Lined & Unlined

Above, top: The Hamilton Digital Watch, the world’s first digital watch, released in 1970. Above, bottom: Emmett Williams, “IBM,” 1973.

One of the most important things I’ve ever read about typography is Paul Elliman’s essay “My Typographies.” Here’s the sparkling gem of it that I’m so fond of quoting to my students:

Writing gives the impression of things. Conversely, things can give the impression of writing.

Beautifully put. In the essay that follows, Elliman dances among several examples of things that give the impression of writing, each of which is connected powerfully to our own origins and the rhythms of life on this planet. He reads the types of clouds in the sky, looks at constellations and signals sent to outer space through the Arecibo Message, unpacks the passing of Uruk tokens, scans the Talmud, finds our flickering digital beginnings in ASCII text and LED watches, then turns to alphabetic codes, GPS messages, and more. Perhaps his most intuitive example, though, is the alphabet of DNA, on which he quotes genetics professor Steve Jones:

It has a vocabulary (the genes themselves), a grammar (the way in which the inherited information is arranged), and a literature (the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being). The language is based on the DNA molecule, the famous double helix; the icon of the 20th century. It has a simple alphabet, not 26 letters, but just four, the four different DNA bases, A, C, G, and T for short.

And now, via Kottke, we learn of Christian Bök, who will encrypt a poem on a particularly resilient bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans. As Wired describes Bök’s process, part of the appeal of doing this (apart from seeing if it Can Be Done) seems to be about constraint:

Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

In many ways, Bök’s project reminds me of Emmett Williams’s work — Sweethearts, of course, but also his lesser-known IBM poem, which uses a technique called “expansion by alphabet,” a process I intend to write more about in the future. However, for the time being, let me just say that no sooner had I found a computational method for collecting Williams Words then I found out that Williams himself had been experimenting with computational verse using this form. Williams is always one step ahead — beautiful. More on the IBM poem here and here.

Peter Mendelsund points to an interesting book by architect François Blanciak. From the MIT Press description,

What would happen, he asks, if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.

The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain-link towers, ball-bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing — and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from.

Metropolis’s blog has more:

Taken together, the drawings are meant as a tonic, Blanciak writes, to architectural theory’s “sole focus on writing,” offering “a creative alternative to critical academic literature.”

I’ll be interested to pick this book up. There’s a bit of Harris Burdick in it — the kind of book that sets the reader’s imagination to work.

I’ve got a review of the new edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color in the most recent issue of Eye, but there’s also an interesting piece about the future of typography online that collects thoughts from Chester Jenkins, Jonathan Hoefler, and Stephen Coles that’s a good overview for those new to the subject. Titled “The End of Default,” this bit from Simon Esterson and Jay Prynne’s introduction caught my attention:

Clients such as corporations and publishers who were accustomed to branding every visible square inch with their custom fonts had to accept the default nature of the Web, and many designers have long resigned themselves to living through the typographic equivalent of the dark ages, relieved partially by the advent of Cascading style sheets (CSS) which allow much greater control over the styling elements of a website, including the size, weight and style of the (still limited range of) fonts.

For a significant minority of designers, the limited type palette became a signifier of authenticity, a cool hair shirt they could wear with pride. The “default look” of non-Flash websites has spilled into books, magazines and music design as a conscious style choice rather than necessity.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece about defaults for Emigre that tried to present them as the thorny, complex topic that they still continue to be. Defaults still serve to self-reflexively critique their own making (as diagnosed above), but they also extend Modernist concepts into the present and update them. I wonder if they will continue to be a productive area of critical inquiry. Historically, they were an intriguing response to the ’90s debates about the possibility of designer-authors. Where once the question was, “How do designers assert themselves as authors?”, defaults countered, “What if you take designers out of the system altogether?”

While the Eye quote above has a slightly skeptical bent about this work, I see it today with more positive eyes. Rereading “Default Systems in Graphic Design” now, I feel increasingly distant from my point-of-view then. That tends to happen with certain kinds of critique; they become dated faster than the work they describe. My goal these days is to write things that, whenever possible, are slower, richer, and hopefully more enduring.

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Kelly at Nothing is New recently posted some of Lady Greyler’s scans of ESPRIT’s 1984–86 Catalog.

As a kid, I used to wander these stores with absolute delight. ESPRIT was perhaps one of the earliest brands I could pick out of a lineup. It still looks energetic and fresh today — the sassy, flirty sister of Memphis, decked out in its patterns, colors, and offbeat esprit.

