Vacuum

Unpolished writing in the open notebook

Steve Crocker, Internet Request for Comments 3, from 1969: "There is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition."

From time to time, someone reads Vacuum and comments that the writing looks unpolished and incomplete. Why would you publish this kind of work, which obviously isn't up to the standards that would let you sell it to someone for use in print? Why wouldn't you hide it in your notebooks?

I'm using this weblog as a notebook, and publishing my notes for myself instead of always as a tightly edited, polished, finished work. By exposing this part of a process I hope to be prepared to find some way to make myself understood, even if I don't completely understand myself immediately as I write through an issue or question. Thoughts go in, get refined as far as they need to be to make them coherent, and then go onto the net and into the world so that there's room for the next piece to emerge.

The open notebook is going to be messy, but it also means that I have some hope of finding my own half-finished work and revisiting it years later; when I don't do that, there's always something lost. Writing this way lets me tune into ideas, spin them around for a bit until I have a clearer focus, and move on. In most cases, I'm not ready to make things shiny and neat, and I'm content to explore facets of an unpolished gem over a series of years.

Previously, because I put it out there in first draft format so that I could find it again: make the first version coherent (from 2011);  creativity vs productivity (from 2008); on shitty first drafts (from 2007); wishing that my weblog looked more like my quadrille notebooks (from 2004).

Brick Bash 2011: Ann Arbor Lego event March 19 at WCC

Brick Bash 2011 was March 19 at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor Township. Show details are at BrickBash.com. I may have seen you there. The event is organized annually by Duane Collicott, who runs the Bricks For Brains organization that does educational, hands-on building exhibits with LEGO.

From previous years, a photo set: Brick Bash 2008.

Some highlights of this show; photos and links to come:

Big layouts with trains from the Michigan LEGO Users Group and the Central Ohio LEGO Train Club.

Mosaics from Christopher Doyle at Reasonably Clever, including a QR code mosaic and one that looks for all the world like stained glass.

Architectural models from Arthur Gugick, A Piece of the World; on the left is St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, next to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

More LEGO buildings, including a LEGO Renaissance Center and a LEGO Burj Khalifa. 

Several tables full of LEGO pieces for kids to make their own creations, known to cognoscenti as MOCs.

A LEGO version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

LEGO is a registered trademark owned by the LEGO Group. And don't you forget it.

Edward Vielmetti watches his son Saul Vielmetti build with LEGO, and often cleans up afterwards. Reach both of them at edward.vielmetti@gmail.com or 734-330-2465.

Notes from a construction project

An old bicycle wheel makes a good pulley wheel.

An old modem, of any sort, can be repurposed by attaching a single RJ-11 cord to both ends of it; you now have a loop, and the RJ-11 threads through the bicycle wheel.

An RS-232 cable should be thought of as a very strong wire rope with helpful screw connectors. 

A transformer makes an excellent counterweight.

There is no piece of old electronic junk that doesn't have some possible usefulness as a part of a kinetic sculpture, whether it works or not. Remember, kids, the connector is the artwork.

My career in food service

As published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Risks Digest, v4 n30, 1986:

 Fast-Food Computing

<Edward_Vielmetti@um.cc.umich.edu>

Tue, 16 Dec 86 16:15:04 EST

I must have been in the cycle early for McDonald's 
fast-food intelligent man-machine systems, according to 
Guthery's law:
   >     In an evolving man-machine system, the man will get
   >     dumber faster than the machine gets smarter.

McDonald's fast food computers (i.e., cash registers) 
collect all sorts of data on the individual employee at 
the counter and on all counter sales as a whole.  They also 
do not have a <no sale> key that opens up the cash
register, probably to prevent theft.  That made it real hard to fix a
mistake without calling a manager to get a key to open the drawer.

Solution?  Well, the people I worked with at McD's had been 
around thesystem long enough to figure out how to get around 
it.  Without getting into too many details of why things were 
as they were, the easiest way to open the drawer without a 
manager was to ring up a sale that gave away a 
tub of barbecue sauce for McNuggets and nothing else.  
   (Hit <promo> <barbecue> <promo> <total> .)
Of course, that messed up the daily statistics some.

Edward Vielmetti, Ex-McDonalds employee, Computing Center 
Microgroup, U. Mich.

 

Detroit Maker Faire, July 30th & 31st, 2011, The Henry Ford

Web site is up, http://makerfaire.com/detroit/2011/. I'll see you there.

 

 

Nathan Schneider defends the memory theater

An essay published in Open Letters Monthly.

What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.

