The Genius of Design

“For industrial designers, the world is never enough. They give shape and texture to the world to make it livable—indeed, beautiful—for the rest of us. This fascinating five-part documentary examines the art and science of design and the stuff it shapes, from computer chips to cityscapes and everything in between. See the evolution from artisans’ workshops to industrial mass production, and the profound changes it has wrought in our economy, society, and environment.” – from the promotional.

 Acorn Media 2009

In five episodes running 242 minutes, we meet some of the leading designers who gave us our material world.  They are not engineers. They are not scientists.  The Apple computer was the creation of Wozniak and Jobs, of course, but they did not give it the form we know.  Their Macintosh, their iPod, Sony’s Walkman, all of the furniture in an IKEA warehouse, and even the weapons of war achieved materiality because designers thought long and hard about how real people would use these common objects.

“Meet historians, critics, and legendary contemporary designers, including Dieter Rams (Braun electronics), J Mays (Ford), and Jonathan Ive (Apple), who reveal the thinking behind iconic products such as the VW Beetle, the Eames chair, and the computer desktop. Along the way, discover how design has influenced even the outcome of war.”

At a time when – surprising to us, today - German goods were called cheap AEG launched what may have been the first modern rebranding.  They hired Peter Behrens who created a new AEG typeface for both their advertising and their product labeling. From William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement to Dieter Rams of Braun, from Henry Ford to Ford Motor’s J Mays, we meet the people and their works and their critics (mostly favorable).  Produced for Athena Learning by Tim Kirby’s team for Wall to Wall Media, the video is supported by the Athena website (here) which delivers biographies of Raymond Loewy, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzk, Henry Charles Eames, Alberto Alessi, and Philippe Starck.  The videos also show us Joe Columbo, Robin Day, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, Earl Silas Tupper, Verner Panton, Marc Newson, and Michael Graves, among many others.  You may not know the names, but if you ever read a highway sign or sat in a plastic chair, you know their work.  It is not always easy. The graphical user interface was first introduced in 1963.  

Supporting the presentation, the website also delivers a study guide for classrooms, and a booklet with more ideas centered on design failures. 

•  Episode 1:  Ghosts in the Machine: What distinguishes good design from bad design in a consumer product?
• Episode 2: Designs for Living: To what extent is the kitchen in your home “a machine for living”
• Episode 3: Blueprints for War: The British Sten gun was designed as a cheap, easy to manufacture, and ultimately disposable weapon. The German “Tiger” tank was the finest quality motorized cannon possible – and because of that, it could not be produced in sufficient numbers.
• Episode 4: Better Living Through Chemistry: Plastic, for better and worse. Steve Jobs famously said, “You know a design is good when you want to lick it.”
• Episode 5: Objects of Desire: How do you think the challenges of sustainability and limited disposal will affect product design in the decades ahead? Glen Olver Low calls it “Crade to Cradle.”  Instead of being down-cycled, his concept of recycling returns material to the highest level of manufacturing processes.

Michael Graves found his inspiration - in part - at a flea market, where he saw a hand-made stopper, carved as a rooster which sang when the water boiled. The conical shape was dictated by the need to boil water as rapidly as possible.

Previously on Necessary Facts

Objectified: A Film by Gary Hustwit

Art & Copy: How Advertising Changed Our Self-Perceptions

Start the Presses: Typography 

Cities: The Urban Visions of Jane Jacobs
Documentation is Specification

Drones are Everywhere

"The influential head of Google, Eric Schmidt, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns. Cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by militaries could fall into the wrong hands, he told the UK's Guardian newspaper.  Quarrelling neighbours, he suggested, might end up buzzing each other with private surveillance drones.  He also warned of the risk of terrorists using the new technology.  Mr Schmidt is believed to have close relations with US President Barack Obama, whom he advises on matters of science and technology.” -- BBC Technology News here Touted on Slashdot here

Radio controlled model Air Force One Giant Scale RC Airplanes here

Radio Controlled Coast Guard Ship Model

Radio Controlled Crane from ToysRUs

Among the huge, wide, broad and deep array of RC “cars” are replica tanks.  Radio controlled toys mimic just about any mechanism you can imagine. And the technology is 50 years old, back to the first transistors. 

