Thoughts Made Words Todd Hoff's Weblog.
Radio Home Programming Weblog My Home Page C++ Coding Standards SciFaiku		Thursday, September 04, 2008   Rules For Superior Stories Charles Tilly in his book Why? distills down the rules for how Jared Diamond takes complicated ideas in books like Guns, Germ, and Steel and whittles them down to an essential yet still interesting essence: Simplify the space in which your explanation operates. Reduce the number of actions and actors. Minimize references to incremental, indirect, reciprocal, simultaneous feedback effects. Restrict your account--especially of causal mechanisms--to elements having explicit, defensible equivalents within the specialized discipline on why you are drawing. Remember your audience: you will have to tell your superior story differently depending on the knowledge and motivation your listeners will bring to it. Think of your stories as relational work. comment[] 1:58:48 PM       digg   reddit The Lifecycle of a Typical New Product Announcement Look at enough new product announcements and there appears to be pattern. The same sorts of articles are posted on every product. So why not jump ahead of the curve? When a new product comes out see which of the following you want to sign up for: Rumor of X's Imminent Release. Oh Joy! X Has Just Launched! Live blogging now. How X Will Change Everything The Real Reason Behind X X First Impressions Warning: X has Serious Issues (performance, security, privacy, crash, design, licensing, etc) X Who Wins and Who Looses X FAIL Why X Sucks X is Better Than Everything Before and After Forever Why Y is Really Better than X The Story Behind Project X X Will Get These New Features Eventually Company Y Announces Support for X Indepth Review of X Here First X Looks Good But Not Yet Ready What X Means for the Plans of Company Y How You Can Make Old Product Z Work Like X Now X Over Hyped and Under Performs X is Now Bigger than Product Y Why Did We Ever Care About X in the First Place? I Wasted an Hour of My Life Using X X: The Video What X Means for the Future of Humanity Tips for Using X comment[] 1:48:24 PM       digg   reddit Monday, August 04, 2008   Which Batman Villain are You? On the theory that insight can be teased from any random meaningless thing in the world, I think the villains in Batman are useful objects of self reflection. What separates Batman from his arch nemesi are how they dealt with the tragic events in their life. Batman on the loss of his parents eventually chose the harder path, becoming a fighter of evil and protector of lost souls. Batman's villains chose the easier path when faced with tragedy. In a way each Batman villain symbolizes a different path for running away from fear and pain.  So when we reflect on Batman's villains we are also exploring how we may let situations dictate who we become rather than making our own conscious choice of who we become. Scarecrow - The Sadist Operating from a position of trust and power as psychologist, the Scarecrow enjoys seeing people's mind snap. Abuses trust and uses fear to get what they want without concern about the consequences. The Riddler - The Narcissist Yearning to be caught, the ever calm and cool Riddler's obsession to be recognized as cleverer than everyone else was so strong he left self-incriminating clues that lead to his eventual fall. Penguin - The Materialist. Penguin tries to fill the hole in his soul with money and things. The hole was created by the bullying he endured as a child. Taunted mercilessly by his classmates because of his beak-like nose, bulbous belly, and ever present umbrella (his mom didn't want him catching a cold), the hole grew bigger and bigger. He thought wealth and power could fill the hole, but it never does. Joker - Chaos The Joker is an agent of randomness and chaos. In any interaction he could be a harmless clown or a soulless killer, yet we never know what motivates him. Money will not buy him. He can not be bargained with. He will not compromise. In that he is like Batman's evil mirror image, but with a sense of humor. Catwoman - The Evil Twin . Batman and Catwoman have much in common. The both enjoy the Furry lifestyle and from a conventional perspective have questionable morals, but are basically decent and do good. The difference is Batman has a line he will not cross, and Catwoman does not. Catwoman is a version of Batman without the ridig self imposed control. She is corruptible, not afraid to commit crimes, and loves the thrill for the sake of thrills.  And that's why they can never be together. Two-Face - The Extremist Harvey Dent was an abused and schizophrenic child who hid his madness in fanatic devotion to law and order. After an injury deformed his face his madness flipped to a life of crime instead of the law. It was his madness, his unexamined extremism which was his essential character, not good or evil. Batman's fight is our fight. He constantly struggles to keep Gotham safe from people who simply gave up and gave in. We also constantly fight the Gotham of our mind against letting fear and pain turn us away from our better natures. Batman may be a silly comic book, but there's a lot to learn from Batman too. comment[] 9:02:21 AM       digg   reddit Sunday, August 03, 2008   Batman and Voltaire: An Unexpected Dynamic Duo "Everything can be taken from a man but the last of human freedoms, the right to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances--the right to choose one's own way." --Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning Why do we watch all these silly cartoon super hero movies? What's the point really? I'm not from planet Krypton and the sun only gives me a melanoma. Chances are a toxic spill will never grant me spidy powers or turn me large and green. For me worrying about how to handle the "with great power comes great responsibility" existential crisis will never be a problem. Unless of course you think we all have hidden greatness inside of us and it's our responsibility to free it to make ourselves and the world better. OK, I might buy that in some abstract "we are the world" sort of way. Other than being a billionaire (can you see Bill Gates as Batman?), Batman has no special powers setting him above normal humans. Batman is all too human as we see in his childhood mythology. Young Bruce Wayne faced a life-changing tradegy that comes to all mere mortals in time: how to deal with an event so terrible you feel like you want to die and burn the world down with you. Typically such events traumatize normal humans. We feel a burning chaotic storm of fear, pain, guilt, regret and anger.  And that's exactly how young Bruce Wayne reacted to the brutal and senseless murder of his parents. With fear. With pain. With guilt. With regret. With anger. All normal responses. Did he immediately rise up as a young child and pledge everlasting retribution against his enemies? No, that's what a cartoon character might do. It would be too superficial and too easy. We would have nothing to learn from such a reaction because it would be so unnatural no human could possibly emulate it. This is why I like Smallville. It shows Superman growing up, making mistakes, learning, and maturing. In Smallville Superman is not born a hero, he earns his super hero street cred. A single spark doesn't light a fire that transforms you from victim to an integrated empowered human being in one step. No, it's much messier than that. Movies have taught us to expect everything to be made better in two 30 minute acts. We see just how messy and how long it takes as a fearful young Bruce slowly changes into a mentally focused Batman. Bruce could have reacted like his enemies did in similar circumstances, by becoming a villain himself. But he didn't. Instead Bruce chose a different route. He made a moral choice to take a stand against evil instead of letting the unfairness of the world turn him towards the dark side. When the Joker experienced injustice, he reasoned justice did not exist. When the Joker experienced meaningless, he reasoned meaning did not exist. Without meaning and justice the Joker chose to become the chaos he saw in the world. As chaos' Avatar on Earth he hoped to shock people into seeing the hypocrisy of their beliefs. To what end is uncertain. The Joker plays a similar role as does Candide in Voltaire's book by the same name. Candide