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Tuesday, March 20

  YVR to YUL now. Why Y?

  Thanks everyone for birthday wishes (e.g.)! It's tomorrow (the 21st). I'd like peace, world peace. Thanks again!

  Boutique hotels prosper in Montreal, notable only for this:

Lorenzo Palumbo, managing director of Toronto-based HospitalityVenture Services Inc., a hotel brokerage firm, says this about boutique hotels and their popularity: "They have a high design content, just like good architecture and design, so they look good and create a certain ambience."

  a few of the many types of boots

  Sheldon Kopp's Escatological Laundry List: if has been a long time since I've thought about this (sort of) thing. Fantastic! Wise! (via NickIfOnly while subbing at kottke.org).

  Drinks with some people I used to work with (the juicy bit was excised) made me think of how very different this year is from last year! Fucking strange! Significant events then and now; amazingly similar and totally opposite.

A year is always ending, I suppose, and the time for retrospectives is whenever it pleases the reminiscer, and others (Alamut, lnp, a.whole..., Capt. Cursor) seem to be dividing things as well, march to march. (Note: I missed the just-passed anniversary (wow I like the old desgin better!) of sylloge-as-chronological-residue-vessel; previously it was a resume site, then a revolving-silly-home-page site.)

That was a digression: the point is that last March the economic optimism was overwhelming and I felt like nothing could ever go wrong $$$-wise. Now that I am thinking about going back to work in a more and more serious way, things don't seem so easy. That last march-to-march was particularly excellent and yet this year is set to be all the better, for the thing I had reinforced over and over was that the best opportunities are neither stumbled-upon nor sought-out: they are created, and I like creating opportunities. I have been thinking a lot about a theoretical basis for opportunitity creation in the shaking-up of possibility spaces (typical! typical! "do it!", you say!). But there, that is the job I want.

Opportunity creation. Fuck me! I think that is brilliant. I'm sure I won't after I've slept, or I'll be embarrassed anyway, but I'll leave it here just to teach myself what it's like. Battery-on-tongue. A opportunity creation consultancy. Ha! (Post facto: been said.)

My birthday is in five days too. That's probably a significance-of-March contributing factor. Life happens so fast! I have to clean!

  Manifestomania: Mau's Manifesto for Growth which I originally read, condensed, on Jouke's IDIE (via blackbeltjones.com/work)




Thursday, March 15

  Montréal: going to be there from the 21st to the 26th. What's the deal? If you know the deal (where to live, where to work, where to eat, where to be enlightened & inspired) let me know. I'll buy you some poutine or other less dubious food. Or a drink. You know?




Wednesday, March 14

  No more prisons.




Monday, March 12

  LOPHtY - KUMO - monokromatik




Thursday, March 8

  So, yes, now that you mention it, I am moderating a panel at sxsw this year. It will too be an interesting panel, goddamnit, mostly because I have secretly recruited special geniuses to be the speakers.

The title is "Possibility and Constraint in Design" which is a favorite topic of mine (and it is emphatically not about the 5k, though that will get its obligatory mention): the interplay between the two is what I find interesting about design. The topic is so very broad that we have lots of room: we have invented a few constraints to try to reign it in.

My special geniuses are Cordy Swope (Principal in the Design Strategy Group at Continuum, former punk bassist — and everything in between, it seems), Ben Cerveny (former head of R & D at Organic, has worked Be and SGI and lots of other cool places, studied at the media lab before it was cool, currently a freelance interaction designer working for Sony Broadband) and Caterina Fake (writerartistdesigner, who most of you will be familiar with, but you may not have known that she was one of the first desingers hired at, coincidentally, Organic, as well as being Art Director at Salon for a few years).

I deliberately chose people who are not really 'web designers": I have always thought that product design/development was the best historical model for web design/development (as opposed to print, which really has little to do with it) and I like both art and whacky science. We all of us always have a lot to learn, and it isn't all about dhtml or "information architecture".

Given the incredible conversations I have had with each of these people individually, and given some quality audience participaction, there is no telling how fascinating this could be. Some things that will most likely be discussed, so far: contraints in the design of video game consoles; some nice diagrams, like this one of "Noah's Vessel" and this one of some birds' feet; lipography and the poet's need to constrain; "The constraints we choose to adopt ourselves are more interesting than constraints that are imposed by others. This is a question of values. It is disingenuous to assume that constraints are always imposed by the client."; how paradigmatic design solutions constrain future innovations and how we come to see new possibilities.

Yes! Yes! All that and more!

  Sorry about the long posts below (and soon: above). "If I had more time to write, I could have made them shorter, etc." I have been posting a lot to make up for periods of quiet. Of which there will be more and more, I bet.




Wednesday, March 7

  why he does that

  Someone being angry at me led to a conversation about whether other people can make you angry. (Ha! I am usually good at getting out of things like that.)

I certainly prefer to think that I am not merely reacting to the things that go on around me, that my rhetoric about choice-in-life is not merely rhetoric; therefore, I prefer "they did something bad AND I am angry" to "I am angry because they did something bad" and I'd prefer "they did something bad AND I am [either] going to explain and help amend [or] walk away". This distinction is not trivial.

