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Sandy Update #3

I highly recommend 722 miles, a book about the engineering and political machinations that went into one of our country's great civic achievements — the New York Subway. Our transit system is over a century old!

Rebecca Mead notes: "Commentators already calling this the 'storm of the century' are hopelessly optimistic." Sadly I agree.

When we finally left the house around noon, we were met with damage much worse than I thought we'd encounter. Obviously the pictures that play on the internet are the flooded streets, downed trees and floating cars, but the level of incidental damage was breathtaking. Some scaffolding on our building had blown clear across broadway, which up here means six lanes of traffic and a wide median. Seemingly every other tree was down or much shorter do to the loss of major branches. It goes without saying there were no leaves left on the trees, bringing an end to our brief Fall. Lev insisted on walking down the subway stairs — you try explaining to him why no train is coming! Four MTA workers were actually on the tracks surveying damage. The tracks and platform were visibly flooded. Lev yelled "Hello!" and one of them offered back "We're closed."

Lydia Callis may inspire the world to learn sign language, or at least get better at giffing it.

Sandy Update #2

When will there be a course in sign-language conducted entirely in animated gifs?

I'd like something similar to what Lifeprint offers, but with a larger vocabulary and modern web capabilities.

neighbor

Related, Flying Words:

In 2003, Slope, an on line poetry journal, published a special issue devoted to American Sign Language (ASL) poetry. The issue featured the winners of the 2003 Heart+Express National ASL Poetry Prize and presented their work in video format.  There is no other way to "read" this work.  Unlike Deaf poetry, which can be signed and/or written, ASL poetry is in, and only in, ASL.  At first, I assumed that the videos would feature subtitles, some printed "translation" of what the poets were signing.  This wasn't the case.  Instead, the videos are completely silent--that is, to someone who doesn't know ASL.  But it's clear from the careful hand, body and facial movements that a great deal is being expressed, and it is maddening not to be able to understand the poems. On the other hand, I think that the decision made by the Slope editors was brilliant.  ASL isn't simply a way of "miming" or literally translating English, rather, it is its own language and needs to be approached on its own terms…

Sandy Update

We are lucky to have power, internet access, cell service and water. I would say most of our friends are without at least two of those, and thankfully almost everyone we've checked in with has water. Also getting sporadic reports of landlines being out, but for the most part that seems to remain the most stable piece of infrastructure in a disaster. Where we live (108th & Broadway) it never rained quite as hard as I feared it would, but the wind was whipping fiercely, so fiercely I expected one of our windows to break or blow in. The Hudson was visibly higher and audibly louder than usual. We can actually hear it in our apartment as I write this, which is hard to believe.

In An Oyster in the Storm, Paul Greenberg makes the point that an intact Oyster bed would have helped to lessen the surge of waters that overwhelmed the city:

Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.

Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

Regarding Mayor Bloomberg's infamously poor Spanish, I had this exchange with my friend Angela Tucker:

Bloomberg, just get a translator to speak Spanish for you. Come on!

— tuckergurl (@tuckergurl) October 30, 2012

@djacobs I know but my concern is that his Spanish is so bad that they might be getting all of the info they need.

— tuckergurl (@tuckergurl) October 30, 2012

Like I said, I could go either way! But I will also go on record about "El Bloombito". I understand why people look for humor when they are anxious or afraid, but who can't read those tweets with a sober eye and see some racism? We get it, you don't speak spanish and Bloomberg barely does.

The best source for up-to-the minute news is the Gothamist. I expect the Times & the News to be able to cover the city with reporters & photographers, but what the Gothamist team has been able to view by combining direct reporting, leads off of social media and direct tips is pretty amazing. That's the newsroom of the future, blending twitter, IRC, IM, blogging, phone and shoe leather all at once.

Power & internet are still on over at 29th Street Publishing, but our (mostly Brooklyn-based) team has been working remotely in IRC. I am thankful to be surrounded by my family. Lev has finally figured out Magnatiles!

We assume that there are some very smart people at places like Google or, if you're feeling lucky, Facebook who are hard at work unravelling the mystery and meaning of all those overlapping patterns. It's worth remembering, though, that these are all companies whose purpose is to service what are basically singular and selfish motives. They are building better tools to automate already learned behaviours. Patterns.

via www.aaronland.info

Aaron Straus Cope, James Bridle and Joanne McNeil revisited the new aesthetic last week at the New Museum. The above is an excerpt from Aaron's slides, but along the way he touches on drones, roombas, instagram and Google's self-driving cars. You'll be able to read the post quickly, but you'll find yourself returning to it for days - so only read this if you have time to think about new ideas.

