service notice

• The Past

• About

This site is maintained by Stewart Butterfield: stewart@sylloge.com

And it is powered, in part, by Blogger.

most recently

  Do you work with or know of an educational charity that could use some free advertising (to solicit donations, volunteers, raise awareness, etc.?) I've been working with Gradfinder for the last little while and though we aren't in a position to help out financially (yet— we do have big plans) we do have a lot of excess ad inventory that could be put to good work. Educational charities only please (but we do construe that broadly: literacy & training programs, hot lunch initiatives, etc., all count).

If so, let me know: stewart@sylloge.com.




Sunday, July 30

  If you are the sort that is looking for an excuse to purchase the latest issue of Playboy magazine, it does mention both Deepleap and the 5k briefly in the Living Online column.

Also, some very short video snippets from Illuminares.

  I put up my pictures from Illuminares. This was my first time at Illuminares, a latern festival (which, along with its sister festival, the Parade of Lost Souls, is among the things that make east Vancouver cool). Go Trout Lake. I ate a whole thing of cotton candy.

While I was searching for the official site, I came across Christopher's Lomopage where there are lots and lots of great pictures. I remember reading about Lomos before. Sounds like as good a cult as any.




Saturday, July 29

  Wonder what it looks like to spend a late evening talking to Michael Fergusson? In the style of 26 photographs of a woman holding various pony tails, here is a large gif movie (185K) to help you learn what it looks like to listen (alternatively, here is a smaller but not as good version, 77K). It also give you some small insight into the layout of my living room.

  Over 10 months now, but I'm not giving up hope yet. And I still want to read that book ...

Thank you for ordering from Indigo.ca. You have 1 orders in process.

Order Number: 402599021 Your express order was placed on Saturday, September 25, 1999. Shipping Address: An old work address and old mobile number. Your order is being shipped all at once. You can review the status of your order below:

Quantity		Item		Order Status
1		The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, & New Media Like Real People & Places (REP) by Byron Reeves , et al. | Paperback | May 1998 Usually ships within 48 hours. List Price: C$23.95 | Our Price: C$19.16 | You Save: C$4.79 (20%)

Friday, July 28

  LET'S TALK ABOUT ME FOR A WHILE

This picture was the most requested at a recent showing of my pictures which I took of myself in the mirror with my new camera (with one out of one attendees requesting a copy of the image). Now, you can have your own copy of the untouched 550K file straight from the camera. Here are some suggestions for its use:

• Put it in a frame that has "The Person I Most Admire" written across the top in cursive script. Hang in your living room.
• Tape a copy to the inside of your locker door.
• Use a printed copy as the practice space for signing your name as : "[YOUR NAME] Butterfield"
• Put a copy into a time capsule to surprise and delight your descendants.
• Use it as your desktop/wallpaper/background.
• Use as gift paper for very special gifts.

I had lunch today with one of the most prominent venture capitalists in the world (nice guy). Plus some other people.

The price of my integrity was up 11/32 today (+ 5.29%) on relatively light trading.




Tuesday, July 25

  Consider the set of those people who will be attending Simon Fraser University's Web Design Workshop and the set of readers of this post: the probability that the intersection between these sets is non-empty is vanishingly small, but I feel compelled to mention that I'll be doing the session on usability on Wednesday anyway. Funny time for me to be doing it, since I am at my most contrarian w.r.t. usability ever. I'll still try to give the students their money's worth but I don't think I can tow the standard usability line any more.

  I am now confirmed to be speaking at the Doors of Perception conference in Amsterdam this coming November 11-13. The theme for Doors 6 is "lightness" and aside from the 5k (which does go very well) I'm not sure what I want to talk about.

Thinking about it this weekend, I started off Socratically: What is the opposite of lightness?

Darkness? (Not in this context.) Heaviness? (Perhaps, but doesn't seem exact). Since I have been slightly preoccupied with the notion of inefficiency (as a requirement for progress: material, technological, intellectual, etc.) I am tempted to stretch that to fit and talk about Inefficiency as the Opposite of Lightness. I'd love to tap your brains on this, but I'll formulate it a little better first.

  I finally got a digital camera (I don't remember the last time I owned a camera of any description). Once I get it all figured and tested out, I'll write a review. So far I like it —it allowed me to record yet another newsbox message without actually pulling the paper out of the box (to take it home and scan it) and thus deprive others the joy of random street communications.