was raised to believe the Leibnizian philosophy that "this is the best of all possible worlds," a theory essentially stating: whatever is is good. The logic behind the "best of all possible worlds" thinking goes something like: God would not be so cruel as to let evil exist, yet we has human perceive evil. How do we reconcile a good God with evil? Well, evil doesn't really exist. We puny humans only see evil because we can not understand the wisdom of God's plan. We can't see the big picture. If we did we would understand that the evil we perceive is really for the best in the long run. This is really the best of all possible worlds. And because this world is the best, change goes against God's plan. This nakedly self-serving philosophy provides all the rationalization needed to justify following one's own dark desires while ignoring evil and injustice in the world. Why feed people who are hungry if this is the best of all worlds? God clearly meant Kings to rule so revolution is wrong. Accept your role, sit down, and shut up. The result of this philospohy is what we see in a Batmanless Gotham. Voltaire witnessed Gotham all around him as the institutions of the church and nobility continually failed. Candide is moved around by Voltaire like a bitterly sarcastic Ninja demolishing the "best of all possible worlds" argument as a way to show just how silly are the foundations of this bankrupt philosophy. Once free of  Leibnizian blinders people become free to think how much better a world humans could build if they chose to believe, think, and act differently. As the world's first A-List blogger (20,000 publications, 1000s of letters sent throughout Europe), Voltaire's witty and savage attacks on the "best of all possible worlds" philosophy in Candide and other works gave rise to the Age of Enlightment, a period of history when people finally realized the only way the world will become better is if humans made it better. The responsibility is ultimately ours to build the world we want to live in. Nobody will do it for us. If there's good in the world it's because we consciously make good happen. It's because of the Enlightenment we have the vast social improvements we see in the world today. But the forces of evil are ever in search of means to rationalize their own hunger, so a scientific version of Leibniz's ideas were recreated in Social Darwanism. We still fight these wars today and we probably always will. The Joker wants plays the same role as Candide, but the Joker is essentially an anti-Candide character. The Joker takes a decayed post-enlightenment world and responds to it by shouting "Hey, this is all an illusion. The grand human experiment of civilization has failed. We are all animals and animals we will always be. So let's be honest and get back to doing what we do best--greed,  hate, war, pride, lust--and I'll show you the way. It's easy. It's fun. Why bother with the other stuff?" At one level it's hard to argue with the Joker as anyone watching current events intuitively feels. Were it not for the continual human effort expended against chaos, we would live in a Jokerian world. Bruce Wayne did not walk away from his early troubles unchanged. In his war for Gotham's mind and soul Bruce Wayne transformed himself into a triune man: playboy, private person, and avenger. Bruce Wayne as a playboy is Clark Kent with glasses on. Playboy Bruce diverts attention away from anyone making a connection to Batman. It's a coercive role, socially engineering others into thinking one thing so he can be another. The private person is someone we see very little of and we only see the private person in support of the other roles. A truly private and independent Bruce Wayne does not exist. Batman as the avenger is a role made possible by the other two roles. Batman is not good in a conventional sense because he stands outside societal laws as a vigilante, yet he has a rigid code (not killing anyone by his own hands) of his own that he will not cross. It's natural to ask when which role is the real person? As an answer consider the roles you play in your own life. At work are you the same person you are at home? When you are with your mom are you the same person you are out on the town with your friends? Probably no and no. And are any those roles more the real you than any other role? We are the sum of how we respond to different situations. One of the most meaningful findings for me in Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect - Understanding How Good People Turn Evil is when he says: situations matter. We change who we are depending on the situation. Ordinary, average, good people can become evil if the situation nutures evil. Take the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison as an example. We can't admit it to ourselves, but most of us would have done the same thing. The guards in the prison were not special. They were not evil monsters just waiting to be set free. They were typical everyday people who when put in the wrong situation did evil things. Philip lists ways to combat the pull of evil in resisting influence. In the compromising situations Batman continually finds himself in, how does he not cross his self-imposed line? What if Bruce would have made different decisions when faced with tragedy? The white hot justifying rage of anger and self-pity easily rationalizes anything we want to become to make the pain go away. We see in Batman's villains what Batman could become if he ever stepped over his self-imposed moral line of no return. To keep on the right side of the line takes an iron will few others can duplicate. Batman perfectly embodies the world preserving ideals of the Enlightenment. He is the tamer of chaos, yet he is human. He is just like us. And he has chosen to do the harder thing. Batman chose to make meaning in a meaningless world. Batman chose to create justice in an unjust world. By his example we realize we can do the same thing. It's possible because Batman did it. That's why Batman is our most human hero. But his hero's journey was not an easy one, and neither is ours. "Whatever you do, crush the infamy." --- Voltaire Inspiration for this post was taken from the History Channel's truly superb Batman Unmasked: The Psychology of the Dark Knight. comment[] 9:55:34 PM       digg   reddit Monday, July 21, 2008   The Cynics Guide to Becoming and Staying Rich Keeping Wealth: Never draw down your principle. Building Wealth: Have no principles. comment[] 3:00:47 PM       digg   reddit Monday, July 07, 2008   Are Web Icons a Modern Form of Illiterate Communication for the Dumbest Generation? How do you communicate with an illiterate population? That's a problem I hadn't thought of before, but on a recent trip to Europe I was fascinated to learn how medieval towns and merchants solved the problem of how to communicate with a population that couldn't read. Their solution was to use elaborate symbols that reminded me a lot of the iconography developed for websites and other computer devices. I couldn't help putting this together with the idea of Mark Bauerlein's new book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future Complex Store Signs in Salzburg Austria Another example of using pictures to communicate with non-readers is the amazing Salzburg street market pictured on the left. This is a very long street with markets running seemingly forever on either side. Imagine yourself a worker who couldn't read. How would you what stores were available just looking down the street? You couldn't know so the elaborately descriptive store signs evolved so people could tell what a store sold. Here's the sign for a McDonalds: German Maypole's Use Pictures to Represent Town Services Many German towns feature a maypole in the town square. In addition to being big and beautiful, a maypole communicates to an illiterate population what services can be found in the town with a picture symbolizing the service. Take a look at the maypole in Munich. It's gorgeous. Look closely and you'll see pictures of beer barrels which would tell you Munich has a beer available. And oh boy is that true! If there's a bakery you'll see a picture of a baker. If there's a wood cutter you'll see a picture of a wood cutter. It's all picture based so you can just look and immediately understand what you'll find in a town. Scan a webpage, an OS GUI, or a