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A Cut Above

I have a fun little essay at the beginning of this month's Wired that basically argues that the current controversy over steroids in sports will be nothing compared to the ethical questions posed in the near future by elective "enhancement" surgery. (Thanks to my brother for suggesting the idea, and my brother-in-law for some of the medical background in the piece.) Here's a snippet:

In fact, there's a chance you've had one of these next-generation procedures: laser eye surgery. Great [baseball] hitters anticipate the type of pitch being thrown - fastball or curveball? - by detecting the rotation of the seams of the baseball, which means that good eyesight is as valuable to them as strength or agility. One study of more than a dozen players who had opted for laser surgery found that "players coming off eye surgery are likely to see substantial improvements in batting average and power."

But poor vision can hardly be considered an injury. At least a pitcher with a torn ligament can say that he required surgery to repair an injury to his arm. Some batters naturally possess more muscle tissue than others; artificially manipulating that endowment with steroids violates the ethics of the sport. Other batters naturally possess better vision than others, but for some reason artificially augmenting that endowment is perfectly acceptable. If the sport objects to taking a pill or applying a cream that temporarily changes your body's chemistry, surely it should be an even graver offense to reshape your cornea or reengineer tendon and bone structure.

On Second Thought

I just noticed that Jason is including a list of donors to his site, including HTML links to their websites if they choose. (See my previous post for background.) It occurs to me that Jason's put entirely the wrong spin on this whole pledge drive thing. He's not asking for donations. He's selling PageRank! A link from Kottke.org has got to have enough cred with Google to make any blogger want to shell out $30 bucks for a Kottke link to his or her front door. Now -- that's a real "A-List blogger" business....

The Weird Turn Pro

In case you missed it, Jason Kottke turned pro today. I got an advance notice about this because Jason asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would donate two signed copies of Emergence as part of the loot he's giving away to people who contribute during the pledge drive, which I happily agreed to do. I'm going to send him a little cash as well, partially because I value what Jason does (he's the real embodiment of the talented linker idea I talked about in Interface Culture so many years ago), and partially because I like the idea of blogging as a career, and not a means to a career. Jason doesn't want to be a book author or a television personality or a lecture circuit staple -- he wants to blog. He's built a big enough audience over the years that he could really make this work if enough of us become "micropatrons," as Jason puts it.

I know some will see this skeptically as another version the "tip jar" approach to online commerce that we used to talk about in the early days of FEED. But tip jars don't make a lot of money for subway musicians not because people aren't willing to contribute voluntarily small amounts of money to support culture they enjoy; tip jars don't make a lot of money because there are a finite number of people on a subway platform -- even in New York City. But a successful blogger has hundreds of thousands of people on his subway platform. All it takes is a fraction of a percent contributing, and Jason has a full-time job. So if you're a kottke.org reader, go send a little cash his way.

Naming Names

I won't even get into the wonderful -- and incredibly useful, at least for parents -- information design at Baby Names Wizard's "Name Voyager" tool. (Do a search on "Max" to see great example of a name's rise-and-fall-and-rise-again popularity cycle.) I think the most striking thing about the tool is the image you see when you first start it up: the overall distribution of names over the past century. The graphics look something like one of those images you'll see of sedimentary layers viewed from the side, with each layer representing the popularity path of a name through the twentieth century. At various points in this history, a few names are dominant, and so their layers are larger: Mary is very hot through 1950; Michael peaks in the mid 1960s; James does well through most of the century.

Now here's the kicker: as you get to the 1990s, all the larger layers grow more narrow; compared to all the other decades, there are no dominant names. Baby names come and go; there are cycles of naming just as there are cycles of fashion. But this is a different kind of trend: a shift in the overall distribution of names. We're a nation of niche naming now -- all tail, and no head.

P.S. I've always want to see something like this for both time and space, showing the geographic spread of names over time. Do trendy names follow the same patterns that fashions do -- starting in the urban centers and slowly spreading to middle America and suburbia, with pockets that have their own self-sustaining fashion systems? Or do they follow different patterns? There should be a Weather Channel for things like this. "There's a major system of Zoe's sweeping into the northeast from Chicago. Meanwhile, that flood of belly piercing we reported in the Rust Belt has dissipated."

Interface Avant-Garde, Where Art Thou?

William Blaze has written a very interesting -- and flattering -- review of my first book, Interface Culture, running at AbstractDynamics.org. (You gotta like reviews where one of the main criticisms is that you write too well!) One of the issues that comes up (both in the review itself, and in the comments) is the whole idea of the interface avant-garde that I proposed in that book: designers that would be challenging the dominant design paradigms, even coming up with deliberately "user-hostile" creations.

I think there's a tendency to assume that the interface subculture didn't really pan out. Blaze writes: "Since the books publication there have been numerous moves in this direction, but I'm unsure if any have actually gelled into real form. Flash designers circa 2000, skinners, game modders, they are more like microcultures of interface, never quite reaching the mass and velocity necessary to self-replicate into full fledged subcultures." I think it's true that subcultures have not exactly flourished in terms of the traditional desktop-metaphor graphic interfaces. But I tried to make it clear in writing that book that I meant "interface" broadly -- that's why I had the chapter on links and agents. By my definition, Google is a major interface innovation, in that it transformed they way we imagine and interact with information, even though there was nothing new from a GUI perspective (other than its minimalism.)