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule,
not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but
to understand them."
— Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza,
A Political Treatise, Part 1 (1:4:2).

But anger is a thing that it is hard to take responsibility for; all aggression is like that ("Saddam brought this on!" or "fuckyouyoudumbfuckingbitch!ifyouwouldjustshutthefuckupiwouldstophittingyou!".) It is right that anger is normally a shameful and unpleasant thing (no matter which side you are on), for it is to be avoided. But we do always want the other party to be "more wrong".

Getting beyond it is understanding that people can do bad blameworthy things —and we are still as free as were before. We may be provoked, and we may react; reproach may be warranted —all sorts of things may be warranted— but the creation and sustenance of interminable spite-misery is never warranted, and it is never caused by some(one)thing external: one has to will that kind of life.

Related*: Robert C. Solomon is a good thinker on emotions: his Emotions and Choice and Solomon on Sartre on Emotions (pdf) are both online (found on the "Ethics and Emotions Portal").

* Even more related, of course, is all of Spinoza's work on bondage and freedom (mostly The Ethics, Books IV & V and much of Treatise on the Improvement of the Intellect). I have not been able to find any good summary of this online; since both the vocabulary and context are crucial and unfamiliar to most, it is hard to just jump in and read. I resolve to write a concise intro later. In the meantime, this listing of Spinoza's texts online demonstrates the glory of hypertext.

  Unedited:

I have this conversation with my father all the time: Are we ever going to get back to a great way of city-making? The climate makes a difference, the people make a difference (the vibrancy, the vibe, vitality, vuh, ve, v-) and all that, but the built environment is what ultimately separates the Viennas from the Vancouvers. (As much as I dig it here, among my main motivations for moving has been the architecture: the planning department here, on the other hand, is superb.)

At some point, I can imagine, people living in the great sprawls, the smart ones at least, must think: "Boy, the temperature in Phoenix is very nice, but this is not the kind of society I had hoped we'd be building and I am doing myself great psychological damage by spending so much time in my car and not living in any kind of real community with my neighbours and always being surrounded by brutal architecture. I must move to a place that is built better." The dumb ones will still marvel at the putative "convenience" of the bigbox lifestyle, I guess.

It has been 40 years since Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities was first published and an incredible amount of thinking has gone on since then. (Some of it is getting lost though! Two of my favorite books on planning, both by William H. Whyte have gone out of print: City: Rediscovering the Center and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.) Since then, I can't even tell if things have gotten better: there have been great projects, but 95% of all we build in North America is still shit.

It is very much for shame! that Silicon Valley, the place that has witnessed one the greatest creations and concentrations of wealth in history, is a land of strip malls, arterial roads, freeways, terrible subdivisions and monster houses. There are scapegoats, but in a system this complex it is hard to really identify the ultimate causes. There are people genuinely trying there, but it is hard to know if anything will come of it.

There is much to be discouraged about, and not much to take heart from. I like to think that efforts like the Congress for the New Urbanism (est. 1993) and the efforts of the many individual developers, planners, architects, social scientists, activists, environmentalists, designers, etc. will make some difference.

The now omnipresent condominium, which, in concept is neither obviously good nor evil, has the unfortunate habit of being less than satisfactory in practice. And there is a secret problem with condos that few people ever realize: They are almost impossible to get rid of, once built. With so many owners, each with their own priorities and preferences, consensus on tearing down and starting over is hard to imagine. My father, with 25 years in development, building and planning, knows of no condominium building that has ever been torn down. Look around: that should make you shudder.

  Zoom

• Fondation Daniel Langlois : Pour l’Art, la science et la technologie
• montrealfood.com
• design.concordia.ca
• C$300K for a castle

Hmmm ...

  Today's snippet from Notes on the Synthesis of Form:

.. in an era that badly needs designers with a synthetic grasp of the organization of the physical world, the real work has to be done by less gifted engineers, because the designers hide their gift in irresponsible pretension to genius.

When I read that, my cheeks burned a little. We should all be a little embarrassed, I think. Some of the time.

  Written on an envelope that I want to throw out, from a fruitful exchange with Derek:

• Alfred Lotka: Elements of Mathematical Biology
• W. Ross Ashby: Design for a Brain and Introduction to Cybernetics
• Michael Polanyi
• Rolf Pixley (Amsterdam).

  From the "no wonder Vancouver is the #1 place in the world to live department":

One of my favorite breakfast joints, Slickity Jim's Chat 'n' Chew (2513 Main St.) has a new menu which includes some choice digressions and slogans. My favorites (illustrations not reproduced):

"WE PUT THE O.K.
IN COOKING"

"EVERY BITE
TASTES
LIKE
MORE"

And then, in the bottom corner of the menu is a one-item section called "Unusual Dishes". The one item is:

Slickity's Abstract Notion $7.95
The idea here is that I sling together a meal that is a brash composition with myriad colors [sic], flavours [sic], textures, tastes and varying degrees of what some may call the mad prophesies of the spiritually ridiculous

I only would have added something like: "served with garlic bread".