cell phone interface and I think you get a very similar feel to the ancient maypole symbols and store signs. I can't help but wonder if over time text will drop out as people stop readining and we develop ever more intricate graphical symbol systems to communicate instead of relying on text? Everyhing old is new again. comment[] 6:45:35 PM       digg   reddit Is Oil China's New Black Plague? The article Oil price shock means China is at risk of blowing up makes clear that if the effects of expensive oil have hit the US hard, they have hit China even harder because the China miracle is in large part built on cheap transportation based on cheap oil. When oil becomes expensive that advantage goes away which could have a devastating impact on China's economy. Curiously this parallels another time when a dominant China was brought low by a black substance, the Black Plague. Many do not know the world has been flat once before.When the Mongols ruled much of the civilized world (which didn't include Europe of course) they instituted many practices we think of being modern: religious toleration, public schools, a mail network for fast communication through out the empire, a rule of law that applied to all in society (both high and low), a common currency, a common trading language, book keeping, an elaborate system of trade through the whole world that allowed trading specialized goods from one area to others that demand the goods, manufacture of goods in one region with the specific intent of selling for profit in other areas, and much more. The Mongol empire was rich and vibrant in a time when Europe was mired in the comparative poverty of the middle ages. Europe was so poor the Mongols didn't even think it worth invading. The Mongols were all about plunder and the pickings were slim in Europe at the time. Then the black plague happened and 50% of China's population was wiped out. Mongol rule was based on profits from trade which rested on fast communication and travel. When the plague hit these networks broke down as expertise was lost and the world started to close in on itself to stop the spread of the plague. A once incredibly open and profitable world went dark for many a year. Few people realize the Christopher Columbus was attempting to reach India so that trade could reestablished with the Mongols. While Europe was not ruled by the Mongols it benefited greatly from trade. When that trade stopped because of the plague money stopped flowing into Europe as well and they wanted desperately for trade to flow once again. Columbus was a little lost. He thought he was in India which is why he called them Indians and that's the name we still use. This "discovery" of the new world opened up an entirely new economy, the role of the Mongols drifted from memory, dominance slowly moved to Europe as Atlantic powers opened a new land. Then the industrial revolution sealed the deal in favor of the west and the role of the Mongols was completely forgotten. But not just forgotten. The Mongols were vilified by Voltaire in his writings as a way to lampoon the Church and Nobility of his time as he could not safely attack them directly. So he used the Mongols as a symbolic device and ever since the Mongols have been reduced to caricature. Until recently we even spoke of "mongoloid" children as a pejorative when the Mongol empire was one of the largest, longest, most innovative, and most successful empires in human history. When I saw that expensive oil might cut the Chinese Century short before it even had a chance to get started, I could help thinking back to the Mongols and how the world was once flat and how disaster may again reform it to be a bit bumpier. comment[] 4:24:59 PM       digg   reddit Sunday, May 25, 2008   Why Stressed Out-of-Control Americans Won't Carpool Gas now looks like it will be expensive until the sun burns dark. SUV and truck sales have flopped while sales of the tiny cars we've always sneered at have pulled a Robert Downey Jr. and have become stars once again. So why don't we American's do the smart and logical thing and carpool? Because we Americans need to feel like we are in control. Without that control we'll stay in our cars all lined up one-by-one in endless traffic jams even if at first it doesn't make rational sense. But this strange affliction does make sense and once we understand why we can design a mass transit system Americans are more likely to embrace, namely: A People Pod Pool of On Demand Self Driving Robotic Cars Automatically Refueled from Cheap Solar. The question of why don't we carpool was asked by a commenter in FuturePundit article American Car Drivers Cut Back Distance Traveled. When you read how the question is asked you'll wonder why you don't carpool either. Now, what's your answer to this? In the short run, I'm fascinated by the potential for carpooling. I don't understand why someone would switch jobs or homes in preference to carpooling (unless they wanted to anyway). It's easy, it's fast, it has no capital cost - 9% of Americans already do it. Modern telecom makes it easy to match people up - it used to be based on work site communication, but no more. It could reduce fuel consumption for an individual by 85% (4 people in a Prius), or for the nation by 25% (50% of US fuel consumption is light vehicles, and carpooling can be used for more than commuting) in a period of months, if we got serious. Also, car-sharing (igocars, zipcar) could share scarce PHEV/EV's - the average car is only used 1 hour per day, so 5M PHEV/EV's could be used by 50M people. My first reaction was well don't I feel like an oily dipstick. It's all so clear. So sensible. So reasonable. Carpooling is the future. Carpooling is smart, responsible, and good. Don't you want to be good? But I don't want to do it. I don't want to carpool. There, I said it. I don't hate the environment (as evidence of my virtue I both compost and recycle!). And I don't want to see mother nature stripped and turned out into the cold lonely night. But as one of those ugly Americans I feel deep in my plush leather seats and fine German engineering that I would rather starve my characteristically overweight American self into the normal weight range rather than give up and share MY car! Yes, I am well aware that this is totally irrational and irresponsible. I won't be the first or last time you notice this about me. Could there be some deeper psychological reasoning behind my madness? Let's hope so because a lot of people don't seem to like carpools and they don't like mass transit either. The Metro, a local San Francisco Bay Area weekly, published a wonderful article Fueling the Fire, on how we need to cure our car addiction using the same marginalization techniques used to "stop" smoking. A telling quote shows how difficult going cold turkey off our cars will be: Mitch Baer, a public policy and environment graduate student at George Mason University in Virginia, recently surveyed more than 2,000 commuters in the Washington, D.C., area. He found that people who drove to work alone were more emotionally satisfied with their commute than those who rode public transportation or carpooled with others. Even stuck in traffic jams, those commuters said they felt they had more control over their arrival and departure times as well as commuting route, radio stations and air conditioning levels. Commuters said that driving alone was both quicker and more affordable, according to the study. "They will have a tougher time moving people out of their cars," Baer said. "It's easier for most people to drive than take mass transit." The key phrase for me is: people who drove to work alone were more emotionally satisfied. How can people jostled in the great pinball machine that are our roadways be emotionally satisfied? That's crazy talk. Shouldn't we feel less satisfied? We Feel Good in Our Cars Because We Are in Control Solving the mystery of why we feel satisfied while stuck in traffic turns on an important psychological clue: the more we perceive ourselves in control of a situation the less stress we feel. Robert Sapolsky talks about this surprising insight into human nature in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Notice we simply need more "perceived" control. Take control of a situation in your mind and stress goes down. You don't actually need to be in more control of a