Author: gulley

It is reasonably well known in this country that 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, but how many Vietnamese died during the same conflict? Estimates vary, but the number (including civilians) may be as much as 50 times larger. We feel bad about the Americans dying in Iraq, as we should, but consider that the toll on Iraqis is much much higher. No matter what other viewpoints or emotions you bring to the conflict, this is a point to ponder. My brother-in-law Craig is an artist who, essentially, put this issue to some high school students at the Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis, Missouri. He created a collaborative artwork with some instructions for the students. The following is from the school’s website.

Craig sent eighty-eight packages to Thomas Jefferson School, enough for each student. Each package consisted of a small wooden grave marker and a set of printed instructions. The instructions asked each student to find the name of an Iraqi civilian who has been killed in the fighting of the last two years. When possible, each person was to select someone of about his or her own age, and someone whose name begins with the same letter as his or her own name. They were then to write that person’s name on the grave marker.

From Rob comes the Wacked User Interface of the Week: Etsy (tagline: “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade”). I can’t help but make fun of them for being over the top, but honestly, I am impressed. This is the zaniest UI I’ve ever seen in an online app that appears to be mainstream. As Rob says, it’s “Flickr meets Ebay.” I might put it this way: “The Flickr hovercraft smashed into the Ebay love-bus and they both fell into the giant psychedelic Flash tickling machine.” Poke around and you’ll see what I mean: Shop by color using colorific pulsating lava-like blobula. Shop by Geolocator, and zippity-spin your selections (and vendors) off to the four corners of the Earth. Shop by time machine and (oh the humanity!) God only knows what’s going on.

To which I say: good for them. We need more stuff like this. But I might take some Dramamine before I shop there. To be fair, if you scroll down past the Flash goodies, you can drive through the site in a pretty conventional way.

I was at an entrepreneurship and innovation workshop earlier this week held at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School. There I was lucky enough to see a presentation by the guys from SkinnyCorp who built Threadless.com. Theirs is a beautiful story of falling into the product that the market wants you to make. If they had been more willful and goal-directed (as we’re taught to be if we want to amount to anything) I feel certain they would have failed. But they didn’t fail. They succeeded wildly. This “about us” statement gives you an sense of their approach to life and business.

What did they do? They made a t-shirt company in which visitors to the site upload designs, which visitors to the site then vote on, which visitors to the site then buy. And their business is booming. It’s mostly a slacker-hacker-ironical-snowboard-cooldude kind of groove they’ve got going, but who can argue with the numbers? They assume almost no risk, spend no money on advertising, and the money pours in. Not to make it all sound easy; they worked hard to build a very loyal community, and their site design is highly tuned to the needs of the community.

The t-shirt designs are contributed for free by aspiring designers. These guys might win cash prizes, but the real prize is getting a reputation that will lead to more design work. In certain design circles, Threadless has become the hot place to scout for talent. If you need a cover for your band’s new CD, this is the place to go. Here are some of my favorite shirt designs. Look around and waste some time.

• Dark Side of the Garden
• Rock Me Amadeus
• AT-AT Boo Boo

SkinnyCorp isn’t resting on its skateboard, though. They’ve recently expanded from cooldude t-shirts into dapperdude neckties. Even snowboarders grow up, and their wallets grow up with them. If you’re feeling too grown up, you can still buy an I Park Like an Idiot bumper sticker.

Quick: you’re on the fourth floor of a hotel. You want to go to the first floor, so you step into this elevator… and now which button do you press? If you’re like me, you press the big number one just below the two. It even has little triangles on either side to indicate its special status as the lobby floor. If you press it, the doors will close, but nothing else will happen. That’s exactly as the designers of the elevator intended because this isn’t the first floor button, it’s the “close doors” button. It’s also an example of bad design for usability in that it actively encourages you to do the wrong thing. I know because I stayed in this very hotel, and each time I got in the elevator to go back down to the lobby, I pressed that damn “close” button.

What can we do about making our designs more usable? One thing we can do is celebrate World Usability Day. Usability professionals (yes, there is such a thing) are always looking for ways to raise awareness about usability-related issues (and, as a not unrelated side effect, point out that they exist). The Boston Usability Professionals Association is hosting a few special events today. My favorite is the Usability R.A.C.E “where teams of researchers study the city of Boston and brainstorm solutions to issues related to signage, and other public issues.” Ha! That’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Boston could improve its signage by HAVING SOME.

When my cousin Margaret was a little girl, her mom (my Aunt Nancy) came across a whole collection of empty popcorn boxes stuffed into the back of her sock drawer. How come? As it happened, a few weeks earlier the family had been to the circus, and when the show was over, Margaret felt so sad for all the empty popcorn boxes being left behind that she gathered as many of them as she could carry and took them with her to give them a good home.

Do you ever feel sorry for inanimate objects? Things left behind and unloved, like old shoes dangling from a phone line? Here’s a site (courtesy of my friend St. Frank) that specializes in taking care of Old Sad Things. As BeeJay, the owner and chief gamekeeper of the site says: “I like old sad things.”

