kip/bot/blog

Gever Tully of the the Tinkering School has a great TED University talk (I think these are the people who don’t get the big stage . . . they should publish more of these) about 5 dangerous things parents should let their kids do. Most of them, in their straight form or adapted, are pretty useful for adult designers, especially those of us who manage more than do these days, as ways to keep us fresh.

One of the downsides of blogging about video or audio is that it’s hard to transcribe the key points, so I’m going on memory, here:

Play with fire — for kids, this covers everything from actually learning how to build a fire (stones and sparks, fireplace arrangements) to working with kilns and fire ovens. Kids not only learn about the physics of fire and respect for powerful forces, but they also learn about the creative power of subjecting things to heat. For adults, I think there’s an analog to playing with electricity, electronics, and code . . . things that are powerful and promethean, but where even a bit of familiarity can be massively empowering.

Throw a spear – it’s physical physics, problem solving, optimization of body mechanics and trajectories, and deeply Savannah evolution primal (I’m going with the secondary -h spelling to see how many people think IxDA08 rather than Africa.) For adults, I think it’s guns. There’s a woman in my office who goes shooting once a month at a Manhattan-based gun club with a Ladies night. My first game design title was a hunting game (Trophy Buck, it’s still on some clearance shelves) and I was fascinated all the things about bullet trajectories, winds, shot, timing and the calculation goes into guns. Bows are good too, but they lack the chemistry, and oiled metal of guns. Shooting in general has a good hunter-gatherer feel, worthy of throwing spears.

Own a pocketknife — this one was a little nostalgic for me.  Tully leads with the point that getting a pocketknife used to be a rite of passage for a young boy.  It was a tool, but it was dangerous and there were safety lessons and responsibilities somberly passed on to me when I got a knife.  This one may be a literal translation for adults:  get a pocket-knife, and not just one with a USB drive, but one that has some tools.  Remember not to take it to the airport, but see how useful it is to carry around, see if you find yourself tinkering more. Then there are some adult tools to potentially play with:  routers, soldering irons, a decent tool box.  Or upgrade to a DeWalt tool and read the last chapter of Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning there was the Command Line

Take apart appliances — I’m doing this one tonight or tomorrow. I just replaced a clock radio (with an iHome!) and I’m going to dissect it tonight.  I may try to connect parts to a power supply and play with contact points to see what I can do.  But it’s a sad reminder of how many things I throw out without looking at them.  Gamers:  take apart a rumble-pack or haptic empowered controller to see how they do it before you chuck it!  Very cool!
That’s four, but I think my enthusiasm wanes here anyway, cuz I think the remaining ones are drive a car (let your kid drive a car) and break some DRM.  I didn’t find those so compelling and the adult analog of driving a car — sailing or gliding or flying — seem expensive and outdoors.

Watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night, I had some musical moments that brought me much joy. They involve Patrick Doyle, a wonderful and rarely trumpeted movie music composer.

The first moment came during the scene in Goblet of Fire in which Harry enters the ballroom. The fanfare sounded really, really familiar to me. I listened to it twice more until it hit me: it’s like Claudius’s entrance fanfare in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet! (This is one of my all-time favorite movies, like top ten, and blah blah blah about his lips and the spittle, just go away.) I looked it up on IMDB and sure enough Patrick Doyle did the music for Goblet of Fire. I take great pride in little catches like that, I drive people nuts when I obsess over where I’ve seen bit actors before (and those that love me have learned to pretend they find it useful).

One of the things that’s interesting about Claudius’s march is Doyle’s thinking behind it. In an interview on NPR, Doyle said he wrote the fanfare to indicate a time of hopefulness: there was a new king following the death of a beloved one, and people’s support for this new one was a sign of great hope and averted crisis. This plays right into the strength of the Branagh Hamlet: the recognition that killing a king is a dangerous and difficult thing to do, that it is, in fact, treason and potentially disastrous for a country. The Oedipal, ennui-ridden interpretations of Hamlet’s difficulty in acting is a recent thing in the play’s history — going back to Freud mostly, and somewhat to Nietzche. Branagh’s Hamlet is set in a 19th century court and in a castle court lined with mirrors and filled with false panels, secret passages and a two way-mirror, highlighting the danger and duplicity of court politics and taking us out of the realm of the psyche and placing Hamlet’s dilemma in a very real world of court politics. While most movies introduce Claudius as a villain and an incompetent, Branagh introduces him as a sign of hope, and shows him forcefully negotiating with Fortinbras (the dramatic tearing of the letter causes great patriotic cheering in the hall). So, when the king enters the court, and confetti falls, people cheer, and the fanfare is buoyantly optimistic. Hamlet’s darkness and isolation are immediate and palpably felt. (The black clothes in a well-lit room helps too.) In that same interview, Doyle noted that he paid special attention to Hamlet-Ophelia music and worked hard to make it a love theme for a couple that could have been quite happy and would have been wonderful to see - not the doomed lovers in Hamlet’s angst-ridden world.

