which he passed on to me.

I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing that sign painting is now a lost art in France. Living in Brazil though I have the privilege to see it alive everyday. The streets here are full of hand painted signs: store front advertising, commercial banners suspended above and across the streets – it’s illegal to hang banners in the streets in Belo Horizonte but it’s still done – political signs, etc… They’re everywhere. Though most of them are unremarkable some do stand out, often more by their size and color than by the quality of the lettering. Maybe I’m a complete weirdo but I do enjoy walking passed a giant blue “A” or a huge red “S”

But back to my initial point… I’ve been thinking for while now about experimenting with replacing the modern, glossy, and minimalist look of computer graphics with the loud and popular aesthetics of expensive team sports. What would that be like? Something like this perhaps:

The GNOME Marketing list is discussing ways to define and reach its target audience. But what are we going to propose to the public to identify GNOME visually and to connect with it? I know it’s a side issue, mere promotion, but it’s a stimulating one for me. I’ve proposed in the past to create GNOME posters which belong stylistically to the standard sleek computer graphic design genre. I didn’t do it to imitate anything or anyone. It just came out that way because that minimalism is a part of me. But after it I also felt compelled to try something different which challenged not only my designing habits but also my assumption about the way to communicate my enthusiasm and my hopes for GNOME.

Now, if only CafePress offered dark red t-shirts!

Eminem vs. George W. Bush

2004-10-26T23:18:00.000-04:00

Eminem takes on George W. Bush in “Mosh” (QuickTime)

“Why Choose GNOME?,” Letter Size

2004-10-25T18:03:00.000-04:00

I finished the Letter size version of “Why Choose GNOME?.” A4 versions in French and in English are still available; see this post: “Why Choose GNOME?” Out In PDF.

Restyling viralata.net

2004-10-24T22:02:00.000-04:00

Viralata.net’s previous white and gray design is no more. I got rid of it because I was getting tired of it, because it looked too web-like, and because I wanted to experiment with web typography. It’s still pretty minimalist but it’s also more textured: there’s a tiled background and a basic serif font working together to create richer and fuller looking pages than with the previous black sans-serif on plain white background. That’s partly what I mean when I say that I wanted something that wasn’t so web-like. I wanted to capture the feel of a printed paper page.

The default font size is much larger (12 points) than usual and the traditional blue and purple links have been replaced by a dark red (#a60000) and a dark gray (#333333). Playing with link colors is not something I would normally do. But since this is my personal site I can relax a bit and ignore the more conservative guidelines for good web design. I have nothing to sell on viralata.net and the site is small enough that I don’t expect anyone to feel lost and curse me for not playing by the rules.

The more unusual decision for me was to work with fixed point sizes, especially for fonts. While this goes against my normal preference for relative units, I figured that, once again, this being a personal site, I could bend the rules. Firefox and Opera are both able to display this new design at greater or smaller font sizes; I imagine that Safari can too. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer cannot but I can’t say that I care.

Using fixed point sizes helped me gain some control over the structure of the page. I have tried to play that element up by paying special attention to the space between lines, paragraphs and headers. I further tried to control the color of the page by redefining the strong and b tags not as indicators for bold weight but as red “ink.” I hope that I was able that way to create a contrast without disrupting the unity of the textblock.

“Why Choose GNOME?” Out In PDF

2004-10-13T18:08:00.000-04:00

The design of newer PDF versions of “Why Choose GNOME?” and “Pourquoi choisir GNOME ?” is done. I made a few typographical corrections on the first French version and modified the original English text to bring both documents closer to each other visually. Both are formatted for printing on A4 paper; a North-American-friendly Letter size version should be out soon.

The GNOME Marketing list has woken up from its torpor which is excellent news.

