This morning I was on a ferry from one portion of Greece to another. I sat in the back to watch the receding of the port behind me to fully appreciate the beauty of the island.
Churning blue Ionian water
The clear waters of the Ionian are astonishing in their beauty. I understand the love people have for island hopping and diving off of zippy boats into the clear waters now. If I am lucky perhaps it will be a joy I look back on more and more.
The content management system I use WordPress has a mobile application that is introducing new lookback features as well. This is my fifth year of writing a blog post every single day and it’s fascinating to look back on where I was.
Heat and sun only added insult to injury as my body struggled to manage inflammation. I had purchased a bathing suit I loved that became known as “the bathing suit I never wore” as I was simply packing it as an aspirational garment.
It was packed carefully in my suitcase trip after trip, in the hopes that I might have a good day without pain. Years went by and I never wore it. It was a sad joke. Not for aesthetics or vanity, but for the cruel pain that poor health puts you through.
If you go through the tags on the blog for ankylosing spondylitis you will see a journey of some length. The blog chronicles it from its starting years and, one day I hope, to its finish. I’ll may never be cured but I am finally living again.
The pale blue Ionian coastal waters protected from development and over traffic contain a beautiful array of fishes
I know it sounds silly that being able to wear a bathing suit without pain is a huge milestone, but I was unable to participate in the most basic outdoor activities with my own family.
A bathing suit was an aspirational garment not because I too afraid to be seen in it, but because the compression along my rib cage and spine hurt so badly.
And today I was on a boat for four straight hours including jumping off into the warm aquamarine waters of protected coastal Ionian water.
Nothing hurt at all. And I am not on any immune suppressant drugs at all at the moment. I am not on antibiotics. I am on a simple peptide regime. And now my swimsuit is being worn so often I need a second one so it can dry.
A halter top from Norma Kamali and a hat from a tourist shop.
Fashion rules are not hard rules. Soft rules apply to soft people who lovingly break them if something better would liven the mood. Being mercurial is a delight for them.
Soft rules do bind some people though. That’s the old canard about conservatism.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. Frank Wilhoit
If you take the above statement at face value it makes for interesting thought experiments. Is the fashion industry is a conservative industry? Why then does it present to some as an entirely progressive culture? Fashion scholars could go on at length.
And this cultural rules exist ,about when to wear white that no one follows except those who are fearful enough to have it forced on them.
I am on an island after Memorial Day so I’m well into wearing white territory. No white before Memorial Day or after Labor Day isn’t enforced now in any meaningful sense but years after late‑1800s upper‑class habits dictated a practical, status‑signaling summer color meant for seaside or country time which were put away when people returned to sootier cities in fall.
At least I hope you aren’t somewhere covered in soot in either winter or summer. I myself am in full costal grandma regalia from white cotton pants to summer weight cashmere. Isn’t it absurd we have summer weight wools? It should really be a tee shirt but like I said soft rules for soft people.
Trains, planes and automobiles are nice but it’s not really summer till you have been on a boat. That’s right, I’m on a motherfucking boat. Well, I’m on ferry so the favored class of boat of certain Saturday Night Live cast mates.
I’m headed to a Greek island to relax with some friends. One of us came partially by train, one by ferry and car, and one by puddle jumper plane.
We’ve run the gamut of transportation across Europe to make it to a favored island known for its views, its caves, and of course its clear Ionian blue.
It’s been an adventure organized somewhat last minute as various itineraries made it clear we’d be within a few hundred miles of each other. So an Airbnb villa was procured at the last minute and the race was on to find our way to the island.
Grecian blue decks out the back/front of one of the many ferries leaving Port of Igoumenitsa
I’m looking forward to a few leisurely days on the water, hopefully involving a few more boats but of the more manageable island hopping varietals. One can’t exactly jump off of a ferry into clear blue waters.
The chaos of loading a ferry fully of cars, mopeds, and tourist buses is an amusing sight. I’m not quite sure how the Greeks manage such an intensely maritime environment but it’s certainly a fun way to travel.
Small barking dogs, screaming children, sullen tweens, and irritated elders all being screamed at by deck hands is quite a way to start a relaxing time.
Having decided to take a proper break I am going all in on making sure my body and mind get the proper signs and signifiers to just let go.
My first activity after a long mess of travel was to sleep for an impossibly long term. Whoop approvingly noted that my 11 hours and fifteen minutes was the longest I’d slept all month.
Low stress, a green recovery and plenty of hours of deep and REM sleep
I know they say you should stick to a regular sleep schedule. I generally have a firm bedtime just past 9:30pm and will sleep nine hours if I can.
