A few weeks ago there was an article on the BBC’s site called The Formula for Happiness which explained that scientists had somehow managed to work out precisely the right way to calculate how happy someone was based upon several core criteria of their lives. This story has been picked up by boingboing.net and ran yesterday. But if you don’t want to go through the whole palaver of calculating the whole thing by hand (as indeed I didn’t) you can now go and have it calculated for you by DotCode’s Calculate your happinesss.
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For the pre-school psycho in your life…
Are you children never satisfied? Do you find yourself buying them ever more toys that they seem to discard almost immediately? Do they have a strange menacing glint in their eyes that you find ungodly? Terrifying, even? Then get them one of the new range of toys from John Lewis. Guaranteed to keep them quiet!
Often as I’m taking the bus home of an evening, I pass a man who looks a bit like a dynamic middle manager standing on Oxford Street near to John Lewis talking about God very loudly through some kind of ‘voice-enhancement-device’. I found him profoundly annoying. From my position he’s just standing up there advertising a way of life that seems to be based around the abandonment of a sense of moral responsibility and condemning people whose lifestyles don’t fit the model of Middle-Eastern propriety two thousand years ago. It seems a bit weird to me. I keep wanting to go up to him and say things like, “I commit the sin of buggery!” Even though I very seldom do and when I do I don’t like it very much. Or maybe, “I do dirty things with men!” Which I do slightly more often and quite enjoy, but doesn’t seem entirely immoral enough. Or maybe buy him a novel or something. So that he has something else to do instead of shout at me all day.
But actually I have a lot of respect for the poor chap. He’s established some things he believes in and he probably gets a fair amount of aggro but still he’s prepared to stand up and do his bit. Occasionally I look around my own soap-box by the side of the road, and check my voice-publishing equipment and wonder what on earth to talk about – even as I know there are a million things I’d like to say. In fact, worse than that, I find myself backing away from confrontation even about some of the things I believe in strongly. I had real trouble writing about Martin Sheen leading the anti-war protest in Los Angeles the other day because I was genuinely proud of him, proud to know that a man whose work I enjoy has the fire and the energy and the commitment to stand up and be counted. But when it came to writing about it, I became immediately timid. I kept qualifying things – we should respect his actions even as we might not necessarily agree with them – he was a great man whether or not you thought his cause was just. So I’m feeling a bit ashamed of myself today, and I’m thinking to myself, “What if I didn’t back down on issues like these?”. I’m even thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I went looking for fights…”
Since I don’t talk nearly enough about the trivia of my life on the site any more, I thought I’d briefly allude to my trip to Suffolk and put online a scant few of the pictures I took when I was up there. I think they came out quite well: The first two weeks of 2003.
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On the first two weeks of 2003…
So what have you seen in the first two weeks of 2003? Shortly after New Year I travelled up to Suffolk to visit a friend who had rented a cottage by the sea for her thirtieth birthday. The weather was stunning and we got to walk on the beach.
The morning after the night before we travelled around a bit, ending up wandering around the astonishingly intact Orford Castle.
While wandering around the village we found several restaurants serving fish and an amazing place that smoked fish and cheese and hocks of ham, and you could watch them doing it (and take photos).
And when we returned to London it wasn’t more than a few days before the weather had changed completely, and blue-skies and ice-cold winds had turned into huge flakes of snow. Here’s the view from my back window:
I’m quite happy with the stuff I’ve done and seen so far this year. If it’s all of a comparable standard, I think I’ll be quite satisfied…
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On doing nice things for other people…
Three things. A) The first thing is that I’m going to send you all over to Sparky’s house and remind you to make a donation to Sparky and Rooster’s Big Gay unWedding – which you should be able to find a link for half-way down the page on the left. Congratulations again, guys. I only wish I could come over and congratulate you both in person. B) Mr Kottke’s advertising his wares in his window again, so if you’re looking for someone with considerable talent who concentrates in clear, simple, user-centered design, microcontent, and the writable web then you should aim yourselves towards his updated portfolio. C) A Friend and secret-trash-professional has launched themselves blogwards at Trash Addict and you should go and investigate immediately so that the novelty doesn’t wear off…
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On 'doing a Kottke'….
I’ve been getting really behind with the stuff that I want to write on plasticbag.org recently, which probably explains why when I do write something it’s fairly hardcore and intensely thought-through rather than a piece of conversational life-fluff. So I’m going to experiment with Jason’s remaindered links approach for a couple of days until I feel I’ve caught up with the world, although I don’t think I’ll do it for long, because I’m not convinced that anyone reads or clicks on lists of links. Nevertheless there is a value to the process, if only in that my link to them (like everyone else’s links to them) constitutes a micro-vote on the utility of the article or resource in question, aiding Blogdex and Daypop reflect the mood of the web-community and helping Google serve the best possible search-results to its visitors…
- My new favourite weblog of the moment (and added to my NetNewsWire subscriptions) is monkeyx.com…
- There’s a couple of interesting face-perception tests over at the BBC’s Science site at the moment…
- Cory Doctorow points and laughs at you for getting all stressed out about WiFi…
- There’s a new content management system on the way from the guy behind textism.com…
- Two search requests that get people to my site: How to bag a man and G.W. Bush’s boyfriend…
- iCommune looks like it’s going to be brilliant – as soon as there’s better auto-discovery…
- A man of principles and passion, and prepared to stand up for them, could Martin Sheen be the best President America never had? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…
- “My gun rights are more important than my gay rights…” Compare this news story with this thing I posted a million years ago…
- Why are Kottke and Megnut two different weblogs? Funny. If you’re in the know.
