because perhaps an online record should begin, no? considering we both aspire to full disclosure? ;)

other folks, please feel free to toss in any change your pockets care to share.

an excerpt from prometheus rising, by robert anton wilson, which i finally finished this morning after a multi-month hiatus:

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode, and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.
If intelligence could be increased, obviously solutions could be found more quickly to the various Doomsday scenarios threatening us.
If each scientist working on the energy-resources problem could double or triple his or her intelligence, work that would require 20 years might be done in six.
If human stupidity in general decreased, there would be less opposition to original thinking and new approaches to our old problems, less censorship and less bigotry.
If stupidity decreased, less money would be wasted on vast organized imbecilities such as the Arms Race, and more would be available for life enhancing projects.
There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. This is virtually a tautology, but we must consider the corollary:
Work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve all our other sane and worthwhile goals.
Maurice Nicholl, physician, psychiatrist, student of Jung, Gurdjieff and Esoteric Christianity, wrote that “the only purpose in work on consciousness is to decrease the amount of violence in the world.” This is Public Health Problem Number One in the nuclear age, the age of overkill.
We are not talking about mere increase in linear IQ – third-circuit semantic cleverness. We are talking of also the kinds of right-brain intelligence that Nicholl acquired from Jungian neurogenetic research and Gurdjieff’s meta-programming techniques. We are talking of, say, Beethoven’s intelligence, which so disturbed Lenin, who could not bear to listen to the Appassionata (Sonata 23) because it made him “want to weep and pat people on the head, and we mustn’t pat them on the head, we must hit them on the head, hit them hard, and make them obey.” More of Beethoven’s intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads.

that’s what i really meant to say.

miyazaki is the best there is.

i know i make a lot of references to stuff i want to post about but don’t, and you may or may not know that i think and scribble about many things that i don’t even manage to refer to obliquely in what survives the grueling gauntlet of distraction to make it into post form, but, fwiw, if you want a fun introduction to one of the concepts (arguably The concept) that drives the distribution of my interests across the worlds of design, the internet, cognitive science, developmental psychology, consciousness, mysticism, drugs, public health, and politics, have a listen to this radiolab episode on emergence.

it’s an hour long, but do what i do: listen while you wash the dishes. or eat. or put together a jigsaw puzzle of warholesque popart lips. ok maybe that last one’s not on your list, but tif and i had fun at the toy store the other day, so the gauntlet lengthens. :)

and sign up for their podcast while you’re at it, eh? folks do a damn fine bit of radio programming. even if the ideas aren’t new to you, i bet it’ll make you smile, and think a bit, and maybe ask me a question. and thus the march of progress continues. ;)

i’ve been thinking more and more recently about the impact that the buzzing and whirring and ringing and clacking of the electronic world are potentially having on our mental health. i mean, we all know that tinnitis makes people crazy, right? but we think we just tune out the refrigerator and the lights and the computer? i’m not so sure. i mean, of course we get used to background noise, and i’m not complaining about a lack of absolute silence. traffic noise and stuff is another mattter. i’m talking specifically about the high-frequency emissions that our electronic devices make, because i think we just didn’t think about it much when there were only a handful of such devices, and now they are all around us and we have forgotten to notice unless they are Really loud. a lot of people can’t really hear some of the highest frequencies anyway, so i think a lot of times we don’t even notice all that’s out there, but i’ve been sitting and listening more closely lately? and it’s insane. it would make anyone a couple notches crankier. and well, i think it just might do exactly that.

so what if we made technology that sings instead of whines? i think that’s an interesting thought.

or maybe my apartment just needs a new light. :)

i’m purging my old drafts and i found this, which isn’t really a draft, and to which i really don’t need to add much.
it was copied from post secret.

—–Email Message—–
Subject: It’s not a secret any more

Dear Frank,

I recently sent you a postcard with one of my secrets on it, and having told the whole internet it didn’t seem like such a big deal any more. Last week I told one of my friends and I feel so much better. I think from now on I might send all my postcards to my friends rather than you.

Here’s hoping you never get another postcard from me.

i started a little side project this month called “The One Hour Essay Project.”

it’s goal is to provide a structured space wherein people can spend one hour a month writing their response to a shared prompt, and then benefit from the feedback and discussion that is generated by others’ essays and comments. the essays are posted anonymously, and the short time limit is intended to both keep people from worrying about getting things perfect and make it easy to scrounge up time to participate.