But between conferences with evening events, long drives late into the night and an eight hour time difference I was carrying a sleep deficit that needed to be remedied.
My next order of business was equally taxing. I booked a spa appointment for a pedicure and a waxing. Fresh toes and a clean bikini line seemed like just the trick before laying out on a pool lounger or on a beach.
Not that anyone will be taking too close a look at me but I like feeling as if I’ve cared for the little details. Cosmetics and beauty are more of a way of appreciating my own body than adhere to someone else’s preferences.
I usually wear a very basic nude shade on my toes. I almost never do my hands but I appreciate a but I felt like I needed something more Ionian in quality or perhaps one of David Hockney’s pools.
A bit of pool blue lacquer
Normally I wouldn’t go quite so exotic on a pedicure as I’m much more basic in my preferences but if I have a chance to stare out at wine dark sea over an aquamarine pool I may as well make the most of the experience.
I myself look forward to reading all 42,000 words of it on an airplane tomorrow. My reader application’s AI says it should take me two hours and thirty minutes. Already the tools have opinions on my study.
I can’t say I fully understand the relationship between the knowledge and teachings put forth by the Pope and a Catholic’s personal faith.
I have very little exposure to Catholicism that isn’t entirely academic so please do not take anything I say seriously or personally, as I’m a mere Protestant.
The Vatican said that Leo had signed the new encyclical on May 15, 135 years to the day since the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) on the rights of workers amid the Industrial Revolution. I understand is a crucial modern document in Catholic social doctrine
I read his namesake’s encyclical long ago when I studied economics in Chicago (not very far from where the Pope himself studied) so I am looking forward to comparing the documents once I have had a chance to read the new encyclical.
It’s very hard to have an opinion on a document written by a faith leader to whom I do not defer myself so please hold your judgement as I have held mine.
Without careful study I hesitate to say much beyond my initial impressions of the media circus surrounding the encyclical’s release and the social context of several attendees of the event around the signing.
The document is officially addressed not only to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill,” calling on us to seek the “protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”
I feel this is an invitation to us all to consider the document seriously. Silicon Valley has been anticipating its release for sometime, with both excitement and trepidation.
There has also been a significant amount of discussion over the last several years as to the role a movement which calls itself effective altruism has played in the development of artificial intelligence.
In particular, there is concern as to whether the movement itself has become its own theology complete with a singularity eschatology.
I make no secret of my concerns around the EA community, its scandalous financial frauds and its intellectual roots in Benthamite utilitarianism.
Several years ago an internecine split developed in Silicon Valley with a faction “meme schism” jokingly calling itself effective accelerationism. I myself professsed a preference for their approach as I am neither a utilitarian nor a rationalist.
E/acc encouraged an approach to technological development which focuses the benefits of material progress in reducing human harms while warning of the harms of the precautionary principle.
Neither are real philosophical traditions in any meaningful sense, but rather competing narrative memetics that came out of the diverse group of technologists making industrial progress from nuclear to computing chips and algorithms.
My concern today came from the highly visible corporate representation at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican during the press release. Past encyclical rollouts were normally handled only by curial officials. This was much flashier and included the Pope.
Further, the Vatican chose to highlight large language model developer Anthropic, and one of its many cofounders Christopher Olah. Both the man, and the corporate entity he represents, are part of an explicitlyeffective altruist world.
That only one frontier lab with a very particular viewpoint was put front and center as an emissary from the technical community may end up sending an unintended message. Or more worryingly, a very deliberately intended message. Only time will tell.
Everyone goes at their own pace. True for kids, organizations, nation states and Americans on road trips. I don’t like to be rushed anymore than anyone else. I probably dislike it more honestly. I take my time with almost everything.
But I understand that I need to get out of the way of someone who wants to go faster than me. I let folks going at a faster pace enjoy the right of way. I’ll encourage them to accelerate by getting out of the way.
It seems I am a bit unusual in this self awareness when it comes to sharing our transportation paths. Maybe I get it from learning to drive on mountain roads where one unaware driver can slog traffic for hours. Or maybe it was reinforced during years of city living where slow walkers are punished with jostling and cussing. “Get out of the f*cling way you damned tourist!”
But America’s interstate system carries travelers of all kinds from all nations. Especially on a long holiday weekend like one.
Interstate 15 run 1,433 miles long from end to end. Starting in San Diego at the Mexican border and ending in Sweet Grass Montana where it turns into Highway 4 in Canada it covers a lot of different terrain.