situation to feel less stress. If you have diabetes, facing your possibly bleak future can be less stressful if you try to control your blood sugars. If you are a speed demon, buying a radar detector can make you feel more in control and less stressed as you zoom along the seldom empty highways. If you are bullied, figuring out ways to avoid your torturer puts you more in control and therefor less stressed. Figure out a way to control and an out of control situation and you'll feel happier. That's what I think we are accomplishing by driving alone in cars. In our car we have complete control. Cars are our castles with a 2 inch air moat cushion. Most cars are plusher than any room in your average house. Fine leather, a rad sound system, perfect temperature control, and a nice beverage of choice within easy reaching distance. In our cars we've created a second womb. The result is we feel more control, less stress, and more satisfaction, even when outside, across the moat, a tempestuous sea of stressors await. Our Mass Transit System Must Supply Perceived Control Given the warm inner glow we feel from being wrapped in the cold steel of our cars, if you want people to get out of their cars and onto mass transit you must provide the same level of perceived control. None of our mass transit options do that now. Buses are on fixed schedules that don't go where I want to go when I want to go. Neither do trains, BART, or light rail. So the car it is. Unless a system could be devised that provided the benefits of mass transit plus the pleasing characteristics of control our cars give us. With Recent Technological Advances We Can Create a New Type of Mass Transit System New technologies are being developed the will allow us to create a mass transit system that matches our psychological and physical needs. Just berating people and telling them they should take mass transit to save the planet won't work. The pain is too near and the benefits are too far for the mental cost-benefit calculation to go the way of mass transit. The technologies I am talking about are: Inexpensive solar with $1/watt solar panels. Our mass transit must of course be green and cost effective. Breakthrough battery could boost electric cars. Toshiba promises 'energy solution' with nearly full recharge in 5 minutes. Personal transportation pods. A reusable vehicle that can take anyone anywhere they want to go. Self driving vehicles. We are making great strides in creating robot cars that can drive themselves in traffic. Already they drive better than most humans can drive (low bar, I know). Mix these all together and you get a completely different type of mass transit system. A mashup, if you will. Create a People Pod Pool of On Demand Autonomous Self Driving Robotic Cars Automatically Refueled from Cheap Solar Many company campuses offer a pool of bicycles so workers can ride between buildings and make short trips. Some cities even make bikes available to their citizens. The idea is to do the same for cars, but with a twist or two. The cars (people pods) can be stored close to demand points and you can call for one anytime you wish. The cars are self driving. You don't actually drive them and are free to work or play during transit. Different kinds would be available depending on your purpose. Just one person on a shopping trip would receive a different car than a family. The pods would autonomously search out and find energy sources as needed to recharge.There's no reason to assume a centralized charging and storage facility. When repair was needed they could drive themselves to a repair depot or wait for the people pod ambulance service. The advantages of such a system are: Perceived control. You have a personal "car" you control the destination for, the interior environment of, and your own actions inside. This gets over the biggest hurdle with current mass transit options. Better regional traffic flow. The autonomous cars could drive cooperatively to smooth out traffic jams. Traffic jams are largely caused by people speeding up and slowing down which causes ripples of slowness up and down the road. And automated system could prevent that. Go where you want to go. It would be used because people can go to exactly where they need to go and be picked up exactly where they need to leave from at exactly the time they wish. None of these are characteristic of current systems. Leverage existing road ways. Creating light rail and trains is expensive and wasteful (except for the high speed point-point variety). They don't extend to where people live and they don't go where people go. So it creates a multi-hop mess out of every trip. We already have an expansive road system that goes where everyone wants to go. Using the road infrastructure more efficiently makes a lot more sense than creating hugely expensive partial solutions. And since these cars would be eco-friendly, most arguments against using cars fall away. Cheaper delivery. One force keeping truly distributed manufacturing and retailing from blossoming is high delivery costs. A $2 item is simply too expensive to buy remotely and ship because shipping costs more than the product. An automated transportation system would make this model more affordable. Live where you want to live. Most mass transit systems are based on trying to socially reengineer our current suburbian and exurbian living pattern into a high density live-work pattern. While this should be an option, most mass transit proposals assume this pattern as a given and can't deal with current realities. For the foreseeable future people will not give up their houses or their lifestyles. The People Pod approach solves the mass transit problem and the "difficulties" of having to change a whole populace to behave in a completely different way for less than compelling reasons. Still can own your own car. This isn't a replacement for the current car culture. It's leveraging the car culture. You can still own and drive your own car. Nobody is trying to steal your car away from you. Cleaner and safer. Mass transit is disliked by many because it is perceived as dirty and unsafe. The pods would be safe and clean. Road safety. Our new robot overloads will make our lives safer. Hopefully, possibly, maybe... It's a Usable Mass Transit System so People Might Just Use It After a lot of reading on the topic and a lot of self-examination on why I am such a horrible person that I don't want to carpool or use mass transit, this is the type of system I could really see myself using. It doesn't try to change the world, it uses what we got, and gives people what they want. It just might work. comment[] 12:58:26 PM       digg   reddit Friday, February 29, 2008   Web 2.0 Suicide Monitoring Using Twitter and Emotional Presence People on anti-depressant drugs--like Prozac--are supposed to be closely monitored for suicidal thoughts that could indicate the drug is having a "paradoxical result." While many feel better on anti-depressants others drop fast and dark into an even worse suicidal depression. Paradoxical isn't quite the word I would use, but we must keep everything clinical. Monitoring allows a doctor to detect if a patient is entering the paradox zone. If so, treatment can be changed and further harm avoided. I was thinking one potentially Web 2.0 way to monitor people's internal subjective state--their feelings and emotions--on an unnaturally frequent basis would be to combine Twitter with emotional presence and a bot that would notify a doctor if certain downward emotional trends were detected. I've been doing some work on a Jabber IM client lately, and I've done some work using the Twitter API, and I've done quite a bit of research on emotion (patent pending), so a mashup of these services seems a pretty natural way of helping people stay alive through their dark times. In IM (Instant Messaging) your presence is broadcasted to your contact list so everyone knows what you are doing and you're availability to others. Using your IM client tells everyone you are available. Don't use your IM client for awhile and and everyone will learn you are away. Pickup the phone, mark your presence as "On Phone" and everyone's IM client will associate your name with a cute little phone icon. And when you close down your IM client everyone will learn you are now unavailable. There's also an idea of emotional presence, often