  I'm walking from Stadium Station back to the office, stopping here and there to snap pictures on my new camera, fairly spaced out. Suddenly I noticed little guy walking briskly towards me in a lane of traffic, shirtless, blood all over his face, screaming "Help! This guy robbed me! Help!" over and over while pointing to big guy (who was well over six and a half feet tall) walking towards me on the sidewalk. Big guy was not interested in all the attention and as we passed each other, he started to veer off in the grass, away from the street, looking around nervously.

I was a little bit dumbfounded and looked back over my shoulder just when big guy decides to make a break for it and runs out into the middle of the street where the lights had just changed. He narrowly missed the first car in the first lane, and ends up rolling over the hood, action movie-style, onto his feet and into the next lane with little guy and some third, medium-sized guy in pursuit (unclear whether medium guy was a hero from the onlookers or somehow involved in the fracas). The traffic behind them had already stopped at this point and big guy tries to open the sliding side door of a van in the next lane over. Thankfully (for the driver) the door is locked, big guy can't get in, and the van speeds away.

The next car (just behind the van) starts to accelerate and little guy and medium guy are just about caught up to him, so big guy decides to lunge for the passenger side door. The window is open and big guy manages to get his hand inside the window-frame but at this point the car is already moving. Big guy holds on tight and lets himself get dragged by the car which quickly gets up to 30 or 40 kph. His hands slip down to the corner of the window frame, his torso flat against the rear door and black jean covered legs dragging along the asphalt, knees rubbing against the spinning wheel. He's yelling "Hey! You're dragging me! You're dragging me!"

As they get right along side me, I can see the panic on the driver's face: he plainly doesn't want to be dragging this guy, but I'm sure he didn't want to stop and let this guy get into his car either. (During the 5-10 seconds that have elapsed so far, I reached for my phone to call the cops, but then I saw a building security guard who was already talking to them on his walkie-talkie.) The car turns left and I was sure that big guy was going to get dragged underneath it on the corner but he didn't. I couldn't see what was happening for a second, but I was still walking and when I got to the corner, I saw big guy running in front of a bus, which stopped. He smashes the door open but little guy and medium guy are already there. Lots of shouting, lots of onlookers by this point, hard to tell what's happening.

And just then I get the important phone call I was waiting for. Shit. "Um, hello?" I hate watching this kind of stuff, but I was still reluctant as I walked away and got into the conversation. Oh well.

But the punchline is that I had the camera in my hand the whole time. It didn't even occur to me to get off a few shots (let alone use the handy movie mode which records sound as well). So I missed it. Damn, I need to work on those photog reflexes.

  Well, thank the original developers of HTTP servers for referrer logs. Cosma hisself wrote back to me passed on another QWERTY-related link: the abstract for The Standard and Dvorak Keyboards Revisited: Direct Measures of Speed which claims a 4% speed advantage for Dvorak . This isn't much of an argument in favour of the market failure spin as far as I'm concerned though — the retraining time and equipment purchase costs required to acheive the 4% advantage would certainly counteract the gains (in just about any instance I can imagine): the essential point is that both practices are local maxima on the typing-speed fitness landscape (there are far better systems for using your body to produce text). Or maybe I'm wrong ...

* * *

This way to more.




Thursday, July 20

  The Notebooks is absolutely, bar none, without any hesitation, the best site I have some across on the web in as long as I can remember. I am astonished that I never came across it before. It astounds me, and I am angry that I didn't get to see it until now. [Found one link in from a link found on Peterme.]

I suppose that if you sat two randomly selected north americans down and had them start listing off their interests, you would get a high correlation initially (good chance that both people are into watching TV, or reading, or "hanging out" or movies, or whatever it is that people do). If, however, you made them go on for a while, off into particular scifi writers, fetishes, web sites, religious affiliations, culinary habits, etc., then the chances of correlation would diminish. Then of course, there is a good chance that your friends will have similar interests, but again, once you start getting into the deep particulars, the chance that any given declaration of interest (say, in Turkish history 1850-1914 or frisbee-golf) would elicit a "me too" would go down fast.

Completely off the top of my head, I'd say that an average interest coincidence with any given friend of mine would be somewhere around 40%. The average rate for me and some random person plucked off the streets in Atlanta or Halifax would be somewhere around 10%. But the long list in the Notebooks goes on for quite a while, and all the way through I found an unnaturally high interest-coincidence rate with this Cosma Rohilla Shalizi. Academically at least, I'd hazard 75% (whereas the highest I had encountered previously was maybe 60%). I mean, Dissipative structures, Global electronic financial markets, Pornography, John von Neumann, War, Otto Neurath, Imagination, D'Arcy Thompson, the Social Construction of Reality. There is no point going on.

