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Saturday, December 20, 2003
Toward a New Logic, Part I Disclaimer: I have nary an honorific, nor diploma, nor other authority save my own gumption, upon which to gird the following exegesis. I read a lot and perhaps had I been less contemptuous of the politics and protocol of the university — well, who knows, but at any rate, I'll not prevent myself from waxing idiotic here; it's my blog, damn it. With that out of the way, my goal here is to argue that logic, as formalized by the majority of western academia, is on the threshold of some sort of profound change. I intend to argue this in a rather boorish, unsophisticated and casual manner, so neener. Having been, as a high school student, an avid exponent of the study of Math, Logic and Western History, I first encountered any kind of serious criticism of my budding Positivism in the form of Existentialism, and other new-age-y stuff, like Pirsig and Wilbur. I came to discern two general branches of this criticism: those who wish to undo Western culture in favor of some kind of ostensible pre-industrial Mecca, and those who have some notion that the reigning paradigm should yield to some new approach. "So wait," you ask, "what is the problem with the reigning paradigm, and what the hell is the reigning paradigm anyway, you pedantic bastard?" Good questions. By "reigning paradigm," I refer to the pragmatic, if not philosophical embrace of some form of Positivism or Objectivism or Materialism on the part of the majority of academics (esp. in the hard sciences.) I would even suggest that many urban and suburban middle-class people in general hold a kind of either atheistic or deistic materialism that is reinforced by much of mainstream media as well as these folk's everyday interaction with technologies that get more sophisticated and undeniably useful all the time. Indeed, it seems every citizen of a western nation has a personal philosophy that has been shaped, at least in part, by science and technology. It must be clear by now, to even the most superstitious among us, that the telephone works, not because too few virgins have been sacrificed recently, but by merit of empirically testable principles (even if they don't have the language to clearly communicate such a sentiment.). Hopefully that clears up what I mean by "reigning paradigm," because if you're reading this, the chances are that you have played a video game, or operated a complicated machine like an automobile, or watched cable television, or operated a personal computer, etc — you know what I'm talking about: technology may have its problems, but in the majority of applications, it works, and that informs much of our collective philosophy in the west vis-á-vis the primacy of scientific thinking. "Okay, enough blah, blah, blah. What's wrong with this paradigm?" Right. The problem is that these mental progeny of the Enlightenment relegate the sort of thinking that humans have always associated with creativity and novelty to a sort of philosophical purgatory. What I mean is that these philosophies are not equipped with any means by which to, for example, ascribe relative value to Mozart and Pachelbel, nor can they provide anything other than the most didactic instruction to would-be creative thinkers on how to become greater in their art. Similarly, these philosophies are wont to describe what motivates the sacrificing soldier, or the laboring prenatal mother, or even the entrepreneur. It seems that for most, the conscious awareness of this disparity is limited to a dim cognitive dissonance that manifests as confusion when examining those parts of themselves that are subject to the mismatch. Imagine it thusly: you are male (just go with it) and you are arguing with your significant other regarding your suggestion that the pants she just purchased "make her posterior appear larger than normal." She likely informs you that she is less than amused by your comments. You note that she still has the receipt, and you were only telling her in order to afford her the option of taking them back so that she doesn't appear to be less attractive than she really is. She is still unhappy. You feel you are being completely rational. It seems that in fact, navigating the exigencies of social interaction is often frustratingly irrational. "You said something about two branches of criticism; WTF kind of presumptuous shite is that? Just who the hell do you think you are anyway?" Calm down, it's my blog and I'm free to look like a fool if I wish. Let me reiterate and explicate the two branches of criticism thing. It seems to me that some criticize the west and the Enlightenment because they believe that the philosophical course taken by the west is somehow fundamentally evil. These people have multifarious reasons for their dislike, (I would suggest that many of these criticisms of the west are simply regurgitations of the wooly-headed hippydom of an idealistic yet largely idle U.S. baby boom generation,) but they are united by the desire to "undo" western civilization in deference to some kind of theocracy — be it Islam or Deep Ecology. On the other hand, there appear to be those that wish to see the reigning paradigm challenged by merit of their desire to see it improved. They point to the aforementioned problems and conclude that this paradigm must not be the conclusion to our ongoing search for truth. They ask, "How can whole realms of human experience go unaccounted for inside a paradigm that seeks to have itself be counted as the ultimate model of existence?" To be continued… posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 10:10 PM · Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Harrison Bergeron My father, my high-school sophomore English teacher, my music theory professor, an advertising copywriter with whom I work: all people who have suggested I read Kurt Vonnegut. I still hadn't read any, until today. Today I stumbled, completely by accident, across Harrison Bergeron, a lesson on the dangers of mistaking rights and outcomes. Wow, good stuff. Now I want to read more. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 7:08 PM · Monday, December 08, 2003
