Month: July 2007

The online type-design community that gathers around Typophile and Typographi.ca just announced their favorite fonts of last year (yes, it’s July, there were technical complications). Of the faces they cite, my favorite has to be Fabiol; I’m a sucker for Venetian Renaissance type. (Plus, anything from the Font Bureau. I want the job of composing their type specimen copy.)

One might think that after five hundred years of typography and more than a decade of the democratization of digital typeface design, that relatively little room remains for creativity in legibly, gracefully representing the Latin alphabet. These designers demonstrate how false that inference would be.
Continue reading “Best Typefaces of 2006”

I can’t wait to hear what Bruce Schneier has to say about the FBI’s new “system to assess risk.” (A German report here, which quotes Schneier as saying something like, “These programs are based on the dangerous myth that terrorists fit a particular profile, and we can pick them out of a crowd if we only put all people into it.” ) It would be great to see an internationally-prominent body adopting the principle that you can’t out-anticipate terrorists, but you can uphold an open, respectful, resilient civil order.

I’m not sure who established Fair Use Day, but as the corrosion of equity and common sense continue to tip the balance of copyright benefits toward corporate publishers (not artists, writers, and creators, and certainly not readers, viewers, and listeners), exercise your prerogative to quote, parody, criticize, or educate using copyrighted works. Use it or lose it!

Courtesy of Doc and Nate:

First, JP “I’m cool for more reasons than just my collaboration with Chris Locke” Rangaswami, the grand slam analysis of Prince’s decision to give away copies of his CD to residents of the UK:

Prince understands how he makes money, what’s scarce and what’s abundant about it. Digital downloads are abundant. Concert appearances are scarce. He makes money because of his CDs and not with them [this emphasis c/o AKMA].

A word of caution. Some people are just not comfortable with abundance economics, so they try to create artificial scarcities as they go along. Second nature to them, I guess. . . .

You cannot bundle abundance with scarcity, it’s like trying to implement region coding of the air that you breathe. But then some people will try anything.

Then, via Nate (the unlinkable), the latest news from Canadian band Stars:

On September 25th, Arts&Crafts will release Stars’ fourth studio album, In Our Bedroom After War. . . .

Traditional music business practice says we are to begin sending out copies of this album now. We give advance copies to print publications in hopes of securing features that coincide with our September date. We meet with radio stations in hopes of securing airplay. etc, etc.

Inevitably someone will leak the album.

Throughout this process, the most important people in this value chain, the fans, are given only two options – wait until September 25th to legally purchase the new album or choose from a variety of sources and download the album for free, at any time.

We hope you’ll choose to support the band, and choose to pay for their album. However we don’t think it’s fair you should have to wait until September 25th to do so.

We believe that the line between the media and the public is now completely grey.
What is the difference between a writer for a big glossy music magazine and a student writing about their favourite bands on their blog? What differentiates a commercial radio station from someone adding a song to their lastfm channel? or their myspace page?

As such, we are making the new Stars album available for legal download today, four days after it’s completion. The CD and double vinyl versions of the album will still be released on our official release date, September 25th. We hope you will continue to support music retailers should a physical album in all it’s packaged glory be your choice of format.

It’s our hope that given a clear, legal alternative to downloading music for free, you will choose to support the creators.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Sincerely,

Stars and Arts&Crafts

If only they realized that it’s not the dollars-from-bits that they’re selling; it’s the packaging (for the physical artifact) and the performances (at live venues). But Rangaswami’s, and Prince’s, understanding of how this digital economy works will prevail in the long run. And if you want to buy the Stars album now, you can go here now; me, I’ll wait to hear how it sounds before I rush to buy. At least Arts & Crafts doesn’t DRM-cripple their digital versions.

Trying to work on some lectionary essays while also getting ready to decamp for Princeton, and pondering the possibility of using Inform 7 for educational games in New Testament studies (thanks for the distraction pointer, Steve!).

I was about to buckle down and write a real review of Everything is Miscellaneous — among the other things I’ve spent the last month on the verge of buckling down to write — when yesterday, David Weinberger offered a wonderful reflection on age, death, John Lennon, and our intertwingled lives.

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On a very much lighter note, the Simpsons avatar maker does its magic even more impressively than the Lego Mini-mizer did.