(It also has an excellent FAQ page.)

(And it lead me to the Archive of Particularly Unsolicited Manuscripts.)

  The Notebooks contains a page on QWERTY and that reminded me of something. Now, everyone knows that Dvorak was a better keyboard layout than QWERTY, QWERTY is a great example of a market failure, etc., except that it is all wrong. The market failure aspect of QWERTY is a myth. Apocryphal. False. Get it? From the April 3, 1999 issue of the Economist (available online only to subscribers— or anyone who signs up, it seems, and their counter is broken) where this first came to my attention, I found the source of the myth-breaking: The Fable of the Keys (the co-authors recommend that you also visit their "far more complete page dealing with our writings on network effects, path dependence, the Microsoft Antitrust case, and our forthcoming book").




Wednesday, July 19

  Lots of material, not enough time: Ethel the Blog presents a tantilizing list of the contents of the biological sciences review issue from the Royal Society's special Millennium review series. (Reminds me of What Is Life? the Next Fifty Years : Speculations on the Future of Biology, which I've just noticed is available for about 1/6 of the price I paid for it in England. Stupid expensive England.)

And Jouke Kleerebezem sends a link to the site for a book I wish I'd written: Darwin Wars (though I would have least made it Wilson/Dawkins v Lewontin/Gould). Copy now on the way.

  This day will be recorded as the day that I bought sneakers. Sounds stupid, and I've never been as aware of it as I am right now, but I haven't worn sneakers since I was a little kid. I don't even think I wore them in high school. Sandals when it's hot, boots for hiking or snow, running shoes while running, ski boots while skiing, dress shoes as appropriate, but otherwise it is brown leather shoes. As generic as possible. I kind of like them. (The sneakers, I mean.)

Also: Saw 8 1/2 Women. Took off great, became diffuse and kind of fizzled by the end, though I can't imagine what could have been done about that. (One of the few movies that I've seen in a while that didn't sorely lack a few more weeks in editing to get rid of the crap and filler.) If you like Greenaway, you'll surely like it, though it may not be "his masterpiece". Awesome title sequence and opening scene.

Also: finished Cryptonomicon yesterday. Entertaining and at points of engrossing, but overall I found it quite unsatisfactory. I can't imagine reading it again (that's pretty much my standard test for books). Goes to show why I don't read much fiction . . . Same problem as Pi (the movie): mathematics has its mysteries and wonders, but if you just gloss them and get (i) too pedantic and (ii) not nearly involved enough for those who are genuinely interested, it is all just a waste of time.




Tuesday, July 18

  Without any doubt the most aggravating newspaper headline to catch my eye in the last five years years was:

SCIENTISTS CRACK HUMAN GENETIC CODE

Now, pretty much any educated person who read that headline understands the (important) surface error: that no particular breakthrough came on the day when the last bits of the human genome were sequenced — it was just more of the same material that had been filling hard drives for the last several years. The difference between 998 million pages (or whatever it amounts to) of ATTACGATT and 999 million pages of the same is not particularly significant; the headline could have just as well read:

BIG PAIN IN THE ASS JOB NOW COMPLETED

And then some percentage (unknown to me) of the population will understand that we are not talking about a "code" in sense in which the word is normally used. Which is also a serious and important and irritating error. But to my mind there is a more serious mistake in this whole way of thinking, one that I have real trouble articulating and one that pretty much any educated person —especially those most "in the know" (viz., scientists working in related fields)— will disagree with me about.

If we somehow magically got the entire genome for each and every individual human being on the planet delivered to us (add as many other genetic sequences, supercomputers, futuristic storage devices as you desire to our little gedankenexperiment) how much further along would our understanding of life advance? (Of course, I mean deep understanding, not practical advancement; surely we'd be able to stymie more and different genetic diseases.) I'll leave that rhetorical device unclosed.

It may sound ridiculous to suggest that it is not empirical data we are lacking, but a better conceptual framework for understanding life (a better metaphysics of organism) since the theoretical work has been going on for well over 2,000 years and the (what we now consider) relevant empirical work has been going on for less than a hundred. That's okay. In certain spheres I like to be contrarian and I don't mind appearing to be a crackpot in this arena: I am convinced that any answer to that delicious question — What is Life? — will not arise from the accumulation of facts.

Or maybe I'm just scared of being wrong (both in the everyday sense of being displeased by being incorrect and in the special sense of really wanting the universe to be arranged in such a way that life is a little more fundamental and interesting and profound than, say, questions about the tensile strength of wood fibre).