Update! The videos are available if you follow this link.

… so now, instead of hunting down design jobs, i hunt down people who have bigger communication problems. i include all the clever bits of design and code trickery that su and i are interested in messing with in our proposals, and i do not involve the client in much of that creative process. that is incredibly counterintuitive to me, because i was trained to treat the client relationship as a hand-in-hand creative journey with reviews along the way to define the client’s desires. but in doing that, i am constantly making things i don’t think are right because of possibly incorrect creative input from mr. or ms. client—so by removing them from the process, i retain a lot of my own autonomy, and their peace of mind. it cuts down on a lot of pain points for both me and the client.

this struck me as crazy talk when i first started doing it, but it actually works in this day and age, when people need things fast, and they’re used to shopping for fully fleshed-out pieces of design on the web, like tumblr and wordpress templates. the idea of a custom process to them is kind of nuts, and incredibly intimidating from a financial point of view—an ever-present cartoon thought bubble over their heads with the words “how much more does this cost?” in it.

via fixingthehobosuit.com

Nice blog post by Patric about his ongoing evolution as a designer. I have a bunch of thoughts about this, but I will save them for later in the month when I get to talk to Patric & Su directly during their visit to NYC!

Live Blogging the States Game

The "Place the States" game has generated some fun conversation over IM and twitter, so I figured I had to blog it.

First up is Michigan, which is no help, since the Great Lakes frame the surrounding states quite nicely. Next is Missouri, which is a nemesis of mine. I can see Missouri in my mind, but my actual placement is 162 miles off. Which is not much on the map considering, but it really blows out my average.

Texas, Oregon, Virginia, Missippi, Hawaii, Iowa, North Carolina, Alaska, Illinois and Alabama are all guided by the coastline or directly neighboring states. Kansas, Arizona and Pennsylvania all fall into place nicely. Then I'm faced with South Dakota:

Major brain fart on my part. I'm not sure what I was thinking, except that "South Dakota isn't that far East, is it?"

Maine, South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Idaho, Connecticut, North Dakota, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Ohio. No sweat. I drop Wyoming slightly off-kilter, simple laziness on my part:

At this point, there's not much suspense except in which order the states arrive: Washington, Nebraska, Maryland, Delaware, Minnesota, Florida, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Tennessee, Nevada, California, New York, Indiana, Vermont, Rhode Island, Utah, Colorado, Utah, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Final score: 47/50, with an average error of 12 miles.

#NOFOMO

These three things rhyme:

• FOMO is the Fear of Missing Out, when activity on social networks preys on your insecurity about how cool or connected you are. As Caterina wrote last year: "To be always filled with craving and desire (also called defilement, affliction) is one of the Three Poisons of Buddhism, called kilesa, and it makes you a slave."
• My friend Anil Dash reframed the debate with his coining of JOMO - the Joy of missing out. This allows you to enjoy being a homebody without making your friends feel guilty about enjoying themselves in public on social networks or engaging in activity that may encourage FOMO feelings.
• As Jay Smooth explains, the phrase No Homo is a defense mechanism for hip-hop performers when they say something that could be construed as "linguistically gay."

But we still have a hole - I'd like to be able to celebrate having a good time, but also declare that I don't want my friends to feel guilty about missing it. So I'd like to humbly suggest that if you want to celebrate your friends and fun times but don't want those who missed out to feel guilty or sad, simply tag your tweets #NOFOMO. For instance:

Just as "no homo" reifies homophobia and rewards insecurity, #NOFOMO could cause a double poisonous FOMO to infect your friends. So use it sparingly!

Thanks to @lonestartaconyc for the best dinner I've had in years #NOFOMO mixel.by/djacobs/2012/0…

— David Jacobs (@djacobs) August 30, 2012

Dear Jason

Hi Jason,

Today I was telling Jake that yours was the best designed site on the Internet.

I especially love this old post, in which some of your design philosophy is laid bare for the reader.

I still cite the comparison to a tag on a pair of jeans as a clear design metaphor. However, when you wrote the post, you were referencing the post that filled the frame. But 8 years later, the frame is gone, having been turned over a few times. Next time you write a redesign post, I recommend including a screenshot. It may appear to be so meta it hurts, but it future-proofs the design conversation.

