According to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.”
I am so totally going to learn these words, just so that the next time I’m at a dinner party and some pretentious kid goes off I’ll be able to drown him in incomprehensible jargon. Or so that I can look smarter to my clients.
I love this quote:
“You can also create artificial scarcity to keep prices high ... markets, like networks, interpret this kind of interference as damage, and usually find a route around it.”
Trying to curb sharing music that I love is creating artifical scarcity. I interpret that as damage and try to route around it.
The AP has made a lot of noise recently about how “news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web (sic) sites without permission”. What any webmaster knows is that a simple robots.txt file in the root directory will eliminate all “article stealing” by search engines.
So, how does the AP handle this? Based on AP.org, all their stories seem to be hosted on “hosted.ap.org”.
Take a look at their robots.txt file.
I got inspired by an article at English Russia, and here are the results:
I broke a bunch of spaghetti in three equal lengths. Yes, it does get cooked in the interior of the hotdog. Some of the spaghetti was initially not covered by the boiling water, but it was simple to flip them over. Overall, it was very easy to make and tasted great.
See the original article for some crazy serving suggestions (including eyes)!
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”—Upton Sinclair
My new iMac has a one terabyte hard drive (1024 gigabytes). When I started doing graphic design in 1995, my state-of-the-art Mac had 500 megabytes of hard-drive space. Everyone was like, “Dawwwg… nobody needs that kind of power, you’re crazy, dude!”
That’s a difference of about 2000x, but that’s not important now.
I hear about petabytes from time to time (1024 terabytes). I may have heard of an exabyte or two, but I thought that was it.
There is something bigger: a zettabyte (1024 exabytes) and a yottabyte (1,048,576 exabytes).
To give you an idea of how much that is (as if that were possible), a yottabyte is 8 bits of information multiplied by a number best described as 1 followed by 24 zeros plus some dust. The approximate number of stars in the universe is 10^20, so we could give each star a nice long name, take a snapshot of it, and store all that on our 1-yottabyte hard drive.
In “researching” this article, I discovered an astounding fact. The number of possible chess games (played according to the rules) is 10^120. This is enormously greater than the number of atoms in the universe, which has been estimated at around 10^80, give or take five or six.
Here is another astounding fact: in French, they don’t use bytes because byte rhymes with a naughty word (think octopussy but for a guy). Insteady they use octets, which are pronounced octay (even if they’re plural).
(I’m American, but I’ve lived in France for the last nine years and speak fluent French.)
I just came across this book, written by a Canadian author. Michel Brûlé really doesn’t like England or the United States. I particularly enjoyed his blurb because I grew up in Amherst.
The title, Anglaid, is a combination of the French words for English (anglais) and ugly (laid). A rough equivalent would be Engly or Uglish.
Here is a translation of the author’s blurb, without exageration:
Like millions, I used to feel the incredible power of attraction of English. With time, I realized that the genius of the language, its English-American culture and its incredible attraction always resulted in a downward flattening. Beyond a decadent civilization characterized by a retarded and omnipresent cinema, by superficial music (also omnipresent), I came to understand that there was something still worse attached to this language and this culture: intolerance. This intransigeance has been manifested for centuries by incessant wars, but also by unparalleled racism: consider all those slogans like those of the Ku Klux Klan: “White Power”, “Speak White” or “The only good indian is a dead indian” (the guiding principle in the extermination of 40 million native Americans). If the Germans are ashamed of their Nazi past, the English have glorified Amherst, who first used biological warfare, Monckton, to whom we owe the first ethnic cleansing, and Kitchener, who invented concentration camps.
To crown all this, English-speakers are extremely narcissitic and ethnocentric: they only watch their own films, only read their own books, only listen to their own music, and almost always eat only their own grub—I daren’t call it food. The most sceptical will say that the French, for example, were the same, when France more or less controled the world. That is false: the French, in spite of their undeniable arrogance, were very open to the world. It is not an exageration to affirm that English-speakers are nothing less than the most ethnocentric people in the history of humanity.
I have made a revolutionary observation that could explain the superiority complex of English-speakers. Could it be possible that this complex is inherent in the language itself? I think so. In fact, the English language is a unique linguistic case. In English, “I” is written in upper case, and there is only one way to designate the other. When he speaks respectifully to another, a French speaker, Portugese speaker or German speaker puts him on a pedestal, but the English speaker, with his overdeveloped “I”, puts himself on the pedestal. This relation between the all-powerful “I” and the you, isn’t it one of subordination, of subjection? English is a language irremediably sworn to imperialism, and the negative leadership of English-American culture pushes the entire world into decadence and war. Continuing to push English as the universal language can only lead us to a dead end. It’s time to move on.