Of course,  good things come in small packages, such as this remote controlled dragonfly.

Back in 1980, the National Association for Rocketry held its annual convention (NARAM 22) in East Lansing. My little sister and I built rockets and went to several launches.  As a result, I heard about the government contracting accomplished model rocket hobbyists to fly cameras over Three Mile Island.  All in all, this is very old technology now.  Altitudes of 2000 meters are typical for record-holders.  The amateur construction record for a rocket is 1648 pounds straight up to 4400 feet, a 1/10 scale Saturn V.

But this should be no surprise.  Wernher von Braun was a member of a club of weekend rocketeers.  When war came, only their social connections gave them access to the decision makers.  They were not sought out by the military or the ruling party.  Even after the effort was funded for militarization, as Willy Ley told it in Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, they were thwarted by the need for massive fuel pumps. They began planning a whole enterprise to design and build them.  Then, one of their industrial collaborators told them about fire engines.  The point is that like rockets, military drone aircraft are just an adopted technology. The private sector came first by decades before the military caught on and recognized the new state of the art. 

 Eric Schmidt’s father was Wilson Schmidt, a German American professor of international economics at Johns Hopkins University who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration. … in 2011... Schmidt dated Lisa Shields, a communications executive for the Council on Foreign Relations. ... According to PCWorld, Schmidt also expressed the following sentiment: "if you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear". ... Schmidt is also a member of the Bilderberg Group. - Wikipedia 

Schmidt is a smart fellow, a Unix wizard who earned his masters wiring up the Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science departments; but, he wants to control your toys. People like him are drawn to centers of political power. That carries a consequence for Google's corporate strategies. Be that as it may, self-propelled, programmed, cybernetic, and autonomic machines have been with us since flyball governors were added to steam engines.

The Science of Liberty

The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris is excellent assembly of cogent essays is an extended argument for freedom and science. The scientific revolution and liberal democracy are inseparable.  To limit one is to defeat the other.  According to Ferris, the scientific method is the root of political freedom.  In that, he continues the case made long ago by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies.  

Like Popper, Ferris misses the center of the target.  It is not “liberal democracy” but capitalism that enabled and was empowered by the Enlightenment philosophy of rational-empiricism that we know today as Objectivism. To be fair, though, Ferris does devote an entire chapter to “The Science of Wealth” where he praises both free market capitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Anyone who values freedom and science will find this book is well worth the time invested.  The essays are crisp, insightful, and backed by citation.  While Ferris does good work building up the material benefits of the scientific method and the human values in liberal democracy, the core of the book is a total demolition of claims that centralism and totalitarianism can lead to good science.  In one chapter, plus other material throughout, Ferris shows that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were scientifically bankrupt, and technologically inferior to the liberal democracies they opposed. 

In just under 300 pages, Ferris delivers a close and informative history of the scientific method, centered on Sir Francis Bacon's creation - and betrayal - of it.  Ancient Greeks such as Aristarchos and Demokritos, guessed correctly, reasoning well, that the Earth orbits the sun, and that matter is comprised of atoms.  But that was not science.  Science is a method of observation, questioning, investigation, tests, and reporting.  (To see why Aristotle's description of the chick embryo does qualify as science, see my review of Great Scientific Experiments, here.)  Science did not exist before the Renaissance; the creation of science led to the political Enlightenment. Like the chicken and the egg, of course, which came first is a moot point: you cannot have one without the other.  More to the point, Ferris argues well, the essence of liberal democracy, what it is that makes freedom work, is precisely the scientific method applied to social problems.