represented by emoticons. If you are happy or sad or angry you can broadcast your emotional presence in the same way you can broadcast your physical presence. Select an option that matches your current feelings and the whole world will instantly know how happy you are that it's Friday and a long weekend awaits. Now let's extend the emotional presence to indicate presence information for thoughts of suicide. I don't know what these would be, but I'm sure doctors could work up something. Say you have a fleeting thought of suicide you could quickly change your emotional presence to indicate your new state. More severe thoughts could have different icons. And so on. Now let's bring in Twitter. Twitter is a microblog. Its purpose is to share brief bits of what is currently happening in your life. That's the perfect match for emotional presence. You could also indicate with each post how you are feeling. These responses can be directed to a channel using the "@reply" syntax in Twitter. Doctors could follow those posts for their patients by briefly taking a look at how they are doing. Or a specially created bot look for certain trends and notify a doctor if a negative trend developed. This would allow a doctor to intervene much more quickly than they could otherwise and the information they are making their decisions on would be much more accurate because it's harder for people to fudge on their self-reports when they are in the moment. With the perspective of time we all do a lot of self-editing, but in the moment you are more likely to be honest. Clearly privacy is an issue. Users need to be able to select who sees what kind of presence information. But that's necessary anyway and exists in some form now as privacy lists. The type of information to block or allow simply needs to be extended to more granular types of data. What's great about this approach is Twitter is everywhere users want to be. On cellphones, browsers, IM, and desktop applications. Users will always be in touch with their emotional presence and doctors can always follow their progress. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could read a lot less about people on anti-depressants committing suicide? It just always seems so wrong that people who are trying to get help end up dying. comment[] 9:54:48 AM       digg   reddit Monday, December 31, 2007   The New Mass Transit: People Pod Pool of On Demand Self Driving Robotic Cars who Automatically Refuel from Cheap Solar Our traffic in the San Francisco Bay area is like Dolly Parton, 10 pounds in a 5 pound sack. Mass transit has been our unseen traffic woe savior for a while now. But the ring of political fire circling the bay has prevented any meaningful region wide transportation solution. As everyone scrambles to live anywhere they can afford, we really need a region wide solution rather than the local fixes that can never go quite far enough. Commuters are Satisfied Not Carpooling You might think we would car pool more. But people of the bay don't like carpools and they don't much like mass transit either. In the Metro, a local weekly, they publsihed a wonderful article Fueling the Fire, on how we need to cure our car addiction using the same marginalization techniques used to "stop" smoking. A telling quote shows how difficult going cold turkey off our cars will be: Mitch Baer, a public policy and environment graduate student at George Mason University in Virginia, recently surveyed more than 2,000 commuters in the Washington, D.C., area. He found that people who drove to work alone were more emotionally satisfied with their commute than those who rode public transportation or carpooled with others. Even stuck in traffic jams, those commuters said they felt they had more control over their arrival and departure times as well as commuting route, radio stations and air conditioning levels. Commuters said that driving alone was both quicker and more affordable, according to the study. "They will have a tougher time moving people out of their cars," Baer said. "It's easier for most people to drive than take mass transit." The key phrase to me is: people who drove to work alone were more emotionally satisfied. How can people jostled in the great pinball machine that are our roadways be emotionally satisfied? That's crazy talk. Shouldn't we feel less satisfied? In Our Cars We Feel Good Because We Are in Control Solving the mystery of why we feel satisfied while stuck in traffic turns on an important psychological clue: the more we perceive ourselves in control of a situation the less stress we feel. Robert Sapolsky talks about this surprising insight into human nature in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Notice we simply need more "perceived" control. Take control of a situation in your mind and stress goes down. You don't actually need to be in more control of a situation to feel less stress. If you have diabetes, facing your possibly bleak future can be less stressful if you try to control your blood sugars. If you are a speed demon, buying a radar detector can make you feel more in control and less stressed as you zoom along the seldom empty highways. If you are bullied, figuring out ways to avoid your torturer puts you more in control and therefor less stressed. Figure out a way to control and an out of control situation and you'll feel happier. That's what I think we are accomplishing by driving alone in cars. In our car we have complete control. Cars our are castles with a 2 inch air moat cushion. Most cars are plusher than any room in your average house. Fine leather, a rad sound system, perfect temperature control, and a nice beverage of choice within easy reaching distance. In our cars we've created a second womb. The result is we feel more control, less stress, and more satisfaction, even when outside, across the moat, a tempestuous sea of stressors awaits. Our Mass Transit System Must Supply Perceived Control Given the warm inner glow we feel from being wrapped in the cold steel of our cars, if you want people to get out of their cars and onto mass transit you must provide the same level of perceived control. None of our mass transit options do that now. Buses are on fixed schedules that don't go where I want to go when I want to go. Neither do trains, BART, or light rail. So the car it is. Unless a system could be devised that provided the benefits of mass transit plus the pleasing characteristics of control our cars give us. With Recent Technological Advances We Can Create a New Type of Mass Transit System New technologies are being developed the will allow us to create a mass transit system that matches our psychological and physical needs. Just berating people and telling them they should take mass transit to save the planet won't work. The pain is too near and the benefits are too far for the mental cost -benefit calculation to go the way of mass transit. The technologies I am talking about are: Inexpensive solar with $1/watt solar panels. Our mass transit must of course be green and cost effective. Breakthrough battery could boost electric cars. Toshiba promises 'energy solution' with nearly full recharge in 5 minutes. Personal transportation pods. A reusable vehicle that can take anyone anywhere they want to go. Self driving vehicles. We are making great strides in creating robot cars that can drive themselves in traffic, better than most humans can drive (low bar, I know). Mix these all together and you get a completely different type of mass transit system. Create a People Pod Pool of On Demand Autonomous Self Driving Robotic Cars that Automatically Refuel from Cheap Solar Many company campuses offer a pool of bicycles so workers can ride between buildings and make short trips. Some cities even make bikes available to their citizens. The idea is to do the same for cars, but with a twist or two. The cars (people pods) can be stored close to demand points and you can call for one anytime you wish. The cars are self driving. You don't actually drive them and are free to work or play during transit. Different kinds would be available depending on your purpose. Just one person on a shopping trip would receive a different car than a family. The pods would autonomously search out and find energy sources as needed to recharge.There's no reason to assume a centralized charging and storage facility. When repair