Before I go to church, so that I don’t give the impression that I’m thinking about any particular service:

The point of worship is worship. The point of taking pains about liturgy — well, I can think of several. One point involves trying to say what we mean, liturgically, rather than our services just mumbling. (Despite my sympathy for the Motu Proprio permitting wider use of the Tridentine Mass, I admit that this gesture may convey both an imprecise retrograde nostalgia and, more importantly, the revival of gravely problematic liturgical antisemitism.)

The other point I had in mind involved the action of worship, when clumsiness and confusion call attention to the goings-on as something other than fluent praise of God. Turbulence distracts; coordination facilitates. (Yes, it’s possible to make an idol of hyperprecise liturgical fussiness; on the whole, I observe a great many more situations in which careless confusion is shrugged off as inconsequential than I observe situations in which fastidiousness interferes with worship. That fits a more general U.S. ideology of casualness, and of theological topics not mattering much.)

I find that my students work better on questions of ethics when you supply them with concrete case studies — so when I read the first bit of this story about Pete Doherty, I immediately thought about it as an example relative to questions of truth-telling and fidelity. But the more you linger with it, the more ethical plot lines come to the fore (especially as you read on to the end of the piece). You could devote an entire semester to teaching the ethics of this narrative.

Granted that word-for-word matching isn’t the cardinal characteristic of good translation, wouldn’t it be fair to translate dipsychos as “half-hearted”? It gets at the sense of divided sentiments better in colloquial English than does “double-minded,” which sounds more like multiple personality disorder to me.
Continue reading “Pondering”

If a 4Gb iPhone costs $500 with phone technology in its guts, how much would a unit cost without the phone innards? A wide-screen, wifi-enabled, web-browsing, email-checking, video-watching, touch-screen-interfacing iPod (and gateway device to the phone version)? Cause it sounds to me as though they’d sell a zillion of them.

Yesterday’s activities included two special destinations. First, we dropped Josiah and Laura off at Midway Airport for their trip to visit Laura’s folks at their summer home; since we were in the neighborhood, we took Pippa to Springfield-in-Chicago, the local

where we gawked at the remade convenience store and chuckled at the clever Simpsons allusions. We will not rest from our critiques of consumer culture — but if you’re going to run a franchised convenience store, you might as well do it with self-deprecating wit. Jeneane swears our package of Krusty-Os will be valuable someday if we keep it unopened; I’m unconvinced that the cost of storing and reselling the cereal will be surpassed by what anyone would pay for it. On the other hand, I haven’t opened the box yet.

After obtaining a sour watermelon Squishee for PIppa and some marginally-nutritious snacks, we turned north to take Pip to the Art Institute, where Margaret and I had gone a few weeks ago. We proceeded first to a gallery in the Asian collection to which Laura had called our attention. Then Pippa led us to a photography exhibition that she wanted to see. I admired the photography treatments of Koto Ezawa (would Flickr consider that a photograph? Remember when that was a hot topic?), but Margaret and I were knocked out by the photos of Sarah Hobbs and Angela Strassheim.

Then we took a very quick stroll through the European paintings before we ran out of energy.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Aretê Krista pointed my attention to the Karaoke Cowboy tape by the late Slim the Drifter, and I’ve been listening to it appreciatively. There’s so very much recorded music flooding our environment — I wonder how the music bloggers manage to listen to anything more than once, just at the level of raw time-consumption; I’ve always been a constant-listener, but at this point I’ve ripped and downloaded megabytes of recordings that I haven’t yet listened to — there’s so much to hear that one can understand how some worthy efforts get lost in the swirl.

If you have a soft spot for Bakersfield country-rock, head over to Jeff’s place and listen to Slim. (And thanks, Jeff, for so generously including me among the “usual suspects” Tom, Ray, Mark — someday I’ll have to start thinking again.)

If you want graphical ornaments for a page layout, head over to Briar Press’s Cuts & Caps section. These are EPS files, not typefaces or jpgs, but most of the page layout apps I know of — in deed, most contemporary word processors — handle EPS.

I keep a fortune-cookie slip in my wallet. It reads, “Your dream will come true when you least expect it.” Let’s bracket, for the moment, the question of whether there’s any sane reason to take fortune-cookie slips seriously; we know there isn’t, and we know that we do anyway.

