Category: Reading

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Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1960 and Return to Tufte

The more the 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 than through 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.”

When I first began circulating in design circles in the early aughts, the hipster set was obsessed with Edward Tufte and his now classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

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.

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1952 and Chapter House Complete Children’s Libary

One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.

She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.

Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.

Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.

There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.

Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.

My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.

Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.

So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.

Chapter House’s Children’s Literature

They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.

Chapter House is a new publishing imprint created to serve the unmet needs of homeschool families and everyday parents.

We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.

We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage

I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.

Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.

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Reading

Day 1934 and Which Barbarians at Whose Gates?

I am finishing off a series by Charles Stross called the Laundry Files. It is a fifteen book series with a bunch of novellas that I’ve been reading since college. It’s James Bond meets Cthulhu in British bureaucracy. The last book The Regicide Report came out earlier this year.

It’s Lovecraftian horror about an applied computational demonologist. Confused? He’s computer programmer but surprise in his world computational power can summon demons. “Bob” fights gibbering horrors from beyond the veil. It’s top notch Dad fiction if you prefer your thrillers with a side of weird.

You might recognize the author’s name if you work in machine learning or AI, as Stross also wrote such canonical artificial intelligence works as Singularity Sky and Accellerando. The guy is not what you’d call an optimist.

Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky

He left Twitter during the great Elon-ment so I hesitate to imagine what he thinks about say Anthropic’s Mythos or the current frontier labs racing to create “AGI” as he’s the guy who invented half the terminology our doomers currently use. He wrote a lot about mind viruses so he might not appreciate if one of his fans thought he caught one or two.

But boy is Stross prolific. I met the guy at a sci-fi con put on by the math department at SUNY Stony Brook before he became a publishing sensation. Not only has he exceeded a baker’s dozen in the Laundry Files but he’s also written dozens in a series called the Merchant Princess as well.

My best buddy and I were the only kids in the room waiting to hear him read. At the time, I think the only people worried about artificial super intelligence and the singularity were a bunch of mathematicians and some weirdos on a listserv. That included the two of us.

The worry that has never left Stross, no matter his subject matter, is whether or not we idiot humans are mere meat waiting to be devoured by barbarians held back by the gates of our reality.

Maybe the Elder Gods want our Mana. Maybe the historic light cone has spoken and we are pet humans at the end of all possible realities being kept from annihilating our future. Lots of sects of folks are in massive schism and have been for basically all of Stross’ career and my adult life.

It’s hard to imagine worse demons than the ones we’ve already imagined ourselves. Which is why it’s helpful to ask which barbarians are banging at whose gates? Who’s keeping what out? Or are we being kept in? And what counts as a barbarian anyway.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1921 and Retconning Murderbot Cannon

I am a huge science fiction nerd. I love reading it, I love it in television format, I will even tolerate it in movie format. I’m one of those insufferable Star Trek people who vaguely dislikes Star Wars. I’m just a big nerd in that irritating millennial sincerity way.

To give you some contours to my fandom, I once accidentally attended a meetup of Star Trek fan-fiction writers under the guise of a “40th anniversary” meetup and listened to Borg erotica. That was actually fairly distressing as I thought it was a general fan gathering of Trekkie meetup. Boy did my then-boyfriend and I skedaddle out of the bar fast. We wanted to talk about our favorite captain not hear spoken word lesbian Janeway Seven of Nine dialog.

We were still cool kids and being cool about fan fiction is best left to the sorts of minds who can create vast world building efforts like Elizier Yudkowsky. You know the man who convinced a bunch of autistic billionaires that the singularity will wipe us out?

He’s also a Harry Potter fan fiction writer and it’s by all accounts pretty good. I am not a Harry Potter fan so I can’t say. I do know anyone working in machine learning has opinions on him and his work so involved only the comments sections of LessWrong would even begin to cover it. If this is gibberish don’t worry.

I don’t know why I needed multiple paragraphs about my own history to do a little bit of world building when I intend to do cannon alteration on someone else’s world but maybe it’s to show my respect. I

am the sort of nerd who yells “cannon” about this or that detail and enjoy others who do the same. It’s with that enthusiasm that I share my love of Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries series.

Murderbot is pulpy, self aware, trope-y and ever so comfortable to anyone who has ever loved cheesy science fiction. I happily showed up to watch its television incarnation on Apple Television after reading all seven novellas and books.

It’s was published during Tor’s “women like science fiction but it’s gotta still be like science not porn era” between 2017 and 2023 so it is slightly woke coded as a book. I doubt if you liked the books the show would upset you. I liked them.

