Month: January 2010

Up’n’attem Linky

Late last night I finished up the last chunk of major urgent work. Now to breathe deep and figure out what else needs doing, then maybe, just maybe, I get to move into a more normal sort of February.
So here come the linky. Ahhh, I love ’em so!
Fake Delicious. Friend of FTM Mallika has started a blog about stuff that looks like food BUT IS NOT ACTUALLY FOOD. Even I think this is crazy but it’s also completely amazing.
Exploring and understanding the Beatles through amazing, well-designed infographics.
The actual play of chess flies over my head, but I enjoy reading about it. The wikipedia article on The Immortal Game, a legendary match from 1851, is a great read, and includes an animation of the entire game so chess-heads can watch as it develops.
Tim Denee designed a calendar. If I had an A3 printer I would so print this out, it looks great. Not that I ever really use calendars. Anyway. It’s calibrated to New Zealand, by the way.
This one time, the television talked to Simon Pegg.
The New York Times writes a lengthy exploration of the strange saga of Little Green Footballs, which was for a long time a home for the most virulent anti-Muslim bigotry on the ‘net, but in recent times has cut ties with the American right-wing. Fascinating for its specifics, about this site and these people, and its generalities, about how stuff works in the political blogosphere. Cultural anthropologists will be fascinated.
Hidden in the entries of the OED is a secret history of typography.
And finally… The Estonians

Yes I am still hectic linky

*deep breath*
R2D2 weighs less than your cellphone.
Wgtn abstract cartoonist Draw’s weather animation. Except I can’t get it to work on the link? It worked in the RSS feed. Anyway, maybe you’ll get lucky.
This deserves a whole big post or two of its own, but I can’t even keep up with it myself right now: The Case of the Midnight Note, a transmedia private detective story set in a mash-up of Wgtn 2010 and Chicago 1930. There’s twitter, photos, video, comics, and some audience interactive stuff where bartenders in Wgtn bars have had clues for patrons who ask them something in-character. Highly cool. A dramatic moment!
What parts of the body do different music genres sing about?
He-Man art gallery. Check out the artworks (big page).
Encyclopedia of tie knots
Jack Kirby designed costumes for a 1969 show of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Chimpanzees ritualistically dance in front of big fires.
*dives*

Running To Keep Up

Ach – January was already really busy, and thanks to an email received this morning it’s now insanely busy. Blogging is low down the totem pole, so this 2010 beginning has been something of a false start.
All this busy is good stuff, though. Very happy.
More when I can, including explanations.

Changing systems

Those systems that don’t produce the outcomes we desire? We can change them, right?
The theory is easy. There’re inputs and outputs. We say we want more of this than that, and we set it to accept certain types of inputs, and tweak the desired output level, and voila.
The reality is complicated. Systems are not simple black-box processes we can toy with in isolation. They exist in relationship with other systems. Sometimes they’re part of massively nested sets of such complexity that it’s really hard to figure out what’s going on, let alone understand what changes will have what effects (see: the global economy).
Economists are a perfect case, actually. Lots of extremely smart people invest a lot of time into developing comprehensive models of the economic system, what goes in and what comes out and how changing x will affect y. Everything’s riding on these models – everyone wants them to be accurate as they can be. But, as those who heard This American Life last week know, even the most highly paid analysts don’t really know what the heck is going on.
For any system complex enough to survive in the real world, it’s tough to make adjustments that give the desired results, and even tougher to make adjustments that only give the desired results.
This doesn’t make us helpless, though, because every system is ultimately responsive to our human characteristics. This fact might give us some clues about where might find points of intervention.
(to be continued, but in a few days, because I need to think this next step through some more. and some examples might be nice too, instead of just talking in generalities all the time)
(I had planned to blog about something completely different all this week, but this is what’s come out. huh.)

It’s not the thinking, it’s how we’re thinking.

(with apologies to ALAC)
Things aren’t working as they should.
Everywhere you look there are systems that don’t deliver what we as a society want them to deliver. Law enforcement, workforce management, politics, education, media, to name five that come to mind for some reason.
Why is everything broken?
Answer: it’s not. These systems work perfectly. Keep a system running and it will inevitably trend towards finding the smoothest, least complicated way it can do what it does.
The systems fail us not because they’re broke, but because they have to interact with something that they cannot control and that we did not design: us.
We resist change. We resent uncertainty. We fear difference. We desire status. We react emotionally not logically. We interpret the world as stories. We construct for ourselves a self-identity.
Everything that doesn’t work comes from the way we think.
We break the world for ourselves.
And this means we can fix it.