was needed they could drive themselves to a repair depot or wait for transportation. The advantages of such a system are: Perceived control. You have your own person car that you control the destination for, the interior environment, and your own actions. This gets over the biggest hurdle with current mass transit options. Better regional traffic flow. The autonomous cars could drive cooperatively to smooth out traffic jams. Go where you want to go. It would be used because people can go to exactly where they need to go and be picked up exactly where they need to leave from at exactly the time they wish. None of these are characteristic of current systems. Leverage existing road ways. Creating light rail and trains is expensive and wasteful (except for the high speed point-point variety). They don't extend to where people live and they don't go where people go. So it creates a multi-hop mess out of every trip. We already have an expansive road system that goes where everyone wants to go. Using the road infrastructure more efficiently makes a lot more sense than creating hugely expensive partial solutions. And since these cars would be eco-friendly, most arguments against using cars fall away. Cheaper delivery. One force keeping truly distributed manufacturing from blossoming is high delivery costs. A $2 item is simply to expensive to buy remotely and ship because the shipping costs more than the product. An automated transportation system would make this model more affordable. Live where you want to live. Most mass transit systems are based on trying to socially reengineer our current suburbian and exurbian living pattern into a high density live-work pattern. While this should be an option, most mass transit proposals assume this pattern as a given and can't deal with current realities. For the foreseeable future people will not give up their houses or their lifestyles. The People Pod approach solves the mass transit problem and the "difficulties" of having to change a whole populace to behave in a completely different way for less than compelling reasons. Still can own your own car. This isn't a replacement for the current car culture. It's leveraging the car culture. You can still own and drive your own car. Nobody is trying to steal your car away from you. Cleaner and safer. Mass transit is disliked by many because it is perceived as dirty and unsafe. The pods would be safe and clean. Road safety. Our robot overloads will make our lives safer. Hopefully... Funding: Current transportation budgets. There's lots of money that could be redeployed from existing less than successful approaches. Advertising. The outside of vehicles could contain advertising as could the inside, especially from the internal search system. Imagine wanting a new place to eat and asking the pod to suggest one. That's prime targeted marketing. Social networks and massive multi-player games could also be created between pods. Efficiencies. The plug-in cars are electric and efficient and low maintenance. That will save a lot of money. Up sells. Individuals could buy their own pods and trick them out. Also, people could pay for a higher class of pod from the pod pool. Licensing. Technology used in making the pods could be sold to other manufacturers. Create a standardized market so competition and cooperation can erupt. Sponsorship. Companies could buy rights to play music, stock the food locker, use their equipment, etc. Naming rights. The rights to name parts of the system could be sold. Implementation: Challenge prize. Maybe someone with a vision and a dream can put up a $50 million prize to get it going. Something like the Xprize. Government funding. Don't laugh, it might happen. Startup. I'm available if interested :-) With a large enough challenge prize this is a viable model. After a lot of reading on the topic and a lot of self-examination on why I am such a horrible person that I don't use mass transit more, this is the type of system I could really see myself using. It doesn't try to change the world, it uses what we got, and gives people what they want. It just might work. comment[] 11:24:47 AM       digg   reddit Friday, July 20, 2007   The Penis and Muscles Develop Before the Brain Why would Michael Vic risk everything to fight dogs? The only reason I can think of is that the penis and muscles develop before the brain. Our brain doesn't mature fully until we reach about about 25 years of age. As early as age 10 the penis and muscles start working their mysterious power. So you have about 15 years under their rule before there's significant resistance from the long ignored organ above the neck. In those 15 years a lot of bad stuff can happen. Fortunately, for most of us nothing irreversibly bad has happened.  We learn and build a life. Yet sometimes it's simply too late to reverse the damage done. It's fortunate most of us eventually learn to follow the wisdom of the elder brain. Otherwise it would be so tempting to sentence those in the dog fighting community to the same punishment they meet out for losing dogs: douse them with water and electrocute them. comment[] 9:34:30 PM       digg   reddit Tuesday, July 10, 2007   Stop Cell Phone Calls During Movies Now! Jessica Alba just died. I was in disbelief. How could she possibly die in Silver Surfer? Was she faking her death? Nope. She was really dead. Was she asking too much for the next sequel? Wait, there's no way she could really die. But how would they bring her back? I was pondering all the existential implications of her surprise death when someone's phone rang, totally interrupting my flow of my thoughts and threating what's left of my fellow man restraint supply. Conservatively speaking, that's about the millionth time a phone call has interrupted my joyful experience of a very expensive movie. I am tired off it. Do you feel me? The problem is the probability of someone getting a phone call during a movie is really high. Let's say there are 50 people watching a movie and they all have cellphones. OK, not everyone will have a cellphone, but some people will have two or three or even four, so it balances out. It seems to me the chances are better than excellent at least one person will forget to turn off their phone and get a phone call. After all, in a group of 50 people the probability two people will have the same birthday is over 90%. What we need is a mechanism that doesn't require people to remember to turn off their cellphone. People are built to make errors and no dramatic special effect laced turn-off-your-phone vignette will change that. Jamming will only piss people off and has the downside of being illegal. How about we have a special signal that when received by a phone automatically makes it go to voice mail mode instead of ring mode? Certain venues like theaters and class rooms could broadcast this signal. So when you enter a protected area your phone behaves with social intelligence and automatically silences itself. When you leave an area your phone would automatically go back to its default mode. Voila! No phone calls during special events and you won't miss your calls. Best of all, people don't have to do anything. And that's what people are really best at. Building this sort of ambient social intelligence into our devices might help us all get along, just a little better. What do you think? Could it work? comment[] 10:53:22 PM       digg   reddit Wednesday, April 18, 2007   Top 10 Things to Do Now that Your Blackberry has Crashed WNBC reported a major outage affecting 100% of Blackberries in the US. What might dedicated crackberry users do with all this unscheduled downtime? 10. Solve world hunger. You now have the time. 9. See a movie all the way through. No interruptions. 8. Go for a run. Without your crackberry you weigh less and you'll be able to run farther and faster. 7. Contemplate the transitory nature of the universe. If an essential service like the crackberry can fail, what else in your life might fail you? 6. Have a drink. Surviving off the grid is stresseful. Did my team win last night? What time is that meeting at corporate? How is my portfolio performing? Did Jughead really sleep with Veronica? Gaping holes are bound to open up in your digital life without instantaneous answers to important questions like these. So just relax. Have a pop or two. 5. Keep twirling your thumb wheel. You want to be in tip top shape once it's back up. You'll be way ahead of the other kids who have spent their time less productively. 