Three GNOME Posters

2004-10-12T00:40:00.000-04:00

Continuing my work with GNOME promotional material, I designed the following three posters. They are large (1189 × 841 mm; 46 ¾ × 33 in), black and white, and somewhat plain. Their size is meant to draw people in when groups of volunteers are presenting the project at trade shows and conferences. They are black and white to keep production costs low. They are plain because I wouldn’t know how to design them otherwise and I like them that way. ;-)

The theme is “values of the GNOME Project” which I chose to define with those three words: freedom, intelligence, respect. Each word actually represents several of the qualities GNOME embodies. I still have to write the short texts detailing what those are. “Freedom” should explain the benefits of GNOME’s GPL and LGPL licenses. “Intelligence” should illustrate the ways in which GNOME strives to be a smart, integrated, easy-to-use environment. “Respect” should be about the importance of interoperability, accessibility and internationalization.

To give you an idea of how large these posters are, I marked on a scaled-down image of one of them an area which is shown full-size, on a 300 DPI export, next to it. What you’re seeing is a footer which appears on all posters and reads “The GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform – www.gnome.org.”

ISO A-Series Paper Sizes

2004-10-11T14:25:00.000-04:00

I’m tired of googling for them.

A0 2384 × 3370 pt
A1 1684 × 2384 pt
A2 1191 × 1684 pt
A3 842 × 1191 pt
A4 592 × 842 pt
A5 420 × 592 pt
A6 297 × 420 pt
A7 210 × 297 pt

GNOME Promotional Material

2004-10-07T00:21:00.000-04:00

I want to review as much GNOME promotional material as I can: slides, posters, banners, handouts, pamphets, etc…. I’d like to inventory all of it and put it somewhere it can be reused by all of those involved in GNOME promotional efforts.

Part of this work, the part I enjoy the most, is modernizing some of this material, redesigning it so that it’s more appealing, more consistent and visually stronger than it is now. This afternoon, I reworked the French version of “Why GNOME?” (« Pourquoi choisir GNOME ? » existing PDF | redesigned PDF)

I used Scribus to produce this new version. It’s pretty nice overall though slow and awkward at times and, unfortunately, not GTK+ software. Regardless, it gets the job done.

Programação Telecine

2004-10-05T14:47:00.000-04:00

I finally did what I had been meaning to do for a while now: redesign the schedule page of Telecine’s 5 movie channels. Telecine, Brazil’s Cinemax if you will, does have a schedule posted on its website but it’s done in Flash, it’s slow and it’s poorly designed. What’s more, it’s not going away anytime soon since they just completed their grand redesign.

My answer to their non-site is quite simple. I wrote one Python script which parses their monthly schedule file into XML—that operation happens once a month—and one PHP script which displays what’s currently on and what’s showing for the next 12 hours.

Check it out; it’s called programação Telecine.

democrats.org vs. gop.com

2004-10-04T17:21:00.000-04:00

Looking at the front pages of democrats.org and gop.com it struck me that the Republicans were using much more of their space attacking Kerry than the Democrats were attacking Bush.

I tried to put this impression in numbers and came up with this: 9% of democrats.org’s front page is dedicated to negative content—attacking the Republican Party or Bush—whereas gop.com has nearly 20% of its content focusing on attacks on Kerry and the Democratic Party.

Here’s how I came up with those numbers. First, I calculated the total area, in pixels, of both pages opened to the same width, on the same browser, using the same font size. Then, I subtracted the area of all links, images, flash animations, etc. containing or linking to negative content. The percentage reflects the relation of all negative areas to the total area.

I defined negative content as anything designed solely to attack a candidate’s record or personality. Comparisons of a candidate’s plan to that of his opponent was not considered negative content. Links to pages mixing negative and positive content—content praising one’s achievements or character—were not considered negative. I used the same criteria for both pages.

My silly calculations notwithstanding, it’s hard to visit gop.com and not be surprised by how much of it is dedicated to John Kerry. At the time I took the screenshots above, there were 4 pictures of him on gop.com vs. one, albeit a big one, of George Bush on democrats.org. His name appeared 36 times on gop.com’s front page, vs. 5 times for Bush’s name on democrats.org.

The GOP’s front page is longer and has, on average, 2.5 times more words or characters than the Democratic Party’s front page. But even taking this fact into account, gop.com is still more Kerry-intensive than democrats.org is Bush-intensive.