work/space

Johannes Kreidler's "Product Placement" (above) a 33-second remix that uses 70,200 samples to create a glitch-heavy masterpiece. (I'm not sure what the criteria are for "masterpiece" in this genre, but Kreidler's clip makes Girl Talk seem like lazy muzak.) Create Digital Music has some background as well as a video of the phone call he made in his attempts to clear copyright for the samples for his work (the licensing agency requires an individual request form to be completed for each sample).

Posted by johndan at 08:01 PM | Permalink

I spent the morning winnowing down my In box, but now Apple Mail tells me I have more than four billion messages in my In box that I need to deal with. Where to start?

As best I can tell, there are actually only around 20 messages, and the status line is an error. But I feel like I now have this enormous, heavy, dark cloud of incoming mail hanging over my head.

Posted by johndan at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Web Zen this week covers typographic zen: the helvetica vs. arial videogame, typographic animations set to Dylan and Zeppelin tunes, Cooper Black: Behind the Typeface (a short documentary on Oz Cooper), and more.

Posted by johndan at 11:44 AM | Permalink

John Curran's Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, & Social Theory Flickr group is interesting browsing. Appears to mostly be clipped from a wide variety of sources (a Far Side cartoon about anthropologists, the much-reproduced Post Modern Toasties, a model of face-work based on Goffman, etc.).

Posted by johndan at 05:39 PM | Permalink

Pencil is an open source (GPL v2) sketching/mockup/prototyping environment that works as a plug-in for Firefox 3. Includes stencils (standard or custom), on-screen text editing, alignments, drop-in import of image and text, and image export for finished sketches (which, when combined with simple imagemaps, would make it a useful tool for generating interactive mockups).

Posted by johndan at 03:34 PM | Permalink

Society in Decline has a great Flickr set on old commercial signage, which might be used as evidence supporting Aaron Draplin's [nsfw] rant on contemporary graphic design

Posted by johndan at 10:23 PM | Permalink

W. Brett Latta at Create Digital Music overviews fifteen web-based resources for learning about sound design: Sections on fundamentals, sound for film, sound for games, and communities/lists.

[via createdigitalmusic.com]

Posted by johndan at 02:53 PM | Permalink

Stephen Malinowski at Cool Tools discusses the benefits of single large displays compared to two smaller displays. Purchasing two smaller displays has long been the economical choice—two 21" LCDs were much cheaper than, say, one 30" LCD. Malinowski notes that the price differential between the two is decreasing; he also notes the benefits of having a single larger display:

I found that once I got used to the idea that most things could be expanded to a size that required no window scrolling, I began to "think big" about a lot of things: my spreadsheets got bigger, my diagrams got bigger - and more unexpectedly: the size of the kind of thing I thought I could handle got bigger; and because I was much less often having to chop things into smaller pieces so that they could fit, things got simpler.

It's a no-brainer that more pixels is usually better than less for knowledge work, but the vertical (usually) gap between dual monitors makes it difficult to use them as a single space. Instead, multiple monitors are separate but tightly coupled spaces.

Here are the rough prices (via CDW.com and Dell.com) for some options:

Apple Cinema HD 20" LCD: $599
Dell EP207WFP 20": $229
Apple Cinema 30" HD: $1,799
Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC 30": $1,199

I'm not sure of the overall quality of the Dell displays above, since those are Dell's lowest-end versions of the displays in each size; the 30" 3008WFP is $1,9999. And as Malinowski notes, there's a fairly large pool of used monitors available at places like eBay to further reduce prices.

[via Cool Tools]

Posted by johndan at 02:44 PM | Permalink

For about six months, shortly after a quick cycle of hard drive upgrades, the keyboard and trackpad on my MacBook Pro have occasionally frozen. Last spring I backed it up and erased the hard drive, took it apart, checked all the connections, and restored everything. No luck. The lockups were getting worse, until last week it would sometimes freeze up through reboots seven or eight times before it'd boot in workable shape. Then I wiped the hard drive and rather than just restore the full drive from backup, I installed a new version of the system and only copied over the Documents folder, then went through the twenty-hour process of resinstalling programs from scratch, on the off-chance that there was a scrozzed prefs file somewhere.