Church of Pop Ecology So I just thought Michael Crichton was a decent sci-fi writter. I have discovered through the speeches he's delivered (and transcribed on his site) that he's quite a thinker. In particular, I found his September 15, 2003 speech to the Commonwealth Club quite a read. From the speech: Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.Go read it and his other stuff now. Hey, I said "now"! posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:16 AM · Friday, November 21, 2003
Yay, the web To quote debunkers poster, setnahkt, "This guy appears to be serious." For instance, wow, eep. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 10:52 PM · Tuesday, October 21, 2003
THS It is time for the leaders of this great country to do something about the scourge upon our society that is third hand smoke. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 9:43 AM · Saturday, October 18, 2003
Ethanot Lynne at The Knowledge Problem made note of forthcoming energy legislation in which ethanol again is foisted upon an unsuspecting populace. The more I learn about it, the more I realize that ethanol is neither efficient nor environmentally superior to petroleum. The knowledgeable llamas offers quite a bit of valuable insight in this debunkers.org thread. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 7:36 PM · Congress shall make NO LAWS... Say what you will about Arnold, but IMHO, this kind of thing should be covered by the First Amendment. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:12 AM · Friday, October 03, 2003
Senate Sikh Suman Palit's blog, The Kolkata Libertarian introduced me today, to the only Sikh-American politician I've ever encountered: Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria. What is even more interesting is his Republican affiliation. He's seeking the GOP nomination to fill the seat to be vacated by U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald. Suman even set up a blog supporting his candidacy. I'd really like to see him nominated and elected, but I'm sure Harry Belafonte will just come along and call him a "House Sikh." posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 4:11 PM · Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Today's Tom Sawyer Rush Limbaugh is at it again, and now he's got sports writers all in a tizzy. I can't say I support Mr. Limbaugh's general tenor — in fact I'm tired of attempts (by what would seem to me to be almost everyone) to obfuscate the genuine philosophical differences that exist in today's political discourse by constantly portraying the opposition as fundamentally evil. In that vein, I think Rush had it coming to him as it were, but I still think it sucks. McNabb’s knee-jerk offense seems to me no more merited than Limbaugh’s constant knee-jerk suggestions that social engineering lurks in every corner – but come on, neither position is evil. I can’t see how Rush’s commentary can be construed as anything other than a snarky comment directed at the media for being ostensibly “racist” (by merit of Rush’s contention that any sort of preferential treatment based upon race is “racist” regardless of the motive.) This seems to me a position that can be argued for or against, but hardly a bit of pure malice, nor does it seem to me to be saying, as some have suggested, that QBs should only be caucasian. Here’s my take: We cannot look into people’s souls, and as such, we are under what I believe to be a considerable obligation to seek a better understanding of our political opponent’s views and their philosophical antecedents. The attempt to lead the populace by attaching purely emotional labels to any views that differ with our own, is to my mind, the greatest single challenge to an increased and improved political dialogue. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 6:01 PM · Friday, September 12, 2003
RoxyLondon My sister-in-law and recent high school graduate, Rachel, is heading to London to study Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins. I helped her get a blog started and designed a template for her. It should be interesting to hear the young Yank's musings on all things English. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 1:57 AM · Tuesday, August 26, 2003
The Prime Directive While perusing multifarious leftist memes, I often encounter someone whinging about American support of horrific governments around the globe. To wit: …this article fails to mention how some of the allies our right wing buddy in the white house is paying (TAX DOLLARS) to be on our "coalition of the willing", violate human and civil rights. Let's see a report from the State Department:The whole argument seems Pollyannaish to me for a couple reasons: First, it seems these pundits would have us believe that it is U.S. influence that perpetuates the existence of governmental evil and civilian hardship in the world community. I consider this a chicanery at best. Come on! We have been in the muck for the better part of what, one or two million years? Civilization is a blip in time by comparison and the kind of information exchange we’ve got going now is so new that the umbilical cord is still attached. The evolutionary mix of technology and philosophy and culture that has produced this situation is by no means a mere exercise in political fiat. It lives on a knife edge, and that we should expect it to exist everywhere