And so when I think of thriving interface subcultures, I think precisely of the blogging world, and all the various meta-blogging tools that have proliferated in the past few years. I found Blaze's review thanks to one of them, Technorati, which pointed me to Peter Lindberg, who had discover the review via another prominent member of the interface avant-garde, del.icio.us. These are all tools for navigating through information space, and so many have proliferated in the past two years that I literally can't keep with up them any more. And perhaps the surest sign that they have formed a genuine avant-garde is that the mainstream is starting to get interested in poaching them, starting with the Google/Blogger deal.

I've been thinking a bit more about Interface Culture recently because Everything Bad Is Good For You (the new one) has -- to my surprise -- turned out to be a kind of sequel to it. More on that later...

Any Apple Engineers Read This Blog?

So I love my new iPod shuffle -- you can't underestimate the fact that it is, for all practical purposes, entirely weightless, in that I don't feel it in my pocket when I'm walking around. And I don't mind the missing screen: I just have it autoload the most recently played songs in iTunes, and so the Shuffle's playlist is generally pre-filtered with songs that I'm enjoying right now. But I had one simple idea that would let you partially recreate the I-want-this-song-now pleasure of the display iPods.

Here's my idea: double-clicking on the forward or rewind button takes you to the next album when you're in linear mode (not shuffle.) Because the shuffle doesn't have that much music on it, given the small FlashRAM size, you might only have about 20-30 albums worth of material on the device. So finding a specific track on a specific album wouldn't be all that difficult if you could double-click ahead. You'd double click through a few albums, find the one you were looking for, and then single-click to the track you wanted to hear. Sure, the scroll wheel/display approach is faster, but you could navigate through the Shuffle's albums without actually looking at the device, which is nice when you're driving or walking, etc.

The other fringe benefit of this approach is that it would let you do something that's strangely difficult to do with the regular iPod. When I'm listening in Shuffle mode, I often find myself hearing a song I've long forgotten about, and I suddenly want to hear the entire album that the song originated from. Getting to that album takes about four steps on a regular iPod. But with the shuffle it would be a two step process: flip the back switch out of shuffle mode, and then double click backwards to the beginning of the album. Neat, huh?

SBJ Spam

For a few years now, I've maintained an informal email list of friends and acquaintances that I send a notice out to a few times a year: when a new book comes out, or someone's published an article I'm particularly proud of, etc. I just noticed the other day that Movable Type has a built-in tool for capturing email address for notifications, so I figured I'd open up the list to any of y'all who wanted to be on it. I promise to use restraint and only alert you when something truly special is going on: when, say, I get the list of appearances for the next book tour, or when I find I really good deal on prescription drugs from Canada. (Wait, scratch that last one.) At any rate, if you're interested put your email address in the form in the sidebar to the right. Thanks!

Do The Eskimos Have Words To Describe This Kind Of Snow?

So it's been eleven days now since the Blizzard of 2005 here in New York City, and it's time for a reality check. I love the magic of an urban snowstorm as much as anyone, but I don't feel that there is enough photographic evidence of what snow in the city really looks like for 90% of its lifespan. Most of the time you see pics like the one I snapped on our block, the day of the blizzard:

Lovely, huh? But this is what it looks like now on our street:

DevonThink Continued

Thanks to everyone for the amazing response to the Times essay and my subsequent post. Clearly, there is some serious pent-up interest out there in these kinds of tools. I've received so many questions and suggestions for further exploration that I haven't been able to go through them all, but a couple of key issues have emerged for me over the past 48 hours.

First, a number of people have alluded to Spotlight, Apple's new advanced search tool, arriving later this year in OS X TIger. I think Spotlight looks amazing -- check out the technology overview PDF -- but one point should be made clear: as far as I can tell, Spotlight does not to the "See Also" associative searching that DevonThink does. Spotlight is great at making rapid-fire exact text searches, and searching metadata, but it doesn't appear to have any built-in search tools for the fuzzier semantic queries. And it's the fuzzy, "see also" command that makes my DevonThink system work.

Second, there needs to be an easy way to import blog archives into DevonThink, particularly because so many blog entries are in that 50-500 word sweet spot. There are some bloggers out there whose archives I would happily import into DevonThink to supplement my own library as well. It should be easy enough to create a movable type plugin that would interface nicely with DevonThink. Lazy web -- get to work!

Finally, while I really like that DevonThink is not explicitly designed to be an academic bibliographic tool, it could use some slots for metadata that might be bibliographic in nature. I'd particularly like to be able to select a whole folder of notes and affiliate all of them with a single book/author/publisher/etc, while tagging them with different page numbers one by one. (Not unlike the way iTunes deals with individual songs belonging to the same album.) I've just been compiling the end notes for my new book this week, and it would have been very nice to just select all the DevonThink entries I was citing and have the software automatically generate the bibliography info for me. (I realize that programs like EndNote can do this very well, but I only want one tool for my notes, and EndNote doesn't do the semantic search that DevonThink does.)

I'm sending these notes to the DevonThink creators, by the way.