SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers — trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others.Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
“You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!” proclaims Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (and one of the other speakers at Future Tense). He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do. Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense. Hence the Hieroglyph project, an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.
Santa Fe complexity theorist Geoffrey West has done some fascinating recent work that shows that cities actually get more creative and productive as they get larger (they also get more energy efficient and greener). West calls this phenomenon the super-linear behavior of cities. This is in contrast to corporations that get less creative and productive as they scale: sub-linear behavior. The long-term result is that cities tend to be very long-lived (possibly immortal, since many of the most ancient cities are still around), while corporations generally are mortal.
The locus of the infantilist aesthetic seemed to be Steve Jobs himself, if his pronouncements at keynote presentations were an accurate representation. The default book in iBooks? Winnie the Pooh. The trailers he used to demonstrate the video capabilities of the device? Pixar movies. The music choices? Resolutely mainstream, conservative and sentimental. At his recent memorial service on the Apple campus, Coldplay and Norah Jones played. Can you imagine these artists playing at a Dieter Rams memorial?Of course Apple products need to appeal to the mainstream, no matter how much the company pretends that they are somehow different from the competition, so the use of mainstream popular culture is understandable. My theory is that this is much more than a carefully considered marketing strategy though. The addiction to skeumorphism seems to say that it’s a deeply held aesthetic position.
My question is: why does this approach not extend to the devices themselves? Why not make a wooden case for the iMac, like those hideous Sony TVs from my childhood? Or why not a case that makes the computer look like a typewriter? And why, when we have these beautiful, clean, efficient devices, do we put up with this horrific, dishonest and childish crap?
Apple’s aesthetic dichotomy | Made by Many
Via Gruber. Rather overstated, but in essence right. The difference in core design aesthetic between (all of) Apple’s hardware and (much of) its software is, for me, extremely discordant. My chief reason for not switching from Google’s cloud services to Apple’s iCloud is that I couldn’t bear to look daily at iCal and Address Book (either the desktop apps or the web versions). I’m genuinely afraid that they’ll extend this tackiness to Mail or Safari or even the Finder.
If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would come to prefer Google Calendar to iCal for aesthetic reasons I wouldn’t have believed you, but it’s true. Google’s software products are getting better looking; Apple’s are getting worse.
Ras Prince Monolulu was born this day in 1881. Here he is at The Derby, Epsom, 1923.
Why is mass online collaboration useful in solving mathematical problems? Part of the answer is that even the best mathematicians can learn a great deal from people with complementary knowledge, and be stimulated to consider ideas in directions they wouldn’t have considered on their own. Online tools create a shared space where this can happen, a short-term collective working memory where ideas can be rapidly improved by many minds. These tools enable us to scale up creative conversation, so connections that would ordinarily require fortuitous serendipity instead happen as a matter of course. This speeds up the problem-solving process, and expands the range of problems that can be solved by the human mind.
Over the past several years, our quest to extract meaning from information has taken us more and more towards the realm of visual storytelling — we’ve used data visualization to reveal hidden patterns about the world, employed animation in engaging kids with important issues, and let infographics distill human emotion. In fact, our very brains are wired for the visual over the textual by way of the pictorial superiority effect.
Popova makes an error here that I’ve seen a number of other people make recently: she conflates the visual with the pictorial or imagistic. You can’t contrast the textual with the visual because text is visual.
Moreover, what she calls the “pictorial superiority effect” is actually, as you’ll discover if you follow her links, the “pictorial attraction effect.” We like pictures, our eyes are drawn to them. But our trust in the validity and accuracy of images is often misplaced, as Edward Tufte has been trying to teach us. Tufte has also tried to teach us that serious problems can arise when we try to deploy text in media (like PowerPoint) designed for images: see this reflection and the comments thereon.
Another question left unasked by Popova and the sources she cites is this: what role does the auditory play in aiding our understanding when images are accompanied by sound, whether music or speech?
Pictures are often awesome; sometimes one is worth a thousand words. But pictures can also be ugly, misleading, manipulative, etc. — just like text! Just like the spoken word! Just like music! These attempts to see one enormous category of information presentation as intrinsically superior to another are worse than useless. We need finer-toothed combs.
I also told her I thought it was a gift to be forced to choose your priorities, because there is no way in hell you can do everything. When teaching I saw what over-commitment did to the kids, and it wasn’t good. So, whether you just realize you’ve slowed down or you have Fight-Club-like epiphany in oncoming traffic or you find out suddenly find out that you’re going to die, the choice-making will be foisted on you. Yes, even you, numerous and belligerent Gen Y, eventually, and you’ll find out it’s not as easy as you think.We’re tired, but still hustling; Austin is a haven for Gen-Xers figuring out what they really care about, which I guess is why I ended up here. Everybody has a side hustle, and that’s the beauty of this town, but the real question is how long you can keep up five different side hustles while dealing with hours and hours of real life obligations. Something’s gotta give, eventually. Until it does, we’ll keep on keepin’ on. But we’ll be singing a new anthem, which will probably be “I’m So Tired.”
We’re not the only church called Mars Hill, and occasionally there arises confusion between us and other churches that share the “Mars Hill” name, particularly as we now have our churches in four states. This was the case recently when one of our members called us to find out if we had planted Mars Hill churches in the Sacramento, California area. We had not, but when we went to these churches’ websites, it was obvious to us how people could be confused. Each of these three connected churches in the Sacramento region—planted in 2006, 2007, and 2010—bore the “Mars Hill” name and their logo was substantially similar to the logo we’ve used since 1996.When cases like this arise in the business world, it’s customary for a law office to send a notice asking the other organization to adjust their branding to differentiate it. This is commonly referred to as a cease and desist letter. On September 27, 2011, our legal counsel sent such a letter to these three Mars Hill churches requesting that they change their logo and name. In hindsight, we realize now that the way we went about raising our concerns, while acceptable in the business world, is not the way we should deal with fellow Christians. On Friday we spoke with the pastor of Mars Hill in Sacramento to apologize for the way we went about this. We had a very productive conversation and look forward to continuing that conversation in the days and weeks ahead.
Clarification on some rumors that have been on some blogs | The Mars Hill Blog
Good for them for apologizing and taking a different tack. But what dos it tell us about the state of contemporary megachurch Christianity that a church would (a) be so obsessed with owning its brand and (b) would think, even for a moment, that the first step one should take in dealing with apparent “brand infringement” is to call in the legal team to write a cease-and-desist letter?
Again: good for them for apologizing. It was the right thing to do. But the next step should be to ask themselves, “How did our church culture get so thoroughly captured by the standard practices of the American business world that we thought a cease-and-desist letter was a good idea?” — and then to spend a good deal of time and energy trying to come up with an answer.
I remember sitting in his back yard in his garden one day, and he started talking about God. He said, ‘Sometimes I don’t. It’s 50-50. But ever since I’ve had cancer I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe that’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it just lives on.’ But then he paused for a second and he said, 'Yeah but sometimes I think it’s like an on-off switch. Click, and you’re gone,’ he said. Paused again and said, 'And that’s why I don’t put on-off switches on Apple devices.’