kip/bot/blog

Fun, spot-on, surprisingly techno-friendly take on the Kindle from a columnist at The Nation.

The Kindle displays only the text of publications, and I missed the pictures as well as the ability to read a whole article without clicking the next page bar every ten seconds. I realized I was accustomed to seeing headlines for articles on a variety of subjects all at once and then choosing which article to read first, something the Kindle makes difficult. I also missed the comforting rustle of the newspaper’s pages. As for books, even I am not inclined to pack more than one for something like a subway ride, so the difference in weight is negligible, and again, there’s a lot more text on one page of a paper book than one Kindle page-view. Like many people, the other place I tend to read is in bed. Bringing the Kindle there seemed, in all honesty, like a violation. No matter its pleasures, ultimately, unlike a paper book–especially a loved one battered and cherished over time–the Kindle is a piece of cold electronic circuitry that seems alien to intimate environments. It’s beautifully designed but unchanging, and thus represents nothing more than itself. By contrast, when I stand and look at my bookshelves, I see books I’ve had since I was a child mixed in with titles from high school, college and after, all of them nestled alongside my husband’s books.

In addition to being a charming discussion of books and electronic reading, her note about scanning text highlighted a design challenge we haven’t faced yet:  discoverability.  Scanning a newspaper to see what I want to read is a behavior that we don’t have a vocabulary for or have as goals in design yet.  We’re still caught in task completion and occasionally drift into findability (though we still don’t have enough people adopting that important phrase).  Supporting serendipitous discovery, allowing people to step outside of their checked boxes, providing the big scan of a front of a newspaper to see what’s there, what I need, what I’m glad to know in miniature.  We don’t do that yet.

My goodreads email has become my only must-read email from a social network site. I am always curious to see what people are reading, adding to their shelves, and eager for the moment when someone writes a comment. This morning, I got this:

Fun on so many levels. This seems to be the book to enjoy reading, at least among my little circle of reading friends, and finally someone who didn’t dig it. It also validates, the dirty little reading secret and rule that you shouldn’t kill yourself trying to finish a book that just isn’t working for you.

Hilarious NYT article about how people use the bookshelves of others as gauges of: their intelligence, sex-worthiness, compatiability as friend or boy/girl-friend. Lots of really funny lines.  Initially dug the article because it contained a funny cut-up of Ayn Rand fans and a link to an Ayn Rand dating site (I wonder what the binaries.pictures-style fora have in them), but the whole article is a gas:

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,� said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.� (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged� and “The Fountainhead,� might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,� beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,� Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences� are a “tedious conversational topic at best.�

Great lines throughout: a woman who pretty much knows she’s not getting naked with a guy who reads life lessons from dog books, a “you knew what you were getting into” blow-off to an Alice Munro fun who dates a Da Vinci Code reader, the asymmetry of male and female reading habits, and, my favorite, the guy who fell for a woman who had Unbearable Lightness of Being on her nightstand — not because he loves Kundera, but because he had vague synaptic connections between the book, bowler hats, Lena Olin, and nudity. Fun read.

For some sad reason, I was thinking about software design and development this morning.  Then I stumbled into doing some GoodReads reviews, ranking, and shelving. During this session, I noted that The Mythical Man Month is pretty much spent (we’ve absorbed it all several times over, and those who haven’t won’t be able to get past the IBM acronyms to make sense of the book). I also expressed my worries that a book about prototyping is going to be wonk-city, focusing on flows and block diagrams with sharp, deadening analytic edges.  Then I wrote up a bit about Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, whose title I loved and which is a pretty good read on a wide range of subjects (craftsmanship, HR, inspiration and innovation). Then I got this screen:

How cool is that. My non-fiction interests in a more creative side of software, points me to John Irving, McCarthy, an interesting choice of Camus. Compare to Amazon:

Yes, the titles are all relevant, but the GoodReads recos are serendipitous, surprising, tasty. I also like the name of GoodReads reco engine: richRelevance. Something worth shooting for.

I am always wary of showing (middle-aged or baby boomer) co-workers some interesting user-generated fact, content, tidbit, gewgaw. More than 50% of the time, the response is a vaguely contemptuous “someone has too much time on their hands” and I can never tell if they’re talking about the person who did this cool thing, or me. So, when GotMedieval, “A [intermittently updated] tonic for the slipshod use of medieval European history in the media and pop culture”, says fan fiction goes back to Chaucer, I feel vindicated.