That said, Ferris is well aware of the essential weakness in liberal politics: experimental programs become permanent.  According to the scientific method as applied to civics, we, the people, vote on certain remedies, try them out, and if they fail, we pragmatically try something else.  Actually, that last never happens.  We go on to new attempts, but the old failures continue to be funded and staffed and enforced.  He has no solution for that.

Ferris does deliver a good history, especially of the American revolution as the triumph of citizen scientists.

In another chapter on “Academic Antiscience” Ferris reveals how Karl Popper’s theory of falsification and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of “paradigm” were misapplied at first innocently, and then wantonly, by “post modernists.”  Claiming that theirs was an agenda of liberation, Paul Feyerabend and those who followed him quickly moved on to demanding an end to science and an end to material prosperity.

Supplementing that demonstration is a chapter on Progress.  Post-modernists decry and deny it.  They claim that material progress leaves us spiritually impoverished.  Politically, they claim that progress is illusory, being only the looting of the poor by the rich. Ferris takes the second claim and shreds it with facts.  Even if the claim were true that the rich are evermore far richer than the poorest, the sheer numbers of the poor, multiplied by their material advantages today, bury any claims to injustice from progress.  The poorest are far better off than they were 50 or 100 years ago. 

The book closes with a chapter on global warming and the consequent ice age that will come “unless we do something.”  What is that “we” must “do” is less clear.  Once again, Ferris is mindful of the precarious state of the world’s poor.  Reducing greenhouse gases, however accomplished, must not come by taking their lives. Who can afford to make which sacrifices today in order to secure the future is a tough question for which Ferris has no answer.

“The point is that lightswitch ethics—pounding the table and insisting, “We must save the lives of our grandchildren” or alternately, “We must leave free enterprise alone”—are inadequate. … Responsible stewardship requires dealing in quantities and probabilties, with little recourse to comforting certitudes.” 

Ferris closes by comparing the universal, invariant nature of science with the universal and invariant nature of liberalism.  Both depend on and advocate truths that apply to all people in all times and places.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe
Science versus Common Sense
Slow Down and Think
Criminalistics: Science or Folkway

Goofing to a Meltdown?

After the Code.Org video touting "fun at work"  (see the post before this one), this article appeared on March 28 on CNN.com about the positive side of "goofing off at work."

The theory is that encouraging "play" at work not only boosts morale but also fosters increased creativity and teamwork, leading to better productivity and quality of work. ...
"The emphasis on fun spawns creative energy," explains Lauren Austin. She's creative director at marketing agency MKG in New York, where play is a priority. "Inspiration comes from interacting with one another and the world around us."

I agree 100% that stepping back from a problem and setting it aside allows the opportunity for creativity and insight.  We all have such experiences and we all know many stories.  Friedrich Kekule solved the problem of benzine's structure while dozing off and staring into a fire.  Kari Mullis had a similar insight about PCR (polymerace chain reactions; how we now replicate DNA), while speeding in his sports car up and through the Sangre de Cristo mountains outside Sante Fe.  But when Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared mind, his emphasis was on the mind, not the chance.

Large social events seldom have a single cause, but certainly do have identifiable contributing factors.  Not everything going on at one moment causes the events of the next.  But human action is causative.  I believe that the Dot.Com Meltdown was caused in part by the "business casual" attitude expressed in acceptable office attire and the casual atmosphere in business of the times.  The prosperity of the 80s and 90s, the Reagan-Clinton years, seemed assured because we never got to the real reason, the root, or radical fact.  Liberty and freedom are requisites to prosperity, but they are not causes of it. 

Cut taxes. Remove regulations.  Wealth will follow.  ... but only if the prepared minds can see for themselves the benefits of their creativity.  The creative mind does not work primarily for money (or primarily for love), but absent those rewards, much less gets done.  Primitive hunters were great artists. They decorated caves and cliffs, their weapons, and themselves.  Naked in the sun, they wore decorative shells for the pleasure of it. ... but the alphabet was waiting... and waiting...