But where Doyle’s music really shines is in support of the the spoken word. Possibly because Doyle has been an actor (he has some lines in Branagh movies), or because his first gigs were for Shakespeare movies, there’s a wonderful connection between the words and the music that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. So much so, that I will sometimes play the music just so I can read along (out loud or silently) with it.

The best moments for me are from Henry V and Hamlet not surprisingly — Shakespeare comedy is even harder to hold onto than most Shakespeare.  So, a call-out to best word and music moments in Patrick Doyle’s work:

• Crispian Day — duh, but seriously, reading along with the music and doing so to support the transition to the rush to battle that abruptly cuts off the speech adds depth to my appreciation of the movie, the play and the music.
• “I loved you once” The last moment of tenderness between Hamlet and Ophelia. (* extra tidbit below)
• “Oh what a Noble Mind” Immediately following the scene above, Kate Winslet is on the floor weeping not only for Hamlet’s rejection of her, but for the loss of Hamlet and all that he was.

The “Now could I drink hot blood . . . my thoughts be bloody” music is pretty rousing, too. I expect someday soldiers and football players will use that to get pumped up instead of “Ride of the Valkyries”, but the three above are just killer.

(*) This scene has a favorite, non-verbal, acting moment that always amazes me for its power and acting genius. When Ophelia attempts to return Hamlet’s letters (or tokens), Hamlet’s line is “Ha, ha! Are you honest?” Branagh does a beautiful thing here. He slaps the letters away and holds her arm, the eyes tear up, and for the line “Ha, ha!”, he makes a quiet noise, twice, questioning her, asking what she’s doing. It’s not an attack on her, it’s not anger, it’s the bitter sadness of having his happiness betrayed, and not even necessarily by her, but by the court and the world that he lives in. It’s the most heartbreaking line/noise ever.
I like to compare that moment to one in Emma Thompson’s Sense & Sensibility when Edward (Hugh Grant) bumbles through his “my heart is and always yours” explanation and Elinor (Emma Thompson) waits a beat and then goes into a glorious release of sub-lingual sobbing and exhiliration. For some reason, I always fantasize that Thompson and Branagh, as young RSC fast-trackers, thought about trying this.

Damn. All this from my least favorite Harry Potter movie.

A nice contrast to Clifford Stoll’s aversion to going deep, is a Freakonomics blog piece about, god help me, sports. The piece is about “expert performance” (no Wikipedia entry!) and the related concept of “deliberate practice” (still no Wikipedia entry!). From the blog post:

When Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in the “expert performance� movement — we’ve written about them before, and we’ll write about them again — try to explain what it is that makes someone very good at what he or she does, they focus on “deliberate practice.� This means that, your level of natural talent notwithstanding, excellence is accomplished mainly through the tenets of deliberate practice, which are roughly:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

The piece goes on to cite an article about an early trainer who saw the young A-Rod practice, and practice hard, at his hitting and fielding, focusing on weaknesses and mixing things up.

This looks like a bottom-of-the-T approach (technique, incremental goals, incremental feedback, iteration) but it has resulted in a complete player (top-of-the-T?). It’s hard to generalize too much about anything applied to A-Rod, given the universal recognition of his inherent talent. (Reggie Jackson, in the second article cited comments on A-Rod’s seeming enjoyment of the training routines, said, “A lot of things are fun when you’re great.”) But Stoll’s rapid move to boredom with anything done more than two times, in contrast to this look at the development of greatness seemed too close together to not document.

Clifford Stoll’s TED talk may not work for everyone. There’s a hippy daftness that may sometimes feel forced and a self-dismissive “what I do so is so boring” that may feel condescending, but about six minutes in he is charming, oddly moving, human, and clever. There’s also some cool stuff in there, like klein bottles, a grade school experiment to measure the speed of sound, a tribute to Moog, and a pervasive Richard Feynman tinkerer-thinker mode. He constantly grounds himself in tinkering that leads to bigger ideas.