4. Play hall hockey. Crackberries slide really well on the floor. Get two teams together, setup two goals, and see who can make the most goals with your new puck. If you are alone find a lake and see how far you can skip your crackberry. I bet you can't slice more than 5 hops. 3. Remember the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Let's help you dial through the stages quickly. Yes, your network is down. Mistakes happen. It's part of life. The digital gods cannot be appeased, so don't even try. There are no tasty binary cookies or digital flowers that can patch panel this one. You feel depressed now, see (2). The last stage is bunk. Deny deny deny. That's how we do it. Acceptance is for losers. 2. Schedule an appointment with your therapist to help you cope with your loss. But, wait, your crackberry is down! Noooo! The irony of it all! 1. Make a pair of glasses using two tubes from empty toilet paper rolls. Viewing the world outside the small window of your crackberry can be disorienting at first. You'll want to transition slowly to view the world in full resolution. Every hour slice an inch or so from each roll so you'll gradually see more and more of the real world. comment[] 7:52:51 AM       digg   reddit Saturday, March 31, 2007   Spam is the New Role Playing Game Spammers must be getting out of work romance novelists to create spam. A lot of spam weaves wonderful little stories that invite you to play the lead role in an exciting other world. Often there is a comely damsel in distress and you are cast as the hero, if only you would open up your wallet and help. Not only will you get the willing damsel, but great riches await when you finally overcome your fear, climb the tower, kiss the princess, and collect your just reward. You see, the princess lives in a place not like where you live at all. You live in a safe boring world where one day is much like any other. She lives on the frontier where risk takers can still earn great fortunes battling nature and striking smart deals. But the frontier is dangerous. And an evil doer is out to steal her families' fortune, a fortune carved out of nothing from years of back breaking work. You can save them! You can make a difference! You are a hero with untapped super powers. Now is your time! You can get the girl, the money, and live happily ever after. This is wonderful stuff. It's like an email based Role Playing Game. The side of good is clear. Evil abounds, yet can be stopped by your heroic actions. You simply must roll the dice and play the game. My favorite example of the genre is Cynthia Benson's game: Dearest, Good morning! I decided to use this opportunity to communicate with you on who I am and what I am looking for. Please I hope you don't mind the way I contacted you. How are you, your business and family? I hope all is well. I am Cynthia Benson daughter of the late ENGR. FERICOH BENSON of Free town, Sierra Leone with my brother. I am a young girl from the family of two because my beloved mother died on the day my younger brother was delivered and my father refused to re-marry immediately because he is the only child of his parents and don't want anybody that will maltreat us due to the love he has for us. My late father Engr. Fericoh Benson was the Managing Director (MD) of BETAX PLC a Gold and Diamond Mining corporation company. During the time of his service he was a very devoted and God fearing person; this cause his fellow staff to hate him because he always refuse to collaborate with them in doing evil. So one sunny Tuesday evening when I was coming back with my Dad from shopping in his own private car we ran into bandits who were totally armed, they traced us till we reach home; there they attack us. My father pleaded with them to take everything he has and spare his life, but they took everything and also shot him three times on his chest they also shot me but to the glory of God I survived the gun shots but my father died in cold blood. How I was admitted to the hospital I don't know but I found myself on the hospital bed after two weeks of the incident when I re-gain conciouse. This happened eight months ago, as I am trying to gather my deserted life and that of my brother in place. Our father has being buried that was four months ago, the present problem we are facing is that my father's uncle that is the brothers of my grand father has took everything that our father left behind both money, landed properties and all his durable asset. They ejected me and my bother leaving only the sum of US$12,5M which my father deposited in a Financial Institution which they don't know about. They treated us badly also accusing us for the calamity that befall our family, now we are left alone in this world. But why I contacted you is because we want to start a new life outside our country and also when I went to where my father deposited the money in west side of Africa they told me that my father deposited that money on behalf of a partner, so that the money should be claimed by my father or his partner, but for the fact that my father is nolonger alive that the partner should come for it. As things is now I don't want to go and get any of my kinsmen as that will also give them the access to claim the money as I can see that it is now the only thing we have to start life again. If I have found favour in your eye I will like you stand as my father's partner as I don't have anybody so that they can transfer the money to you. While we will prepare to come over to your country and meet you there to start a new life again. If you can help us please let me know. Thanks and Remain bless, Cynthia Benson As you read the email it creates in your mind a truly dramatic action packed tale of woe. Can't you just see poor Cynthia's troubled life? Don't you just want to rescue you her and find the treasure? That's the genius of the email. It taps into all the usual story telling tactics used in myth, fairy tails, role playing games, romance novels, and fantasy novels. You know this story form and you immediately want to jump in and play. Look at at all the colorful words just dripping with echoes of a game world: dearest, daughter of, Free town, Sierra Leone, brother, engineer, gold, devoted, father, God fearing, pleading, attack, shot him, survival, left alone, start a new life, rescue, Africa, kinsmen, found favor, transfer money, start a new life. And the spelling is off just enough that it suggests an educated person who may speak a different language and live in an exotic locale. The fact that spam works on enough people that spammers keep spamming speaks to the power of greed and ego when backed by an internally consistent story that taps in to our years of well honed fairy tail inspired instincts. Simply beautifully done. A sure winner for the Pulitzer Prize of Spam, if they gave out such a thing. They don't now, but they may in the future. comment[] 11:45:44 AM       digg   reddit Tuesday, March 20, 2007   You Can't Twitter at Relativistic Speeds Twitter is entraining the technorati on an unbreakable hedonic treadmill. The treadmill gorges itself on an infinite supply info mediated dopamine hits. Addiction, divorce, 12 steps, and the grief cycle are sure to follow . But what really should concern twitterites is their global stream-o-conscious will shatter once we travel in space at near light speed. Let's say you're accelerating towards Vulcan in your new Mercedes X Series Space Coup and you type in your latest bon thought: I really need to upgrade my materializer. The pate was runny. Your thoughts will stream out at a constant speed of 186,000 miles an hour and nobody will hear you! And you will not hear them! You will ache. It will 1 millisecond without a info mediated dopamine hit. Then another. And then another. Until you go entire days without sharing the barely conscious thoughts of the twitter-sphere. Then you are in hair pulling, drano drinking withdrawl. Oh what a glorious future it will be! I do see a market in relativistic hermitages however. In time no place on earth with be safe from ads or phones or other information radiators. The only safe place to hide will be in a space capsule near the speed of light. Only then will you be alone with the strange sensation