in the world – right now dammit! – is an eye-roller. Which brings me to my second reason: What is the best we can hope to accomplish? I submit that the best we can hope to do is to attempt to place incentives here and there, leading less developed nations to discover, by their own volition, the incredibly sophisticated, iterative evolution of systems and ideas that have produced our wealth and prosperity. Were the U.S. a socialist Mecca, I imagine the call to liberate the nations of the world would be legion. Look at the left’s support of Kosivo or their recent pressure to go into Liberia. “Socialists are often pacifists,” you say? Tell Anastasia Romanov or the 23 children on the 13 de Marzo. My point is, the exigencies of geopolitics are too vast and convoluted to control short of world empire, so our incentives and attempts to curry favor or provide balance are often the best we can do and we do it with the knowledge that it will sometimes fail. It is a non-invasive approach. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 3:02 AM · Thursday, August 21, 2003
Environmental Misanthropy The French are demonstrating nicely, the fundamental misanthropy girding much of what calls itself environmentalism. The Independent is suggesting that “some 10,000 people - mostly over the age of 75” have been killed in the recent heat wave. While the French government points innocently at the thermometer, they belie what amounts to, in the words of one debunkers.org poster, their citizens being “taxed to death – literally.” The debunkers thread links to this nice summation of the issue. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:38 PM · Friday, August 08, 2003
I think I may be on to something ...although in these situations, it often turns out that I am, in fact, not. I shall not, however, allow that to deter me in the least. You see, I got to wondering tonight about the motion of people in a large group. Consider, for example, the flow of foot traffic in the corridor of Busch Stadium during a Cardinals game. How, if at all, does the ostensible free will of the individuals moving through/with/against the throng effect their movement? Does the human consciousness have any sort of mathematically discernable impact on an individual’s behavior in a situation like this? Or upon the pattern of the entire motion taken as a whole? In particular I wonder, if one could describe the motion of both water molecules in flowing water and people in a flowing crowd with some success mathematically, would it then be possible to make some comparisons? Would these comparisons provide any insight into the nature of free will? posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:08 PM · Thursday, July 03, 2003
Gray Corporation It occurred to me recently that I could post the results of my labor here while simultaneously lending something concrete to the explanation of why I don’t post as often as I would like. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I am a multimedia developer/designer. My most recent project, which occupied so much of my time as to make posting to the blog difficult, is now complete and live. It is a web site for the Gray Corporation - a design-build construction firm in Lexington, Kentucky. There you go: shameless self-promotion. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:17 AM · Tuesday, June 24, 2003
AdBluster Steve has the DU to lampoon (fish in a barrel) and I have AdBusters. Having a career in advertising, I feel inclined to respond to and elucidate their intellectual bankruptcy. As their rhetoric (what little of it is explicitly stated) appears to be a mishmash of multifarious anti-capitalist, anti-industrialism dogmas, it has already been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, so I'm sure I'll cover some well-tread ground. Furthermore, I can’t imagine being able to paint a complete picture of their pusillanimity and perfidy in one blog post, so this will be an ongoing project. What struck me as specious enough to start writing about AdBusters and “creative resistance” in general, is the notion that artists are marginalized or exploited by capitalism. I’m dumbfounded even typing that. Where else but in a market full of eccentric capitalists can an artist find funding for even the most bizarre projects? Even the evil Enron was the single largest source of funding for artistic endeavors in Houston. What opportunities are available to the artist in China aside from propaganda? As social critics, AdBusters remind me of a favorite quotation of mine: ”What every artist knows: No matter how great my contemporaries, they are only human. Alas, work calls and I get to go be creative in the service of the “evil” corporate hegemon, because of whom I have indoor plumbing, air conditioning, a means of transportation, a nice computer and a lengthy life-expectancy among other things. Obviously I’m a shill and should go live in the trees. ”All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”What indeed. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 1:02 PM · Sunday, June 15, 2003