He also has a line that sits in nice contrast to my current reading of The Craftsman and pre-occupation with expertise:

The first time you do something it’s science.

The second time it’s engineering.

The third time, you’re a technician.

He was saying this in reference to his boredom with hacking and computer security. (He first came to prominence with a fun, witty, popular computer science of his detection and catching of East German hackers in Cuckoo’s Nest, a book I still remember with a smile 15 years after reading it.)

On the other hand, he seems to have been making Klein bottles for many years and is still getting something out of it.

=-=-=-=-=-=-

I’m a little disappointed in myself for not knowing Klein bottles. Wikipedia has several pop culture references listed that make me think I should have known it: Futurama has Klein beer sold in Klein bottles, and Magic has an Elkin bottle card.

Maybe it’s not my fault It’s just something damn hippies seem to do:

Richard Sennett’s new book on craft seems to challenge some of our assumptions about the virtues of generalism. I just started the book last night, and there’s a much bigger argument in the book: that by separating our minds from our hands, our homo faber life from our homo laborens life (he uses the Arendt construction, that’s not me being pretentious with the Latin), we are living diminished lives. Still, the passion for craft, for “doing one thing well”, seems an important voice to bring into the blogosphere’s current discussion of T’s, fuzzies, generalists, etc.

While I wait for the book to take shape in my mind (in addition to reading it of course), there’s a decent WAMU interview with Sennett. Some high points:

• they spend a little time on the 10,000 hours maxim, that it takes that many hours of studious attention to something before you do it really well. An interesting parallel to Nicholas Negroponte’s rule that important worthwhile projects occur across five year time-spans

• “learning to get skilled and committing to getting good at something . . . [is what] nurses, doctors, and scientists do … it’s not about manual labor”

• Capitalism does not necessarily create forces for “doing something well”, it has no inherent interest in building skills and might actually be a long-term force for the race to the bottom.

• Sennett has comments about how the educational system tends to make vocational training, shop, even engineering second class to more purely brain-focused work. (This is an interesting parallel to Omnivore’s Dilemma which points out that the US has done everything it can to turn agriculture into a machine or an activity for stupid people to do. Innovative farmers isn’t something we celebrate even though there are many.)

• “there’s a lot of work that we think of as simple work that is not simple, there’s real content to it . . . we’ve become very snobbish about what we think of as ordinary jobs, we think anyone can do it, but that’s not true. … the reasons that motivate people to become craftsmen is self respect.”

• labs are like “modern workshops” they have the values and approach to work that an artisan of the 19th century. At MIT, he asked scientists if they were craftsmen which they didn’t always like.  But at good labs, they would say “I’m very hands-on”. They use different tools, but the attitude is similar and there’s a respect for the importance of the ‘mechanical’ processes.

• mentor/master relationships need to be restored, people need mentors who say “that isn’t good enough”. The best thing you can say to a kid is “you can do better, it’s not a put-down”

I used to liken programmers to furniture makers. Programmers choose materials, techniques, tools and environments with the subtle care and attention to detail of a craftsman. They think simultaneously about how to make it work, and how to make it better (this is an important distinction for Sennett).  They think about their components with the texture and nuance that a furniture maker has for the properties of wood, finishes, joints, and the tools that will shape them.

That said, though, I’m pretty sure I’m bastardizing Sennett’s book by dragging it to this level. In the preface, he talks about bumping into his teacher Hannah Arendt in the weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis and sharing reactions. In a moment of self-loathing I was tempted to send the book back to Amazon.  I mean, surely, he has a much bigger project that I should respect (and this is the first of a thee book project). But hey, advertising and marketing is all about coopting important ideas, right?

Talking to Agile advocates, has been, in my experience almost like talking to Ron Paul supporters:  they never let go, can turn anything into an argument for Agile, will play any cheap rhetorical trick available to turn honest concerns into small-minded opposition, and point with fervor to companies you’ve never heard of as shining beacons of the self-apparent rightness of it all.  That might just be me, but I do often feel like the crazy person in the room when I say “agile’s not good for everything, and it might short-circuit good design thinking.”

I just started reading “Effective Prototyping for Software Makers” and they’ve got a nice little line:

An overachieving prototype artificially wows an audience by showing inppropriate high fidelity too early in the software creation process.  An artificial high fidelity, while it may impress, will often cause many design decisions to be made prematurely — a leading cause for finding yourself designed into a corner.

Coded prototypes have a dangerous effect akin to the picture superiority effect.  They imply that many things have been solved which aren’t, that the time-consuming back-end issues are worked out.  Worst of all, coded, agile prototypes are an implicit argument that time-to-market is more important than doing things right.

