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The Wizard of Op
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Ed Emberley is online! Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing recently posted about children's artist/author Ed Emberley. I loved Emberley's book The Wizard of Op when I was a kid. It's full of eyeball-twisting optical illusions.
Yesterday morning I picked up the newspaper outside my door and saw this: Woah, hold onto your brains! Zombie Crisis in the Vatican! Anyway, after I took it out of the wrapper, the full picture emerged. Don't things like this make you wonder if the people doing front-page layout are awake, asleep, or trying to make us spit our coffee all over the paper?
I just finished reading The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around . This one is for a class, so it's outside the range of my usual reading list. Basically it's a manifesto on how computers could be made easier to use by making them more "human-centric" -- fitting the computer system to the way people need to use them, instead of forcing people to learn how to work to fit the computer.
The author, Michael Dertouzos, was head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, so his examples are filled with his own actual experiences using (guinea pigging?) experimental computer applications developed by colleagues. There's a flight-reservation system that operates on speech recognition technology instead of keyboard input, and a "meaning processor" that attempts to spider information as you use it and tag meaning on your behalf to create an ever-expanding index.
The ideas are interesting, but they
Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy . Last weekend I was in Maryland for a ColdFusion conference. I detest traveling alone. It throws me into a survival-level tension, where I obsess over where my next meal is coming from. I find myself swimming through a crowd of strangers from one session to the next, and I am too busy coping to be more than marginally sociable. Chit-chat I can handle, but I eat alone.
So when I discovered a Barnes and Noble down the street from the hotel, I was giddy. A safe place that felt like home, where I could hang out for the rest of the evening after dinner. I browsed through summer reading, bestsellers, Gibson and Gaiman, but I ended up buying this book. My excuse was that I didn't use cash, I used a gift card that was a birthday present. And after a full day of tech talk, I needed to balance my brain. As the Pythons would say, "And now for something completely different."
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