Analog by Night

About 15 minutes in Virgina shows Hedy for the third or fourth time as an example of glamour, and then drops the anecdote that she invented spread spectrum technology. According to Wikipedia she’s a co-inventor. Damn.

Let Virginia tell it.

Does anybody even bother asking why ENOUGH times?

Why is Google on top? Search
Why is search so important? People have questions and search is one way of getting answers? (there are legion other ways, including browse, invention, and non sequitur)
Why are answers so valuable? They are the most rational, comprehensible way of alleviating the emotional anxiety that questions pose. (There are other ways of responding to that anxiety–that curiosity; they include emotional manipulation, distraction, emergence of new questions, irrelevance.)

My point is this. Search is not Googles only weapon. Of equal and possibly greater import is the I feel Lucky option.
The human being is not simply a robot serving only the immediate need for a rational response to a tactical query, but a complex organic milieu of emotion, novelty, irrational exuberance and defiance, and technology, however traditionally rational in its iterative design, is not the last best pattern, but the first pattern made by those very confused and fleshy organisms that work at google. In our lifetime, the simplistic binary nature of computing will seem laughable, and people will be reminded that that binary mathematics it is based on is nearly as old as electricity itself.

Should the designers choose, it is merely a tight left turn, on the order of a decade or less of work, for any person to author that irrational machine, and it is the pattern of humans to appeal to it as they may with all, or other faculties than the rational. We shouldn’t be looking for the next rational predictor, we should be loooking for the pattern maker, the Lakoff+”rapid prototype” that allows us to home construct our own frames, and our own rose colored search/browse/I-feel-lucky result set.

Emotion is hot on the heels of the purely cognitive gen 1 one of the computing experience, exploration, and challege will be next.

Think of google’s ” were you looking for..” suggesting something interesting rather than relevant. Also see “design for debate”, and you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

I’ve long been fascinated with the myth and reality of Los Angeles. I am reading an article about Helen Gurley Brown (author Sex and the Single Girl, cosmopolitan magazine), and I came across thus quote about the city of her maturation, “There is no better place on Earth to live (or die) by your wits than Los Angeles…”
Quote by Caitlin Flanagan

Based on my one visit, vicarous years through two friends, the writing of Bret Easton Ellis, and endless portrayals by Holywood; I say, “nicely put.”

Sat in my room in the afternoon watching Slacker. It made me nostalgic for Lexington, and Frankfort KY before it. Doesn’t make me want to move to Austin though. I’m sure Seattle was Austin-like at some point.

Where am I now, what am I doing now. I think I started working so that I could play, now i’ve worked my way into this dirty corner thinking that if I play, if I stay up all night, the next day the light-blue collar ghost might set my income into decay.

People find it funny when I make strange metaphors in meetings. They say, where do you get these thoughts, and I’m always struck by the experience that I’m made magical because what is outside of work for me is not simply dinner, friends, a family and home. Frankly i really have little of those anyway, but deep culture. Deep reference. I have a connection, however noological, to the deep shared experiences of my culture. My experience is that of a librarian of the flatlands. Life in the map.

The New York Times has a pretty cool interactive infographic on how people (Americans as presumed by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics) spend their time.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Notice that it doesn’t say anything like “Discussing today’s NPR topics” “Preparing locavore ethnic cuisines for 12,” “p-patching” or any of that “Stuff White People Like“  Getting to know the statistical reality of your home is way more important and interesting that practicing the clever navigation of your extremely like-minded social nest.

Reading is also nowhere to be found on this graph.