i thought of the idea because i had too many things on my list of stuff i wanted to blog about, and never enough time to tackle the ones that i thought deserved the most attention. because you notice that most of the posts that get through are about food or random activities, right? ;)

anyway, it’s just getting started, and there’s a lot i want to to with the site, but the first batch of essays is up at: http://www.onehouressayproject.com if you want to drop by and check ’em out. i won’t tell you which one i am. :)

i’m not sure yet how i’m going to handle recruitment and registration. it seems like there is an upper limit to how many essays are absorbable, but we might be able to break it into clusters or something… the response this month was already more overwhelming than i had anticipated, and only half of the people who replied ended up submitting, so i’m blessed with a healthy batch of guinea pigs, and i’m excited to see where it leads. drop a comment if you’re burning to play along and i’ll see what i can do. :)

how much would it rock if there were status message madlibs? like it could prompt you to enter what you’re doing with a certain syntax: “verb, adjective, noun, adverb” and you put in something predictable like “drinking, cinnamon, tea, slowly” and it spits out “While drinking through the cinnamon forest, Kynthia threw some tea out the window and nearly had her arm bitten off… slowly.”

the words you put in could even be a different color or something, so the actual information remains, but the nonsense adds value.

and that right there shall be my new status message in the meantime.

onward now to other business.

so for a long time i was annoyed with itunes because there was so much more i wanted to do with playlist management… and there still is.

but recently i find myself doing something very interesting that i must grant is only possible with the ginormous always-there library that is itunes trademark, and that is this:

i think of a song or album i want and type in a keyword to trim the list down – like “river” or “hotel” – and then i listen to the song i was after, but when it’s done i listen to all the other songs that came up, too. it’s kind of like getting a themed shuffle playlist, but the theme can be like “songs with the letter ‘g’ in them.”

once i realized i was doing this, i started having fun with it, and sometimes i just type in a random word, or i take the word i was going for and erase a few letters to see what happens. like just now i typed in “great” because that’s my new favorite way to get all of david’s gift of the greatest jazz recordings of all time while also getting other good songs for kicks, but then i scaled back even further to “gre”, and as a result my playlist now has songs, albums, and artists with “green” in their name and, for some reason i don’t understand, all of OK Computer.

people wonder how we will slice and dice our music when we are perpetually confronted with a full lifetime library. so there’s my random data point for the anthropological record. :)

over the weekend i took some much needed time to start figuring out how to wrap my mind around the question of what next, and in order to do so i sat down with a piece of paper and started making lists. what are my priorities right now? what regular expenses do i know that i have for at least the near future? what potential sources of income do i have that satisfy the latter while still furthering the former? what steps do i need to take to make those sources viable?

this was a very good exercise. i ended up with a couple interesting ideas and have some tangible things to work on, so i’ll talk more about how those things unfold as they move along. right now, though, i want to take a minute to talk about making lists, because it really is one of the most powerful activities i know, and for some reason i realize this a few times a year and yet still never discipline myself to just sit down and do it with any consistency or regularity.

i know it’s obvious but lately i’ve been really struck by the idea that all these things i know would make my life better but still don’t do? like exercising more or eating better or not letting the dishes pile up or drinking more water? it’s not laziness that keeps me from biting the bullet. it’s guilt. for some reason i think that, if i was really built for such endeavors, i would be doing them already. and maybe one day i will just wake up and figure out what’s holding me up and never look back. like it’s a matter of triggering some secret internal switch, rather than admitting that the only switch to flip is the one that makes me devote energy to looking for switches when the lights are already on.

anyway, when it comes to listmaking, a big hurdle for me is that i have grandiose visions. you see, i happen to believe that computers are enabling an evolutionary shift in our ability to classify and manipulate information. i believe that we are on the cusp of being able to think Better, and figuring out what that means and how i can help it along is the reason i meddle in these things we call HCI and design. i know in my gut that listmaking is a part of the picture, and so i find it very difficult to sit down in front of a piece of paper or a computer screen without coming up with a host of ideas that get me really excited but which i have neither the time nor the ability to implement before dinner, which frustrates the meddlesome intermediary step of writing down what i need at the grocery store.

this is incredibly lame, since i will never get to the point where i can build the tools i want until i get over myself and manage my ideas with the tools i have, so i just need to shut up and knuckle down, which is what i told myself this weekend. then the topic came up yesterday as well, when i sat down with the lists i had made and tried to decide where to take them next, and it was in the midst of this thinking, while on a blogroll break, that i tripped over something i have encountered in the past but never given much thought, and that is the world of text-only to-do management.

the to-do market in web 2.0 land is pretty intense. the good folks over at 37 signals offer tadalist, which suffers a bit because in some ways it’s just an attempt to get you to spring for their not-free content management apps, and it kinda shows. more excitingly, there are remember the milk and gubb, both of which have their devotees and each of which has different strengths and weaknesses. and some folks just hack their way through the to-do jungle using various elements of the googlesphere.

