destroyed

Talking Points Memo

I need talking points. OK? They're not for you, they're not for some elevator pitch or to convince anyone by my pithy persuasive power. They're for me. They're to remind me what I know. I need reminders of what I think. I need linear help. Otherwise it's just a big timeless lump that I can't access. My mind is a large lump and I need levers to open the crannies.

Trace Evidence

All my traces add up to a lot of scratching. Pollackian wandering. On the surface of the earth.

Why 2009 Is Really Like 1984

OK so we all know that http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=Aapleach man kills the thing he loves, but does he need to turn into his evil twin while doing so? Apple Inc (formerly Apple Computer) famously and now perhaps infamously fought The Man back during its introduction of Macintosh. Now, not only are they The Man, but honest and righteous little guys have had it with them. I refer, of course, to the debacle that is the iPhone App Store approval process. Too much has been written about the whole sorry business to rehash its sad history here. All I'd like to point out is that when enough is enough for men of reason, you'd better start looking to your escape pods. No, this doesn't mean I'm predicting some kind of imminent demise for Apple (IBM and Microsoft, respectively The Men of their times, are still around and despite heinous acts of bad faith of bankrupt ideaspace, continue to thrive, each in different ways and for many different reasons). That is not the point. The point is how can a smart company go stupid? Buildings don't fall all at once, they crumble little by little. It is not a question of Apple dying. Apple is super-healthy. But what do you lose when you start selling ad-space on your soul? Who the fuck is in charge of the silly-go-round that is the iPhone App Store, merely looking at the monthly sales totes and saying "We good? Yah. We good." I defy you to read the above-referenced Ars article and not see something rotten in the state of, you know, that Shakespearey place.

Wormonauts!

This is simply a repost of today's article on Schott's blog, but it's so good, and my mind is so full of worms since last night's episode of House, that I think everyone will find it interesting: most especially the fact that 80% of a worm's genetic makeup is identical to human. Talk about global connections!

Worms sent into outer space!

Reporting ahead of the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, which will transport more than 4,000 Caenorhabditis elegans worms into space, Jacqui Goddard wrote in The Times of London:

The British wormonauts will spend 11 days in orbit more than 200 miles above the Earth, travelling 4.5 million miles, as part of a study that is expected to have important implications for future human space travellers.

Scientists at the the University of Nottingham, England, spent more than a year preparing for the wormonauts’ mission. According to Goddard, the worms are considered a good model for studying human physiology – in this instance, muscle wastage caused by space travel – because they share up to 80 percent of their genetic make-up with humans.
[fromSchott's Vocab, NY Times, 11/17/2009]

The Millions: Tina Brown, Goin’ Rogue, and the Limits of Timeliness

Now, at The New Republic, Damon Linker has blogged a pretty succinct summation of Beast Books’ weird commingling of the redundant, the oxymoronic, and the inevitable:

Opining is fun, and so is ideological combat. But a book is, or should be, something different: A chance to slow down. An opportunity to raise one’s sights a little higher. . . . To reflect instead of react. What Beast Books is proposing . . . is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing.

via www.themillions.com

A book should be something different. Isn't that a beautiful idea? And one that resonates so simply because it's already true. A book is something different. We may put makeup and false noses upon it, we may surgically alter its face until it is stretched beyond recognition, but we know, we who love the book, what its purpose-beyond-purpose is. Make available the teaching.

Beginning Again

I always enjoy beginner's lists, how-tos for this or that, no matter the subject of interest or how "expert" I already am in what's discussed. There is always something new to learn or something simple and basic to reinforce. I am reminded of that most beautiful of all practices, the ballet, and how each day the dancers begin with the most basic of movements at a barre. Each and every day, they begin at the beginning. And in this way, they advance farther than any other approach would permit.

The Appification of the World

The idea of the app, popularized so much by Apple's iPhone App Store, but in existence at least since Macintosh enforced the semantic change from "program" to "application" back in... oh I don't know when, somebody with a better sense of tech history than me can look it up... but the idea of the app, so marvelously reinforced by the brand name of the company itself, is, I think, going to be the driving metaphor of at least the first half of this century. Driven, oddly enough, by the Sasquatch of Socialmedia (not just Twitter, but indeed Twitter), we're seeing all kinds of once-discrete communications moving toward apphood. And many, many, many more to come. Everything from your GPS receiver to your conference (TED, poptech) to your book (Jamie Oliver) to your record album (Apple LPs) to your image/photography creation-consumption to your research (Wolfram Alpha) to your... I'm talking EVERYTHING, it's all going the way of the app. After all, what better way to experience these things, even if you attend them "live", than in enriched and archival form? And live is so limiting anyway: in-person so needlessly analog beyond the tiny number of attendees at any given happening. After all, aren't you "live" when you're interacting at a distance? And how deep is that distance anyway when the connectors of communication are ever more deeply embedded into the interface of the app itself? (Eye contact? There will be an app for that. Or rather a code-in for everyapp.) What is watching baseball on TV but an "app" for being there? The app is the wrapper for almost anything you can name, and even those areas of life we simply can't digitize our way around -- food, sleep, sex, medicaments -- well, apps are coming for those too. Sleep is already there, arguably, at least in terms of helpers (there are some marvelous white noise and calming muzak generators available now, see list below for a few examples). All the others, the stuff of science fiction comedy, how much are you prepared to bet against the wizards of neuroscience and anthropomorphic programming?