Socialism is the Opiate of the Masses This is but one of the reasons I consider myself fortunate to be an citizen of the U.S. I cannot imagine exactly how the EU intends to continue to fund their massive welfare systems – but one thing is certain: the European populace (read: dependents) won’t stand for any curtailing, regardless of the consequences. I can’t help but think that the knee-jerk appeal to socialism is the product of a profound misunderstanding of the importance and fundamental pre-eminence of individualism. I found what I believe to be an apt illustration of this in the above article. To wit: The controversy also goes to the heart of the debate on what kind of society "Europe" is building. In an essay published in Frankfurt and Paris last week Jürgen Habermas in Germany and Jacques Derrida in France hailed the birth of a "European public" which should be matched by strengthening the European polity.It seems to me that the above gives the distinct impression that the author (and indeed the European mainstream) feels that “private provision” is just as much a top-down model foisted upon a people as is a welfare system! I think this is indicative of a general disposition toward mental masturbation in Europe — great expenditures of thought (and money) yielding grand plans and analysis for and of Europe; as if the demise of the Sun Kings was merely a logistical nicety. In contrast, I would argue that the U.S. is taken at its very core, by the notion that it is every individual’s actions and interests that are paramount — and as such, pronouncements from on high are generally treated with a good deal of skepticism, if not hostility, (Gore Vidal, be warned.) Taking pot-shots at Europe aside, the issue I’m trying to shine some light upon is the Taxis/Kosmos dichotomy. Taxis and Kosmos are appellations given by Friedrich Hayek, Economist and Nobel Laureate, to encapsulate the concepts of made order and grown or spontaneous order, respectively. Made order seems to be the most intuitive kind of order — it is order imposed by fiat. Accordingly, when something in society is distasteful to a segment of the population, the call is made to fix it — and what is meant by this is the imposition of taxis. Because this approach seems so obvious, it is ubiquitous — the particular form of the taxis may change, but it is still taxis that is easily understood and therefore applied over and over. Kosmos is Hayek’s name for spontaneous order. Spontaneous order is the order of nature. There is no fiat in nature. Take a simple plant as an example: there is no central governor that controls the process by which a plant should grow and manifest. Rather, it will grow toward its light source — if that source should be to the north, it will grow to the north, etc. It is the exigencies of the context in which a grown order appears that dictate the nature of the order and NOT fiat. This is a sophisticated concept. It is not easily understood or assimilated, and because of this, it took many thousands of years before a system of human governance that exemplified Kosmos was developed (embodied in the Constitution of the United States.) I suppose a pissed-off 50-year-old post office worker can’t be expected to keep such subtleties of knowledge in hand while considering their pension. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:25 AM · Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Standards Imposed by Asshatocrats I've been neglecting the blog in response to crazy project deadlines. In particular, I'm developing a web site and I'm trying to get it to conform to W3C specifications. This seemed like a good idea when I started, but now I'm beginning to question certain choices made by this not-so-august body. There are many things I could complain about, but just as an example, HTML 4 supports the ability to open a link in a new window by simply adding an attribute to the the link's tag - as of XHTML1.0 Strict, the use of this attribute has been deprecated. Why? Because the ivory tower bureaucrats at the W3C deem it so. They would like to see the complete reductionistic separation of the semantic nature of HTML from the language that controls the styling of the content. These fools don't know thing one about art to begin with, but their philosophy notwithstanding, what bothers me most is my feeling that posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 4:58 PM · Friday, May 23, 2003
Two Things 1. Steve Verdon has a new site and the Movable Type look is more suited to his brand in my humble opinion. 2. This one will only be useful to web developers and designers: There is a tool called DHTML Menu Builder, written by one Xavier Flix, that for under $100, will give you the ability to create a wide array of completely customizable (font, background images, borders, etc) hierarchical menus that will work in almost any browser. This is a significant value. What makes this software even more incredible is the support that the author provides. I have never waited more than 24 hours to hear directly from the author on implementation questions — in fact, there have been occasions where he has posted a new build of the software containing new functionality that I had asked about on the previous day. Did I mention free upgrades? I don't often promote products, but this guy deserves all the business he can handle. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:17 PM · Saturday, May 17, 2003
The Banal Terrorists In my humble opinion, these folks are terrorists. They are targeting Huntingdon Life Sciences for their use of animal testing, and the methods they employ are quite abhorrent. Here’s a particularly nasty specimen: Activists paid a Mother's Day visit to the homes of Chiron employees late Sunday night to serve as a warning of things to come if they do not sever al times to Huntingdon Life Sciences immediately. The company's chairman of the board (address removed) was awoken by a personal alarm screaming in the night and a putrid stench rising up from the floor of his home.This is not a cosmetics firm; they develop diagnostics for HIV among other things. In fact, if you are interested in a sober evaluation of the situation, check out their pages concerning ethical issues. On the other hand, if its hand waving and bluster in which you’re interested, check out SHAC’s vitriol. The intellectual bankruptcy of SHAC’s rhetoric should be immediately obvious. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 7:09 PM · Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Intemperate Temperance This sort of thing is complete crap. ”Temperate temperance is best. Intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance, while temperate temperance helps it in its fight against intemperate intemperance. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky.”People should be allowed to hurt themselves. While I was studying voice in college, it was explained to me by one Dr. John Jost that one cannot sing without damaging one's vocal apparatus — in fact, singing may be one of the worst things you can do to it. Hearing this was a bit of an epiphany for me, as it seems to extrapolate well to the general proposition that every activity has a cost, no matter how innocuous the activity may seem. If this proposition is valid, one could argue that the compulsion to “protect” the ostensibly feckless masses from risk would have no end. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:46 PM · Friday, May 09, 2003
It's a Small Blogosphere I've only really been conscious of the blogging phenomenon for about about six months, so I'm still amazed at it's success. I was astonished, for example, to find that I'd been blogrolled by Michael over at Discount Blogger. Thanks Michael. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 3:21 PM · Missing the Trash Because the Trash Talk forums have been down, I haven't been able to ask the assembled brains therein about this thing. How's that for a short post, Skye? posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 1:53 AM · Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Design as a (partially) Stochastic Process In my 4/23 post called Dogma and Design, I kvetched about dogmatic usability gurus and their tendency to use a rhetorical style that alienates the audience they most need to reach: designers. I suggested off-handedly at the end of the post that perhaps their rhetoric is a function of their general philosophical persuasion, which I further postulated to be some form of positivism or objectivism. While I hold these philosophies in some esteem, I have some profound issues with them as well. All I will say on that subject for the moment is that I don’t think the enlightenment was the end of the process — but I definitely don’t think we need to do away with it, in fact I consider the enlightenment to be one of the most important things to have ever happened in human history. I digress. Because I have some esteem for the “scientific worldview,” I feel compelled to try to elucidate my opinion about design using at least an empirical, if perhaps not quantitative, argument. The crux of the argument is an experiment I read in something by Robert Anton Wilson (the particular source of which eludes me,) which, if I remember correctly, was co-opted in turn from Buckminster Fuller. So this is something of a multiparty plagiarism at this point. Here’s the experiment you can try at home: Ask a friend to fetch a newspaper you haven’t seen. Instruct said friend to stand a distance just far enough from you that you cannot read a headline of a certain size. If the paper has been close enough to you during this process to have read the given headline, request that your friend find another headline of the same size and show it to you at the distance already described. While looking at the headline that is barely too distant to read, ask your friend to read the headline aloud. If the paper is not too far away to discern the headline from other elements on the page, you should see the words as your friend reads them aloud. This experiment has worked for me every time — I encourage you (all three of you that read this stuff) to try it. This experiment leads me to something more like the position of Aleister Crowley when he suggests: Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, colour, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese. All 'material things,' all impressions, are phantoms.I have digressed from my digression. Let me try to bring this back around to commercial art. Part of the responsibility of an ad, or a web site or any other marketing vehicle is to communicate the brand. The experiment above seems to suggest that some part of what has meaning to us as humans is perceptual. There seems to be an intersection here. Add one more element to the equation: Our world is full of art and design. It permeates our existence. Because of this, we all have a quite nuanced and subconscious network of associations between a matrix of artistic concepts, paradigms and elements and a matrix of emotions, memories and contexts. In other words, we all respond to the language of art, in part, on a visceral level that gets in “beneath the radar” as it were. Furthermore, the stream of artistic thought and action is fluid, so that concepts, paradigms and elements are constantly engendered, revised or revisited. This fluidity seems to reinforce the “beneath the radar” effect by keeping the audience somewhat off-guard. Taking the quote from the 4/23 post: "Web design is not about art, it's about making money."I’ve already said I have no problem with the second clause; it is the first clause to which I object. How does a brand like Nike, competing in a crowded market, get and keep market share? It seems to me a big part of how they do it is through the intuition of the commercial artist whose keen awareness of the shifting tides of artistic value helps shape the perceptions of the market. The artist is your friend holding the newspaper, with the brand as the headline and he’s telling you what that brand means, using the archetypes of art. The web is an excellent marketing vehicle. It certainly seems to entail more vis-à-vis usability than, for example, a magazine ad, but it still does a great job conveying brand messages through art. In rare cases, I even think the value of this trumps a usability rule here and there. When considering the preceding commentary, one should take into account the incredibly convoluted nature and the fact that the author was drunk (not really.) At least he spell-chevked. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 1:05 AM · Saturday, April 26, 2003