Any essay of lamentation about the end of books and the glory of human memory has to include some touchstones. Frances Yates is that touchstone here:

One of the books that I used to habitually pick up from my college library, and which, recently, I finally bought used, is Frances Yates’s classic The Art of Memory. First published in 1966, it chronicles lost mnemonic techniques, passed down from the ancient orators to the Renaissance humanists: spaces people would conjure in their minds to help them remember all the precious accoutrements of civilized knowledge.

One of the pleasures of writing incessantly online is the likelihood that you've run across something before, even if you don't have it in the top of memory. Prentiss Riddle wrote about The Art of Memory in 2003, apparently because I mentioned it on a mailing list, saying this:

[Frances Yates], [The Art of Memory] -- just getting started on this one, which is an account of the history of mnemotechnics: the art and practice of expanding and augmenting the human memory. The classical account of this goes back to Simonides of Ceos, who had memorized all of the names and seating arrangements of the attendees at a banquet while giving a speech to them and was thus able to identify the dead when the banquet hall collapsed. Ancient orators used these memory systems to memorize long, long speeches.

Now, armed with a new word "mnemotechnic", I can go through and pluck out this precious specimen from Google Books; the Phreno-mnemotechnic dictionary, a work from 1844 by Francis Fauvel-Gourand with a preface that illustrates the noted figures in the history of those who have an exceptional memory. The bulk of the work is a dictionary compiled along the principles of "soundex", where words with similar consonant structure are indexed together and given a number. Thus you will find on page 62 the entry for 382 ("homophony", "muffin"); to make this make sense, you need to get a mapping between the "m" sound and the number 3, "f" or "ph" and 8, "n" and 2, and then encode.

Could there be any practical use for this? Certainly; this is a learned synesthesia, where numbers turn into words. If you ever have had to memorize a license plate number (I am looking at one where the partial plate is "6981") you know it's hard. But knowing that 69 maps to "sheep" and 81 maps to "fat" means that this vehicle can be memorialized as "sheepfat", which is wonderful in its own way.

Now where was I? Distracted, I guess. Like Nathan Schneider, my memories are indexed in part through the books I have been reading. The bookshelf that he evokes, carefully collected, is the memory construct that says that when you pull in one book you want to be able to leaf through the one next to it on the bookshelf, or the whole shelf full of them assembled for a purpose. You judge the quality of a story told through books by the quality and comprehensiveness of the books invoked to tell it, and you look for the bibliography eagerly for texts you have missed.

My bookshelves are too small to hold all the books that might sit on them, but sometimes there have been ways to make up for that. The photo of the bookshelf provides some substitute to prove not only that you have had the books but also that you know that some go together with others.

Find the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226950018/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=superpatron-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0226950018">The Art of Memory</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=0226950018&camp=217145&creative=399369" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> on Amazon.

assisted synesthesia as augmented reality

A comment I wrote on Ethan Hein's account of color-coding sequencer tracks:

When you say “color coding improved your ears”, the first thing that comes to mind is that you are doing some kind of machine-assisted synesthesia. very cool, that.

another enticing pice from oblong industries

It's true that one of the elements is a blue ball that bounces in time to the music and touches down on the notes that are playing just then. Also true: a ball like that can never be entirely serious, but it can be entirely effective. What works is assisted synaesthesia, making sound seem like sight and looking seem like hearing. The time in which music happens is turned into the space of the animated score.

And then pretty quickly we hit this video of John Underkoffler at TED on the future of the user interface. Not quite what I was after, very lovely in its own Minority Report style but not for the perspective I was after.

This has an interesting perspective from a synaesthete, but I won't quote based on the copyright:

PLEASE DO NOT LIFT CONTENT FROM THESE PAGES WITHOUT FIRST OBTAINING PERMISSION. ONCE PERMISSION HAS BEEN OBTAINED, YOU ARE OBLIGED TO INCLUDE A LINK FROM THE CONTENT BACK TO THIS SITE. You are welcome to post content on this site, provided you include a link back to its hosting origin. Many thanks.

An, finally, aha, wikipedia yields a reference: Plouznikoff, N., Plouznikoff, A. & Robert, J.-M. (2005), "Artificial Grapheme-Color Synesthesia for Wearable Task Support", Ninth IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, pp. 108-113

This paper presents the benefits of generating an artificial visual synesthesia through a wearable computer. Following a short introduction to remind the need for seamless human-wearable computer interactions, this paper makes the case for drawing upon synesthesia, a combination of the senses naturally occurring in a small portion of the population, to augment everyday entities and more precisely to enrich written graphemes. We present the rationale behind our research and summarize the functionality, architecture and implementation of our current prototype. Preliminary results suggest that this kind of artificial synesthesia improves short term memory recall and visual information search times.

and the followup paper crucially gives the link to augmented reality

This paper studies a novel approach advocating the virtual alteration of real-world interfaces through a form of augmented reality. Following an introduction reminding the need for easy to use and more consistent interfaces across our many day to day devices, this paper makes the case for using wearable computers to enhance the interactions between humans and conventional appliances. We present the rationale behind our research and summarize our current prototype's functionalities, architecture and implementation. Preliminary results suggest that virtually altering the interface of real world devices improves execution times for simple tasks using these devices.