Do you? What’s the oldest, saddest technical thing you can recall being used as directed (i.e. not by a collector, not with irony)? I remember lots of Polaroid pictures from my childhood, and not from the fancy shmancy SX-70, but the old Model 360 with its goopy, smearing film and the pop and crinkle of its disposable flash bulbs. I still remember the shredding sound our family’s Bell & Howell projector made when our family movies slipped the sprockets. And every film ended with the rhythmic whap-whap-whap sound as the loose end of the film reel flapped freely. And the slide carousels for the slide projector… click… clickety-click click. The pictures came out upside down as often as rightside up.

It’s funny that as I sit and try to recall these old sad machines, what I call back most easily are the sounds.

Hey, you want to read a fun book review? Read this review by Cosma Shalizi about Stephen Wolfram’s massive monument to himself, A New Kind of Science. The review is long, but it’s packed with lots of good information, and believe me, you’ve never read a review about a physics book that dishes quite like this one. From the subtitle (“A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity”) to the summation (“There is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported”), it’s nonstop action.

When Wolfram’s book first came out, it had an Emperor’s New Clothes feel to it (the Emperor’s New Kind of Science, perhaps?). Wolfram’s reputation for brilliance and legal aggression had a numbing effect on his reviewers. Sure he’s arrogant, but might he be right? Nobody wanted to be branded as the idiot who gave it a bad review just before God Himself endorsed it as the Truth. I have been looking forward to the day when the gloves came off, and that day is upon us. Shalizi is a clever (young) prof at the University of Michigan, and his critique alternates between truncheons and erudition.

Bruce Sterling, commenting on Shalizi’s review, offers this bon mot:

Maybe reviewers shouldn’t pick on isolated, wealthy math geniuses who have intensely private, highly bonkers-sounding, self-published cosmological schemes. I mean — what if he comes out of his ivory basement and deliberately DISTURBS THE UNIVERSE? We could be looking at the pixelated rags and tatters of reality by Friday!

My friend and erstwhile co-worker Nabeel is getting deep into the Google Map hacking these days, and for his latest trick he’s come up with a real winner. His GeoIndex tool takes the stock performance for each company in the S&P 500 and puts it onto a map of the US. Little green and red arrows tell you if the stock went up or down for the day. Click on a company ticker or location, and you get a nice little in-place five-day chart. I found this moderately interesting until I realized I could click on industries too. So for today, I see that Pfizer had a bad day (not so surprising these days). But a click on “Pharm/Biotech” shows me that most of the pharmas also had an off day. I can also see the geographic distribution of companies: the big East Coast pharmas clustered around New Jersey went down, but the younger West Coast biotechs in San Diego and San Francisco did well on the whole.

I don’t know if it will help me make money, but it’s fun to look at.

He must be expecting some company pretty soon, because he’s got the place decked out with Google Ads. I can’t blame him: one mention on SlashDot will send his bandwidth bills skyrocketing.

Quick, how many airplanes are airborne in US airspace at the busiest time of the day? Answer: just over 5000 (that’s IFR airborne aircraft for you aeronautical sticklers out there). Next question: how many airplanes are in the air RIGHT NOW? Answer: go ask the insane detail-obsessed people who put together FlightAware. They’ll not only tell you (as I post this, the answer is 2732 aircraft), but they’ll show you a freakin’ picture of it. They’ll even tell you how many Cessna Skylane 182s are in the air right now. And the sky is lousy with Airbus A320s. Show me the inbound and outbound flights for Newark International? No problem. They’ve got minute-by-minute altitude, position, and speed for every plane in the air. The more I dig into the site, the more amazed I am at the wealth of completely free information available to me, the lazy web-surfing airplane geek.

And the pièce-de-résistance? A movie of all flights over a 24 hour period. Every time I watch I see more fascinating things. Watch the east coast wake up, roll over and poke the slumbering west coast. Look at Maine being hosed down by Europe until it overflows and boils back the other way. Avert your eyes from Florida’s rude Caribbean drip. See the trans-Pac crowd huddling nervously in Seattle before walking the lonely tightrope to Alaska. I can’t stop looking…

The overall effect is of fire, or of bugs pouring out of their underground colonies and marauding. Every single one of those red buglike dots is great big metal tube filled with people. I declare: that do beat all.

Newsflash: I know from my logs that people have been trying (unsuccessfully) to leave comments. I was puzzled for a while, but I believe the problem is fixed now. We’ll see if the new version of Movable Type has good spam controls.

In the meantime, if my blog gave you the comment cold shoulder, please accept my apologies and try again…

I’m doing the big switch from one web host to another (from Interland to ImHosted.com). From where I sit, the nameservers are already pointing people to my new site, so that part’s good. At the same time, I upgraded my Movable Type installation to version 3.2. It seems pretty good so far, but man what a pain it is to go fiddle around with giant complex completely different style sheets and templates. Anyway, if things look weird or unstable for a few days, that’s why. If they look weird or unstable a week from now, please tell me. Assuming my email account is working, which it isn’t at the moment.

So far so good with ImHosted. Thanks for the recommendation Nabeel!