Stanley Fish plumbs the benefits of pragmatism in a lengthy post for the NYT. Here are his closing thoughts:

But if pragmatism doesn’t have a real world payoff, if it is of no help when the next crisis comes your way, what’s the use of it? Why should anyone be interested in it? Behind these questions is a larger one: why should anyone be interested in philosophy in any of its versions? The usual answer is that philosophy, by identifying first principles, can serve both to guide and justify our actions. When pragmatism tells us that there are no first principles, it not only disqualifies itself as the source of guidance and justification; it disqualifies the whole enterprise, at least in its more ambitious forms. What it leaves are the pleasures of doing philosophy, the pleasures of thinking about thinking freed from the burdensome expectation that we will finally get somewhere. Now there’s an advantage and a gift to boot.

My own thoughts on pragmatism as a useful set of ideas for contemporary design here.

Named for the comic strip above, the Linus Sequence is defined as follows:

The sequence composed of 1s and 2s obtained by starting with the number 1, and picking subsequent elements to avoid repeating the longest possible substring. The first few terms are 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, …

The sequence’s sister set, the Sally Sequence gives “gives the sequence of lengths of the repetitions which are avoided in the Linus sequence.”

Both sequences are listed in the astounding Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. High five on that one, Internet.

Michael Pollan’s talk at The Long Now Foundation includes a glimpse of the gift economy at work in the business of agriculture:

A lot of it depends on redefining our sense of what a clever technology is. And what I suggest is that a really smart rotation — like that eight-year rotation in Argentina— is as clever and as powerful a technology as the latest genetically-modified seed. And we need to look at it that way. The question is why don’t we look at it that way? Well by in large because there’s nothing to sell, in the case of the rotation. And what makes agriculture really work in a sustainable direction are processes more than products, which is why there’s very little R&D that goes into developing these technologies.

Reminds me a bit of what Lewis Hyde has to say about textbooks in The Gift:

Scientists who give their ideas to the community receive recognition and status in return […]. But there is little recognition to be earned from writing a textbook for money. As one of the scientists in [Sociologist Warren] Hagstrom’s study puts it, if someone “has written nothing at all but texts, they will have a null value or even a negative value.” Because such work brings no group reward, it makes sense that it would earn a different sort of renumeration, cash. “Unlike recognition, cash can be used outside the community of pure science,” Hagstrom points out. Cash is a medium of foreign exchange, as it were, because a unlike a gift (and unlike status) it does not lose its value when it moves beyond the boundary of the community.

Contrast the natural process Pollan describes in which the land renews itself but no value is extracted to one in which the land is managed by commercial fertilizers that are sold at a price. The cycle of nature, like the circle of gift-giving, ensures its own success, but weakens when cash value is extracted at any specific point. It’s unmonetizable, but, as Pollan points out, learning from it might be the key to healthier eating and better food.

See also: Pollan’s writing about pioneering farmer Joel Salatin in Omnivore’s Dilemma.

The Preface Paradox stems from a common enough source — that bit of text found in the prefaces of many academic books along the lines of, “the errors that are found herein are mine alone,” absolving advisors and other editors of any blame.

While this may seem nice enough, with this single bit of text the author has asked us to accept two mutually incompatable beliefs:

1. Such an author has written a book that contains many assertions, and has factually checked each one carefully, submitted it to reviewers for comment, etc. Thus, he has reason to believe that each assertion he has made is true.

2. However, he knows, having learned from experience, that, in spite of his best efforts, there are very likely undetected errors in his book. So he also has good reason to believe that there is at least one assertion in his book is not true.

Somehow, despite these paradoxical facts, we know to trust the author, and trust that his or her mistakes, if any, will be few and far between, a wayward needle or two in the haystack of facts. The paradox is an epistemic one, related to how we know what we know, and, because of its relationship between what’s likely (the facts are correct) and what’s not (the facts are errors), classed with another paradox involving the lottery.

Kottke quotes from Steven Levy’s Wired magazine article on the syntax and evolving language of search queries:

Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context.

Being reasonably acquainted with Wittgenstein, I found myself wondering which of his ideas came so integrally into play in solving this problem. The Wired article only links to Wittgenstein’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, which includes a survey of all his major concepts and works. Was it his distinction between sense and nonsense? His arguments against a private language? His work on the connection between seeing and saying and his example of the “duckrabbit”? Or perhaps it was something he didn’t discover but simply weighed in on, like ostensive definitions or contextualism?

The strongest candidate, though, might be his concepts of language games and family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s best-known example of a language game is the “builder’s language.” Here’s how he describes it:

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar” “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.