What’s the effect of being told that my dream will come true when I least expect it? Doesn’t that instigate a pattern of expectation that itself militates against dream-realization? Or does it mean that a second-tier dream comes true instead, because I was too attentively expecting the unexpected realization of the most prominent dream?

I’ve got a small assortment of dreams any one of which would be an ecstatic delight. One of them was eliminated in the past couple of days; I guess I mistakenly thought too seriously about it.

I suppose it is with dreams as with zazen, that in order to attain, you must banish consciousness of wanting-to-attain. So I’ll try to relinquish my dreams — and not simply so that I might attain one unexpected one, but so that I may appreciate more fully the dream-come-true that is my marvelous family, my fantastic dear wife, and the tremendous network of lovely friends into whose lives I’ve been woven.
Continue reading “What Dreams May Come”

Last night Margaret and I spontaneously went to see Ocean’s Thirteen after dinner. We enjoyed it, though I’d have appreciated slightly more intensity to the concluding twists. I like just sitting around watching George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and their friends look stylish and ingenious.

On our way out, Margaret wondered what the movie was for which the long line had been snaking around the theater. “Why, the Transformers movie,” I answered. “No!” “Yup.”

Margaret had no idea just how deeply the Transformers reach into the dreams and nostalgia of their audience. I have only a faint appreciation for this, having fallen in with a Transformers fanboy online a couple of years ago. We spent the rest of our walk home coaching Margaret through her jaw-dropped amazement that anyone, much less a sizable crowd of mixed generations, races, and genders, would be willing to sit through a movie about cars that change into superhero robots — much less, that they’d line up for hours to see the first showing. She’s still researching Transformania this morning.

Anyone out there interested in beta-testing Skitch (requires Mac 10.4.6 or later)? It certainly looks like an interesting alternative approach to photo treatment and sharing to Flickr; high emphasis on client-side editing and annotation, without server-side interaction. Intriguingly different strengths, though.

I used to play chess, long ago (as Dennis Fischman, my teammate, reminded me last winter!), in which endeavor one of the celebrated events is the “simultaneous exhibition.” A strong chess player can examine and understand games well enough to play on numerous simultaneously (one by one, to be exact). I have enough difficulty playing at all that I would never dream of trying that — my main accomplishment since high school has been beating Nate and Si while playing blindfolded (to their amazement, and my own surprise).

I started working through my email inbox this morning at about nine o’clock, and am just now modulating to other productive modes of labor, and I haven’t even answered all the mail I got. This feels less like a simultaneous chess match than like playing tennis simultaneously on several courts at once.

I haven’t checked to see if Font Sugar has these, but the faces that Jos Buivenga makes available at exljbris would make admirable candidates for the sans-family or serif-family faces for your collection. (If only Tallys were expanded to a complete family. . . .)

During my morning stroll through bookmarks, blogrolls, and RSS streams, I came to this set of pictures of a 7-Eleven redecorated to match the Kwik-E-Mart from The Simpsons TV series (in preparation for the movie, I suppose). (Link via Jason.)

I post the link here because of the comments on this picture. “Gotsomeideas” says, “It would have been easy for them to screw up this promotion and make it unfunny, but from what I can tell from the pictures, they actually did a good job.” Bananatree responds, “Attention to detail is awesome.” Exactly. Most anyone who has watched a few minutes of The Simpsons could throw a few jokey signs into a convenience store and sit back; that would have met the Flickr commenters’ expectations of a wooden corporation lamely miming the brilliant cultural currents from which it’s hoping to draw cachet. That’s the self-appointed “funny” guy in the company repeating jokes from The Simpsons by the water cooler: thanks, I’d rather watch the show. Instead, the 7-Eleven people opted to pay attention to detail, to go with the painstaking composition that infuses such manic humor into The Simpsons — and people could tell. It makes a difference.

Now, let’s ask the embarrassing question. which is your church more like: the office funny guy repeating something that someone once thought was amusing, or the brilliantly subtle, detailed creation of a physical-world Kwik-E-Mart?

