thursday, april 12, 2007
Oil wells, containerization, trains, love
When I saw Edward Burtynsky’s pictures of oil fields and containers a couple years ago, I knew that he had taken the pictures I’d been thinking about since I was a little girl staring out the car window at oil wells that looked like dinosaurs. Doug likes odd industrial things too, so we went to UCSB’s screening of Manufactured Landscapes, which turns Burtynsky’s pictures and picture-making process into a quiet and wonderful narrative.
A few days later, we visited the Goleta Depot railroad museum, which has one real exhibit: a neat old caboose. Next door, you can buy reproductions of lemon packing labels, homemade persimmon jam, and little xeroxed pamphlets that explore Santa Barbara County history.
Then we wandered around California and looked at oil wells.
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tuesday, april 10, 2007
You may draw your own conclusions
I like learning about infographics, but the ones I make don’t live up to my glorious visions. Here’s one that represents my first two years (six quarters; half the planned total) of college education, if I finish all the work for my classes this quarter:
More explanation: “4 unit” means a complete, regular class and “2 unit” means an incomplete, student-taught, or otherwise less-work-required class (only 4-unit classes count toward requirements). The lines between classes represent a relationship in their subject matter, such as I read a few of the same texts for both these classes, Knowledge from this class was useful in that one, or These classes covered different aspects of the same topic.
This chart is useful for me. It says I haven’t completed enough literature classes, but I collect half-credit computer science classes. My classes have no overarching theme except curiosity about humans and their activities; they’re a little miscellaneous. Most of my classes don’t resemble my vague career plans. I enjoy having this “college” excuse to learn things, and I like playing with Omnigraffle.
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tuesday, march 27, 2007
Excerpts from my moleskine, part II
Here’s some of what I’ve written in my notebook, both so I can find it later and so you can read it. See the first part of this series.
Draw, you rogue, for though it be night, yet the moon shines. I’ll make a sop o’ the moonshine of you. You whoreson cullionly barbermonger, draw!
From King Lear, Act II, scene 2.
Some of my notes on a talk by Steven Pinker:
Swearing is an emotional weapon; it invokes the supernatural, scatology, disease/death, sexuality, and disfavored people, and uses poetic devices to engage the listener.
The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by the glows of algebra and abstraction.
From The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, page 24.
A professor visiting my CCS history class said that educational experiments never fail. People get interested and excited, try to make it work, overlook imperfections, put in effort — even if the idea behind the experience isn’t very good — so they learn a lot.
Real ladybugs don’t look much like some of the symbols that represent them; “friendly” bugs get anthropomorphized pretty heavily. Many pictures of ladybugs apply baby-mammal-like proportions to the defining features of their insecthood. Compare this to symbols representing spiders.
(Excellent sticker courtesy of Nasty Nets. And not actually in my moleskine, but relevant:)
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sunday, march 25, 2007
Today I met a bunch of internet friends
This morning Doug and I went to BarcampLA (an event where nerds get together to be nerdy) and livemoblogged with the great and revered John Wiseman, which generated content like the following picture of a double-twittervision moleskine-note-taking session:
Then we listened to several self-promotional presentations, including a couple of amusing ones, and talked to neat people. Doug and I are probably going back tomorrow for more.
In the evening, we maneuvered over to Chinatown for some Nasty Nets Art Show Fun and were rewarded with grade-A surfing selections of YouTube and Flickr and other lovely artworks as well. I met some of the lovely members themselves, and after dinner and further intra-city maneuverings, it was dance-talk party time, nerds-only-style (no dancing required). There were cheetos (cheetoes?) involved. Also fun (fun?).
I think it is late at night (early in the morning? (4:30 am?)) and I will go to sleep now (before I write any more).
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thursday, february 22, 2007
Reading for learning various things
Books I have re-read or read or am-reading recently:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte — re-read because my New Media professor assigned an article titled “Cornerstones, Pillars, and Pitfalls of Charting” (written in the 1960’s) and I had to give myself an antidote. It reminded me to use circles, not squares, to represent places on a map I am making for the class, and to make street lines thinner:
I first read that book a few years ago, and I felt how good it looked: soft and proud and correct. Now I know a little bit about small-caps and linespacing, and some of its typographical magic is lost in semi-jaded half-conscious analysis.
The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker — the only non-assigned fiction that I remember reading and enjoying in the past year or two, which is probably because its subject is minutiae (shoelaces, soda straws, footnotes, memory). I like how the book archives things that are now archaic: record players, backless park benches, and grooveless escalator steps, among others. People who are older than me remember those things, like they remember the references in old Bob Dylan songs, but they are less likely to tell me about ancient perceptions of the Rite-Aid brand than to explain a lyric associated with old emotions.
The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan — I got this from the library today and read it all at once. I found it laying face-down on the shelf, with an unlabeled spine; I picked it up, and it surprised me. Of course this book would be full of interspersed and full-bleed images of all kinds, strangely large Helvetica, and clever page-turns, but I didn’t realize any of that before I looked inside. Of course! Anyway, now I know what people mean when they talk about this guy as a prophet; I read him as bursting with joy about the potential of the Web in 2007 when he was thinking about the potential of television and telephones in 1967. One of the best parts of this book is the comments in the margins by other students:
I have started reading Type & typography: highlights from Matrix, the review for printers and bibliophiles. I requested the book through InterLibraryLoan because Design Observer linked to it, and today my copy arrived here from — where else? — The University of San Francisco. I miss that city. The first article in this collection tells some history of the tension between beauty and utility in typography; I think the articles about setting math and music and bibles and Bengali will be more interesting.
