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02 April 2007
Mon, 02 Apr 2007 21:12:54 GMTBeautiful Evidence
Tufte’s newest tome on the art of information design, or whatever he calls it these days. I really don’t do much design of any sort, but find the stuff fascinating to look at and even read about. Here’s a list of things from the book that I’d love to have poster size and hang somewhere:
- 17 – Prints of fish.
- 37 – Pages from book on skiing.
- 46 – Visualization of Chopin piece.
- 73 – horse by Verrocchio.
- 84 – Centuar manuscript.
- 96 – da Vinci sketches of the moon, 103 – da Vinci star chart.
And a few notes:
be approximately right rather than exactly wrong 50
The rage to conclude:
The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded. Gustave Flaubert, 154
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24 December 2005
Sat, 24 Dec 2005 09:49:56 GMT Information Awareness Officevia Kjell Olsen2237 days agoThe government is running this office, with this in mind:
The IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data. In essence, the IAO
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25 November 2005
Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:26:08 GMT IT Conversations: Brewster Kahle - Universal Access to All KnowledgeKjell Olsen2266 days agoExcellent talk about how the new Library of Alexandria is coming to be through the Internet Archive.
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01 November 2005
Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:45:06 GMT The Looming Attention Crisisvia Kjell Olsen2290 days agoWhat information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. Herbert Simon
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31 October 2005
Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:27:11 GMT Official Google Blog: More video to watch!via Kjell Olsen2291 days agoGoogle video works in safari since I don’t know when, but it rocks.
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21 September 2005
Wed, 21 Sep 2005 09:47:44 GMT Jon Udell: Information routingvia Kjell Olsen2331 days agoHow do we deal with all the info that passes under our fingertips in the digital age? How is it going to change?
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21 July 2005
Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:51:54 GMT Wikisourcevia Kjell Olsen2393 days agoWiki* is tremendously neat. I (heart) free information.
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25 June 2005
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 16:13:59 GMT O'Reilly Radar > John Hagel: Attention as a resourcevia Kjell Olsen2419 days agoWe’re being bitten by Gilder’s and Moore’s Laws—bandwidth and CPU increased to the point where naive systems flood us with information. What we need now are sophisticated systems: we need to use that bandwidth and CPU to hold back the flood: data mining and the other machine learning disciplines will all play into this.
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20 June 2005
Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:50:12 GMT microformatsvia Kjell Olsen2424 days agoA new site to catalog, discuss and develop mircroformats, the new hotness on the web.
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10 May 2005
Tue, 10 May 2005 17:47:20 GMT The Computer for the 21st Centuryvia Kjell Olsen2465 days agoWhatever happened to Xerox PARC? They did some cool stuff in their days, did Xerox drop the whole computing idea and go into building office machines like printers and copiers?
we are trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.
Peripheral computing, using a machine with the ability to aid us somehow, but without knowingly sitting in front of your keyboard and moving into the computers world of applications and keys.
The “virtuality” of computer-readable data—all the different ways in which it can be altered, processed and analyzed—is brought into the physical world.
We have found two issues of crucial importance: location and scale. Little is more basic to human perception than physical juxtaposition, and so ubiquitous computers must know where they are.
Pads differ from conventional portable computers in one crucial way. Whereas portable computers go everywhere with their owners, the pad that must be carried from place to place is a failure. Pads are intended to be “scrap computers” (analogous to scrap paper) that can be grabbed and used anywhere; they have no individualized identity or importance.
I’ve started keeping most of my documents on the internet – spread between flickr, here, and a wiki I use for schoolwork and brainstorming, everything I can think of thats important to me but for large files (videos and mp3’s on my iPod/external HD) and my address book is at my fingertips anywhere there is a computer handy. Sweet.
So tabs, pads, and boards; individual computing devices. On the front end of interaction, none of my virtual things are stored anywhere, yet the back side everything is always centralized somewhere.
By pushing computers into the background, embodied virtuality will make individuals more aware of the people on the other ends of their computer links. This development carries the potential to reverse the unhealthy centripetal forces that conventional personal computers have introduced into life and the workplace. Even today, people holed up in windowless offices before glowing computer screens may not see their fellows for the better part of each day. And in virtual reality, the outside world and all its inhabitant effectively ceases to exist. Ubiquitous computers, in contrast, reside in the human world and pose no barrier to personal interactions. If anything, the transparent connections that they offer between different locations and times may tend to bring communities closer together.
When almost every object either contains a computer or can have a tab attached to it, obtaining information will be trivial: “Who made that dress? Are there any more in the store? What was the name of the designer of that suit I liked last week?” The computing environment knows the suit you looked at for a long time last week because it knows both of your locations, and, it can retroactively find the designer’s name even if it did not interest you at the time.
Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.
Fun stuff.
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19 November 2004
Fri, 19 Nov 2004 21:11:00 GMTThe Visual Display of Quantative Information
I’m going to try something new here and go by chapters in my summary so this should be updated often as I get through the book.
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11 November 2004
Thu, 11 Nov 2004 18:55:00 GMTVisual Explanation
Great book, I finished it a few days ago and it’s still around keeping my attention from other things. Dry in places, but absolutely stuffed with great bits.
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Also somewhat recently
