Robin Sloan's Posts
Smiiiiiiiiiile
Peter Kirn describes a high-speed photobooth—three seconds of video captured in the booth, slowed down to a minute of playback. The results:
Look at that slap at 2:10—it’s like a cheek tsunami!
Super fun idea. Two things, though: 1. There should be more kisses. Photobooths are for kisses! 2. Obviously I want to be able to print these out on little strips of flexible screen. Little moving portraits in your pocket. When’s that gonna happen?
The sneaky e-reader
Good stats from Luke Wroblewski on the market for e-books and e-readers over here. This one jumped out at me:
29% of readers of e-books consume their books on their cell phones. 23% of readers of e-books consume their books on a tablet computer.
That jibes with the results of a quick survey I sent to the folks on my email list back in December: significantly more people said they read long-form material with their iPhones than with their iPads or Kindles. Now of course, this is largely a function of the sheer number of iPhones out there—but so what? The behavior is real and I’d argue the proportion is unlikely to shift anytime soon. Amazon will sell more Kindles, sure, but Apple will sell more iPhones at the same time. In fact, there are probably more iPhones and iPod Touches getting added to the “device pool” per unit time than Kindles of all flavors. (I’m sure Horace Dediu has the numbers on this, were I diligent enough to dig through his archives.)
Anyway, this big contingent of iPhone readers was one of the primary reasons I went ahead with the project that would become Fish rather than, say, something designed specifically for the iPad. I mean… 29 percent is a lot! Especially when most of the other 71 percent—the Kindle and iPad readers—have iPhones as well, so you can probably convince them to read something on that screen.
Meanwhile, Android phones are basically still a complete mystery to me.
Blockquoting Bruce Sterling
As I was reading Bruce Sterling’s stirring, wacky, magisterial essay on the New Aesthetic, I was whispering to myself the quiet blogger’s curse: unblockquotable. Each graf is more stirring than the one before… each claim wackier, more magisterial. It’s all interlocked, and to extract a piece might make the whole beautiful edifice collapse, Jenga-like, so… I’ll have to just link this one blind.
But no. Not only does Tom Armitage find the blockquote…
Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake.
…he adds a riff, wise and concise, that itself demands blockquoting!
[T]his is the leaper-out for me: the reminder—as I fervently believe—about truly understanding the things you work in. And in this case: the reminder that all the old metaphors of computation are rarely true. Computers are not intelligent; they do not see or hear. But nor are they stupid, blind, or deaf. They are just other.
How about that? Blockquotes beyond blockquotes. Tom’s commentary a must-read (but there, you’ve read it) and Bruce’s essay the must-read below. Read it.
‘Trembling with excitement’
I feel like we’re suddenly faced with a glut of these great how I read blog posts from The Atlantic and News.me (I did one) and elsewhere. Now the service called Findings has started pitching content into this pile, and their latest post, featuring Clive Thompson, is, I believe, the greatest of the genre to date.
Two things jumped out at me. One…
How do you annotate, and why?
I annotate aggressively. If I’m reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I’ll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.
…I want that book! I want my highlighted passages from any Kindle ebook rebound as a slim volume that I can leaf through anytime. I want that in my collection more than I want a physical version of the book, and maybe even more than I want a digital version of the book. I want the reduction.
And two…
How social is reading for you right now?
It’s extremely social, in part because I grab every tool possible in order to make it so. […]
I’m almost trembling with excitement, because I foresee this point when we surmount some of these design challenges and we’ll be able to have different ways of reading a book. You’ll have a digital book, and if you want, you’ll turn off all the comments, read in solitude — “everyone shut up” — or you can say, show me the most awesome comments, show me the highest-rated comments, show me everything, show me the firehose. What have my friends or people I care about said about this book? Are there any actual people reading this page right now that I might want to have a live conversation with about it? There’s so much fun someone could have with these layers, ranging from classic, total isolation to like rollicking bar-party conversation.
