Notes on noting + not to mention, @imyke ‽ stop hurting yourself

I noticed that my wrists have been hurting these last few days. My neck hurt as well.

I asked a long time ago what can be done for avoiding writing too much. This got me looking into and thinking about posture, writing, ergonomics, keyboards, typing, iOS.

I came upon the conclusion that I should try to bring about good in the world by drawing people's attention to note things they would otherwise not notice.

Note: there were several puns in the last sentence. Just drawing your attention to that.

So one thing that is stupidly unchanging, is chair design. Our chairs will always be built with the ideas of yesterday in mind. But I want to describe the general principles of a design so that an automated decision making processes can update our model in light of new data so that whatever is known at the time about the nature of human ergonomics and information representation tasks can easily be incorporated into the design. I want to design a chair for today.

Yes I know it's cheesy. Whatever it's catchy too! :p

I can't, no one can(yet) but I want to get as close as is possible. I would argue that since I have massive limitations in information processing en masse, if a computer can compute some of the relevant parameter updates, it will be more up to date than I could ever do on my own. This is simply a property of the fact that I can't read all the papers, and analyze & synthesize them as fast as others can produce them. Furthermore, even if I could keep up with it, I'm much more likely to be able to live a happy life if I don't have to do as much to keep it state of the art.

In any case I don't know what back angles would be good because I don't know what the dynamical and structural stresses that the relevant tissues face.

If apple really is going to make an hBook(i.e., the healthBook app), wouldn't it be awesome if it could automatically adjust your chair in response to whatever it is able to sense either from the chair or the lumoback(or lumolift) or smart wrist guards. Whatever it needs to it can automatically adjust to counteract any unhealthy behavior — if it really is the ideal chair with machine learning capabilities, it will be able to do that.

More on this later (esp. As relates to typewriters and keyboards).

Here are some desiderata for such a chair, which will act as potential learning/error signals if the chair for today were made real.

There are videos of me attempting the left handed curl, but I'm not very good at videotaping my writing. The ideal chair would fix that.

In any case avoid, painful hands. They are good for no one. If siracusa has taught me anything, it is that.

cheers,
:€

Believe it or not this was the complete text of a single message: truth is wet with time

The following is a message to a friend, an excellent scholar and correspondent on lots of cool things.

He is more concerned with searching for truth than for life(or more accurately what it is to be alive and have your truths shattered). Or at least that is what I would worry about were I to critique josh. But I mean this as a complement as well as a eyebrow raise (critique can be positive or neutrally interesting). Josh just understands so much that only thing that even approaches something like scholarly issues are actually pretty well defined. It's a case of discretitus.

It's a weak computational bias at first, but it can really accelerate rapidly if you aren't careful.

But if there are to be truth statements about things that happen in the world they must be temporally defined. I would argue that even if we allow for approximate simultaneity, so long as just noticeable differences work out to be stable. But they are not stable. In fact, the order of stimulus presentation matters in and of itself. (Ackn: Thanks to Thom Morgan for helping me think about this stuff.) so it changes overtime and the endpoint is affected by the slope over time, meaning there's also some notion of nearness (and therefore of farness) since there is some dimension somewhere along which you can imagine yourself having had thought… were you to believe the information were uniformly randomly delivered (ie on a poisson schedule…notErlang Ackn:josh Abbott for getting me to think about random variations in vehicular transfer time(time to get on and off the bus + the time takes to slow to a stop and open the door and close the door and then speed up to what the max speed would be) to avoid collisions (or more accurately… caravans)) And then you could reasonably calculate the range of possible data structures that could result from the data that you have seen, if it had been delivered in the opposite direction. Well, what does this amount to? Slippery truths that suggest a wide range of mutually exclusive but model consistent ideas, but particular instances of truth only are the knots that we happen to see, or rocks in the stream of thought/experience.

Grasping at nothing. Nothing there to grasp.

Truths are slippery. Get w i m . s m g i n

Cheers, :€

•bzzzzrrrt•

For another example of how this idea of same input different filters meaning very different things…

Error sourcing, causal inference, abduction, high-level languages

Suppose your program fails.

As evidence for the reasonableness of this assumption I Point to: Casey Liss (@caseyliss) described an instance of this occuring, in ep 54 goto fail; ~29:00 mins into the epsiode.

If there is a hidden fault (a memory leak) produced by the program, presumably if you were able to watch the activity on the memory in relation to the commands that are being executed that cause the memory activity, if the two clocks that govern both were appropriately synchronized, then you might be able to identify the particular cause of the total interaction of all the memory leaking by considering how much of the allocated memory was actually due to that particular sequence of code (appropriately built into a functional equivalence class where if there is some output put into it there will be a bunch of other outputs that would produce the same output when input as well. I.e., a many to many mapping).

So in this case suppose that every allocation was automatically analyzed with respect to the code that generated it, could you then not use that as an error signal? I.e., you have identified what the problem is (memory leaking), and have allocated appropriate responsibility portions to all of the pieces of code, and then attempt to analyze there to see if they come to a common source point.