Much of the time, my rants about attention to detail and communicating carefully and responsibly and deliberately, are drowned out by a culture of casualness, spontaneity, free-wheelin’ yada yada yada. Hey, spontaneity and relaxation and freedom are good things, I approve of them. But attention to detail — by people who know what they’re doing — makes a difference, and viewers, visitors, congregants can tell (even if they can’t articulate the difference it makes). I didn’t see Diana Butler Bass when she passed through town (she was here only in father-daughter time), but it sounded as though she was saying similar things: that congregations grow not because you belong to the Single Correct Side of a theo-ideological schism, but because you realize that the work of living as a congregation, as a Body, requires care and attention to detail. People can tell the difference.

Margaret bought me a copy of Made to Stick for Christmas, and since I’m only just warming up to the odd pursuit known as “reading” over the last week or so, I finished reading it a couple of days before I left for Pittsburgh. The book devotes itself to several moderately obvious premises (the authors show charming diffidence about the novelty of their insights), and the manifestly non-obvious implications thereof. Why, ask the authors, if the characteristics of “sticky” ideas are so obvious, do not more people generate more sticky ideas? (And likewise why do so many ideas turn out to be non-sticky, if not altogether repellent?)

The short answer: notions that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotionally charged, and narrative in structure have a greater likelihood of sticking. This is easy enough to say, easy to illustrate, but much more tricky to put into effect; the Heaths devote the book to showing their analysis in practice, and the book merits attention (whether as a library take-out or a purchase) for its careful attention to the ways of stickiness. Despite the book’s casual logic of causality and its breezy rhetoric — which I’m quite content to ascribe to their expectation of reaching a mass audience — the Heaths make plausible points from which most people who traffic in ideas stand to learn.

One of the villains in their piece is the “curse of knowledge,” the extent to which greater depth of knowledge in a particular area blinds the know-er to what seems strikingly clear to a less-informed observer. One familiar example is the software application that performs a zillion different functions via commands and click sequences so obscure as to be quite useless. Some developer(s) presumably said, “All you do is invoke this menu with that key combination, find the check box, alt-click the check box, then highlight the selection and right-click-and-drag the selection” whereas a naive observer would say, “I can’t figure that out, I’ll never use it.” Combine the curse of knowledge with the [disputed] Dunning-Kruger effect, and you set in motion a typhoon of sticky-less-ness.

The Heaths gave me a lot to think about. The field of biblical studies fits very typically into those areas where the curse of knowledge effects a barrier between practitioners and their ostensible clients. We have to teach our students not solely “stuff about the Bible,” but also “why we would think about the Bible in these counter-intuitive ways.” The curse of knowledge has also played a role in selecting who enters the field of biblical studies; those of us with temperaments suited to our arcane modes of reasoning feel more comfortable reading and evaluating biblical scholars’ arguments, and we perpetuate those sorts of argument when we enter the field. That’s not because we’re uniquely brilliant, or have discovered the One True Path to Biblical Veracity, but because we do it more or less the way our forebears did. (By the same token, our knowledge is still very valuable knowledge; it’s just a mode of knowledge that particular sorts of people have worked out over generations, and it’s neither exhaustive nor exclusive.)

When I return to teaching, I want to have taken some time to think through (for instance) things that my students already know, that the practices of biblical interpretation resemble. I anticipate introducing interpretive problems and axioms more as a narrative about how readers of the Bible puzzled over things, and how they’ve resolved their puzzlements, than as conclusive “facts” about the New Testament.

Made to Stick also provoked me to wonder whether, alongside the curse of knowledge, there might be a “curse of authority.” This latter “curse” operates on those whom it affects by preying on their (actual) situation as decision-makers, truth-determiners, or authority-bearers, who eventually will have to arrive at plans, conclusions, and policies. The accursed authority figure supposes that since authority is vested in him, his perspective on a situation has to determine the course of action — without testing that perspective against, perhaps, the circumstances of the world around him. Un-sticky ideas might well develop from policy-makers whose authority exceeds their imagination.

In any case, I’d recommend Made To Stick firmly — as a library read at the very least. Once we get over the conclusion that the authors aren’t saying anything so very novel, and attend to the preponderance of evidence that most people’s ideas depart from the Heaths’ advice, we stand to benefit from their insight into how much we have to learn.