… “I’m almost trembling with excitement,” he says. That is both 100% Clive Thompson and 100% correct. You’ve simply got to be able to see past the present lameness (such as, e.g., the fact that Amazon won’t let me tap into any sort of Kindle API to create the highlight book that I want so badly above) and into the future possibilities, which are really more than possibilities, they are certainties, and it’s just a matter of when, and how, and who. Do that and you will tremble, too.
Addendum: You know, I just realized that Sonia Saraiya is behind both the News.me series and the Findings series. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but I should have known there was a how I read mastermind lurking in the margins. Good work, Sonia.
E-ink wholesale
So via Kottke comes the news of flexible e-ink displays from LG. I think this is just unspeakably super exciting, because e-paper isn’t really e-paper until you can roll it up and stuff it in your back pocket.
I have a serious question: How would a person get their hands on one of these, or a box of them, for hacking and prototyping? Is there anything equivalent to this development kit for pico-projectors from Texas Instruments? (Pico-projectors are another Snarkmarket obsession.)
I don’t even know where to start looking. Any ideas?
Real things pretending to be fake things
Media is weird. (And it’s not a new technique, either. Who knew?)
Jitter
You might not think you’re interested in a long technical blog post about scalability at YouTube… and you might be right… but don’t be so sure. You never know where you’re going to find useful ideas—hard-won ways of thinking that can apply in domains well beyond the one where they were born. I think this post has several ideas like that, and the best is jitter.:
- If your system doesn’t jitter then you get thundering herds. Distributed applications are really weather systems. Debugging them is as deterministic as predicting the weather. Jitter introduces more randomness because surprisingly, things tend to stack up.
- For example, cache expirations. For a popular video they cache things as best they can. The most popular video they might cache for 24 hours. If everything expires at one time then every machine will calculate the expiration at the same time. This creates a thundering herd.
- By jittering you are saying randomly expire between 18–30 hours. That prevents things from stacking up. They use this all over the place. Systems have a tendency to self synchronize as operations line up and try to destroy themselves. Fascinating to watch. You get slow disk system on one machine and everybody is waiting on a request so all of a sudden all these other requests on all these other machines are completely synchronized. This happens when you have many machines and you have many events. Each one actually removes entropy from the system so you have to add some back in.
What would it mean to add jitter in other domains? Maybe it would mean publishing things at odd hours. Maybe it would mean shaking up your own habits. (I think there’s evidence that exercise and diet both benefit from jitter.) What else?
Dancing the flip-flop
This dance video is incredible. It’s ostensibly TRON-themed, but that’s irrelevant to its coolness:
What makes it so great is the way that it puts the techniques of video editing—freeze frames, jump cuts, motion trails—back up on stage, live. (And of course now we’re watching it on video again. I love the flip-flop: from digital to analog to digital to analog to…)
You actually see a lot of this in dance these days. To me, popping and locking and the stuttering, slow-mo dance moves on display (e.g.) here are basically inconceivable without video. We need to see human bodies moving this way on screens before we can imagine moving them that way out on the street.
Via Michael Donohoe.
Update: Wrote a longer note about the flip-flop.
Propulsion paintings
Oh man, I love these so-called propulsion paintings. Super simple but effective and interesting. I like seeing the block-gloved hands reaching down to start the show:
Of course, I like Detroit as a backdrop, too. In these videos it seems poetic and almost playful rather than, like, blunt and message-y:
Check out the student propulsion paintings over at today and tomorrow, too.
Imagination to imagination
You’ve heard people (including me?) say things like this before, but Ellen Ullman’s articulation here is particularly good—maybe the best:
I think that literature—essays, stories, poems—is the one form where we can meet, imagination to imagination, without hosts of people in between, no directors and actors and set designers and so on. The medium itself is fairly transparent. You don’t need equipment or electrical outlets. You can go off alone to read, and, if the work is good, you are then intensely close to other human beings.
Here’s more on Ullman and her new novel, which is set in San Francisco. BONUS: Spot the quote from Sean McDonald, my editor at FSG and longtime Friend of Snarkmarket!