The difference between making and meeting:
If you’re rushing to make a train, you have to be there before the last moment. Five seconds too late is too late. The cost of error is absolute.
If you’re hurrying to meet a train, though, there’s a soft deadline. Five seconds is no big deal. Thirty seconds might be annoying, particularly for someone returning from a long journey. And five minutes is really rude.
Too often, we treat our obligations as meet, not make. We impose a sliding scale, a soft penalty, and we not only show up just a bit late, we show up a bit behind on quality or preparation.
Making is a discipline. Meeting opens the door for excuses.
Not to mention some free advice: show up early. But, never run.
We are our own best advisors. Often, the best discovery of myself, then, comes from a serendipitous archeology of my own writing.
Today, as I consider love, I did some excavation on my writing to discover what I’ve loved.
The list:
I never could have listed these in a single sitting, yet seeing it here — I could not imagine anything else. When in doubt, remember how to do what you love. What is it?
Martin Beeby on the origin of popular browser names. On my browser of choice:
While there was a codename vote early in Chrome’s development, none were finally chosen (I’d love to know what they were). Instead, it’s said by Glen Murphy that they chose Chrome because one of the design leads liked fast cars. They then ended up sticking with the codename for the final project launch because 1. they’d grown used to it, 2. they associated it with speed and, 3. because it minimised the amount of browser UI (sometimes called chrome).
And a mystery, as described by Scott Gilbertson over at Webmonkey:
[N]o one seems to know the exact origins of “Safariâ€, though the Beach Boys’ album seems like a reasonable guess — surfing the web, Surfin’ Safari … get it? The WebKit blog is named Surfin’ Safari, which might lend some credence to that story, but the name also nicely ties in with the notion of exploring the wild and connotes some of the same images as “explorer†and “navigatorâ€.
No word, so to speak, on lesser-known browsers such as Konqueror, which begs the question: how does a name affect later adoption and use?
How language affects economic behavior has been hotly discussed of late, primarily due to an unpublished paper from Yale economist Keith Chen on the same:
Chen […] thinks that if your language has clear grammatical future tense marking […], then you and your fellow native speakers have a dramatically increased likelihood of exhibiting high rates of obesity, smoking, drinking, debt, and poor pension provision. And conversely, if your language uses present-tense forms to express future time reference […], you and your fellow speakers are strikingly more likely to have good financial planning for retirement and sensible health habits. It is as if grammatical marking of the difference between the present and the future insulates you from seeing that the two are coterminous so you should plan ahead. Using present-tense forms for future time reference, on the other hand, encourages you to see that the future is just more of the present, and thus encourages you to put money in a 401(k).
A potentially exciting correlation. (As designers, I believe we seek these correlations and assumptions often.) But is it? Geoff Pullum respectfully reviews Chen’s work and pointedly points out what concerns him. His greatest concern:
None of these briefly summarized worries about Chen’s work, however, disturb me as much as the appalling journalistic misrepresentations that David Berreby offers us. His title is: “Obese? Smoker? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It’s Because of the Language You Speak.”
A lesson for any designer who synthesizes user research to inform design.
iPad poetic practicum:
I prefer to fall asleep while reading, an excellent way to avoid those nocturnal thoughts that can suddenly jerk you into wretched wakefulness. On chilly nights, I love to pull the covers over everything but my head and read a book propped up against a pillow until I drift off.
You can only do that with the light on, of course, which means that I’d either wake up at 4 am to a bright bedroom or I’d have to calculate the exact moment when the long, cold reach of my arm to the bedside lamp would still leave me sufficient reserves of sleepiness to close the deal.
The iPad requires no bedside light, doesn’t need to be wrangled into a held-open position and will obediently turn its own pages with the tap of a single finger darting out from under the cover of the warm duvet. When that finger hasn’t dropped by in a while, the iPad obligingly turns itself off. While it’s still on, while I’m suspended with it in the darkness in that tiny pool of light, this feels sublimely intimate and snug. For these reasons, I find myself less and less willing to read anything but ebooks in bed.
I also can’t read anything for work at the end of the day, as my brain starts to switch its circuits to dreaming mode. Sometimes I’ll dream that I’m still reading the book, the narrative getting stranger and stranger, the dialogue repeating itself and yet satisfying in some odd way that the conversations in books seldom are.
A new spot to read by Laura Miller and Maud Newton. Night or day: yes.