Snopes.com Perusing Dave Barry’s blog, I ran across a link to this item. Needless to say, I was feeling dubious about this whole story and after a google on the name “Andrew Carlssin” returned some 400+ links (many of which were from multifarious international blogs,) I was certain it must be a hoax. I suddenly remembered the place to check: Snopes.com. Despite the apparently young life of this story – they had the answer. Good show, indeed. Now they need to hire me to redesign their site. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 2:11 AM · Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Dogma and Design Because I enjoy it immensely, and because it pays my mortgage, I am an interactive designer/developer. I say designer/developer because I really labor intensively to do both well – which is not at all easy. One thing that makes it particularly difficult (aside from the clients) is the tremendously different attitudes and philosophies of designers and developers. Most of the designers I know consider themselves, for the most part, artists. Most of the developers I know consider themselves engineers of sorts. Perhaps one can begin to see my point. Personally, I think that no interactive project will serve the client well if it is either unusable or ugly. In other words, an integration of these two disparate perspectives seems to me necessary. It is my experience with the medium, however, that this integration is very rarely achieved. As to why this is, I suspect dogmatism. One dogmatist in particular raised my ire today: Vincent Flanders. Vince, it seems, is a cohort of the egregious Jacob Nielsen. I’ve got to give some props to Dr. Nielsen for the light he has helped to shed on usability concerns in software. That usability is a matter of great concern, there can be no doubt, but the cheerleading for usability is not what troubles me. What troubles me is the dogmatic assertion that usability is not only important, but paramount. It is my contention that in some instances, usability is the most important concern, but in others, aesthetics is the most important and still others where they should be on roughly equal footing (this would seem to be the most common). It seems this is lost on these gents, and as I indicated above, I would submit that the kind of rhetoric they employ exacerbates the difficulties that naturally occur between designers and developers. So, rather than helping to produce an environment in which great work gets done, they’re despoiling the waters with comments like this (source): "Web design is not about art, it's about making money."Incidentally, this is the comment which raised my ire — he even has it in bold type. I have no problem with the notion that web design is about making money, I just don’t consider profit and art to be mutually exclusive. My experience with designers suggests to me that comments like the above do more to turn them off to usability, heuristics, et al. in toto. Perhaps Vince should consider employing E-Prime. I suspect the distance between Jakob or Vinny and say, Eric Jordan may actually be posterior to a deeper philosophical distance. In particular, I wonder how many of Nielsen’s ilk would fancy themselves objectivists or positivists. It would explain much, as the perspective of the designer/artist is often poorly or nearly impossibly parleyed into the language of slide-rules and t-squares. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:27 AM · Thursday, April 17, 2003
Steve Verdon was quite kind to post something about my blog - as well as blogrolling me! I have him blogrolled, but if you haven't been there, go read his blog: Deinonychus Antirropus. As he notes in his post, he's a regular at the Trash Talk BB, which is an excellent place to be informed about how specious science is used to further various agendas. I’m also adding a link to the “Edification” section of my links to a site I found on Steve’s site: the site of a certain David Friedman, whose online writings on economics, game theory and libertarianism are incredibly interesting. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 9:41 AM · Tuesday, April 15, 2003
My experience with Blogger has been less than stellar so far. Currently, my archive contains a link to a test post I used when I first started the blog. I deleted it some time ago, but there it remains – and even formatted in one of the default templates. For those few who read this, should you be unfamiliar with Blogger, the blog administrator is provided a way to view archives and there are even buttons that say “delete.” One would naturally assume that clicking such a button would result in the deletion of something. One would be wrong in this case. Clicking said button returns inscrutable error messages, and a consultation of the convoluted “Knowledge Base” seems to suggest that, yes, in fact, you can NOT delete the archives using the captious delete button, or indeed any other method (getting to that). I am not certain that this is what the “Knowledge Base” wants me to know, because the language is unclear at best and contained in a section suggesting that posts may not be deleted even if the site is deleted (?!?) Well – I rather enjoy it anyway, despite the shortcomings, because I’m publishing my very own rubbish for pennies. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:54 PM · Thursday, April 10, 2003