This is a very small kit of parts; a lexicon of just four elements, combined in a certain way. But by uttering these words in the right context, a building gets built. The meaning these words have comes from their ability to activate the builder’s assistant to do what the master builder is asking. And their family resemblance has to do with this limited language, in which these words’ meaning is defined by their context and shared by the two builders. After the workday is through, the builder might look forward to how his children “beam” at him when he arrives home, and the context is entirely different.

The Wired article continues,

As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant.

A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.

Oh, and on the headline above — just my humble attempt to confuse the hell out of Google.

MoMA acquires the @ symbol. NYT:

No one knows for sure when it first appeared. One suggestion is that it dates to the sixth or seventh century when it was adopted as an abbreviation of “ad,” the Latin word for “at” or “toward.” (The scribes of the day are said to have saved time by merging two letters and curling the stroke of the “d” around the “a.”) Another theory is that it was introduced in 16th-century Venice as shorthand for the “amphora,” a measuring device used by local tradesmen.

Whatever its origins, the @ appeared on the keyboard of the first typewriter, the American Underwood, in 1885 and was used, mostly in accounting documents, as shorthand for “at the rate of.” It remained an obscure keyboard character until 1971 when an American programmer, Raymond Tomlinson, added it to the address of the first e-mail message to be sent from one computer to another.

It was acquired formless—purely as a concept—and from the public domain:

[…] “MoMA’s collection has always been in touch with its time,” Ms. Antonelli said, “and design these days is often an act with aesthetic and ethical consequences, not necessarily a physical object.”

That’s why MoMA decided against adding a specific version of the @ to the collection in favor of using it in different typographic styles and sizes. Ms. Antonelli likens it to the museum’s acquisition of “The Kiss,” a performance art piece by Tino Sehgal, in which a couple embrace for several hours. Just like the @, each performance can take a different form with new protagonists — though there is a difference. MoMA reportedly paid $70,000 for “The Kiss,” while the @ is joining the collection free.

As Liz noted, Fred Wilson’s MBA Mondays should be required reading for just about everyone, but especially for designers. (Nearly everything Wilson writes about is fascinating — his A VC blog is among the most fervently-read in my daily roundup.) Here’s Wilson on a fundamental business concept, the Time Value of Money:

Money today is generally worth more than money tomorrow. As another commenter to last week’s post put it “you can’t buy beer tonight with next year’s earnings”. Money in your pocket, cash in hand, is worth more than cash that you don’t actually have in hand. If you think about it that simply, everyone can agree that they’d rather have the cash in hand than the promise of the same amount at some later day.

And interest rates are used to calculate exactly how much more the money is worth today than tomorrow.

These interest rates are determined by many factors, but among them are inflation and risk. In aggregate, these rates frame the behavior of markets:

Markets set rates. Banks don’t and governments don’t. Banks and governments certainly impact rates and governments can do a lot to impact rates and they do all the time. But at the end of the day it is you and me and it is the traders, both speculators and hedgers, who determine how much of a discount we’ll accept to get our money now and how much interest we’ll want to wait another year.

Also excellent: his plainspoken breakdown of how to read through a Profit & Loss Statement. Makes me wish I had MBA Mondays back in high school.

According to Wikipedia, the arrow of time is a term coined by British astronomer Arthur Eddington to distinguish between two types of physical processes:

Physical processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time symmetric, meaning that the theoretical statements that describe them remain true if the direction of time is reversed; yet when we describe things at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow) of time. An arrow of time is anything that exhibits such time-asymmetry.

Put another way:

Any process that happens regularly in the forward direction of time but rarely or never in the opposite direction, such as entropy increasing in an isolated system, defines what physicists call an arrow of time in nature.

There are also some helpful rules about the arrow of time:

1) It is vividly recognized by consciousness.
2) It is equally insisted on by our reasoning faculty, which tells us that a reversal of the arrow would render the external world nonsensical.
3) It makes no appearance in physical science except in the study of organization of a number of individuals.

More on the arrow of time, including a great interview with Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, here at The Long Now Blog.

Mentioned earlier here, Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud’s sequence “Correspondence,” now online, is a brilliant and frequently hilarious recursive read:

I’ve just received your last letter and am immediately replying. You’ve asked if I’ve received your last letter and if I intend to reply. If I may, please let me point out that your having sent your last letter makes the letter you previously sent no longer the most recent, and if I reply, as I am now doing, it is not in response to your second-to-last letter. I cannot, therefore, satisfy the requests you’ve made in your last letter.

I don’t know about you, but my life’s imitated Roubaud’s art more than a few times, making “inbox zero” sound less like a productivity strategy and more like a distant Utopian future.