I'm too sleepy to finish this off, but Sylloge will be mainly about the philosophy of biology for the next little while, until I work it out of my system. So, anyway, here is the blurb on the back of a book that I am about to start, which almost certainly not going to be interesting (the book, I mean) to anyone reading this:

"Organisms have disappeared as fundamental entities from modern biology, replaced by genes and their products as the primary determinants of selected characters. This is a consequence of Darwin's theory of descent with variation and survival of fitter variants. The first part of this book … looks critically at the conceptual structure of Darwinism and describes the limitation of the theory of evolution as a comprehensive biological theory, arguing that a theory of biological form is needed to understand the structure of organisms and their transformations as revealed in taxonomy. The second part of the book … explores such a theory in terms of organisms as developing and transforming dynamic systems, within which gene action is to be understood. A number of specific examples, including tetrapod limb formation and Drosophila development, are used to illustrate how these hierarchically organized dynamic fields undergo robust symmetry-breaking cascades to produce generic forms. These are the basic morphological structures available for evolutionary transformations, whose classification into equivalence classes provides a basis for taxonomic relationships,

"Evolutionary and developmental biologists, geneticists and philosophers of science will all find this a thought-provoking book."

Webster, G. & Goodwin, B. 1996. Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (With a characteristically shitty CUP cover.)

One more quote (from a 20 year-old paper by Webster & Goodwin, which I'm paraphrasing since I'm too tired to go find it):

"Darwin ignored the question of life in the same way that Newton ignored the question of force."

  CROSSROADS WALKS

Walking down the street yesterday I finally realized what had been bothering me. It went like this: I got to a busy corner where I had to step around these two old bums, one black, one white, both in what would have been nice suits 25 years and several hundred wearings ago. With silver-white hair starkly sticking out of one's afro-beard and the other's well trimmed bald-fringe, wrinkles which trapped all manner of ambient microparticles and complementary dental defects, they were nonetheless equal parts handsome and ugly.

They were the type that seemed always, whenever I saw them, to be happy and genial, generally pleased with themselves, comfortable with the nature and evolution of the world. They retained the better part of their dignitity and charm to spare. As if, of course smelling so terrible and being subject to sores which won't heal was a fair trade for a life of drunkeness. As if homelessness was an acceptable by-product of the best of all possible lifestyles. I admired the sprezzatura with which they did nothing in particular.

No doubt their good-humoredness was not perpetual and they suffered more than they enjoyed, but while I edged around them I was envious and well into the crosswalk I imagined myself joining them in the cheap bars, abondoning everything, staking out a claim to a nice piece of alley off of Main Street somewhere between Hastings and Terminal. Carefree and happy-go-sour, picking up tiny ends of stepped-out cigarettes to produce triple-tar drums and bathing with water from the public toilets in Victory park.

It wasn't until I got to the other side and my walking companion tugged me back into the conversation that this desire struck me as odd, or at least indicative or something other than what it appeared to be. And then it all came into focus at once. The reason success makes me apprehensive, the cause of that unease every time something goes my way: unlike them, I now have things to lose. And I have lots of responsibilities. And these come together, neatly bundled, pretty much every time I acheive something I set out to acheive. And the cross-product of responsibilities and things-to-lose is anxiety. Now I just have to figure out how to cancel it out without giving everything up. I've seen it happen, and goddamn it, if anyone can do, this ol' championship cherry-enjoyer can. God bless us all.

  Cooked. Beach. Sun. Book.

And on the way back, I picked up some near-perfect cherries. I felt like no-one in the world could understand how much one can actually enjoy cherries. Like I was a professional cherry-enjoyer and the best in the world at that. Like kids who were just discovering how delicious fresh cherries can be would seek out my autograph after cherry-enjoying tutorials. Like I fucking invented the enjoyment of cherries. Oh, they were delicious.




Friday, July 14

  Today I was sick and tired all day. Did nothing (except for finally remember to move my car which was parked for two days in a two hour zone without a ticket, further confirming my unnatural blessedness). Yesterday, however, was a great day for postal mail. Lots of those $5 gift certificates for a store I've been asked not to mention, a box from McSweeney's (which contained another issue of #4 and two T-shirts of the wrong size, but we're getting closer anyway) and a package with all the recent publications of my good friend Ethan (impressive list). He is who I went to go visit in . . .

  San Francisco, USA. An example of something I meant to write about a while ago.

