Everybody else seems to be doing it, so I’ve put together my rundown of my favorite iPhone apps after a few months of use.  Full listing inside…

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Bad design, particularly industrial design, is a subject I’ve wanted to write something about for a while, but I make it a policy not to talk about design unless I have a proper example as otherwise it turns out much like talking about love:  interesting only for the person talking.  So today I was fortunate to find a truly excellent example of just the kind of bad design I had in mind.

This is the “Helios”, by designer Kim Gu-Han, which recently won “best use of technology” in the 2008 Interior Motives Design Awards.  It looks pretty cool, and it is horrendously terrible ID.

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… each of which, I thought, are an odd combination of reality and fiction.

Left to right: Blixa Bargeld, Sarah Palin, Jemaine Clement, and Don Draper

I think one of the best reasons to become the eccentric commander of a legion of indistinguishable humorless soldiers (and I realize there are many) is that they have to answer your rhetorical questions deadpan.

“Tomorrow is the festival of peace? That’s just too bad, isn’t it..?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We seem to have lost them! Oh well, I wonder what would happen if we were to blow up that clump of trees over there..?”

“Only one way to find out, sir.”

Endless fun.

Maybe you’ve already heard of “HDR” — high dynamic range — photography. As the name suggests, the idea is to capture an image with a very large difference between the darkest dark and brightest bright, rather than flattening dark areas to black or blowing light areas out to white.  In theory, a true HDR system would include a specialized HDR camera, an image format with more dynamic range than normal, and a display device with extraordinary contrast ratio and color bit depth.

All three of those are very complicated and only really understood by imaging professionals who spend most of their time trying to explain it all to people who make cameras, image formats, and display devices.

Fortunately, you can also just apply a couple photoshop filters to a regular digital photograph and simulate the “look” of HDR by flattening the tonal curve of the image into the median range. If you go to flickr.com and search for “HDR”, you’ll get thousands of photos where people have done this.

Here’s an example I made:

Generally I think the HDR version looks like garbage, but the thing is: most people prefer it. It reads as clearer, more colorful, better. As the photographer, I find that really irritating because it’s completely disconnected from what I saw, and because I can see all these little artifacts of the photoshop filter like the soft halo around the building. Anybody can apply a photoshop filter to any old photo.

The point of this post, however, isn’t about photography. It’s about cookies. Read the rest of this entry »

(For my introduction on why exactly I’m using Shinto philosophy and terminology, click here for the preceding post. I may expound on my almost certainly poor interpretation of Shinto philosophy, but for now let me define some useful terms from it.)

As the basis for further essays I’ll be writing, I first want to define two terms that serve as the foundation:

I believe there is a fundamental quantity that can be used to describe and link broad aspects of human progress. Perhaps the closest term for this quantity might be made by stripping away the authoritarian overtone from the word “order” — using it more as the opposite of “entropy” than that of “lawlessness”. But more than that, this quantity is constructiveness, intelligence, elegance, goodness, beauty, and complexity all rolled up together.

I’ve been looking for a single word to describe this broad concept because I think the preceding English words are specific cases of a single thing. All of them have to do with what I think of as progress: of things proceeding in the right and proper way, of optimizing the use of what is available for the greatest good. I think it’s useful to define a word for this because it seems like there are a million arguments about a million topics — politics, morality, business, design, etc. etc. — that I am finding are best approached with the same basis for evaluating what is productive and counterproductive, right and wrong, a benefit or a hindrance.

Fortunately I think there’s one good word for this concept: musubi.

I have read musubi defined as “the spirit of creativity“, but there is a lot more behind the word in Shinto philosophy, with refinements and extensions of the concept that describe how it functions in the world. In its various forms and applications, it seems a very good fit for this concept, this quantity, that I want to discuss. So grasping my new word, I will begin:

I believe that musubi applied to human endeavors defines the magnitude and direction of the arrow of human progress. Great men and women bring more musubi to the world than others. Successful businesses create it and increase their wealth. A well-designed machine is musubi made physical. Great artists clearly express the spirit of musubi in their work. Musubi makes the world go ’round — better living through musubi — Vorsprung durch Musubi the Germans might say. Read the rest of this entry »

Part of the reason I started this webpage was to give me an outlet for some essays centered around a certain concept that I’ve become fairly obsessed with. I’ve been collecting notes for these essays, expanding outward from this central concept, but I’ve been increasingly hindered by one problem: I couldn’t think of a word for it.