What you can measure you can improve.  The invention of large numbers (beyond 3) led to the creation of writing. And here we are 8,000 years later, living by means that would be inexplicable to our Ice Age ancestors.  The difference is that we learned to work when we did not need to.  We gave up the luxury of hunting in an abundant environment for the opportunity to work long hours every day.  We could measure, count, tally, and store the excess wealth.

Will the new theory of goofing off on the job improve the statements of earnings, or are we on the verge of another Dot.Com Meltdown?

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Entrepreneurship
Steve Jobs: One of a Kind
Venture Capital
Capitalist Culture

Engines of Creation

I told him how much I wanted to be paid if I was successful.  He locked me in his business on Friday night. …   When he came back on Sunday, I had the solution wrapped and ribboned.

The folks at Code.Org created a video with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and others, encouraging kids to learn to program computers.  That much is laudable.  Disgracing the video, with an odd anti-capitalist mentality, is a segment by Drew Houston of Dropbox about how much fun it is to be a programmer.  (View from the 3:00 minute to the 4:00 minute mark of this 5:44 announcement.)  Was it the fun of 48 hours in three days to solve a tough problem?  No, it is the fun of skateboarding in the office, playing ping pong, and chatting with your fields.  The segment also touts free food including gourmet cooking three times a day.  But where do these come from, if no one works?  Blank out.  (Firms are not launched with perquisites, benefits, and privileges--but more on that in another post.)

From the 3:17 mark: “… to get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible."  Fantastic chef, free food, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, free laundry, snacks, even places to play, and scooters. “All these interesting things around the office: places where people can play or relax, or goto think or play music or be creative.”

Back in the 80s when the concept of a “Dot.Com Meltdown” was inconceivable on several levels,  working as a technical writer for a software start-up I was paid a salary of $400 per week for a 40-hour week. I would come in on my own time on Saturdays and find most, if not all, of the four programmers there, also.  This was neither the first nor the last time that my co-workers and I at that company or for some previous or subsequent job worked “for free.” 

It was not unusual. Computer programming was the quintessential brain work that people did because they loved it.  As well as we were paid, getting paid was a bonus., a secondary consequence.  Thus, hackers created Open Source software and formalized it with the Open Source Foundation.  Unix became Linux and GNU: Gnu is Not Unix.  Freeware and shareware abounded.  Companies made money selling it.  Individuals made money creating it and marketing it.  But we did it because the "fun" - the ecstasy of creation - was in the work.

“But first, I want you to think and tell me what made me give years to this work. Money? Fame? Charity? Altruism?... You see, I’m never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building’s theme and problem, as my building’s material—just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action …”  (Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Plume edition, 1994; page 604)

Continues below click "Read More"... 

(A jump lead walks into a bar.  
The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't try to start anything.")

Start the presses!

The fundamental principles of composition are constant.  Styles are invented, transformed, evolved.  Good styles depend upon the adaptation of principles and then validate those principles.  The composition may be poetry or prose, music or dance, sculpture or painting, but the same principles govern: order, structure, and motion; rhythm, melody, and harmony; contrast, conflict and resolution.  These make a symphony or a skyscraper or this page. 

Typeface is a film by Justin Nagan about the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Company and the Wood Type Museum of Two Rivers, Wisconsin.  For about a hundred years, wooden type was the preferred mode for very large printing, from political protest placards to circus posters to billboards, and everything else that required type more than 72 points (1 inch) in size. These letters were larger than your hand, some a foot high. 

The film also ties in the re-birth of the old letter presses, history not just as it was but the adaptation and assumption of traditional tools and media to new expressions, bringing a “crazy growth in letter press printing.”  Students in university graphic arts classes make the pilgrimage to Two Rivers and then apply their insights on Chandler and Price, Steracle, and Vandercook presses.  At the museum, they acquire a three dimensional understanding of letters that is not available from  computerized typesetting.