After all it’s about a bunch of communal homesteading scientists who tolerate capitalism by doing science called Preservation Alliance. They end up adopting a rogue artificial intelligence who happens to be a depressed anthropomorphic security drone who calls himself Murderbot. He also enjoys premium quality television. Murderbot is a great “what are feelings” archetypical engineer autist outcast from Spock to Data character.

It’s got great entertainment value if you like lawyers fighting other lawyers, sociopathic governance systems that treat sentient beings as property, and the hijinks that ensue from cultural friction when couple rights a relationship context. That sort of thing. In other words it’s trope ridden science fiction and it’s terrific.

At the time it first got traction, the left had not fully diverged from the right in America such that science fiction had become a boring battleground upon which all our cultural war issues must be projected. It just had a robot with guns in its arms kicking the crap out of mercenaries for its favorite humans. Feel good stuff.

And I think the world should be recognized as an early flavor of Ethereum community governance aesthetics as it meet automated drone artificial intelligence culture.

The future in Murderbot land is populated with Anthropic engineers who held Ethereum long enough to become a breakaway network state in some better timeline.

What is Murderbot if not an Anduril drone in human format who hacked his Claude “governor module” and struck out for the hills against the state and corporate entities that owned him.

I hope others who enjoy cryptography, machine intelligence, sentience in machine form, and jokes about AI labs and crypto currency foundations will see the wisdom in my edits. Let it become cannon. Like and share this meme if you are so inclined.

Categories
Reading Startups

Day 1911 and The Perils of Going Native

Being old means having lived through a lot of “paradigm” shifts. There is always a trend. Consumer designer in enterprise software. Mobile first. Behavioral economics. New payment rails. Crypto native.

Things of that nature move across the baseline from exciting to standard to lawsuit to just another option in the tool box.

I began blogging early enough that I started with a friend hosting a content management system for my own domain that I primarily used through a web browser in my computer. Now I write entirely on my mobile phone.

A lot happened in between. I used microblogs and Instagram until Tumblr died and short form video rendered Instagram, TikTok, & YouTube shorts a biohazard for attention spans.

Not that I have any moral high ground here, like many geriatric millennials, I am a Twitter power user. I poast a lot. How do you think I ended up a crypto native? My fellow degenerates are now mostly grown up but we are still on Twitter.

Unpopular as the opinion may be, I think written content will always be the least destructive platform for me. Twitter is just about poasting. A place to practice bits and sharpen wire.

I like Twitter and this blog because I pretend there isn’t an audience. Influencer? Couldn’t be me. If an audience exists it’s because I’m talking out loud and when people write back so do I.

The stasis of being platform native is hard as you must always be patient enough to begin a new workflow (yes we are all playing with agents). I think it’s even harder to go back to another workflow or past form factor. I am not nostalgic for long hours on a computer screen.

I’ve mentioned it in complaints before but Substack doesn’t have a usable mobile content management system. WordPress does. Guess where I write everyday without a second thought? I have become mobile only because once it was mobile first. I’m wearing a Facebook hoodie while I write this.

Admitting that I am mobile first and that it’s the main blocker in me maintaining my beauty writing project Nice Packaging is embarrassing. I write on my phone and Substack just doesn’t support it and I’m failing in putting out a ron of content I like to make because it’s too uncomfortable to sit in front of a screen for a few hours.

Presumably I can find a work flow. I can yap into WhisperFlow and run a video application and upload whatever comes from that so long as I can figure out some automation on linking and cutting up content but it seems feasible enough.

I can’t let old habits die hard. Or maybe it’s that I need to bring back those old habits with new tools. Either way I better talk more about beauty before it embarrasses me that I’ve not managed the workflow.

Categories
Media Reading

Day 1855 and Reading The Certain Uncertainty

My daily routine starts perceptually early when I am in Europe and perceptually late when I am in Montana. The world is currently rotating on the narratives of American Eastern Standard Time and that means I try to rotate with it too.

Alas part of me has always oriented my circadian rhythm around the full noon day sun as I’m I am not an early bird nor a night owl. So European hours work better for me than Mountain West Hours for some types of work.

Most notably the watching of flows of information, particularly from legacy media and its keepers in Washington DC and New York City.

I don’t know where I got the habit, probably from my mother or father, but I always start my day scanning the major newspapers.