Somewhere among E.B. White and Adam Gopnik there is Cord Jefferson:
I’ve never felt more important than when I lived in New York. I was poor and my work was neither very good nor very well-read, and yet every day I’d wake up in my 10 by 10 room, its window looking out over my building’s rusted trashcans, and somehow think I’d achieved another great victory. …. Eventually my fellow New Yorkers started to feel more like teammates than neighbors. The tumult the City throws in your way daily engenders a sense of community the way getting its ass kicked on a rink might galvanize a hockey team. Stuff like complaining about real estate — the price of it, the rotten brokers, the changing neighborhoods — is like a secret handshake for New Yorkers, thrown out quickly to differentiate between those in the know from everyone else, who probably talk about reality television at dinner. Then there’s the knowing nods from strangers on the street in times of extreme heat or cold, their meaning being “This shit again.†In the cases of literal shit, like when I saw an old lady pooping on the street by my office, there’s the “What are you gonna do?†shrug New Yorkers give one another. At the sight of the pooping woman, I heard a man to my left say to his horrified companion, “It’s, like, New York, y’know?â€
Still. We do. We love NYC.
This week my cello and I had to ride the C Train with Giants fans. Unrelated to the parade, it needed to go uptown for some repairs. As I rode, smashed together: me, giant awkward case, Giants fans, flags, shirts, yelling, mashing, directionless, in a direction, in cold sweat, past 14th Street, 34th Street, 42nd Street Station, I realized I had had a choice. I was on the subway. I was not in the privacy and softness of a taxi. We were on the subway. Huddled together. Together in motion. Well, almost. The train was stopped. “Unfamiliar objects on the tracks ahead.” But nobody stopped. The chatter moved on. Fan, flag, woman, cello. We rode along together as the train lurched forward again. Because we are all teammates.
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Chris Mizes on the seemingly quiet dredge as co-creation between the natural and its urban counterpart:
[T]his massive assemblage of global weather patterns, regional tourism, lunar gravitational forces, transportation infrastructures, urban escapism, geologic displacement, and ocean-floor ecosystems, the dredge becomes only a single point, a transient infrastructure of human desire. The dredge happens at a massive geologic scale but takes place in the context of an expansive network of relations that defies any attempt to place it within such a specific scalar boundary. The miles of pressurized metal tubing temporarily fixed in the beach landscape are a not-so-quiet reminder that “nature†is not the pristine condition of the pre-anthropocene. Instead, we tolerate the dredge’s ephemeral infrastructural interruptions for the sake of remaking a relaxing space outside the city. We are always working against other non-human forces to, in a sense, preserve the “natural†common for human consumption. The dredge reminds us that the “natural†never stands alone.
I like this: dredge as reminder of what is common. Human desire with all its attendant inventions and reinventions, with all its accusations and creations, when at its best is co-creator.
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Reportedly, “weather derivatives” are not only a thing, but a growing market:
Financial contracts based on the weather have been around since at least the late 1990s. The contracts, many of which trade like stocks, are typically pegged to such things as rainfall and temperatures. But in the past few years, contracts specifically tied to snowfall have started to take off in popularity. The contacts essentially act like insurance, allowing, say, retailers or ski mountains to insure against too much snow or too little. Wall Street sells the contracts, matching buyers and sellers and pocketing a small commission. Typically, it’s a good business, but this year it could be a real moneymaker. In theory, there could be as many firms betting against snow as for it. But in reality the market is always lopsided. It turns out there are more firms that are hurt by large snowfalls than the opposite. And large ski mountains have yet to get into the market.
The result:
[U]nable to find sellers, brokers who specialize in the market say financial firms ended up taking other side of the trade in order to complete their clients transactions, essentially betting that snowfall would be light this year. “I’m short snow,†says Bill Windle, who heads up weather trading at reinsurance firm RenRe.
Just how much money the financial firms will rake in and who will profit is unclear. Last year, PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimated that the total weather derivatives market was $12 billion. Snow is only a small portion of that, perhaps a few hundred million. But it’s growing.
It’s one thing to capitalize on weather that may be, but another to try to control and capitalize on weather that may be more desirable. Yet that’s precisely what the science of cloud seeding does. The practice was most loudly taken on by Yuri Luzhkov, former mayor of Moscow and its most notable enthusiast, who seeded the clouds (with help from the Russian Air Force) to stop rain from falling on his parades. It nearly worked.
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[Image: Irving Langmuir, Bernard Vonnegut (brother of Kurt), and Vincent Schaefer, forefathers of cloud seeding, making it snow in the research lab at General Electric. The project was later transferred under the name “Project Cirrus.”]
Elmore Leonard with rules to remain invisible when writing a book that help show rather than tell. Number 10 and the unofficial number 11:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10:
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Substitute the word “writing” for whatever it is you do, and this becomes the most important rule for making — not only true for writing, but for anything we make.
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