randomosity

I came across this one in a book on the Rush Lib­rary. Not that earth shat­ter­ing, but some­thing about the tex­tual over­lay caught my eye. Could be the use of text rather than col­our and legend, or rather than icons to rep­res­ent the use of the space. Well done.

There was a time when the the bril­liant illu­min­ated manu­scripts of Irish Mon­as­ter­ies rep­res­en­ted the pas­sion­ate col­lec­tion of the works of the sol­it­ary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intric­ate knot pat­terns are a study in a real pat­tern lan­guage. Years ago, when my cre­at­ive juices were sought a middle ground between a clear sys­tem­atic approach and yearn­ing to find break out of these same sys­tems, I dis­covered the work of George and Iain Bain. — father and son. The elder Bain made a life­time study of find­ing the pat­terns in the knot­work and devis­ing tech­niques to allow oth­ers to appre­ci­ate these and to rep­lic­ate these celtic mas­ter­works for them­selves. His son built on these tech­niques to devise a an even sim­pler way of cre­at­ing the ela­bour­ate designs. I was hooked and pro­duced some large scale knot pat­terns. I also dis­covered the won­der of dood­ling in square and tri­an­gu­lar knot pat­terns. At one point I even delved into zoomorph­ical celtic art­work and dic­sov­ered and even lar­ger challenge.

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I hadn’t been to the Digg Labs area in a while. Wow. They have a won­der­ful assort­ment of story and author visu­al­iz­a­tion tools avail­able there that are both mes­mer­iz­ing and thought pro­vok­ing. Navel gaz­ing is a won­der­ful past-time and methinks that Digg is mak­ing a con­cer­ted effort at per­fect­ing the art. I am par­tic­u­larly attrac­ted to the new Arc tool. Its shows story pop­ular­ity in real­time and also makes a link between stor­ies dugg by the same users. Thicker vec­tors indic­ate story pop­ular­ity. Inter­est­ing.
The Stac visu­al­iz­a­tion is also extremely cool. A col­lec­tion of stor­ies rep­res­en­ted by bars of varyiong shades based on pop­ular­ity spread across the bot­tom of the screen and then as they are dugg, weight blocks fall from above rein­for­cing the story title. Just neat. And as before far to mes­mer­iz­ing.
Its a quick way to gauge pop­ular­ity and user activ­ity. The anim­a­tion is smooth and enter­tain­ing. Pop­u­lar of course has noth­ing to do with my interest or rel­ev­ance, but the visu­al­iz­a­tion is effect­ive in con­vey­ing the info and it does make a fine screensaver. Apple’s new RSS visu­al­izer in Leo­pard is another cool infofeed screensaver. Visu­ally stunning.

So…48 hours back on a Macin­tosh laptop and I am in ser­i­ously danger of get­ting drunk on the kool-aid again. What is it that pulls one back? Hav­ing never really left was part of it. I simply was being interdenominational.

I have my iMac in the liv­ing room and an HP Media Centre in the den. I con­duct most of my daily work on my laptop though. I am a happy user of an IBM Think­Pad X32. I did not come to the X32 blindly. I star­ted using Think­Pads on a daily basis back in 1999. Before that I was that bane of the Win­dows world: the Mac bigot.
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Bill Turkel pos­ted another great thought piece today on the Import­ance of Infra­struc­ture. This post is, as his oth­ers always are, very eru­dite, well phrased and pro­voke one to think. In this case, his fram­ing ques­tion seems to be whether one can really envir­on­ment­ally engin­eer innov­a­tion. His post sug­gests that let­ting the right people play in the right sand­box, with the right toys can yield aston­ish­ing res­ults. He addresses the nature of how we con­struct per­sonal space in order to bol­ster pro­ductiv­ity, cre­ativ­ity and all those good things.

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Jim Pick­worth poin­ted me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleep­ing and missed point­ers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amaz­ingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mis­sion of data lib­er­a­tion. His talks have seem­ingly inspired the UN to release pub­lic health data that had been kept a guarded secret. Armed with this data he has cre­ated a won­der­ful flash based data anim­a­tion tool called Gap­Minder. The tool is fun to play with if only purely from a visu­al­iz­a­tion per­spect­ive. That he has provided UN world­wide data on mat­ters such as infant mor­tal­ity, car­bon emis­sions and wealth, allows a layper­son such as myself to explore the rela­tion­ship between these vari­ables for indi­vidual coun­tries.

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Inform­a­tion Aes­thet­ics points to a great back­ground art­icle on the visual rep­res­ent­a­tion of taste in Rata­touille (a movie I abso­lutely recom­mend — great story, superb anim­a­tion). I watched these sequences and didn’t think much about them — but what a great ques­tion : how can one visu­ally demon­strate the sen­sa­tion of taste? Addi­tion­ally, how do tastes sound — the anim­a­tions that Michael Gagne cre­ated for the movie were used as inspir­a­tion for the accom­pa­ny­ing soundtrack. Is this a sign of sens­ory con­ver­gence? That fla­vours will com­bine and pro­duce an entirely new visu­al­iz­a­tion makes abso­lute sense, but how do you account for syn­ergy or for cata­lytic beha­viour. What a won­der­ful chal­lenge to be presen­ted with and to muse about.
There is a lot more to dis­cover at Michael Gagne’s site. His work had appeared in a string of well known pro­duc­tions. Moreover, Gagne is a Québe­cois and Sheridan gradu­ate — so won­der­fully close to home.
I won­der what smell looks like?

Last week­end Toronto ded­ic­ated a starkly breath­tak­ing park/memorial to the Irish Fam­ine immig­rants of 1847. Ire­land Park was opened by Mary McAleese, Pres­id­ent of Ire­land and fea­tures a rather strik­ing memorial wall made up of glass bricks com­mem­or­at­ing those who died dur­ing the exodus and also those who died try­ing to help them. The aim of this park is to com­mem­or­ate this his­toric tragedy and also to remind us of sim­ilar events occur today.
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There is a great dis­cus­sion at Bri­co­leur­b­an­ism on the absence of people-scaled spaces in Toronto’s urban streets­cape. The dis­cus­sion takes as a start­ing point con­struc­tion hoard­ing on two sides of the street near Bloor that inad­vert­ently cre­ated a humane street scale not unlike that found else­where in the world.
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Sorry for the drought of post­ings of late. Things get in the way.
There’s a unique concept hotel open­ing at Gatwick in July. Modeled on the com­pact sleep­ing spaces that I have always asso­ci­ated with Asia, they provide what they term ‘cab­ins.’ The Yotel provide upscale, high qual­ity space designed around human dimen­sions.
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