The bonus features in this disk deliver the nuance and context.  Among them are an extended history of wood type and “The Most Ambitious Type in the World: Louis John Pouchée.” 

When I win the fight with Blogspot, these blogs begin with an opening paragraph in blue Helvetica Bold 12 point.  The body is in Georgia.

Helvetica: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

 “Since millions of people see and use Helvetica every day, I guess I just wondered, "Why?" How did a typeface drawn by a little-known Swiss designer in 1957 become one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words fifty years later? And what are the repercussions of that popularity, has it resulted in the globalization of our visual culture? Does a storefront today look the same in Minneapolis, Melbourne and Munich? How do we interact with type on a daily basis? And what about the effects of technology on type and graphic design, and the ways we consume it? Most of us use computers and digital fonts every day, so are we all graphic designers now, in a sense?” 

Also on Necessary Facts 

Documentation is Specification
Art & Copy 
Objectified, a film about design by Gary Hustwit
The Genius of Design

Hacking Computer Security: BSides Austin 2013

The 3-1/2 day event  (March 20-23) kicked off with a screening at the Paramount Theater of Code 2600, Jeremy Zerechak’s documentary about the origins and present reality of computer hacking and privacy issues.  The festival officially began the next morning at the Wingate by Wyndham in Round Rock.  Registration was $10 per day for the official 2-day event.  The movie was extra.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and beer (courtesy of New Republic Brewing of College Station) came with the price of admission. Conference schwag included t-shirts and complicated ballpoint pens. Other giveaways and door prizes were plentiful. Officially closing Friday at 5:00 PM,. an after-party and Saturday field trip to Texas A&M’s Disaster City training center capped the hacking holiday of hard work.

Star Trek theme with
Command for the volunteers,
Blue for attendees
and some Redshirts.

Special two-day games included a lockpicking contest, a social engineering challenge, and “capture the flag.” 

Lockpicking is a traditional cultural aspect of hacking.  The practical side for computer security professionals is that business managers typically hang five dollar locks on server racks with millions of dollars of data: you need to know your exposed risks.

“Social engineering” is the engagement of hapless intermediaries as tools to reveal and expose software and hardware. The two-day challenge was limited to the hotel and the adjacent shopping center: the residential neighborhood with its homes, day care, school, and senior center, was off limits. 

“Capture the flag” involves a server loaded with typical applications. The defense team must keep the system up and running while offense teams attempt to break in.

Sponsors included RackSpace, Digital Defense Inc., Visible Risk, RSA, Rapid 7, Palo Alto Networks, Mandiant, ISSA of Texas, Pwnie Express, Security Innovation, Tenable, The Denim Group, Milton (providers of shwagg), Last Pass, Haking, the International Association of Forensic Investigators, Longhorn Lockpicking, and New Republic Brewery of College Station. Also mentioned were "Protect Your Nuts" and "Kommand && Kontrol: Revenge of the Carders."

Money was collected for two charities, "Hackers in Uganda" and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, via the sale of conference buttons.  EFF is famous for protecting and extending rights in cyberspace.  "Hackers in Uganda" is to be a film by Jeremy Zerechak.

Friday lunch: about half of the 175+
attendees sat in the big room.

BSides San Antonio will be held in May, DFW in November. (BSides Texas here). 

Summaries and reviews of talks delivered follow below.

(Much of this presentation began as posts to the Group64 and the Austin Tech Geeks local groups on LinkedIn.)

Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe.

Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris is a narrative rhapsody honoring amateur astronomy.  You do not need even a telescope to be blessed by the wonder of the skies.  City lights are not a barrier.  Certainly, a large telescope deep in the countryside, above the surrounding landscape is best. Building your own observatory is the epitome of the hobby. But for anyone, anywhere, passion and patience deliver the rewards.  Seeing in the Dark is about the people whose love and work open the universe for themselves and others. 