No luck. So yesterday I wiped the hard drive again, reinstalled the OS from the install DVD, and today took out the forty-some tiny screws and re-seated all the connections. So far so good. But if that doesn't work, we're looking at using a hammer.

Posted by johndan at 01:16 AM | Permalink

A Simple Book Repair Manual. If you're like me, you have a lot of books, some of which are (a) not easily replaceable and (b) in various states of disrepair. (If you're actually like me, you have other issues as well, but we won't go into them at this point.)

[via Lifehacker]

Posted by johndan at 02:02 AM | Permalink

Clearleft's Silverback is $49.95 software for the Mac that does screen recording augmented with screen capture for guerilla usability testing. Uses the small Apple remote that came with your Macbook for adding a chapter markers on the fly. There's a thirty-day free trial version available. Features include changing location, size, and transparency of inset video, tracking click locations on screen, and more. (You can also turn off the inset video, which lets Silverback double as a simple app for creating screencasts.)

The program lacks the advanced features you might find in spendier products like Morae—there's no built-in video editing (use iMovie) and no stats tracking, but for quick, on-location work, it's definitely worth $49.95.

Ten percent of profits from registered copies goes to the Save the Gorillas campaign. ("Silverback," "Guerilla usability testing," "Save the Gorillas." Get it?)

Update: Hicksdesign, which created the Silverback icon, posted a series of design sketches showing how the icon evolved from basic concept through hand sketches to final design.

[via Daring Fireball]

Posted by johndan at 05:18 PM | Permalink

Noise Between Stations summarizes (and links to) some research on two practices that separate design experts from novices. Experts tend to problem solve top-down/breadth-first and they reframe difficult problems while novices don't.

Obviously, a novice consciously deciding to switch those two behaviors won't automatically make themselves an expert designer. Both expert practices, for example, probably rely on having a rich repertoire of strategies, skills, and experience. But if nothing else, it suggests things that novices might consciously work toward. (I say all this without having looked at the articles referenced. Hey--breadth first.)

[via Vol. 2: design-management.de]

Posted by johndan at 01:42 PM | Permalink

Do you sit around idly wondering what it would be like if fonts gathered as a group to vote on membership to some weird, UN-style council? Then this is the video for you. Sort of predictable (Arial Narrow is ethnocentric; Ransom is holding Courier as hostage; Old English is, well, you get it) but still funny. If you're a font geek.

[via Typophile]

Posted by johndan at 04:32 PM | Permalink

Michael B. Johnson of Pixar, interviewed by Peter Merholz:

The important take-home point, though, is that Pixar loves their films so much, we make them twice :-).

[...] We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film. “Fail fast,” that’s the mantra. With a team of 10-20 people (director, story artists, editorial staff, production designer and artists, and skeleton production management) you can make, remake, and remake again a movie that once it hits 3D will take an order of magnitude more people to execute. The complexity of the task does not ramp up linearly.

Building things and then taking them apart isn't an error; it's a design strategy. "Measure twice, cut once" is fine when you're sawing a sheet of plywood, but it's a limiting strategy with virtual tools. Find an environment that lets you fail fast.

[via Daring Fireball]

Posted by johndan at 09:49 PM | Permalink

My office on campus yesterday.

Update:: Underdog's immediate comment: Barton Fink.

Posted by johndan at 12:02 PM | Permalink

SurveillanceSaver for OS X and Windows screensaver that pulls images from 400+ networked surveillance cameras around the world. The programmers call it a "haunting live soap opera." Creative Commons licensed.

[via things magazine]

Posted by johndan at 10:35 PM | Permalink

Virginia Heffernan at the NYT takes on the difficult issue of quoting casual web texts in more formal publications like the New York Times.

Consider another example. To show that Web users are curious about human reproduction, I might quote kavya on Yahoo Answers, word for word: “How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?”

But that makes kavya look like an idiot. Readers might miss the sweet earnestness of his question. Maybe he (or she) is 7 or a native speaker of Hungarian. I should cut the kid a typographical break; that’s not an easy question to ask. The cockamamie diction and syntax of Internet English is, possibly, only incidental to his inquiry. A reporter could paraphrase or revise his question — “How is a baby formed?” — lest readers get blinded to the intent of the question by moronizing typos.