of your own thoughts. comment[] 12:45:47 PM       digg   reddit Sunday, February 11, 2007   Pleasing Things - How am I like a lady-in-waiting from ancient Japan? It's exciting to think about what people were like in different cultures in the past. Are they like me? Did they have goals and motivations and dreams that I would understand? If some rift in time tossed us together how would we get a long? In a way, books our are rift in time. I recently traveled back in time when reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Sei Shonagon was a lady-in-waiting for a 11th century Japanese empress and she wrote a book about her life in court. In her time writing a book was rare for a woman. It's even rarer for the book to survive, so people must love it or it would have long ago crumbled into dust. What's do readers find so enchanting? Sei Shonagon chronicles how completely poetry was integrated into elite culture, the vast separation between elites and commoners, the vast difference in roles of women and men in her time, the political structure of the court, the passing of seasons, the cycles of religious observance, and the ever tangled web of humans just trying to get along. It's hard to imagine a more different life between hers and mine. Both products of our times, I found myself continually recoiling at how effortlessly she dismissed anyone of a lower class than her, be they ugly, or poor, or just oafish. Yet there was an envious amount of beauty in her time as well. They would take walks at night to enjoy the moon. The would make snow piles in the winter and watch them melt as the seasons changed. They would compose a poem on the spot to make more remarkable any occasion. They would have poetry contests. A common game was to give a line of an old poem and see who could remember it. Far different than surrendering to must see TV. They also had an amazing form of 11th century instant messaging. A network of pages would take letters, deliver them quickly and bring back a reply. The receiver would often be expected to compose a poem on the spot. You would be judged by the quality of your reply. These poems would be shared in the court and gossiped about by all. Sei Shonagon excelled at this game because she was a master poet and quick wit. The messages would fly around the court and between houses, linking everyone together much like email and instant messaging do today. As different as we are, there were many passages in her book that crossed the gulf of time and connected with me. One such section is called Pleasing Things, which is where she describes what she finds pleasing: Finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment. Someone has torn up a letter and thrown it away. Picking up the pieces, one finds that many of them can be fitted together. One has had an upsetting dream and wonders what it can mean. In great anxiety on consults a dream-interpreter, who informs one that it has no special significance. A person who is very dear to one has fallen ill. One is miserably worried about him even if he lives in the capital and far more so if he is in some remote part of the country. What a pleasure to be told that he has recovered! I am most pleased when I hear someone I love being praised or being mentioned approvingly by an important person. A poem with whom one is not especially intimate refers to an old poem or story that is unfamiliar. Then one hears it being mentioned by someone else and has the pleasure of recognizing it. Still later, when one comes across it ina book, one tihngs, 'Ah, this is it!' and feels delighted with the person who fist brought it up. I look for an object that I need at once, and I find it. What a joy! When one is competing in an object match (it does not matter which kind), how can one help being pleased at winning? I realize that it is sinful of me, but I cannot help being pleased when someone I dislike has a bad experience. I am more pleased when something nice happens to a person I love than when it happens to myself. I greatly enjoy taking in someone who is pleased with himself and who has a self-confident look, especially if he is a man. It is amusing to observe him as he alertly waits for my repartee; but it is also interesting if he tries to put me off my guard by adopting an air of calm indifference as if there were not a thought in his head. Entering the Empress's room and finding that the ladies-in-waiting are crowded around her in a tight group, I go next to a pillar which is some distance from where she is sitting. What a delight it is when Her Majesty summmons me to her side so that all the others have to make way! When I read this list I can't help but a get a big warm smile on my face. What she finds pleasing I too would enjoy. It doesn't mean we are the same, but I think we could comfortably sit down, drink some tea, and talk about poetry and life for while. Assuming I was of the right class and rank of course! comment[] 10:21:12 AM       digg   reddit Monday, February 05, 2007   Rich Buddha, Poor Buddha How-to books on managing finances always top the best seller lists. Some popular books in the past have been Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, The Millionaire Next Door and a million others. It turns out this book genre is a lot older than you might think. How would you like some sage financial advice from 2,500 years ago? In Karen Armstrong's excellent book Buddha, she tells us the Buddha was a fount of wisdom not only spiritual matters, but he also knew a thing or two about personal finance as well. Perhaps he soaked up this knowledge in his early years, when he lived as the pampered son of aristocracy. According to the Buddha you should: Be attentive in your financial and social dealings. Save for emergencies. Look after your dependents: care for your partner, children, and servants. Give to your church and charities. Avoid debt. Make sure you have enough money for the immediate needs of your family. Invest money carefully. Be thrifty and sober. Avoid alcohol, late nights, gambling, laziness and bad company. And most importantly: be compassionate. While not quite as sexy as flipping a house or shorting the market, for 500 BC it sounds like pretty solid advice, even for today. comment[] 10:48:20 AM       digg   reddit Saturday, February 03, 2007   Smackdown #2: Scrolling Crushes Paging After 2000 Years of Dominance Scrolling is now enjoying a historical renaissance over 2000 years in the making. Once upon a time all books were lovingly drawn on papyrus scrolls. Jewish Rabbis would have read the Old Testament from a scroll. Early Christians, perhaps as way to differentiate themselves from Jews, preferred a different book form, the codex. The codex is the same book style we use today: two sided pages held together with a binding. As Christianity rose to power the codex rose with it and scrolls fell out of popular use. Fast forward 2000 years into the future and scrolls are once again becoming the presentation form of choice. Why? Because web tech makes scrolling better than paging. But that wasn't always the case. Early web design continued the codex form. If you read most of the advice on how to design early web sites (circa 1994) the codex form was still king. Web pages were supposed to be cut up into little chunks and readers slogged through the text stream one slow click at a time. Small pages were faster to load, scrolling was new to most people, and scrolling in web pages was clumsy. So it was thought most readers would not scroll. Pages were the better design. All that has now changed. ClickTale, a web site usability service, has found people are scrolling and that web designers are now designing pages to feature scrolling. The User Interface Engineering folks have also found long pages are now what all the cool kids are doing. The tipping point came for me when mouses started sporting scroll wheels. Scrolling became as easy as bending a finger and just as quick. Single clicking through text was tortuously slow by comparison. And fast network pipes broadbanded concerns over slow load times into a quaint cautionary tale of the past. What is old has become new again. It's a fascinating quirk of history that technology has brought us right back to one of our earliest forms off mass information distribution. comment[] 1:04:32 PM       digg   reddit Friday, January 19, 2007