I.e., if you find the root of a many tiered many faced superorganism of causal relations (like oaks, or aspen?, or strawberries? See Peter Godfrey smith post for details about this, or I think I also linked to one of the chapters that includes this information), and you excise the root, how much will wither?

It is it this way that bugs, diseases, viruses infect our systems and have effects that are far reaching for organisms much larger than itself. But if we can identify these things automatically in the real world where we don't have access to literally all of the details, how can we not identify these things automatically in our virtual worlds (simulated logic sPace$) where we do have access to literally all of the details. This is a Turing no worries task, because in order for something to be sent it needs to have already been encoded.

This is also the case for the history of eve online book, which you should check out today is the last kickstarter day for it, and it'll be a text that I will probably be pulling a lot from in the time following its release (and possibly before if they open source their data).

It will also be the goal there, where literally every interaction that could have possibly mattered, by definition could have been recorded perfectly, to undertake the task of automatic abduction in a complex space. I hope to be able to build a model that in theory could be applied to this dataset that will output the relevant root causes in an actually mathematically defined universe.

But a history of any series of computations is possible. And that history may be able to identify patterns that suggest fixing. Such an abductive strength could even help create automatically improving code. If you want to get to really the highest possible level of programming, it is to be able to automatically change the particular implementation of some code on the fly(like field medicine, but field enchancement), to avoid creating obvious errors and to notify the developer when it's too injured and confused that it doesn't know how to fix itself with super high confidence.

Code that would have caught Casey's bug, and fixed it for him, that is about as high level as you can get. If you had a programming language that did that it could hardly be said to not be substantially easier for novices to begin coding.

For better or worse.

Cheers, :€

John Siracusa (@siracusa) would probably enjoy oquonie

This week atp(65) discussed monument valley and to a lesser extent, journey.

I've played neither. I have played oquonie. It was really good and is exactly what John Siracusa defined as a non-linear game(paraphrased):
You have to go back and do a tonne of things in a particular order that involves topologically and temporally — which were it not for the monument valley discussion I wouldn't have distinguished — tortuous paths.

Oquonie is that.

Also holy crap I am so happy that Squarespace figured out how to let you select text and navigate the cursor’s position without activating the block movement mode in their iPhone blogs app. Like seriously, kickass!

I wrote down how Casey Liss (@caseyliss; congrats btw, though I don't know why you want to have kids… not that you need to explain anything to me)

a sidebar on beAts and apple & nest and IFTTT and hue

John gets it. Regarding beats, this was an investment of fashion. I said the other day that this was a day when beats headphones users just got huge dividends on their investment in fashion. That is, now they are going to have the geeks around to help them progress into the brave new world of an automated life.

I really like the in case sonic headphones. But they are more subtly bold in their fashion style, so it'll take a while before the two–tone-chunk headphones (and other things, see picture) will take-off, but, I think it will eventually. just give it time.

I started buying brightly colored socks that I purposefully did not match in spring 2011. Followed by, bright shoes with different shoelaces in left and right shoes; shoes that are of the same style but of different colors so one can be worn on each foot. Only now are they getting big. It's the obvious reaction to this upcoming wave of intense monotonicity.

It's why I wish apple would make a rose gold colored iPhone (like twsbi’s 580).

It'd twist the current path but into new and interesting directions.

In any case, the reason why this should pay off so well for beats users is that due to their choice in fashion they are allied with the nerds of apple fandom. To show their authenticity the nerds will kinda rebel and grudgingly accept them but in doing so they will interact and offer massive improvements to both of their lives.

This generation will finally spawn, once combined with the backlash against hipsterdom, bitNeaks will be arise (spoonerism: beatnik; pun: Bit; jargon formatting reference: camelCase).

But that is a tale for another day(particularly after it's more obvious to more people that it's occurring).

The point is that there will be a stylish technorati that are able to improve people's lives. I want to share the most important parts with anyone who will hear them.

I want to say a few things that I think could dramatically improve people's lives.

Nest and IFTTT and hue: this automated life

Nest is a smart thermostat and fire alarm company that was bought by google. They would figure out when you wouldn't be home and thereby save you money by turning down the air when you leave. Fire alarm knows different kinds of signals in the smoke so that it can detect what's likelier to be a fire and a seared steak. I think. If that isn't the case, work on it cause it should be.

IFTTT is short for if this then that, which is an excellent way to automate various parts of your world by hooking them together with nice if clauses, which behave rather nicely as event catchers for event streams in real(continuous)-time

hue are lights by Phillips that will turn off when I leave home, and on when I return.

Off at night. Purple to signal last call to go to the store. gradually on in the morning.

Mall of them turned off at once to go to bed cause it's too late already.

Don't some of the pieces look like they're jumping out at you?

Cheers, :€

Design by maths:

golden rectangles, functional aesthetics, & the future of the iPad

Rho rho rho your boat

When I was young I loved the film Donald in mathmagic land.

In March, I heard a mathematician give a delightful exposition about why π isn't that great.