But “How is babby formed?” is funny. And who wants to deny readers a chance to laugh and to get the full flavor of Internet-culture wackiness? It’s flat-out lying to pretend that everyone (or anyone) spells well online.

This is something you've run into if you write about the Web much: Do you preserve spelling errors? Do you correct them in brackets? Do you just paraphrase? When and why? It all comes down to (predictably) rhetorical purpose, tempered by maintaining the validity of your data. As Times editor Daniel Okrent says in Heffernan's piece, we've struggled with this issue for a long time in terms of quoting verbal statements (do you spell out accents to give readers the flavor? do you preserve the "and ... uh ... um"?), and there aren't simple answers. (Not a direct quote.)

[via Fimoculous.com]

Posted by johndan at 02:12 PM | Permalink

Vijay's O'Reilly Ignite presentation covers how to do well in a job interview for a technical position. They're very basic and a little clumsy, but job interviews are generally pretty basic, a little clumsy, and run by people who don't really know or think a lot about interviewing processes, so maybe they work. If nothing else, they might help interviewees avoid hyperventilating during interviews (which, with technical types, seems to be the frequent job interview strategy). (As an aside, most of the techniques reminded me of strategies covered by the car salesman in Palahniuk's Rant.)

There are a dozen things that I would have changed in the presentation and web page—ranging from lack of concrete, visual examples to the use of Courier—but then again, I'm not the audience for this.

[via Lifehacker]

Posted by johndan at 11:09 AM | Permalink

Check this xkcd on posturing and grad student susceptibility by discipline. Written (obviously) from a science/engineering perspective, but, yeah, I see the point (and have been that grad student). (And, yeah, I've way exceeded xkcd's estimate.)

[via Benny]

Posted by johndan at 12:40 AM | Permalink

YouTube (obviously) has the trailer for Making Faces, a documentary on typographer Joe Rimmer.

[via P22]

Posted by johndan at 04:16 PM | Permalink

The Telegraph reprints some of Kubrick's letters.

DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, 1964 (with Peter Sellers as Dr Strangelove)

In pre-production, and casting matters arise, but Kubrick ever has his eye on the money.

November 19, 1962

To James Harris, producer

Thanks very much for the Gene Kelly matter. I think he’ll be a fabulous off-beat choice if we can work things out with him. Please try to create the impression in his mind that we’re very tight on money (we are).

They also have an interview with Christiane Kubrick (+ some video) about the controversy surrounding the release of A Clockwork Orange that's worth a look.

[via Daring Fireball]

Posted by johndan at 03:29 AM | Permalink

Wikipedia has a Lamest Edit Wars page.

Back in the good old days, people would settle this sort of thing with a gunfight; now they do it by toying with an encyclopedia. Truly, the Wikipedia outlook has changed the way things get done. It has changed them from actually getting done to never getting done. On the other hand, nobody gets shot.

[via Fimoculous.com]

Posted by johndan at 03:48 PM | Permalink

Time-lapse video of Matt Willey laying out an article for Royal Academy magazine, trying out different options as he goes. This would be even better if (a) it had a voiceover explaining Willey's decision processes and (b), as Kottke says, if it were on Vimeo or some other site that had better video ("... sometimes YouTube is like watching a UHF station from 200 miles away with the rabbit ears positioned just so").

Still, cool.

[via kottke.org]

Posted by johndan at 02:14 AM | Permalink

The Man in Blue asked several type designers to send him samples of their own handwriting. Above is a sample from Nikola Djurek, along with two of his fonts.

[via Drawn!]

Posted by johndan at 12:22 AM | Permalink

Ira Glass offers earnest advice (Ira Glass is nothing if not earnest) on the painfully slow transition from beginner to expert. (Glass is obviously talking about radio, but this is a process you'll see in nearly any field.)

[via 43 Folders]

Posted by johndan at 12:11 PM | Permalink

Channel 4 has a 65-second tracking shot through a reconstruction of the set of The Shining.

Channel 4 Creative Services, the broadcaster's in-house creative resource, cast people who resembled Kubrick's own crew including his script lady, assistant director and director of production, John Alcott, who also worked on films including 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange with the director.

Look-a-likes were also found for Duvall, Danny Lloyd, who played Danny Torrance, and the twin girls who appear fleetingly in the film.