I’ve been a professional graphic designer for almost twenty years. I’ve been feeling more and more lately that there is something offputting about most of what we consider to be good design.
As I mentioned in my post on comfy websites, When I see stuff that’s really great, top-notch design, my reaction is almost always “that’s not for me.”
Admittedly, this may say more about me than about the design.
But what I’m getting at is that good design (real good design, not pretty design) should be functional and inclusive. Too often, design by the best visual designers is shockingly well done but subtly pushes away the user/client/visitor. You feel like you’ve wandered into the opera by mistake, and you’re underdressed.
I guess the word would be pretentious, but I’m looking for something a little less negative… counter-inclusive. Often what we consider to be good design runs against the weaving of relationships with people.
For me, a design is good when it functions well mechanically and above all encourages the audience to jump in the arena and to splash some mud around.
My guess is that this is why the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon is so popular… people now feel like they can participate in the internet. They feel invited.
I live in two different apartments. One is a bit beat, a vacation place with older furniture, and the other is a classy city pad.
I realized recently that I felt much more chez moi in the vacation apartment, but I couldn’t understand why. I was largely responsible for decorating my main apartment, and I really like the furniture we chose.
Finally I concluded that some furniture is just more inviting than other furniture. If you have a clean, contemporary white sofa, it may look great while at the same time saying “be careful how you sit on me, don’t get me dirty”.
The vacation apartment feels like a place where I can just bang around without being careful; the furniture (and the rooms themselves) invite active participation. My city apartment, while much more beautiful, is a place where I tread lightly, where I can’t just flop down and hang out.
This brings me to a point that I will elaborate on in a future post: in designing a web site (and there are exceptions), it’s important to consider what feels inviting, what makes users want to bang around and try things out. It’s all to easy for us designers to fall into the trap of elegance and glittering perfection while subtly excluding the user.
The next time I’m designing a site, I’ll be looking for ways to make it more like my vacation place, where you come in and instantly feel at home.
I just read this article about circumcision. I am not circumcised.
If you’re considering circumcision for your infant, spend a moment imagining how sensitive your tongue would be after 20 years if you kept it in your pocket.
My guess is that eating would be a lot less fun.
I have been learning to use the Pylons web framework, based on the Python programming language. I have no experience in either.
To do this, I have followed several tutorials on the subject. They are like cookie recipes, and make the setup process look simple.
However, though meant for beginners, they do require background knowledge.
Take the recipe for Toll House Cookies. Nowhere does it tell you to remove the eggshells before adding the eggs.
My Python cookies are full of eggshells (sigh).
When you are with people you trust, blurt.
It’s better to express everything you think, whether it be stupid, sexist, or otherwise offensive.
If your friends are worth their salt, they’ll tell you, and you’ll get slapped.
Otherwise, you’ll stay screwed up all your life.
I just listened to a podcast about passive racism. Apparently, more than 70% of white people are not overtly racist. They are, however, significantly more likely to believe that a white candidate is better qualified than a black candidate for any given job.
I say get it out there so we can be confronted and heal.
Whenever you see primitive people on TV or in movies, they’re ugly. I’m not talking about real tribes, but about depictions of neanderthal and cro-magnon men and women.
They’re dirty and unkempt, have lumpy faces and make ugly sounds, but why should they be ugly? Animals are beautiful—there are very few ugly primates.
The tribes that could be considered the most primitive may seem bizarre to us, but they’re never dirty or unkempt.
Why this insistance on the fact that primitive man was dirty? In all likelhood, he was magnificent—clean, well-groomed, and in great shape.
In this post-Baconian world, perhaps we seek to reassure ourselves that all this progress is really worth something.
This is the first installement of a series about amazing things that no longer exist. Like dinosaurs, these phenomena were once breathtakingly cool but are now gone.
During World War I, before airplanes played an important role in warfare, warships were camouflaged in a mind-blowingly colorful style.
We think of camouflage as a way to hide. However, during WWI, the goal of the camouflage was to make it impossible to clearly see the outlines of a ship. The result was that enemy gunners were unable to effectively estimate size, direction and speed.
The techniques used resemble modern art from the 1950’s, and these ships were gorgeous monuments of splashy color.
After the war the ships were repainted. Few photos remain of dazzle camouflage (almost none in color).