{ 2002.08.16 } I love the Froy Marriage Test.

{ } I very very much want to visit Diggerland.

{ } New in notes: A fairly incoherant and rushed rant about patents, trying to figure out why patents used to be okay but in the world of software make no sense at all. Including some rather convoluted mushroom metaphor.

{ } The Naked Face [via kottke]: lengthy, readable, article on facial expressions being tied to emotions. Two main surprises for me were that expressions are universal and very finely grained, and that exercising the muscles involved in certain faces can cause the emotions they represent (I wonder what the evolutionary pressures behind these two points are). Also: the face-reading abilities of Tomkins and the subject of microexpressions.

{ } What Can Be Patented: Any person who "invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent".

{ 08.15 } ActiveBuddy's Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers. Oho. So ActiveBuddy, commercial Instant Messaging 'bot agency, now have Patent 6,430,602 on (among other things): running a bot on an IM network to talk to really people; loadbalancing the processing; using the IM channel to form a simple kind of authentication to the www; having a presentation layer to use the same back-end to talk to many IM systems.

I find it difficult to dispute the patent because within the rules of the system that granted the patent, everything is fine. But a system that grants a patent that consists of well-understood components and patterns previously practiced and obvious, a system that does that has to be wrong. I've built IM bots. I admire ActiveBuddy's services, and I admire their scripting language. It's clever. But it's not revolutionary. It's been done before. Hell, I've done a lot of it before, and I'm just another not-very-good Perl hacker. All they've done is facade it with agency-speak and move it into the commerical arena.

And here's what fucking riles me. Their USP, the thing they and they alone have, the thing they really should be protected -- it's got fuck all to do with the technology. It's about their sales team, their PR machine, their position in the sector. They're doing very well. If I had the funding, I could start a company tomorrow to do what they do and quite possibly do it better. But I wouldn't beat them because they're established, and you don't need a patent to protect that. You just need to carry on working hard. Looks like they want to sit back.

{ 08.14 } Just read, non-fiction: Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst (at Amazon.co.uk, with good reviews). Best anything, bar everything, about typography I've every read. Typeface history, classification, fine-grained style-guide, book design, font choice, all with spectacular detail, explanations, in an exceptionally easy to read book (high recommendations also come from a friend who knows far more about this kind of thing than me). I'm now looking at the type around me thinking: hm, rationalist axis, hm, why did they choose that, what does it mean. Seriously, any book which suggests that picking an American typeface for a Mexican book is insensitive, or using a ligature invented only in the last thousand years for an Ancient Greek history is stupid -- any book that talks about that is worth reading.

{ } Just read, fiction: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (at Amazon.co.uk). It's an incredible book, highly recommended, fulfilling my need for human focussed sci-fi completely. Without spoilers: The best thing about the book is that if it was a film the story would be obvious, but it's so well written, so well paced, the rhythm picks you and echoes of story elements combine to move you forward and suspend disbelief completely. One of those books that stopped me talking for a while. (I'm told that this isn't just a fluke and that Orson Scott Card is a fine author, kdickian but with a more social perspective.)

{ } In depth critique of Starship Troopers - book and film - covering the politics of both. The novel's been attacked for being too right wing, this critique argues against that. (Anyone who's talked to me about work recently knows about my Technical Implementation/ Mobile Infantry parallels. I'm taken with the idea of being a domain expert wielded by someone else. The chain of command protects you from dealing with unreasonable requests from external sources and lets you get on with your job, while it guarantees you'll be allowed to do the Right Thing and trusts you to make your own domain choices.)

{ } A duck quacks in English, but a French duck says "coin coin". More animals, more languages at Sounds of the World's Animals. Worth it entirely for the recording of a zebra which has to be the bizarrest noise I've heard.

{ } Mac OS X User Experience developer's site [via scribot]. Interesting, especially for the Windows/Mac OS X differences. (The Human Interface Guidelines are also there for download as a PDF. The metaphors chapter especially is worth a read, to see the level of consistency Apple place on nouns/verbs and interface actions.)

{ } Great photos at Slower.net [via prolific], mainly of the out-and-about variety. Click the photos for galleries.

{ 08.13 } Bitterly funny, Get Your Exx On: "I wonder what would happen if you literally had to fill up your gas tanks with the bones of killed and raped people in order to make your car run?" (If you've ever said the www would never produce as good and biting satire as the golden age, read now.)

{ } Armadillo Aerospace is "a small research and development team working on computer-controlled hydrogen peroxide rocket vehicles, with an eye towards X-Prize class vehicle development in the coming years", and led (bizarrely) by John Carmack who created first-person shooters Doom and Quake. We live in a world of super-geniuses who can turn their hand to anything, from video games to rocket science. Ultra weird. Very 2003. It's a good job Carmack isn't eeevil. (Or maybe he is. We'll find out when all the geeks lift off to their secret spacestation and start bombarding the earth with contagious bacteria to wipe out the weak of Humanity RC1, to make them submit to the Golden Masters.)

{ 08.12 } The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, both past and recent [via As Above]. Superb.

See also: The Antique Vibrator Museum. Hand cranked? Crikey. But alas no vibrator electric chairs as used by doctors.

{ } First mention of Y2K problem on Usenet, and also a very funny anecdote about how two engineers coped with a similar problem in around 1980.

{ } Time-binding: " In 1921, Alfred Korzybski, a mathematician and scientist, classified Life with precise and accurate operational definitions of plants, animals, and humans. He defined the plants as energy-binders, the animals as space-binders, and we humans as time-binders".

Three things. One! Time-binding is what makes humans unique. Time is what we operate in. It's the axis that gives us our power. All other axis are symmetric; actions and behaviour are symmetric across physical location. Two! The theory of time-binding can produce a system of ethics, a morality that can scale up to global levels. Three! Korzybski, after defined time-binding, developed general semantics, a philosophy based on modern science that understands implicitly the important of language, knowledge and time.

{ } Why Systems Fail and Problems Sprout Anew, a review of the book Systemantics, including John Gall's Basic Systems Axioms. (I'd like to read the book, especially if it has anything to say about human and automatic processes, and how to replace systems.)

See also: Ray Ozzie's essay Why?, from the creator of massively popular collaborative software on why such software is desirable. Along the way he hits social dynamics and how to construct incentives to encourage participation in the collaborative space (and the software is all about replacing, or augmenting, ad-hoc processes with automatic ones. Extrememly hard). I like what he calls the OHIO principal: "if information must be entered in two places, it won't be" [Only Handle Information Once].

It occurs to me that the shift from one-to-one data entry/retrieval (traditional software) to collaborative software is bigger than it might first appear. The fact that the information has to be shared, sorted and merged means that the information entered has to be regarded as a form of input, that is, something that changes the behaviour of the computer, instructions. Usually only the mouse and keyboard are used for input, and the documents don't constitute behaviour-changing instructions on their own -- but collaborative software changes this and suddenly the computer becomes a high bandwidth input/output device, rather than just a recording machine. That shift from low to high bandwidth input makes the software hard to build, even without the social dynamic.

{ } This is a Magazine is a magazine, on the www (requires Flash). It's brilliant, and beautiful.

{ } I'm not sure how politically correct today's Upsideclown is, but it's certainly an interesting image. Victor wants to Beat the Mongol: "Running against children with various strains of palsy posed very few problems".