[via Daring Fireball]

Posted by johndan at 10:49 PM | Permalink

CNET summarizes and links to a WSJ report [sub req'd] on Allied Security Trust, a consortium that includes Cisco, Verizon, HP, and more, which is buying patents as a strategy to protect their own patents. Allied claims they're doing this as a strategy to protect against patent trolls [wikipedia], who themselves purchase patents in order to launch legal proceedings against companies they claim are infringing on their (purchased) patents.

Makes your head sort of hurt, doesn't it? On the order of the Crimson Permanent Assurance?

[via CNET News.com]

Posted by johndan at 01:55 AM | Permalink

Douglas Coupland at Granta on Visual Thinking.

Here’s a personal anecdote. Someone recently asked me what the most beautiful word I know is. I thought about it and the answer came quickly: my father used to have a floatplane with those call letters on the tailfin, ZRF — Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. The way these words look on paper is gorgeous; the images they conjure are fleeting, rich, colourful and unexpected. To savour the look of Zulu Romeo Foxtrot on a page is almost the sound of one hand clapping. The letter forms mean something beyond themselves, but the meaning is not empirical — and it’s pretty hard for me to imagine discussing this at a literary festival. Doug, there’s no verb.

Here’s another question I was recently asked: when I see words in my mind, what font are they in? The answer: Helvetica. What font do you think in? It’s a strange question, but you know what I’m getting at: how do you see actual words in your head as you think? Or do you see words at all? Is it a voice in your head? Do you see subtitles?

[via Daring Fireball]

Posted by johndan at 02:22 AM | Permalink

Another one in the "I haven't tried this yet, but I plan to" category: MacLife reports that the buzz you may sometimes hear in your external speakers when they're too near (i.e., three or four feet) from your GSM cellphone can be tamed by attaching a small hunk of iron to your speaker cables. Many USB cables have a small, cylindrical ferrite bead (which acts as a passive damper on the cable) on them to prevent frequency noise in the cables. Apparently you can either cannibalize the beads from old USB cables or purchase them directly to attach to your own speaker cables.

I'm hoping that this trick can also be adapted to recording equipment, since that GSM buzz is also picked up by either the mic cables or the speaker cables and effectively trashes a recording.

Update: Or, there's the Red Bull iPhone Anti-Radio Interference Shield.

[via Lifehacker]

Posted by johndan at 03:23 PM | Permalink

Deeplinking has paper sketches of early plans for sites and applications, including Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter (above), and more.

[via boing boing]

Posted by johndan at 01:20 PM | Permalink

Google has long been used as a method for gauging public opinion (I use it frequently decide on how to spell a word—the variant with the most hits wins). A trial lawyer in Florida is now using Google search data to defend a client against obscenity by defining community standards based on queries entered into Google by users in the defendent's community. As the New York Times reports,

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

This is why lawyers make the big bucks.

Posted by johndan at 12:45 AM | Permalink

I haven't tried it out yet, but WorldCat has released CiteMe, a Facebook app for generating bibliographic citations in MLA, APA, Chicago, and other styles. (Probably only useful for on-the-fly citations of one or two items; the main WorldCat site supports larger projects.

[via metafilter.com]

Posted by johndan at 10:38 PM | Permalink

If you've been dealing with the hassle of opening Microsoft Office 2007 (Windows) or 2008 (Mac) in your older, Mac 2004 version of Office, Microsoft has finally released the free converters you need to open those files.

As c|net points out, the side effect of Microsoft dragging their feet on this likely relates to the fact that they'd rather you upgraded to a new version of Office rather than continue to use your old one. I upgraded last year primarily so I could stop emailing people to ask them to re-save their documents in a compatible format, but I can't say there's any other feature of Office 2008 that I thought was worth upgrading for. (I've started working as much as possible in Pages, InDesign, or Dreamweaver, then sending people PDFs or URLs unless they need to edit rather than just read/comment, in which case I have to resort to Office. Luckily, that's not a common occurrence since my inability to play well with others means I don't collaborate very often.)

