Last night my cousin and I were stuck in Grand Central Station waiting for our 1:08 AM train to leave. To pass the time we wandered around and noticed two people standing in opposite corners of the room pictured here, which is right next to the Grand Central Station oyster bar.

They were facing the corners as if they were being punished, and were whispering to the wall. I guessed that perhaps the acoustics of the room allowed them to hear each other, although I sort of suspected we were being had.

Being one who is always up for a fun experiment, my cousin and I put ourselves in the same place as the two we had seen and began talking to the wall.

I was absolutely astonished. You can hear even a soft spoken person as if they are right beside you. If you are ever in Grand Central and have five minutes, I highly recommend this. We were lucky that almost all of Grand Central is empty at 1 AM, but I would be curious to find out if it works during normal hours.

I’m pretty certain that this has to do with the vaulted ceiling and stone materials in the room, reflecting the sound waves back into the opposite corner, but if anyone has a more technical explanation, do post.

Image: Wikipedia

That’s a line from a speech famed CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow gave in 1958, and which I just heard at the end of the sort-of recent movie, Good Night and Good Luck. He was hypothesizing a future in which television might do more than entertain, in which the media would inform for information’s sake, without sweetening the news with mere titilation and irrelevant gossip. He followed with a line that, I think, goes a long way towards defining what our School of Information is and, indeed what all iSchools might be:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.

That aside, all iSchoolers should see this movie! Seriously, it’s like a genre unto itself: infonoir. It’s all smoke, words, and shadow. Brilliant!

Also, anyone from other iSchools out there? We should be talking!

As I was walking my dad through the process of buying music online and loading it onto his iPod, it occurred to me that one problem facing UI designers must be dealing with the expectation that the UI will suck. I feel like my parents sit down at a computer to accomplish a new task assuming it will be hard. When I say something like, “Ok, now move the files onto your iPod,” they assume they’re going to have to hunt down the right menu and find some command like “Move songs…”, or jump through some inane sequence of hoops they didn’t even know existed, or utter some cryptic incantation hidden deep within the online documentation, when in fact, all they had to do was drag the music files to the big icon of the iPod. In a lot of arenas, UI metaphors are far more literal these days than they have been in the past, but if people don’t expect things to be obvious, the things won’t be obvious.

Has anyone else observed this? Those of you who have experience in UI design, do UI designers consider this? If so, how do they deal with it?

Here is an example of scary bad UI design, care of Mangosquasher:

link to project
via codinghorror

now i feel horrible for laughing so hard and so often at this.

what’s more, i considered buying tickets to the godfather of soul’s show at bimbo’s in san francisco.

who’s next? abe vigoda?

do an inordinate number of people die around Christmas?

what qualifies a celebrity’s death (whether it has happened or not) as fodder for a comedy sketch?

can you define celebrity as “someone whose death will be written about outside the standard obituaries”?

if you thought santa was scary, with his “what do you want this year?”, here comes the New Year: a whole interrogation of possibility. enjoy.

A few months ago, visiting scholar Sonja and I were talking about undesirable nicknames. I told her about a college friend we dubbed “Schmutzee.” Her eyes lit up as she told me about Schmutzli, the “goon” who does the dirty work alongside the Swiss Santa, Samichlaus. Schmutzli literally means “the little dirty one,” and his role traditionally includes beatings and kidnappings. In some cases, parents warned, he would take bad children into the woods and devour them. I did some more digging into this and in Europe there seems to a diverse array of Santa henchmen. However, back here in America, our Santa sometimes hands out coal, but he’s generally a jolly dude. We didn’t really have a Christmas goon until Dr. Seuss introduced The Grinch in 1957.

And as the years have worn on, the violent stories about holiday goons has tamed a bit. Schmutzli has laid off the beatings and the cannibalism. Austrian Krampusumzüges (the runnings of the goon Krampusse) used to feature violent acts with chains, but now provide reason for kids to smile.

What’s shifted in western culture? We used to provide horrifying stories for kids, but now things seem to be warm, fuzzy and edifying? At worst, they’re just dubious and weird. What gives?

If you read the headlines presented to us every day, it’s hard not to feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket:

• the war raging in iraq.
• the global war on terror.
• violent fundamentalism on the rise.
• the increasing divide between rich and poor.
• the mass retirement of the baby boomers.
• birds givin’ us the flu.
• limited and fragile natural resources.
• unchecked human wastefulness.
• genocide in darfur.
• et freaking cetera.

(photo by Flickr user Alicat3)

in the warm spirit of the winter holidays, i would like to bring tidings of good cheer. That glass is more than half-full, my friends. And Egg Nog is delicious. OK so maybe Egg Nog should be listed alongside the other reasons to hate the world… but still!

First, for your ears… EVERYBODY LOVES BEATLES COVERS!!!!
English pop band Gomez covers “Getting Better” by the Beatles:

Second, for that slimy thingy between your ears (brain?), an except from William Bernstein’s book, The Birth of Plenty.

It’s all too tempting to lament the state of the world, particularly when you focus on the melodramas of mankind—violent conflicts, large-scale malfeasance and failure, and the latest installments in the age-old racial and religious hatreds that permeate the human story.

(optimism below the fold!)
Continue reading ‘you’ve got to admit, it’s getting better…’

Attention, filers and Boblings: “Order can be profane and life-diminishing.” So sayeth Rabbi Irwin Kula as quoted in a recent NYTimes article on the benefits of messiness. From the article,

Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.

Granted the article concerns atoms more than bits, but pilers are pilers.

Also, example of poor stemming in search (I think): searching for “messy” on Flickr returns this picture of Messier Object 31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Death to Porter!

I’ve been watching a lot of TV since the break and one thing thats been obvious is enormous number of gift card commercials. As internet and other personalized media get better at delivering commercials that are relevant to the user, mass media like TV are left with advertising a more generic good like a gift card or a store-brand. The other converging factor I believe is the enormous amount of research that needs to go into buying a gift. The amount of effort raises exponentially with the increasing range and variety of products (along with reviews, websites and deals, in some cases). So its a lot easier to give a gift card than trying to sift through stuff. The result, we almost have a gift-card-commercial-long-tail on mainstream media. I am sure 2006 will have a even larger spike and thats my two cents.

Apparently reading Shakespeare and other classics activates different parts of the brain than other kinds of literature. A colaboration between neuroscientists and humanities researchers at the University of Liverpool has found that the use of a functional shift, when a word takes on a new syntactic role, incites the brain in interesting ways. From the press release,

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre, (MARIARC), explains: “The effect on the brain is a bit like a magic trick; we know what the trick means but not how it happened. Instead of being confused by this in a negative sense, the brain is positively excited. The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak. The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word.”

Sadly, there’s never any mention of a publication in a peer reviewed journal, or of the kind of controls run, or what exactly they mean by “positive brain activity,” but it would be interesting if certain authors or certain styles induce different responses that can be measured by FMRI. Of course, this Telegraph article tries to spin it as a reason children should be reading more Shakespeare, even though I imagine this kind of linguistic technique could be found in all sorts of different kinds of literature. The kind of interpretive thinking this requires is also something people probably do when they enter a new digital environment with its own lingo, like a new game or bboard. Kids should read more Shakespeare, of course, just maybe not because of this.

Via The Affected Provincial’s Almanack