  [warning, all these pages have embedded applets: if you are java-sensitive, stay away]

Stereoscopic Animated Hypercube

I love this. Mostly because there is someone who can say:

"Please also check out:

• My Hyperspace Star Polytope Slicer (new January 28, 2001).
• Russell Towle's 4D QuickTime Animations (amazing morphing figures).
• My Stereoscopic Polyhedra (with or without 3D glasses).
• My Animated Necker Cube (some faint relevance to the hypercube).
• My Counter-Rotating Spirals Illusion (no relevance whatsoever).
• My Fechner Color Illusion (new November 1999, also no relevance).
• My page on the Rhombic Dodecahedron and its relationship to the hypercube.
• Other Stereoscopic Animated Hyperspace Objects on my Java Page."

  I have tried to read the books of Christopher Alexander several times in my life. The first time was almost 10 years ago when I was working on a project that drew princinples from A Pattern Language (scattershot influential) and the last as recently as December. But, for reasons unknown to me, I've never actually been able to get down into it.

About a month ago, I began Notes on the Synthesis of Form which I was quickly distracted from and dropped. A few days ago, I picked it up again and BING! I could finally read Alexander! I still don't know what was stopping me all those years, but now I am loving it, totally enthralled. While I finish the book, I will post the occasional note of interest here. The first is just a simple image:

He says: "Here we have a street map with arrows of various widths on it, representing the number of vehicles per hour flowing in various directions at peak hours." Sure, we've all seem hundreds of similarly cool diagrammatic representations, but this one I really like.

  cool: not a single image

  With uncharacteristic lucidity, the inimitable To/x Hobog/n writes in to clarify the Schopenhauer metaphor I didn't quite get:

I'd say Artie says, As one philosophically inclined wanders through thoughtspace, picking up with wonder & delight the various profound thoughts that can be had while they lead him on to others, as he comes to be familiar with as much & many of them as he can, getting a general understanding of the whole of profound thoughts: despite the pleasure of this activity, of fulfilling his curiousity, he cannot shake the awareness that since these are TRUTHS about the world, and he is part of the world, they must relate back to him, his very deepest being & he therefore has existential heartmindmovements.

This is, for obvious reasons, no longer considered a tenable view of the philosopher. But since it's impossible for an ordinary person (and who isn't? - the enlightened - however that works) not to feel in 'his very deepest being' that he's relating in some way to the world itself & not just ideas of it, it's a good working theory.

That sounds about right to me. Thanks Toadex, wherever you are! (And aren't we all curious?)

Emendations (from Toadex): It's early morning but yes I think I typoed it & it ought to be "not to feel". But even that sounds strange. Anyhow, how I put it first isn't right. Let me think ... mpossa ordna to feel elat orld not just ideas impossa feel relat ... Yes, it's either "not to feel" or "not relating" & probably with an italicized not.

Or the whole paragraph is troubled with not enough and too many distinctions & starts to sound like some pedant upon whom the afflatus has lowered for the first time. I imagine some terrible orangutan Angel sitting upon & totally enveloping the speaker's head.

  Heh. Among the amenities: • 2 Fridges-freezers • Cooker with oven • Micro-wave • Dish-washer • Washing-machine • Small robot, Coffe-machine, Toaster, Mixer... • Kitchen ustensils (pans, frying-pans, pressure cooker...)

"Small robot"?

  If there wasn't a "weblog community" I'd just say: guess what? I'm in love! But since there is one, I said "If there wasn't ..." first. See? Let that not obscure the fact. And never you mind. This is my goddamn personal website.




Sunday, March 4

  It wasn't that funny.




Friday, March 2

  Funk me a river: listening to MMW's Wiggly's Way from a show back on January 24 1998 (which you can find on Napster, if you look). The opening is so delicious and at 1:14-1:16 there is a great example of why I think John Medeski has some of the best wrists which ever connected to keyboard-playing fingers.

They are at the Commodore (which I still haven't been to since it reopened however many years ago) on April 13 and they just might be in your town too.

  To whomever it was that I was discussing this with at that party:

(i) The book was called An Exaltation of Larks (includes some engravings by Dürer!). (ii) It is too an "unkindness of ravens". (iii) Lower down on this page there is a reasonable list which includes a labor of moles, a knot of toads, a trip of goats and a skulk of foxes.

  In an otherwise unfunny pretending-to-be-an-absurd-advice-columnist piece for Shouts & Murmurs in the Mar. 5 New Yorker, Steve Martin delivers the profound:

My wife is having an affair with a bartender, and I have been secretly filming her and her lover having intercourse. I then sell the tapes on the floor of the stock exchange. I would like her to be more wrong than I am. Who is more wrong?

"I would like her to be more wrong than I am." God, that is so funnysad. Haven't you ever wanted someone to be more wrong than you? What is up with us little humans? The miseries we invent, when there are so many other far, far, nobler things to invent. Ha!

  I have not written any significant email in over a week. I'm starting tomorrow. Um,  : )

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.