I have an old friend, with whom I haven’t spoken in some time. The last time I saw her, she was with her significant other, who was decidedly Marxist – well…I don’t presume to offer a label for her own particular nuanced flavor of communism – but I gathered from our long conversation that she was pretty hostile to capitalism. I consider my friend a brilliant artist and while I was only just meeting her girlfriend for the first time, she struck me as possessing a quick, clever wit. My friend, at the time had just received an impressive post-graduate degree from a highly-esteemed art school and her girlfriend was pursuing the like from the same. They are both within five years of my age, I believe. These are smart people. I think their particular type of intelligence exacerbates the issue I was kvetching about in my 4/6 post. I learned a lot from my discussion that evening, vis-à-vis trying to package very pragmatic concepts in a way that speaks to lateral-thinking minds, but there was much that I felt I communicated, perhaps accurately, but not compellingly. While this was many months ago, these things roll and loll in my cranium and since only Skye reads this thing, I thought I’d try to repackage some of my libertarian yang to her communist yin. One of the sort-of subcutaneous threads of the discussion was the perceived dichotomy between science and nature. She seemed to suggest that the results of the application of science and empiricism were ugly, dehumanizing and destroying the planet. She is by no means alone in her belief. Let me really get down to primacy here. Real freedom for all individuals is a product of enlightenment philosophy. In particular, empiricism suggests that you can prevent people from lording over you through appeals to religion or the supernatural, by testing their claims against your own experience. This is practical for everyone provided the issue is a very simple one like, “if you don’t do my bidding, you’ll immediately be struck by lightning” – anyone can test this claim – but empirical knowledge of some things require special tools. For example, your practical knowledge of the moon is dramatically increased through the intercession of a telescope. One of the dangers she mentioned – and I’ve heard it mentioned many times – is that posed by industrialized farming practices. When examining this issue, the equivalent “telescopes” of agricultural science produce dazzling images like this one. Here are some highlights: “Stated simply, 1960 yields would require virtually all of the land not yet being used for crops — or taken out of cultivation for habitat and wildlife conservation — to be cultivated.”These things are all a result of the technologies employed. Seeing these kind of results is especially noteworthy when you consider that agriculture is probably the oldest human technology – we’ve pretty well sussed it out. Now what the hell was I talking about? Sorry about the length of the post, Skye. Jeez, my one reader makes one request, "keep the posts short like you have been," and I've already blown it. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:52 AM · Wednesday, April 09, 2003
It pisses me off. The majority of the media I encounter on a daily basis, irrespective of political or philosophical identification, strikes me as tendentious and abrasive. For too many and profound reasons to enumerate at this moment, I regard genuine objectivity as functionally impossible – BUT – I see no reason why writers/reporters can’t attempt to present multiple opinions and name the body of thought associated with each opinion. Is the “conventional wisdom” really that empiricism is so ridiculous that people can’t be trusted to make up their own minds? It’s not just the media – politicians are just as bad…worse. I hear platitude after platitude in the made-for-tv communications of the body politic – but never any attempt to elucidate the philosophical antecedents of the specificities of Senator X’s positions. Would it be so terrible for the left to admit that the right doesn’t want the indigent to rot in the gutter – they just believe the issue should be addressed through different means? Couldn’t the right speak calmly about the possibility that a reasonable person could have a cogent argument in opposition of the war (not that I’ve heard any)? I want to launch into what I perceive to be the failure of classical academia to effectively market the enlightenment, but I am in pursuit of some capital and idle bloviation will not bring it nearer. Another time… posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:17 AM · Sunday, April 06, 2003
As I see it in those around me, I realize that I, too, have been well trained in arguments critical of Western society and philosophy, without having been given a thorough grounding in that which I have sought to criticize. In the spirit of ameliorating what seems to me to be a not insignificant problem with my and my peers’ knowledge, I’m eager to lay some blame on my/our public school education. As a sophomore in high-school, I was offered a class (taught by the English Department, strangely) in Existentialism – a class misleadingly named “Modern Thought.” It has been about twelve or so years since I took this class, but I remember the first day opened with a critique of Plato. While Plato strikes me as being considerably less important to the enlightenment than Aristotle, I am and was bemused by the fact that I had not received even the most cursory of instruction in Plato or Aristotle (or any other in the Western canon) and yet here I was being taught refutations. Standing on the shoulders of giants is one thing, but what we were engaged in was something more akin to stomping on the shoulders of the giants upon which we stood. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 2:17 PM · |
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