I had just a super-duper time. First, there were lots of non-urban activities which provided hours of fun (picnic on Mt. Tamalpais, climbing up and falling down the cliffs between Baker Beach and the Golden Gate, hiking Muir Woods — which, by the way, if you're from BC, is pretty unimpressive — leisure time in calm ol' Berkeley, a drive out Napa to the Culinary Insititute of America for dinner, etc.). Perhaps most importantly, it was several consecutive days of hanging out with non-web people (surprisingly).

Sure, I got to go party at Peterme's house (thanks!), and finally meet Judith and Matt and there were lots of impressive, interesting people there. (All of whom I apologize to for being so basically incapable of conversation on account of only a few hours of sleep plus flying resulting in a splitting headache, with one particular in mind.) And I got to see Prya's office, which is so small that I thought to myself "holy shit, that is one small office" and "boy, you can work some magic with a web cam w.r.t. making your office look bigger".

But I went out there to visit a vacationing friend from New York who is doing a JD/PhD at Yale and we hung out with various people: a law student at Berkeley (who has a summer gig at the EFF, close as we get to the web), a staff writer for Mother Jones, a med student at Mt. Sinai, a marine biologist/nautical engineer. Then there were a few dot.commies around, but mainly they weren't and I went a whole day without talking to anyone who had an opinion about XHTML or methods for interaction design. But we could talk philosophy or politics or history or economics or theatre or music.

Just interesting that there are happy, sucessful, interesting people who have nothing to do with software or the web. For whom computers are just tools. It sounds stupid, but I forget sometimes.

From a nice meal. I always get the good fortune. I always get the good fortune.

  I now have a long list of things I've been meaning to write here. I wonder if I should keep the list and cut out the hard step?

But I should probably tell this letting other people into your apartment building story:

Few nights ago, about 1:30am, I walking along the sidewalk up to my building about 10 paces behind a really tall man in drag (evening gown, heels, the whole bit). He's carrying a large purse and something else big like a box or some flowers or something (I don't remember anymore). Anyway, while he's futzing in his purse, trying to find his keys, I get mine out, walking past him, unlock, open and hold the door.

Man: Oh, thank you so much.
Me: Not at all.
Man: Mmm. You look like the type of person that Carol [building manager] would rent to.
[Pause]
Me: Huh. [Half side-nod-smile] You look like the kind of person Carol would rent to.
Man: [Elevator closing as I head up the stairs.] Touché

Maybe that's only funny if you know Carol.

- - -

Bing bing! Ahem, "got it all" now includes a new haircut. Lookin' sharp and feelin' fine.




Wednesday, July 12

  Metafilter | Community Weblog
Metafilter, after a serious bout of self-referential and 'weblog community' meta-gibberish seems to have settled down again into being fun to read.

I just found this site called Fireland there, and I like it: good looking and a nice and flow-y resizable layout (resizable text and it'd be good to go, whatever that means in this context).




Tuesday, July 11

  Perhaps more importantly, from the same album (song: Springtime In Vienna).

We live to survive our paradoxes

  The beautiful lull, the dangerous tug
We get to feel small, from high up above
And after a glimpse, over the top
The rest of the world, becomes a gift shop

— Gift Shop, Tragically Hip, Trouble at the Henhouse




Monday, July 10

  Look at me, look at me! I'm (was) right at the top, undisguised and extremely excited. Nothing oblique about it.

  What is it like to be me? Have a listen to »»this«« little number and then dance around your living room. That's pretty much what it's like (except also, sometimes, the next post).

It's Tom Zé of course (the song is called "Vai (Menina, Amanhã de Manhã)"). Go buy that CD (as a reward to Luaka Bop for having reissued it, which is what I'm assuming happened even though they still list it as sold out). Want a partial translation?

Girl happiness
Is as full as a city square
Smells like mildew
Smells like a tin can
Is full of grace

  "Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits. But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine's activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent. The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity." [Emphasis mine.]

[I am keeping my mouth shut.]

The passage is quoted from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity, MIT Press 1997. A book which begins thusly:

This book does not present a theory of entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity production. Nor is it a manual that will tell you how to succeed in these domains. Rather, we hope that this book will help you develop a skill that is essential for being an entrepreneur, a virtuous citizen, and a solidarity cultivator — that is, for regularly and as a matter of course seeing yourself and the world anew.

  Now I am able to say that Eric Costello of Glish.com has pointed out Harry Frankfurt's wonderful paper: On Bullshit. There. Phew.

  Sylloge Experiment. This allows for some serious self-reference.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
This year's contest is now open for entries. Help collectively correct for my laziness by telling everyone you know.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

A motion study where you can see all the frames of an animation at once, but also still see the animation.

Some pictures of my friend Paul spinning around in some art, which is really a machine.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.