- A new home for left-wing weblogging in the UK: PolitX.org…
- Three films in order of quality (worst first): Star Trek: Nemesis | Spider | Chicago
- A collection of wishlists for webloggers…
- For Buffy fans only: The Diary of the First Evil…
- Some UI design lies for your delectation…
- I’m hiding my shame down here where no one will see – my second paper to ETCON on the despotism of social software also got rejected…
- Read about the most overhyped and under-reported stories of 2002…
- Find out why my mate Phil turned Pepys’ Diaries into a weblog…
- Did you know? The song ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ by Queen was inspired by the delirium that can affect people in the later stages of AIDS-related decline? Find it ‘quirky’ now…
- Memeufacture is very much a step in the right direction when it comes to using weblog content in an aggregated way – but it’s not there yet. Please employ me to be the person who makes this come true…
- Matt Webb talks about Adaptive Design For Weblog Software
I’m two-thirds of the way through my second Edward Tufte book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Now, before your eyes glaze over and you start skipping over to one of those proper weblogs where they talk about sex and disastrous relationships and the movies they’ve been to see recently, I want to try and convince you that the books of Edward Tufte are fun and interesting. I have no obvious reason to read them – I’m not a statistician and I don’t work with graphs – and yet I find them endlessly pleasurable. I suppose there are several reasons for this , although some of them might be unexpected. Firstly, they are books which are intellectually stretching without being wordy or incomprehensible. They immediately open up realms or spheres of engagement with the world and with the information in it that are normally hidden from people. Secondly they are profoundly sensual experiences. Printed on high-quality paper, mixing textures between covers and cloth and sheet – these are quality publications. The typography is beautiful, the diagrams are never less than beautifully rendered – and occasionally they are simple beautiful diagrams, charts and the like. And finally they have the charm of the Schott’s Original Miscellany (in that they contain as asides blocks of utterly unexpected information and background) without the handicap of being about nothing… In fact all of Tufte’s books are satisfying because they exude the care of the artisan or the craftsman – someone with a profound expertise in, and love/respect for the process of creation of quality. In this respect his books really remind me of Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, another book that beautifully expresses passion and expertise based around a respect for quality.
Which is probably why, when I was reading The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, I was so surprised to come upon a paragraph that was so completely alien to the practices of web clarity and usability. In it, Tufte states some beliefs that have long-since been rejected from web design – ostensibly because they are smack of elitism and are impractical – even costly. He states, in effect, that we shouldn’t forsake complexity just to communicate with our audience. Here is a brief quote from a much larger section of the book concerned with novelty and different paradigms of information-presentation:
Moreover, it is a frequent mistake in thinking about statistical graphics to underestimate the audience. Instead, why not assume that if you understand it, most other readers will, too? Graphics should be as intelligent and sophisticated as the accompanying text.
The section concerned is a lot longer and more detailed than the quote above, and is fundamentally about revealing complex and large amounts of information through graphical means – rather than about navigation or layout. But it’s still interesting to me. He talks about how most diagrams used in the national press (if compared with those used at schools and colleges) are of a pre-adult level, and that we shouldn’t allow this to happen. We should respect the intelligence of our audience. The comparison with the title of Steve Krug’s brilliant web usability book Don’t make me think! (much recommended) couldn’t be more striking.
So what is it about web navigation and site structure that means we should treat our users as idiots while infographics are allowed to treat their viewers like grown-ups? Unfortunately the answer is ultimately extremely simple – infographics are designed to transmit useful information and that information is the final goal of any interaction with them. This isn’t true of web-navigation. Web navigation is designed to structure and communicate information about how to find different information. Web-navigation (and my doctoral supervisor in Bristol is literally turning over in her tenure as I say this) is for the most part nothing but meta-information – no one (except web UI professionals) visits MSN.co.uk for the information communicated by the navigational scheme. It’s fundamentally uninteresting.
But this does not necessarily have to be the case – it seems to me eminently possible that we might be able to generate a hybridised system whereby web navigation actually itself holds valuable information – much like Tufte demonstrates the axes of a graph can be redeveloped to carry additional information about the data that they frame (I’ll see if I can find a visual representation of this as soon as I get a moment). I have at this time no sense of how one might go about doing this (except through a cascading series of inter-navigating graphs) but there seems to me to be a certain amount of potential in this line of investigation… More on this later (perhaps)…
Addenda: How to pronounce Tufte (after kottke.org).
A brief list of some interesting articles I’ve read today:
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On the lazyweb – iTunes remote…
So I have an iBook. And I have a desktop computer. They are both Macs. My desktop computer is plugged into a stereo amplifier. I use it to play mp3s that I’ve rippped from my ample music collection. But mostly I use my lap-top for everything now. My home computer is nothing but a grotesquely powerful wireless networking bridge and jukebox. But I’m getting increasingly frustrated because I want to be able to control my jukebox from my main computer. From my laptop. My first reaction to having wireless networking is that I should be able to use my laptop as some kind of remote-control. I need a bridge a way of interacting with my main computer – something that will let me control iTunes long-distance… I hereby invoke the lazyweb…
- Is this the answer? iHam on iRye 1.1.1
In related – posted-after-the-fact – news, I’d like to thank Euan for pointing me towards iHam on iRye (above), which is one of the best applications with a chronically stupid bloody name I’ve ever used. I am now comfortably sitting on my sofa wirelessly connecting to my desktop computer and completely controlling iTunes. I will be able to do this from any room in my ludicrously tiny flat. Including my bedroom. While I’m in bed. All in all, excellent stuff. And in related news, Matt Webb has pointed me towards the iTrip – an achingly gorgeous little piece of kit that you plug into your iPod. The iPod then broadcasts the music it’s playing in such a way that it can be picked up by any nearby FM radio. Stunning. I must have one…