Thanks,
David

Michael Stipe on Animated Gifs

Fifteen-year old David Jacobs and Thirty Six-year old David Jacobs have the same crush, Michael Stipe:

Bullett Media: The most buzzed topic—what comes up when you Google your tumblr—is the brief cock shot in that art video you posted of your getting dressed. What was your reaction to the internet’s focus on your penis almost exclusively?

Michael Stipe: That was the same year, 2009. Again, it’s exactly like MichaelStipe.com—I took a bunch of still images and put them together and created a moving film that again, loops on itself. I mean, I guess, there was a little more chatter about it than I expected. I looked at it as an art piece. Of course I knew that people might freeze frame, but if people want to look at my penis, I don’t have a problem with that. [Laughs.] It raises a kind of more interesting question, which is where we are right now in terms of what the still image has become. We’re at this very fascinating moment in the history of photography and representation, where the still image is disappearing and becoming something very different, that is, a moving image that we will now be able to freeze frame. That’s what gifs represent in a primitive way. If Susan Sontag were alive, or Marshall McLuhan, they’d have a lot to say about where we are, and where this is all going. Over 100 years the photograph went from being this amazing thing that seemed impossible, to being something that was positive proof of an event occuring; and then we realized images could be manipulated to the point that now, with new technologies, everything is manipulatable and the still image is beginning to—like many other things, with the advent of digital and existing technologies—disappear. Our idea of what a still image is has now becoming very different. It’s almost like a scene in Blade Runner where they zoom in on a certain part of a photograph or, I think there’s another scene, where we’re looking at a still image and it moves slightly. Now I’m starting to sound like a science fiction geek…

BM: Science fiction geeks are great. It’s interesting too because a lot of the flat images we are looking at are on a screen which has a dynamism to it.

MS: Yeah, backlit, and you are in control as to how you interact with it. When you go to one of those pages that are largely gifs and you’re looking at, say, 80 images with each of them moving, how does your mind and your eye and your memory regard those single images? Are they to be seen as a still image that happens to be moving? How does a 12 year old, who is younger than the technology that we’re talking about, and has lived with it their entire life, view that? That’s what we’re talking about.

Forehead Time

Apple bloggers are all atwitter over the apparently significant amount of unannounced ("TBA)" conference sessions at Apple's annual dorkapalooza (WWDC) next week. I am attending this year¹ and so I too have wondered, what is TBA? I have some ideas.

• Facetime will finally be Facetime, not Foreheadtime — Apple will release a new device with tiny cameras in-between the pixels. This would allow us true 3-d pictures and movies (holograms) and more importantly Facetime featuring true eye contact. As it is, everyone Facetiming is staring at foreheads. It's bizarre. The New iPhone will fix this problem, and this technology will be new and thrilling enough that developers will forgive Apple for changing the screen size.

• The New QuickTake — Apple is making a camera, to be announced next week. It will be called "The New QuickTake". It will run apps, replace the iPod Touch in the product line, and work entirely on iCloud. iCloud has been a complete dog the past couple months, and I think they haven't fixed the bugs (notably, Photostream is often lacking in photos and stream) because they are preparing a major upgrade.

• Apple will self-identify as a gaming company — Apple TV will be just like it is, but with apps. Apple will announce a Cocos2D like set of gaming APIs and the new Quicktake, the new iPhone, and the new iPad will all be usable as game controllers.

• Some of the mystery is just Apple being late – Some sessions are truly TBA because they haven't been planned. Remember how late WWDC was announced this year? That's because iOS 6 (which will power the new [iPhone, iPad, iPod, QuickTake and TV]) and Mountain Lion are demanding a lot of time and attention.

• Apple will pay off some of its technical debt — Apple will announce new Core Graphics, Core Text, and Core Animation APIs. They will claim that these new APIs are to take advantage of retina displays and create parity between Foundation Kit and Application Kit, but really it will just be a release of backlogged bugfixes.

• Batteries aren't getting bigger — All of the new software will be more power efficient. I replaced my iPhone recently and turned off all notifications except Messages, and it's amazing how much better my phone works - the battery appears infinite, and my messages arrive promptly. Nerds have been blaming AT&T for crappy service, but the reality is that the iPhone is extremely chatty over the wire.

Like my NBA conference Finals predictions (Thunder in 6, Celtics in 6), I predict that my predictions will be half right. Thanks for reading.

¹ I am attending for the first time since 2006! Apple announced that an RSS server was going to be built into every desktop that year, and I was thrilled.