John Dobson built large, rugged, cheap telescopes that he set up on the streets of San Francisco for onlookers.  He did not invent the Dobsonian Reflector, but he popularized it; and now hundreds of stargazers enjoy instruments that would have been the envy of professionals a hundred years ago. Here is the deeper lesson: you do not need the Wilson Observatory at Mount Palomar to discover the skies for yourself – and even to publish work of academic quality – because the pioneers of astronomy from Galileo forward did not have such tools. 

THE PBS DVD

Galileo, Kepler, Caroline Herschel and hundreds of others all relied on telescopes that were severely under-powered – arguably mere toys – compared to today’s instruments.  Many of them were amateurs because astronomy was not an academic profession until late in the 19^th century.  Today, astronomy is one of the few endeavors of scientific exploration and discovery where amateurs contribute significantly to the work of professionals.  (Numismatics is another: more on that later.) 

Ferris warns that some tension does exist, as amateurs occasionally do not care about or understand the astrophysics of the objects they see, track, photograph, and measure.  Largely, though, the working relationship is one of mutual admiration and appreciation.  Amateurs are free to devote themselves to work that professionals cannot afford to do. 

Amateurs and professionals carry out the same work with the same tools: telescopes, cameras, spectroscopes, and more, including even radio telescopes that bring information about the universe from far beyond the sadly narrow visible band.

The book version of Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris (Simon & Schuster, 2002), was followed by a PBS presentation in 2007.  The movie is better. 

The Book

The book is padded with basic astronomical information about the planets and stars that appears in every astronomy book.  The print version of Seeing in the Dark is a long narrative, devoid of pictures.  So, while Ferris told me everything I already knew about The Great Red Spot of Jupiter (and many facts that I did not), I had to goto Wikipedia to learn what a Richey-Chrétien telescope is and to bolster my limited understanding of the Cassegrain reflector. 

The PBS website for Seeing in the Dark (here) is replete with supporting articles, how-to guides, and biographies of accomplished amateurs (few of whom appear in the book, which introduces others). Of course, the PBS website also gives helpful links to Local Societies, Books, Videos, Magazines, Websites to Explore, resources on “Astronomy & the Arts” a Glossary and much more.  Perhaps chief among them are the links on astrophotography.

Looking through a telescope is at once startling, edifying, and disappointing.  We are treated to images from the Hubble space telescope.  You are not going to look through a $500 five-inch (130 mm) reflector and see an 8x10 color glossy print of the Andromeda Galaxy.  But you will see pretty much what it really looks like – or looked like 2.5 million years ago even before our ancestors stopped dragging their knuckles -  because when you look into space, you always look back into time.  And more to the point, amateurs who are accomplished and gifted viewers do measure up even against the great Hubble.  

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Perfect Machine

The Scientific Method

Cosmos: A Spacetime Travesty

Measuring Your Universe

Images from SXSW 2013

Another day and night of fun and splendor as 6th and Congress remains the focal point of energy in downtown Austin. On Saturday, March 15, Oliver and Wilder Lee moved across the street. Balafon player Abou Sylla returned from last year. The Yellow Roses returned from yesterday. The Magician and Sonia did not. 

A rapper with his own videographer and a portable generator to power the sound took up the northeast corner. The valets at Ruth'sChris could not park in their garage because a pianist and his lively and talented skittle band blocked the entrance. Also making a video of some sort, a fake priest declaimed to his cast of actors and actresses about "The Church" (whatever he might have meant about that.) As the night ground along, the crowd flowed back and forth more quickly and also slid down the socio-economic scale. I finally had to warn a mild vagrant and his really nice dog that they were not going to sleep in the doorway of Brooks Brothers. 

Oliver on bass and Wilder Lee with banjo and percussion

The flash is connected to the camera ...

Thursday, March 14, was "Camera Day." Cameras are common enough at SXSW, of course, but the shutterbugs swarmed the streets with equipment closer to field artillery than to anything you carry in your pocket.  This was a professional shoot. They took about 50 clicks with her sitting and then standing on the corner in "Vogue" poses.