Netflix is positioning itself for the soon-to-come day when the DVD falls victim to the evolutionary superiority of the app. Its on-demand service is an app for instant access. Magazines will be apps soon. The New Yorker web site, so deep and functional, can it be doubted their tech team is submitting to ADC right now some subset or better of Harold Ross's vision? Forget about books: authors themselves will be apps. Why limit readers to a single volume when your entire corpus can be interconnected as you're creating it? With all the extras and sketches and bells and whistles you like, or as minimal as you like, it will be part of the author-brand, the new lingo-lango of the app. Companies too, as well as their CEOs and all other levels of the corporate domain: Zappos will be an app, but Tony Hsieh will be an app as well, and as extensively (available from within the meta-app, cross-directional, omni-directional). The world is a ghetto, but the ghetto will be an app also, and might be a way out of the ghetto, or into the ghetto, depending on your desire: aspects of technology penetrate beyond economics (think cell phones in the hands of the homeless).

The world itself is a kind of app, and more so, ever more so, as we go. I don't know where it's going but we're entering the Age of the App. Strap in and hang on.

For further reference:

MLB.com At Bat 2009

Jamie Oliver's 20 Minute Meals

Wolfram Alpha

Co-Pilot

Reel Director

Starck

Ghostly Discovery

Japanese

Ambiance

White Noise

TED

Amazon

Dancing with the Stars (ABC TV)

KCRW (radio)

SOMA-FM

Bloom, Trope, Air (Brian Eno, Peter Chilvers)

NASA

MotionX GPS Sport

Navigon

Future Doc

You know I'm not the first to say it, but books, reading matter of all kinds, are changing their medium. Was it naïve to ever think they'd stay in one form? After all, novels themselves had quite the heyday in serialized magazines. Did anyone in 1847 think the time would come that Everyman might have a solid series of bound volumes on the shelves? They probably did. But I doubt they thought the written word would move and slide off paper entirely, or as overwhelmingly supported by visuals as we've seen come to life. With the addition of digital, who knows where it's going to go?

Well, it's going onto e-Ink appliances for one thing. No great surprise there now that Kindle has established a few of the possibilities, and here comes nook to offer itself as not so much a next step as a quarter-shuffle forward. But for me, the real change, the intensive difference I see not just on the horizon but here can be found in the how-to book. And that platform, at least for a brief moment, is on the iPhone. And the cases in point are Jamie Oliver's new app 20 Minute Meals and the O'Reilly publications in app form of their Missing Manual series. (I know just one is out the door at the moment, but you can take this to the bank: they'll all be there within a year at most.)

Educational, instructional, how to, self help, anything that can be broken down into steps of clear information delivered, it need hardly be added, by some personable someone (Jamie Oliver has got to be a kind of gold standard: simple, good looking, aw shucks, but with a down country English accent which to Americans means simultaneous approachable and posh), this is a territory for transformation. And it's already here. The Oliver cooking iApp is just splendid. Easy, short, simply to follow, exciting, well put together. And NOT 99 cents, thank goodness. Let's charge proper money for these things. (A quick how-d'ye-do and tip of the cap to Wolfram for their guts in prem pricing their Alpha app.)

The point is: why buy a cookbook when this is possible? Yes, for the moment, real indepth, How to Cook Everything, or coffee table trophies, or French encyclopedia-type door stops need their analog heft. And reading MFK Fisher, sure, for the moment take her to bed although you'll be able to have her digital avatar read to you eventually when techno raises her from the ashes. But there will be more and more students who simply want the information delivered as show-and-tell as possible, which I put to you is the least painful injection in a semi-literate world. And Mr Oliver and his cohorts have really hit it out of the kitchen, in my view.

O'Reilly isn't doing it all quite yet. But they will. At the moment they're just PDFing their way into easy app-hood. But if anyone is capable of seeing the potential as they cram their podcasting, vodcasting selves into an endless series of 5 dollar manuals, it's O'Reilly.

It's all good stuff. And none of it has stopped me from buying the latest Folio Society Limited Edition.

The Good, The Fun, and The Sucked On

Scott Jarvie undertakes product design as a labor of fun. Everything he makes has an ambience of joie de tous. This project, the Clutch Chair from 2007, is made entirely of drinking straws. Try not to love it.

Made from 10,000 drinking straws, the Clutch Chair is an exploratory research piece that passes comment on our disposable culture. The development process of this piece also informed that of the Clutch Light, both of which were developed from an observation of the structural characteristics of trees. This piece was selected by Zaha Hadid as her Curators Choice at Noise Festeval 2008 The Clutch Project began as a microscopic observation of the structural composition of trees and the directional properties of Capillary tubes (xylem).Detail of the seating surface of the Clutch ChairUbiquitous drinking straws are grouped and transformed into a primitive spot light. The reflective inner surface of the straw transmits the light in a directional manner creating a jewelesque effect.

via www.scottjarvie.co.uk

Where Public Money Should Go

I've said it before: youtube should be declared a resource in the public interest and... whatever comes next. Wikipedia too.