In April I read the elements of typographic style.

Today I heard the prompt begin to describe a report on the possibility of a two app split screen mode. They cited 9to5 Mac for their report. And said windows 8 had a split screen mode.

gently down the stream

I have not used or seen a windows 8 screen.

I have not read the 9 to 5 mac post.

I have paused the prompt @ 46:05.

Much like John Siracusa used to explain, he wouldn't listen to shows so that he could come to the idea fresh, without having to deal with the worry of having any opportunity to plagiarize others (or in another sense to upset your own thinking by the rapids that result from the arrival of another thought stream).

merrily merrily merrily meerily

I have been enjoying thinking about the importance of geometric structure in the history of thought. Euclidean geometry held away for so very long. And certainly if we are interacting with a flat surface it will imitate Euclidean geometry. Thus, we may have something to learn from the ancient Greeks about flat design.

I remember from Donald that there was a general obsession with ratios. In particular, whole number ratios when it came to music, and one particular ratio, the golden ratio, when it came to analyzing physical objects. It appeared in the buildings' proportions.

The fascination continued to Da Vinci whose vitruvian man supposedly embodied this ratio. It appears again in the Nautilus’s golden spiral

ok technically that isn't true on 2 grounds; 1) a Nautilus is well described by a logarithmic spiral 2) there is no such thing as the Nautilus, it's an idea not a thing. I'll point you toward John dupré for the counterpoint and I will elaborate on some other day.

But this is aside from the point.

life is but a dream

My point is that the golden ratio involves a self-similarity that goes deep. If I remember correctly, you can take a chunk of the golden rectangle out by following the following recipe:

• shares 1 complete side with the smaller side of the rectangle
• the two smaller rectangle's sides that meet the aforementioned side(perpendicularly) will share some space with the large rectangle's longer sides.
  • the length of these sides would be equal to some ratio (ϱ) times the length of the short side of the big rectangle(which, remember, is the same size as the length of the smaller rectangle)
• the larger rectangle's ratio is also

I leave this as evidence of my line of thinking. I now will rework it: cut out a square with sides equal to the short edge of the rectangle from the golden rectangle and you still have a golden rectangle.

Damn, that self similar thing I thought world work. I thought you could cut out a scaled down version of the same shape but turned sideways and what remained would be an object that obeys the golden ratio, but that doesn't make sense. Since the long side would be subtracted from exactly what is needed to make the other one a golden ratio. But if we're to subtract from the long side, the only way to keep the golden ratio is for it to become the short side. But then you have two short sides connected end to end that are equal, since they share the same long edge. Which means that the two new shapes are the same. Like a book's pages are laid out.

But that's actually what I wanted to avoid. As Siracusa elsewhere has made more than abundantly clear, there are cases where you do want true secondary controls. That is, you want to not have two equally prominent sets of controls

or displays — that's the beauty of a true interface like an iPad versus an outerface like a Cinema Display

Rather, what you want is one primary (large) and one secondary interface, and you want to embed them in a rectangle that will take the max of their edges to know how small they will need to be. Since the larger rectangle is fixed, the best way to lay out the two secondary rectangles is to use as much space as is possible, so it makes sense for the small side on one to be congruent with and equivalent to the long side on the other one.

One solution is to given primary a square and secondary what remains, now unfixing the big rectangle's long side, we can search for what works best such that what remains always has an area less than the square and retains the fixed side that must run congruent and identical to the square. Now the question is what ratio do you want the remaining portion to have between it's sides?

My suggestion is that you make it the same ratio as the iPad and put portrait mode in there that spot.

I was hoping for a scaled down version of it would fit but then I realized that that produced a contradiction given what I had been trying to say about maximizing the area of the iPad while putting two things that share a side that have the same ratio as the full iPad, but scaled down so that one would be portrait the other landscape. But that doesn't work. Still the square would be a fun shape to design for).

Or, you make it the iPhone's or iPod's ratios and include the display from the respective device.

I think developers could do a lot with a new form factor. I think designers would do cool thinks with the square.

I should also mention the silver ratio

which I have mentally encoded as the mod 2 version of the golden ratio. I think because you take a square out of it once and then you take a square out of that one, and then you get back something with a silver ratio. Or something.

But there's also a bronze which was mod 3? But I don't know if 4 would work…

does that suggest a connection to the prime numbers? And Fermat/Wiles? Or is it more analogous to galois and 4 will exist but nothing greater than 5.

But, to be honest I just don't remember too much about the silver ratio in particular. I read about it in the elements.

No not euclid's.

Not that his wouldn't also be useful for designers to read… I just haven't read it, so I don't know.

In any case hopefully these mathematically inclined wanderings through land of the possible ways that the dual screen could be implemented. We had some false routes, but hopefully we even learned something from the act of retracing our steps and seeing where we made a wrong turn and righting what can be wrought from what remains after attempting to ford the river of thought, thinking it merely a thought stream.

If educational games in school taught me anything it would have to be this: never ford the river.

Cheers, :€