The camera is connected to the flash over the model

YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS,

a gentlemen's club

Right space; wrong time. He missed the Yellow Roses.

Sonia was more interesting with eight knives stuck in the box.
She assisted her father with his magic tricks.

Even blindfolded Sonia can see what is behind her.
She actually missed this one: Dad's fault of course.

These were some of the people who worked the intersection of 6th and Congress on Thursday.  Blues and bluegrass, rock or skittle, tuba, xylophone, acoustic and electric, break dancing, no corner goes unoccupied for long.  These shots were possible only in the moments when the on-lookers were sparse.  To get me to work, we just waited for traffic to stall and did a "fire drill." Later, on my way to a bus stop after work, I found the poet Bill Keys up a block, once again surrounded by girls. (Oh, why I did choose technical writing?)  

Friday the 15th Abou Sylla plays the balafon

Saturday the 16th
Signing the "Charity Life" tour bus (www.MyCharityLife.com)
This is basically a clearing house for small and local charities.
You can pledge as little as $5. Your favorite charities save
the burden of administrative staff.

Saturday the 16th "Chico Chico" plays "Puttin' on the Ritz"

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

South by Southwest 2013

South by Southwest 2012

Formulas for Success

Austin at Night

Around Austin

Happy Pi Day 2013

That we celebrate Pi Day is curious. Granted, e = 2.71828… does not lend itself well to February 71 or the 27^th day of the 18^th month, whereas March 14 exists and finds millions of kids in school mathematics classes.  Yet our fascination with Pi – versus the speed of light, Planck’s Constant, G, or anything else – may speak to a basic belief that reality is not just easy to understand: it is fun. 

You can make a pretty good compass from a length of string and a thumbtack. In ancient Egypt, geometers were called “arpedonapti”, those who knot ropes.  (Garden of Archimedes at the University of Firenze (Florence) Italy in English here.)  You can make a right angle by knotting any convenient length of string into a 3-4-5 triangle. With a known right angle, much else can be drawn and thereby computed.  This was important to the Egyptians because the annual flooding of the Nile erased boundary lines.  

The compass is more reliable, precise, and accurate than a knotted rope. The inventor that instrument has been lost to time.  We can call him "Daedalus" for convenience.  Clearly, the architect’s compass (bow compass or divider) had to have been a specific and sophisticated invention. The earliest known is from the 6^th century BCE.  Wikipedia on the Drafting Compass.  Wikipedia on the Divider Caliper.  The invention of formal geometry is credited to Thales of Miletus. Pythagoras of Samos was a near contemporary. This was also the time when philosophy was supplanting religion for explanations, when coinage was replacing commodities as stores of value, and when hereditary rulers were replaced first by tyrants and then oligarchies and democracies. Those were heady times

By the European Middle Ages, the importance of builders (masons) made the compass a symbol for God’s work and order within the universe. 

William Blake's Ancient of Days
from Wikimedia commons

The opinion that a benevolent God placed us within His creation was different from the classical view that life is unpredictable because even the gods cannot change the work of the Fates, three blind sisters who spin, measure, and cut the threads of our lives.  In our postmodernist era, we have fallen back to that pagan view, perhaps best stated by Albert Einstein.  While he denied that God plays dice, he felt that the universe is stranger than we can imagine.  That may well be true – and it may also explain some aspect of our fixation on pi.  It is at once understandable and unpredictable. 

Yet, paradoxically, formulas to generate pi are known.  (See the presentation on “Machin’s Formula” by Dr. Milan Milanović here.)  Interestingly, you can find the nth digit of pi without knowing the preceding numbers.  (See "Fun Facts" from the mathematics department of Harvey Mudd College here. )

One Million Digits of Pi: http://www.piday.org/million/

Four Million Digits of Pi: http://zenwerx.com/projects/pi-digits/pi/

Previously on Necessary Facts:

Patterns in Pi

“Slow Down and Think” by Daniel Kahneman reviewed here.