This has irritated me to no end for two reasons.  First, that the English language, which I’m kind of a fan of, hasn’t seen fit to develop a word for this concept that I believe to be very important; and second, that it’s damn hard to write about something you don’t have a word for. So to solve the latter problem, I decided to pick a more-or-less arbitrary word, “umami”, for a while simply because it was a word in Japanese for a concept (a fifth taste sensation) that apparently the English language also hasn’t seen fit to develop a single word for. I even started to justify the choice by likening the “meaty” umami flavor to the “meatiness” of topic of my essays, but that just made me more frustrated not less.

I think I’ve found my word however, and in discovering it I learned that I (unsurprisingly) am not the first person to become obsessed with this concept. I was on the right track though because the word is at least in Japanese, and the concept seems to underlie much of Japan’s native religion, Shinto. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I’ve seen a resurgence of the “audiophile product makers are snake-oil dealers” meme. I’m not going to defend any particular make of audiophile product (I don’t know anything about Pear Cable, which has been getting the attention recently) but I do feel compelled to defend audiophile stuff from out-of-hand dismissal, because I hate the false reasoning used by a lot of the critics and because I know from a couple years working at an audiophile store that some of the stuff is honestly pretty amazing.

I think the reason this particular topic draws the kind of debate it does has a lot to do with the nature of our sense of hearing. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve developed a preoccupation with grammar and literary style recently, which is a little weird for an engineer. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading things like Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, I’ve been trying my hand at writing a bit, and I’ve nurtured a deep revulsion of business-world statements like

“we will create go-forward action items offline”

that replace direct statements like

“we will assign responsibilities after the meeting”.

which I suppose people find uncomfortably committal.

Sensing a need, a friend recommended I read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, which is 52 pages of awesome. With headings like “Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form” and “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end”, it’s so succinct that you honestly can improve your writing just by reading the table of contents. The book is filled with ways of choosing words, phrasings, and structures of sentences and paragraphs that inherently keep a reader interested and convey your meaning. It isn’t just about writing correctly; it’s about writing to most economically get what’s in your head into somebody else’s.

Partway through I realized that I was reading the programmer’s guide for the English language; it ought to have a woodcut of an obscure mammal on the front.

Following the rules in Elements of Style takes work, but the book implicitly makes the argument that if you’re not following these rules, you’re wasting your reader’s time and trying his patience. That is, if you don’t decode your ideas into writing that is easily parsed, the reader has to decode it and that extra effort is what drives him away. Your goal as a writer should be to convey your intent as economically and elegantly as possible. This realization tickled something familiar in my brain. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been lucky enough the last few years to have spent quite a bit of time traveling for business, within the US, in Asia, and in Europe. No matter the vast cultural chasms between these places though, I’ve noticed there’s a sort of common rhythm to the business visit: Introductions are made and sympathy given for the frustrations of travel, Business Topics are discussed, and the day is closed with common goals, good intentions, and plans of action.

Then there’s dinner.

Visiting US companies, I always find the dinner part pretty unpleasant. I spend much of the day dreading the evening when I’ll have to pretend to understand football references and find gay jokes amusing, and know I’ll generally come across as unsociable by trying to steer the conversation back to engineering where I feel less awkward. But as I started traveling overseas a lot, I noticed that I enjoyed dinner. Conversation, conducted in the simplified English spoken by basically everybody in the world anymore, was entertaining and engaging.

I began to realize that this had everything to do with the topics that we fell into discussing. When (at least) one side of a conversation is forced to use a second or third language (and the other side must throttle their pace and vocabulary to match), it’s nearly impossible to talk about subtleties and nuance. No, the simplest topics are the big ones, the ones requiring the words everybody knows: love, life, belief, art, food. And this is reinforced by just not having much of the assumed commonality one has with one’s own countrymen; they don’t watch football in mainland China.

Recently I’ve been reading a bit about Versaille during the reign of the Sun King, the political island created by Louis to isolate and impoverish the nobles of France, and thus solidify his power over them. Life at Versaille was an endless dance of ceremony, intrigue, and parties, and the the Sun King set the tempo. Rapid shifts in extravagant fashions ensured that nobles spent all their money on frivolities, and the swirling succession of social events ensured that enemies were kept close, and infighting was maximized. It was a shared, contained, small little world made of nothing but subtlety and nuance, that left no time or resources to engage in substance, unless you were the Sun King.

Similarly, dinners between Americans (and I would assume other countrymen) seem to be dominated by the guy who has mastered the subtleties of the standard small talk between Americans. Once you’re outside Versaille and talking to people of the world, conversation becomes more substantial and less dominated by anybody.

I suck at the dinners with Americans, but I had some of my deepest conversations with nearly complete strangers in Taiwan. I found that really odd at the time.