but nobody gets it Just Right for goldilocks, so she keeps trying out new chairs…

meanwhile, back in web 1.9, some geeks staunchly defend the practice of keeping their to-do list in a .txt file, and pundits scratch their heads, because how can you have gradients and rounded corners with a freakin’ .txt file?! avert thine eyes!

said pundits sometimes cough uncomfortably, however, when it is mentioned that one person who is not above this approach is marissa mayer, director of consumer products at google, which always makes its way into interviews somewhere. apparently she has sections for each person she deals with and, i don’t know, different projects and stuff, and she sits down every day and figures out what to do based on some sort of magical system that is never really discussed directly. kind of like pagerank! :)

this factoid has always made me go “huh…” without really inspiring me to jump on board. i mean, i can See the advantages of a digital dumping ground to a paper one because i could theoRetically cut and paste and not have to rip out scribble-filled pages, but… that is a world where theory and practice will never meet, folks. it and the world where i could theoRetically go on a 5-mile run before breakfast every day can meet up for martinis and trade wisecracks, and i’ll just keep living here in the land of things i actually care to focus energy upon.

anyway, what i realized today (with more “duh” than “huh”) is that i have been a bit dense. my inner computer geek has been making up for a lot of lost time over the past few years, and i predict that it has still not reached its mature state, but i still sometimes fall prey to the fallacy of forgetting that my power to sic the computer on a given chunk of information is independent from the existence of buttons and dropdown menus. and in this case that means that i forgot just how much one can do with text if one is not afeared of the command line…

so yeah, geek alert #FFFF00 (yellow), k?

gina trapani at lifehacker, who spearheads a little community called todo.txt, builds her system around a plain ‘ol .txt file full of lines like this:

p:blog @home @computer @offline write about list management

where p:____ denotes a project and the “@____”s denote the contexts in which the task might come up, an approach that is in line with the rhetoric of productivity guru david allen, who founded and leads the cult of GTD (Getting Things Done).

GTDisms aside for the moment, you can see the basic idea of a list with tasks and categories, and with a bit of grit this list can be updated directly from the command line like this:

echo '@store @grocery @cooking lemons' >> todo.txt

and knowledge can be intelligently extracted from said list like this:

grep @grocery todo.txt

which spits back the whole line “@store @grocery @cooking lemons”, along with any other lines that have @grocery in them. a bit wonky, but i am nevertheless empowered to fight scurvy with deliciousness, so i might best think twice before turning up my nose at such an offering.

and presto!
you slice it, you dice it, you email it to yourself, you add categories on the fly, and that mess of a .txt file starts to feel “interactive” pretty quick.

there is actually a pre-written script package at todo.txt that makes it so you can just say stuff like:

add @store milk
or
list @store

and also archive and complete items without getting too wacky.

so that’s handy, and with a few basic scripting skills of your own, you are well on the way towards the sort of testing and tweaking that i haven’t been able to find the patience for when it comes to paper or learning to play nice with someone else’s API.

and all while giving the inner geek a little playtime and not relying on someone’s flashy website that might go down because cats are in ur serverz.

i expect that david, as my personal grep evangelist and “what you UI people always seem to forget is that building top-notch UI’s takes energy” foil, will be absolutely ecstatic over this post once he returns from his current mission to decrease international ignorance of the glory of bryce and zion, and to all this i say, work well done, /_\.
:)

but it’s all in the name of expending that energy more efficiently later.
or something…

i know this is all rather rambly, but i think what i’m saying is that i realized, in thinking about all of this, that it is important to grant that it is possible to overlook the experimental value of old skool hackery in the pursuit of the user experience. we design heads get in this place where, just because we wouldn’t be caught dead releasing something into the wild, we think there is nothing to learn from it. in our hurry to put things before the user early and often, we limit the scope of the questions we are able to ask, and in doing this we are in danger of distancing ourselves too much from the creative potential of a good raw geekout.

this is touchy, because i am not at all saying that we should back down from the cause of user-centered design, nor am i saying that all designers need to be computer geeks. i’m just saying that we should remember that the point is to expand the computing family tree, and we don’t do that by severing the roots, or by telling the people who want to climb up a mountain the hard way that they are silly for not taking the new paved trail.

every trail has a different view, after all, and sometimes we have goals other than just getting to the top as quickly as possible.

ok, too much metaphorical meandering.

i’ll read this later and see if it makes any damn sense, and in the meantime, i’ll take a crack at organizing my life from the command line, so that you don’t have to.
;)

something i’ve been wanting to do for a while is shift from the boring and overwhelming list of categories on my sidebar to a tag cloud in the ultrahip web 2.0 folksonomic tradition. this is not because i aspire to be hip like three snaps in a 2(.0) formation, but because i think clouds are a good idea.