[via CNET News.com]

Posted by johndan at 04:17 PM | Permalink

The ad industry weblog Dear Jane Sample tracks a Typical Friday in Brands of one consumer (herself), displayed as logos over time. What's striking about this (like the 24-hour media diaries I sometimes ask mass media students to keep) is not how large the diaries are—and they are large—but the fact that these diaries are extremely incomplete in most cases—it'd be nearly impossible to actually get through a productive day while still tracking all of the mass media or branded products one interacts with. (The comments to the original post include links to some followup timelines by readers.)

[via things magazine]

Posted by johndan at 10:45 PM | Permalink

Don't confuse legibility with communication.

—David Carson in Helvetica

Posted by johndan at 08:10 PM | Permalink

Robert Cox at the Media Bloggers Association has some interesting backstory on the whole Associated Press/Drudge Retort issue. Which is apparently a lot complicated than either the AP or the Drudge Retort (or anyone else) have portrayed it so far.

So, Drudge Retort got on AP's radar due to the posting of entire articles with exact headlines which all parties agreed constituted copyright violations two months BEFORE the most recent spate of DMCA Take Down Notices. Technically, Drudge Retort got onto AP's radar because those posts were flagged by software used by AP called Attributor. This is a data mining spider similar to the bots and web indexers used by search engines; content companies can use it to track the use of their content on the web. It is very important that people understand this because it makes clear that the AP is not on some wild rampage through the blogosphere, lawyering up to to go after every blogger who quotes an AP story in any way. Yet that is how this story has been portrayed including by a lot of people who should know better but are having too much fun bashing AP.

[via http://www.thepomoblog.com]

Posted by johndan at 06:13 PM | Permalink

Just Creative Design has a nice, short overview of design basics: color, line, shape, scale/size, space, etc. One paragraph summaries and simple examples for each concept plus links to additional material.

[via etc.]

Posted by johndan at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

BBC News has a story on writers who still prefer typewriters. Most are old-school writers, like Frederick Forsyth:

There was the steel-cased portable he used as a foreign correspondent in the 1960s. "It had a crease across the lid which was done by a bullet in Biafra. It just kept tapping away. It didn't need power, it didn't need batteries, it didn't need recharging. One ribbon went back and forward and back until it was a rag, almost, and out came the dispatches."

I'm old enough to have spent the first part of my college career on a typewriter (at the same time I was learning computer programming, ironically), and I can honestly say that I still occasionally miss the typewriter. The simplicity is useful and, as several people in the article (and the comments) point out, the cognitive process differs because of the amount of commitment required. (Brother still apparently sells more than 12,000 typewriters annually in the UK.)

[via metafilter.com]

Posted by johndan at 10:43 AM | Permalink

From a ComputerWorld article discussing Apple's plans to make v 2.0 of iPhone conform to corporate IT needs:

"I have nothing against iPhone. It's great," says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. "But we're a BlackBerry shop, and I don't think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that's all."

Which sort of says it all. (To be fair, other IT analysts quoted in the article are a little more user oriented.)

[via Daring Fireball]

Posted by johndan at 07:56 AM | Permalink

Hey, thanks. This was after an initial round with a registration form on the same site that told me that my registration info--for setting up a new, free account to view articles on the site--was incorrect because I hadn't entered a valid email address. There was nothing on the form requesting an email address. The phrase "email address" didn't even appear on the form. So I took a wild guess and went back and entered an email address in the field simply titled "user name". Then I got the error message above. Then I gave up.

Posted by johndan at 03:50 PM | Permalink

Phillip Toledano's images of bankrupt offices.

[via Boing Boing]

Posted by johndan at 01:36 PM | Permalink

Dan Saffer points to a slightly old but still very useful-looking paper about embodied interaction design and re-thinking the current, relatively thin approach to how people interact with computers (and other work technologies/environments): "How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design" [pdf]. Here's a summary from the article's introduction:

This paper presents five themes that we believe are particularly salient for designing and evaluating interactive systems. The first, thinking through doing, describes how thought (mind) and action (body) are deeply integrated and how they co-produce learning and reasoning. The second, performance, describes the rich actions our bodies are capable of, and how physical action can be both faster and more nuanced than symbolic cognition. The first two themes primarily address individual corporeality; the next two are primarily concerned with the social affordances. Visibility describes the role of artifacts in collaboration and cooperation. Risk explores how the uncertainty and risk of physical co-presence shapes interpersonal and human-computer interactions. The final theme, thickness of practice, suggests that because the pursuit of digital verisimilitude is more difficult than it might seem, embodied interaction is a more prudent path.