She's Such a Geek!
Visualizing Complex Data

SXSW 2013

South by Southwest is iconic. Music is the core experience, but much more is associated and affiliated from Interactive computing to a Film Festival with multiple venues. Technically not an SXSW event Bill Gates was here to dedicate a new computer engineering lab at UT.  As a security guard posted to 6th Street and Congress Avenue, SXSW comes to me.

Bill Keys writes poetry on the spot.

Round here we're all swimmers
Everything that has ever breathed this sweet air
was conceived in a liquid medium
Blood is smarter than the nerve
              the heart quicker than the brain
Swimming is more sensitive than a jog.

Photographers are ubiquitous.  I like to take snapshots, too.  I wonder what they see that I do not.  Of course, I see them: gangs, droves, clubs, and clutches of them.  Austin is no more or less photogenic than any other town, but they are here for SXSW.  My ex taught me that the best camera is the one you have with you right now; and so, therefore, the best subject is the one before you.

Posed, but nice.

My buildings are the Scarbrough and Littlefield, both built in 1910 and both competing to be the tallest -- but, by law, no taller than the State Capitol Dome.  That has changed, but the Art Deco of the Scarbrough and the Beaux Arts of the Littlefield draw photographers.

SARAH, A PEDICAB

Pedicabs work for tips and they are regulated by the city.  They are limited by law in where they can go and what they can charge. Austin is a one-party people's republic, politically like Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Portland.  The city council just outlawed disposable plastic bags.  So, now the stores give away plastic bags even larger and thicker than the old ones, very undisposable.  And paper.  Lots of paper. The Austin City Council chose to chop up the Amazon, rather than drain Saudi Arabia.  Moral choice are so difficult...  But, that aside, pedicabs may be the sine qua non of capitalism.

Pedicabs wait out the rain at Halcyon coffee shop

In the late 1600s, in London, bank runners were supposed to carry papers from place to place.  However, they stopped at coffee shops and there they exchanged their notes.  This was the origin of the merchant banking clearinghouse as we know it today.  The same coffee shops also gave birth to the insurance industry.  It was at the Lloyd's Coffee House in 1688 (the year of the Glorious Revolution), that news of shipping was posted, bringing in the modern insurance industry.

Previously on NecessaryFacts:
Images from SXSW 2013
South by Southwest 2012
Stadtluft Macht Frei
Around Austin
Austin at Night

Thank You Notes

“Thank you” is rare enough, even by email. If you want to stand out, send a handwritten note. Even if you practice often and own a passel of pens, it takes time. Making time says that you honor the recipient. You can improve your handwriting with a browse through a calligraphy book and some practice on scratch paper. You can spend 89 cents each on a three-pack of fiber calligraphy pens or you can invest $890 in a Mont Blanc fountain pen.

Fountain Pen Geeks
www.fpgeeks.com
conventions, product reviews, chat and more

You can go to extremes with paper or rely on a basic 25% cotton sheet.  Fine laid 100% cotton or linen are always nice, but not always perceived for what they are.  Be aware that some modern parchment finish or other fineries take modern inks differently. Covers (envelopes) are another parameter.  The U.S. Postal Service democratically treats all envelopes equally – by machine.  Therefore, anything oddly sized or shaped costs extra. 

https://www.pencollectorsofamerica.com/
fountain pens for kids, and much more

Sometimes, I am able to ask the USPS counter clerk for commemoratives.  Commemorative stamps celebrate special events that you might like.  (The "regular" stamps are called "definitives" to philatelists.)  If you know a local coin store that is a member of the American Numismatic Association, they often have sheets of old stamps at a discount, 80% or 90% of face value.  It is nice to be able to celebrate baseball, national parks, space exploration, or whatever else ignites your passions.

The important consideration is how the message is received. If you care enough to make the effort, it will show in the final product.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
A Man's Home is His Market
Capitalist Culture