Awesome homebrew USB Lego printer printed "Hello World" from a Mac

The critic says "I like Lego City better."

mindless mindfulness

I used this phrase in my meaningless indicators of progress post.

Some other uses of it, just so I manage to put it in an appropriate context:

Chronicle of Higher Education has a story called The Art of Living Mindfully on the work of Ellen Langer. Her blog is not frequent but it is thoughtful.

We have been explicitly and implicitly taught by our culture to be mindless. We have been taught absolutes when none really exist independent of context. When we think we know something absolutely, we have learned that it is reasonable never to question it, nor to pay attention to how it may be otherwise. Beliefs and behavior always make some kind of sense from the actor’s perspective or else the actor would have done otherwise. Blame suggests mindlessness on the part of the blamer who does not recognize this. We are not at fault for what we do not know just because someone else can see a way we could have known it.

Just Breathe: Meditation as Organizational Slack is a paper by Kaisa G. Holloway Cripps.  Mostly a literature review, it looks at meditation inside an organization and identifies ways where it may be useful to engage human resources that are slack.  The discussion reminds me of MBA consultants who work like dogs for months and then are periodically "on the beach" for a while when their gig is up.

I quickly hit Buddhism when I look up this phrase, the parts of Buddhism that I haven't lived close enough to that I appreciate all of the subtleties of the words.

Mindfulness within mindfulness mindfulness without mindfulness mindfulness with
mindfulness,” he mindlessly chants. “Shut up just shut it up already,” ... (Circle This Mountain, mercifully abbreviated by Google Books)

Distraction, scatter, gather, focus, discardia: a five part cycle

Herein a recipe for producing what looks like some kind of careful long term reasonable insight into a question, but what is really a coping strategy for the complete inability to be attentive to anything for very long.

Be distracted away from the thing you are supposed to be doing; that part is pretty easy.  Wander off randomly into the wilderness of recent changes to the Internet or a random page in your personal knowledge management heap or some long-dusty book in Google Books.  Note some small fragment of something that isn't at all relevant to what everyone else seems to be looking at right now but that somehow temporarily holds your interest long enough to compose a few paragraphs with a few links.  Write about it here; try with desperation to find a category it should already belong to so that it has some illusion of continuity with what you have been doing all along.  Hit "save", hit "publish", and return to the task at hand.

Scatter your attention all over the Internet to a range of places where recent changes seem to be more predominant.  Post to Twitter, or Facebook, or your favorite online newspaper's best reader comments section, or to some seasonally or topically appropriate blog where you know that the author welcomes your readership.  Be outwardly visible and pay attention to someone else, something else, some place other than yourself.  Make the rounds of the usual places and hit a few new ones.  Stop before everyone is asleep.

Gather up things you have written on a topic, things captured during previous distractions or scattered to the four winds.  If there is a search engine, search for your own long-forgotten commentary on something, and collect it back to somewhere central.  If all you have is paper, leaf through it steadily and methodically until inevitably that journal yields a relevant fragment.   Pile up the fragments, enumerate them, list them out carefully as though they were bits of papyrus needing careful reassembly.  See what you might have known in the past and re-know it, relearn it.

Then, when all of the distract-scatter-gather process has all been put into motion, can you focus on that one thing you have been getting ready to do all this time.  Come back to what you have gathered up and re-assess the work as a whole.  Allow yourself to work methodically through the work you have gathered together, to pull it apart, to see what the whole set looks like and not just little bits of it.   Pull through everything that is relevant and stitch it all together into something new, something that lasts longer than a simple short distraction but that hold and sustain a concentrated narrative with examples and ideas and themes and notions pulled out from a long time.

The whole process should run on some cycle appropriate for the task or the season.  As I write, I think about the quarterly holiday of Discardia, where you celebrate letting go, and of all of the distracted and scattered thinking I have about that event that culminates in an every three months deliberate effort to tidy things up.  The collected effort of pulling things together means not only that you have everything in mind but also that you can free yourself of the distractions that eventually got you here - and that you get, periodically, a chance to edit out some randomness and make it look like you are more organized and orderly than your easily-distracted nature would allow.

This season's Discardia holiday is coming up on June 20-22, 2009.