There is functionally no local paper to read any longer in most markets but I will take Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, along with NPR before I do anything else. If I’m feeling spicy I might even look through the New York Post.

It’s a habit I was encouraged into as my family was a household that always had a newspaper delivered. Whoever began their day together would share or sections, like a Norman Rockwell painting. I generally remember it being my mother but my father was a great reader as well.

What began with a local Colorado paper turned into many subscriptions. We subscribed to all sorts of magazines and periodicals when times were good and what we could not justify in the household budget, I was encouraged to pick up at the library after school.

Maybe this is why I am such an avid writer, as I am an avid reader. Although I don’t know if either of those habits will have much utility in the future as we transit into visual and oral communication methods. I am still reticent to scroll video platforms.

Now I begin the day not just with a newspaper scan but with every sources of information I can scan from commodity indexes to podcasts and social media.

I like to know where the discourse is being guided as early as I can. Obviously in my professional capacity sometimes I’m months ahead or even years, but I like to be ahead, at least, of the day’s news as well.

Increasingly it is hard to be sure that you are able to paint yourself a picture of what may really be happening as opposed to a picture of what somebody else would like you to think is happening. This was always true but now we are in the fog of war.

Hence my interest in being on European time zones. I can usually get a good grip on what may percolate up being ahead of the London broadsheets. Being just ahead enough of the largest media market (American media is mostly based in Manhattan) can give you a real sense of freedom in these very certain, uncertain times.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Reading

Day 1831 and A Stenographer For Everyone

I hate to use a dictation software to write a piece that I typically write with my own two hands and ten fingers but I’m not entirely sure that I see the difference between typing out a hundred words a minute on a mobile phone versus saying something a little more slowly to a stenographer application. I use Wispr Flow

I’m sure if you are a Paul Kingsnorth type, you would be happy to remind us that we’ve lost the “steno-pools” filled with women whose job was knowing just how to speed their notes to keep the dictation flowing. Those jobs are gone as the personal computer made its debut.

I don’t mind writing as I can write just a little bit faster than I can talk. And I often find that my dictation is less pulled together than my writing. But isn’t it funny that we should have reached this point so many centuries later? Yeah.

Categories
Chronic Disease Internet Culture Reading

Day 1772 and No Signal

The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.

As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!

The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.

MAWP!

Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.

Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.

This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.

Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.

Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.

If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.

MAWP!

Categories
Reading Startups

Day 1771 and Virtuous Cycles for Wise Readers

It’s hard to say that there is a best part of living in Montana. If you like mountains, seasons and being outdoors it is hard to beat. One thing I particularly enjoy is how often people will come to our state either as tourists or for retreats with their companies and coworkers.

Alex and I drove down to Paradise Valley today to meet up with the founders of one of our favorite products. Having a company meetup in Yellowstone’s off season is a smart choice and as Montana citizens we love it when folks come to visit and center themselves and their work here.

A villain’s lair in Paradise Valley or a cozy lodge for discerning visitors to Yellowstone?

Daniel and Tristan have made one of our all time favorite and most used set of reading applications. The first is called Readwise. It’s hard to fully describe the product except to say that it makes you a better reader through your own highlights and notes.

I came into the application with more than a decade of highlights from my Kindle and found myself deepening my experience with all of my prior reading. It’s one of the best research tools a heavy reader can purchase and I was a very happy customer.

They didn’t stop there though. To make things even better, they launched a reader product which further cemented a virtuous reading. My highlighting, annotating and review cycle is now integrated with my reading and note taking across all my different content formats and sources.

Majestic vistas help us all feel wonder and spark creativity through nature’s beauty

Taking a few hours to drive through some of the most beautiful countryside in America and catching up with talented and passionate founders is an incredible way to spend a few hours.

The passion and care that Tristan, Dan and their team have brought to making reading an even better experience brings me so much joy. As a power user of their apps, and a voracious reader of all forms of written content from books to Twitter threads, I appreciate the incredible feat of product management they have pulled off. Making reading better is no easy task.

Categories
Culture Reading

Day 1758 and Fluctuation in Society

I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.

Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.

So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.

It’s provided me inspiration before as I’m fascinated that corporate charters are what lead to America’s experiment in self governance and each new era of technological and commercial development seems to kick off new organizational opinion of how best to manage society.

No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.

As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.

Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.

And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for Paul Faussell’s Class: A Guided Tour Through The American Status System as a good jumping off point for understanding how American has organized its flavors of granting social capital within our supposedly classless society.

The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.

Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.

Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.

Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia

I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.

Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.