i like clouds because:
they have more information in them than lists (size is information!).
they are prettier than lists.
they take up less room than lists.
they are where the care bears live.

what’s not to love?

once upon a time, in a spurt of energy to this end, i downloaded and installed the formidably named Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which promises nifty tag cloud goodness for all, but which ended up requiring too much of me in order to realize such goodness, so i let it drop.

i think i was frustrated because i knew deep down that it was not a very complicated problem, but it was still too much for me to think about on any one given day, so i ignored it for a silly long time.

therein languish so many of the ills of this world…

but today i prevailed!
go look! (you have to be on the main page, not viewing just this post)
heeeheehee!!!

and if you don’t want to hear anything geekier than that, you should stop reading, because now i’m gonna talk about code and stuff. so consider yourself warned.

i decided to search around again for options and advice, and i found very fruitful beginnings in:
this blog entry wherein the code professor churns out some wordpress-ready php for cloud-building, he being inspired in turn by
the technology evangelist writing about using php and css to build tag clouds for movable type blogs.

i liked the approach suggested by them because the core idea for wordpress is simple:
1) replace the part of the sidebar.php file that goes to fetch the category list with your own code that makes a tag cloud.
2) size appropriately using css.

once i thought about this, installing a plugin for the task felt silly and much less fun, so i was inspired to follow their trail.

the php as provided went through the trouble of counting the number of posts in each category even though wordpress provides a function for that, but then someone in the comments pointed that out and offered some new code, so that was nice.

the css was taken from the technology evangelist as written, and i didn’t really like it. it basically assigned each tag an id based on the number of posts in the category and then sized the tags based on that number, which is reasonable in theory except in practice it led to css brackets like this:

a.tag4 ,a.tag5, a.tag6 {
 font-size:16px;
 font-weight:300;
}

for each triad of numbers up to 30.

and apparently it just expects that no category will have more than 30 posts.

this seems short-sighted to me, particularly because if you were a somewhat balanced category user and you blogged for a number of years you would eventually get to the point where almost all of your tags were the same size. which defeats the purpose.
and sure you could go in as you wrote more and change the numbering scheme, but who wants to do that?

it makes more sense to me to size each category based on the percentage of total posts. in the beginning all your tags would be big because each post would be a large percentage of the total, but it seems like it would equalize out pretty quick, and then scale well with time.

the only downside is that it requires you to count all the posts, and writing another loop for that seemed a little excessive. i did a little more searching and found this, which offers a php function that will get the total number of posts for you. apparently people want to do that somewhat often, but wordpress doesn’t support it directly. yet. but i still love them.

anyway, here is the code that i ended up with after mashing those bits and pieces together and fiddling with dangling quotation marks and asking david for some help because he conveniently appeared on IM right when i was having an issue.

thanks, david!

if you are running wordpress and want a tag cloud like mine, open your sidebar.php file (it’s in wp-content/themes/youractivetheme), find the part that looks like this:

and replace it with this:

categories ORDER BY cat_name";


$cats = $wpdb->get_results($qrystr);


//get total number of posts to use for normalizing 
//the size of the category tags
$totalposts = $wpdb->get_var('select count(*) from wp_posts 
where post_status = "publish"');

//read and write the category data
echo '
';
foreach ($cats as $cat)
{
$catname = $cat->cat_name;
$catlink = get_category_link($cat->cat_ID);
$postcnt = $cat->category_count;
$catweight = $postcnt/$totalposts; 

/*this part sets the values that are used to do the tag sizing.  
you can fiddle with the percentage thresholds if you don't like the 
size distribution within your cloud.
if you only have a few posts or a few categories, everything will be 
big for a while.  blog more! :)  
you can also change the id text if my flippancy annoys you.  
just be sure to change the css too.  and bah, humbug. ;) */
if ($catweight == 0) $tagweight="zilch";
elseif ($catweight < .02) $tagweight = "notmuch";
elseif ($catweight < .05) $tagweight = "some";
elseif ($catweight < .1) $tagweight = "couplefew";
elseif ($catweight < .15) $tagweight = "several";
elseif ($catweight < .25) $tagweight ="lots";
else $tagweight = "damn";

echo '';
echo $catname," ";
}
echo '
';
?>

#cloud {padding:1px; line-height:20px;text-align:center;}
#cloud a {text-decoration:none;padding:0px;}


a.zilch {
display:none;
}


a.notmuch {
 font-size:12px;
}

a.some {
 font-size:16px;
 font-weight:200;
}

a.couplefew {
 font-size:18px;
 font-weight:300;
}

a.several {
 font-size:20px;
 font-weight:400;
}

a.lots { 
 font-size:24px;
 font-weight:500;
}

a.damn {
 font-size:28px;
 font-weight:600;
}