It’s nice to hear software people show some respect for design-time.

So, I’m somewhere around a year 2 piano lesson taker (as opposed to player). For three weeks, I’ve been learning a piece that’s kind of complicated. This is a plateau piece, like the Bach Minuet in G (in the picture), so my teacher told me it would take some time. It’s got some distinctive features:

- 6/8 time

- lots of broken chord accompaniment

- left to right hand phrasing and vice versa

- little grace notes

- a complex melody (doesn’t trip off the fingers like the minuet)

As I had my third lesson dealing with the piece, my teacher told me the next step was to start being expressive with the piece. So, there’s a process, leading up to that last expressive piece:

1) Break it down — most songs have different sections requiring different moves, fingerings, techniques. With most songs, I break it down into component parts, such as a tough left hand position change, getting the grace note in before, after, or on the beat, a long finger reach, contrary hand movement, and the like.

2) Add it together — after breaking it down into component parts, you start to pull it together and adjust the pieces so they flow together, and so you can prepare your hands to lead into or out of sections.

3) Clean it up & Understand — smooth out the edges between sections, and then start to look at the harmonies and music ideas. Once my hands are moving through it OK, my teacher starts to point out the tensions, resolutions, harmonic moves, the vertical harmonies, the Is, IVs, V, V7s.

4) Make it Expressive — once I have the component parts mastered, flowing, and have digital memory (digital as in finger) and a deeper sense of the music, I pull it together as something expressive. Then I can get all Ray Charles or Ashkenazy at the keyboard.

Of course, these phases aren’t completely separate or sequential. Even as early as when I’m breaking it down, I find exciting musical moments that will be part of the final expressive phase and I’m constantly refining the basic key striking throughout. It’s also interesting, because some of the adding it together (which has a lot to do with flow) will change in order to accommmodate some of the musical understanding in step.

Feels like a design process: break it down, add it together (repeat as needed), look at the whole and get the bigger picture, and make it sing.

The widely blogged NYT article about the new interfaces has a nice passage about the new breed of designer emerging, one who codes.  The article describes how the Wii and iPhone are beacons of a move from the mouse-gui mode of interface that has dominated the last 20+ years of computing. (It does the obligatory Minority Report mention, of course.)

The transition to more immersive displays is happening in part because of more powerful computer hardware, but also because of an explosion of more powerful programming tools. These tools offer visual effects that were once within the grasp of only the most skillful programmers to a wide audience with only basic skills.

“The old paradigm is breaking down,� said Paul Mercer, senior director of software at Palm Inc. “It used to be that you needed to be a visionary and technologist like Michelangelo, but we’re turning that corner.�

INDEED, the more powerful graphics-oriented software has spilled over into the creation of palettes for a new generation of software-oriented artists. One new programming language, Processing, is an extension of Sun’s Java designed specifically for students, artists, designers, researchers and hobbyists who are interested in programming images, animations and interactions. It has been used extensively at “Design and the Elastic Mind,� a digital art exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I’m not sure that they’ve captured the dynamic exactly.  Programming tools are becoming more powerful, to be sure, but designers (especially the under-25 set cited in the NYT article) are becoming more technical.  Processing, or Proce55ing, is not Logo or pure kids stuff.

From Clive Thompson’s CollisionDectection post about his article for Wired on the decline of our ability to make or do things in the analog world. (Interesting syntax: this blog post presents a quote from a link that comes from another blog that links to the full article (elsewhere) that blog post is promoting.) From the Wired article:

We’ve lost our Everyman ability to build, maintain, and repair the devices we rely on every day. And that’s making it harder to solve the country’s nastiest problems, like oil dependence, climate change, and global competitiveness.

Thompson recommends a New Atlantis article titled Shop Class as Soulcraft which has this nifty line about craftsmanship, satisfaction, and oh yes the human condition:

—craftsmanship might be defined simply as the desire to do something well, for its own sake. If the primary satisfaction is intrinsic and private in this way, there is nonetheless a sort of self-disclosing that takes place. As Alexandre Kojève writes:

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

The picture above is one of my Arduino experiments. During the month that I took between jobs, one of my goals was to learn to solder . . . I worked through most of the ITP physical computing section, playing with the Arduino, learning a little about transistors, playing with breadboards and making the occasional solder. It was deeply satisfying to have that 7-segment LED count to 9.

from a friend after I twittered and flickred my purchase of a new zoom lens.