[via O Danny Boy]

Posted by johndan at 02:37 PM | Permalink

Christies is auctioning the first-ever telephone book: The Telephone Directory, Vol. 1, No. 1, for New Haven, Connecticut, November 1878.

The instructions provided in the Directory for correct use of the telephone, the first such directions ever published, include much sound advice: "Never take the Telephone off the hook unless you wish to use it....Should you wish to speak to another subscriber... you should...commence the conversation by saying 'Hulloa!' When you are done talking, say 'That is all!', and the person spoken to should say 'O.K.' ... While talking, always speak slow and distinct, and let the telephone rest lightly against your upper lip, leaving the lower lip and the jaw free..." The push button phone bore slightly different requirements: "After speaking, transfer the telephone from the mount to the ear very promptly ... When replying to a communication from another, do not speak too promptly ... Much trouble ensues from both parties speaking at the same time.... No subscriber will be allowed to use the wire for more than three minutes at a time, or more than twice in an hour, without first obtaining permission from the main office... Any person using profane or otherwise improper langauge, should be reported at this office immediately." (pp. 4-5).

[via Gizmodo]

Posted by johndan at 02:04 PM | Permalink

Mark Bernstein provides a short, illuminating little account of why symbolic-analytic work relies heavily on (a) knowing your work environment, (b) being able to hack together tools on the fly, and (c) situating both of those into a broader rhetorical purpose. Here's one part, while he's trying to set up a method for assigning reviewers to proposals for WikiSym 2008:

OK. I could scrap the screen, parse it in ruby, dump the result to xml, and get the xml into Tinderbox. But that's a bother.

Instead, I copied the text from Safari to BBEdit, quickly turned it into a tab-delimited file, and pasted it into Numbers. In Numbers, I rearranged the columns so the first column was the title of the paper. Then, I copied the table from Numbers and pasted in Tinderbox, Voila!

• I get a note for each paper
• The note title is the paper title
• I also get new user attributes, already populated, that tell me
  • the paper's identification number
  • its author's name
  • its length in pages

So far, so good! I made new new prototype Paper, and assigned all the papers to use this prototype.

Next, I wanted to distinguish short papers. I added a rule to the prototype:

Rule: if($pages<6){BorderColor=white;} else {BorderColor=black}

Now, short papers have white borders.

The promise of computers was always that they made things easy. And they do, but not always the way a banner ad or 30-second commercial might suggest. Would it be easier to have simply done this work in Excel (or Numbers)? Only if you defined "easier" so that it reduced the problem space to the point that it left out important variables. So in cases like this (as with much symbolic-analytic work), programs like Tinderbox (and the slew of other programs present in Bernstein's workspace) make things "easier" by making them possible at all. So on one hand, doing the things that Bernstein is doing here look amazingly complex to someone without Bernstein's particular set of expertises. But gaining those types of expertise is absolutely crucial for someone who works with data in complex rhetorical contexts. It's not that what Bernstein describes is easy—it's just easier than the other available options for the same problem space.

[via Mark Bernstein]

Posted by johndan at 11:29 PM | Permalink

Pasta&Vinegar compiles several key resources (w/images) on the evolution of game controllers. Above is a snip from Sock Master's Controller Family Tree.

[via Pasta&Vinegar]

Posted by johndan at 11:09 AM | Permalink

Although usually this topic is covered as a harbinger of the end of civilization, it's nice to see Justin Reich's thoughts at the Christian Science Monitor on how students using MySpace, IM, and weblogs is potentially a very good thing for improving communication skills:

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption.

Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education. As educators, we face two choices. We can scorn youth for their emoticons (J), condemn their abbreviations (Th. Jefferson would have disapproved), and lament the time students spend writing in ways adults do not understand. Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

[via Christian Science Monitor | Commentary]

Posted by johndan at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

COLORlovers posts a nice history of the color wheel. Above is Gautier's attempt to illustrate gaps in Newton's Optiks (w/Newton's band of color in the center).

Posted by johndan at 01:53 AM | Permalink