Chaucer seems to have attracted this sort of activity more than other writers–or possibly, we modern readers are more interested in tracking down this sort of thing when it’s done to a writer we admire as much as Chaucer. Chaucer left a lot of gaps in the Canterbury Tales, and other writers stepped up to fill them, writing tales for the poor Ploughman who never got one in the original, an extra tale for both the Merchant and the Cook, and a whole story about what the Pilgrims did once they got to Canterbury

This was in my morning paper: a poker column, a chess column, this day in history, and a daily reflection from Marcus Aurelius. Love it.

Interesting, affecting, sobering this day in history: in 1925 on this date the state of Tennessee prohibited the teaching of evolution; in 1964 on this day, Kitty Genovese was murdered. (March 14)

Came across a line in Omnivore’s Dilemma that captures some of my frustration with super-crunching and marketing models:

To reduce [a complex agricultural system under discussion in the book] represented the scientific method at its worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry . . . that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery . . . gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

I love the idea of biology giving way to chemistry: systemic thinking giving way to engineering problems. How often do designers struggle against models of people that focus on two factors to the exclusion of everything else, that reduce people to the actions we want them to take?

Stick a pin in it and it dies.

An independent bookseller in Seattle shares some thoughts on book stealing, reminded me of my post about a Soho bookstore’s handling of highly steal-worthy books. He lists the top most stealable authors as:
1. Charles Bukowski

2. Jim Thompson

3. Philip K. Dick

4. William S. Burroughs

5. Any Graphic Novel

The list of popular books is surprisingly static, although newer artists have earned their place in the pantheon with Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats: Palahniuk, Murakami, and Danielewski have become hugely popular antisellers in the last five years. I’ve had hundreds of dollars of graphic novels—Sandman, Preacher, The Dark Knight Returns—lifted from right under my nose all at once. Science fiction and fantasy are high in demand, too: The coin of the realm is now, and has always been, the fiction that young white men read, and self-satisfied young white men, the kind who love to stick it to the man, are the majority of book shoplifters.

I’m just now starting How to talk about books you haven’t read, and I’m reminded of a powerful conversation I had with my senior thesis advisor . . . a conversation which startles friends today.

I was doing my thesis on rank-and-file worker movements in towns that voted for the Nazis. I had a 40 book bibliography and I was falling massively behind in my reading. My advisor had been frustrated until a thought hit him, and he asked: “Kip, are you trying to read these books in their entirety?” “Well . . . yeah.”

“Let me explain something: there are maybe ten books in the whole wide world that deserve to be read the whole way through.”

Lots of people carry lots of guilt about that one . . . how many of us in the design/web/media professions read all of Blink after all?

The other dirty little reading secret is that not only do I selectively read (non-fiction) books, but I regularly bail on fiction books after 50 pages or so. I learned this from Steve Leveen’s The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, which argues that there are so many great books you’ll never live long enough to read anyway, there’s no point in forcing yourself to complete ones you’re not digging. The rule: if a book doesn’t have you totally enthralled by 50 pages, dump it, move on, next.

The author of that book is the CEO of Levenger, a nifty store with tools ‘for the serious reader’. In addition to great lap desks (B&N ripped it off from Levenger and the Levenger ones are infinitely better), they have a bunch of tips about keeping reading journals, the virtues of marking up books (and a system for your marks!), and I just discovered that they’ve added a reading site.

So, yeah. I have a problem. I buy a lot of books and things from Amazon. I’m one of those people that cringes at meetings when people say “who could spend enough at Amazon to actually find Amazon prime worthwhile?” Uh . . .

So Alex says he’s hearing good things about Proust and the Neuroscientist from the “art meets science is” cool crowd. I always listen to Alex: Add to Cart. Shew tells me to get understanding exposure and learn something already about light and photography. I always listen to Shew: Add to Cart. I need a replacement copy of Convergence Culture, cuz mine went missing (along with all my brilliant marginalia) some weeks ago. Shirky, well duh. Classics for Pleasure is a romantic love of mine . . . I’m a guy who was so busy with politics and economics at college that I never stopped to smell the classics. (I am alarmed, though that “classics” includes Agatha Christie, PKD, Arthur Conan Doyle as well as Ezra Pound, Sappho and Zora Neal Hurston).

And, finally, the irony purchase of all time: How to talk about books without reading them. I am such a doosh.

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The DS games look tasty: Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy game with an minimally intrusive anime kids save the world story; and Curious Village is a puzzle game . . . I miss MYST, Monkey Island, Tex Murphy, Gabriel Knight and Journeyman Project.