I did the Montana through Idaho to Utah portion which is pretty much straight through. It is roughly 558 miles from my home in Montana to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County) and much of that distance is a straight line on I-15 through 3 states.
Montana’s scenic routes merging to I-15
That means I’ve driven over a thousand miles this week. Welcome to the summer amirite?Even if you take a detour for the scenic routes through Yellowstone, or pop up to Deer Valley in Park City like I did, you are running about a third of the route of one of our greatest roads.
I law a lot of misunderstanding of the manners involved in using the left passing lane and the right merging lane. The right lane or lane #2 is for merging onto the highway, exiting, and driving at or below the average speed. Slower traffic must stay here. The left lane or lane #1 is for passing traffic. In some states, cruising in the left lane is illegal and can result in traffic fines.
This system is now how one is meant to aid the smooth flow of motor vehicle traffic on our interstates. And boy I saw a lot of misunderstanding of the manners of this system.
Utah Bluffs
I saw a cop have to ride the butt of an old couple going 50mph in a 75 express lane before he gave up and flashed his lights. They still didn’t yield.
I saw a pile up of 20 plus cars behind a struggling 4 wheeler who inexplicably wouldn’t budge from the passing lane even when he could have gone to the right.
I saw a pair of motorcyclists dodging and weaving between left and right lanes around motorists as they raced each other, several times swerving back and forth around our Subaru. Heck I even saw a tricked out rice rocket style Subaru barrel through the interstate that runs through Idaho Falls.
So please if you take to our fine interstate roads this weekend please remember to stay in your lane. That’s not a metaphor. I mean it literally. And if that’s not for you maybe consider another mode of transportation? You can do 500 miles like Arlo Guthrie that way. Every native son knows the tune.
Good morning, America, how are you? Say, don’t you know me? I’m your native son I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans I’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done. – City of New Orleans
I’ve written about my love of road trips and in particular the Eisenhower interstate highway a few times. If a destination is within a day’s drive in the west, it’s often worth piling into our trusty Subaru and heading for the hills.
Heading to the West Yellowstone entrance through beautiful Madison County Montana
With a portable mini-Starlink, you can work from even the most remote corners of the mountain west. Nothing is quite so satisfying as being in some of America’s most remote areas and having enough connectivity on call if it is needed.
Driving hundreds of miles in a day is often more enjoyable than attempting to fly and you can take in rolling hills and jagged mountain tops without the haste of the TSA rummaging in your bags and needing to show up hours ahead of time. The open road is freedom in the psyche of Americans.
I’ve done this in Europe as well where the infrastructure is not quite as well suited to this type of transit. There are more borders to manage and no consistent roadways.
Europeans generally seem to regard my fondness for road-trips as selfish folly though I rarely do them alone. I’m almost always with friends and my husband.
The freedom to traverse easily over some of the world’s most beautiful land is a privilege. to see rolling green hills and bright sky as spring overtakes the mountain west is just about the best way I can imagine spending a day.
It’s funny that whenever I should have a particularly good week I am inevitably presented with pain and a bad day. And today was a bad day.
I woke up starving at 5am for no reason. Everything hurt. My skin was peeling and I was freezing. A snowstorm barreled in overnight which was cause for some distress and an awkward moment of uncertainty as whether our spring chickens could weather the storm. It’s their first full week out of the barn and in the outdoor coop and the smallest one is still so very little. They did great but they were not happy about it.
Our five new pullets who are snowed in on the first week outside the barn
I also got a sad bit of news about a company that I had witnessed being birthed through its early years as a direct to consumer darling. My first boss had been on its board and their technical cofounder was a college friend who also worked with my prior boss.
If one is to believe the reporting it was sold in debt to a large foreign company whose own brand is the antithesis of what the startup has meant to its customers. It was the first and last of the direct to consumer companies.
I don’t wish to make anyone sadder than they already are about it and I am saddened common stock holders get nothing. It’s a common story in the space and it hurts to see every time.
So I went and bought a bunch of basics in memory of what the company had tried to be and in a show of mourning as I do not trust the new owners to maintain quality.
That’s a common story in all consumer categories now. One is sometimes let down by growing too quickly or raising too much too fast and I have so much sadness in my heart that reality. It was the end of an era.
The more power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.
Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated rather than relying on subjective, non-definitional standards.
How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.
You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”
Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.
Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.
Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.
His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.
Some of Tufte’s self published tomes
The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.
He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.
The Design of Everyday Things second book cover
Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function
You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:
Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.
Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.
A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.
Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.
Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.
Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.
With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.
I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.
