I have been running some in-home discussion groups for a design project recently. The ebb and flow of context is just so interesting to me and highlights the challenges of getting “all” the information.

[none of this is verbatim]

Q: If you and your wife own one iPod, how do you determine who is going to use it?
A: Well, for commuting, it’s either the iPod, or the New Yorker.

Two scenarios are likely:
1. She takes the iPod on the train and he drives their lovely car, a New Yorker.
2. Whoever takes the iPod gets music, and the spouse gets to read the most recent issue of the New Yorker magazine.

There’s always the clarification question: “When you say ‘New Yorker’ are you referring to the car or the magazine?” but in this case, we didn’t get to ask that, and I was confused at the time. It’s clearer looking at the video that they are talking about the magazine.

Later on, the same guy (still talking about iPods) tells us “Well, when you do that, it looks more Zen. It actually looks like the competition.” and moments later another participant adds “Yes, it’s like he says, very Zen, very Japanese, very spiritual.”

But that’s not at all what he meant. He meant another type of MP3 player, the Creative Zen.

I understood what he meant, at the moment, but the other person, didn’t. And it wasn’t possible in the flow of things to clarify (and maybe not even necessary).

I have powerful memories of being in Mr. Collison’s grade 6 class, and seeing him do this sort of thing all the time – missing a word or a piece of context of what someone said and riffing on it, in entirely the wrong direction. It really made me squirm in my seat to see all this miscommunication around me and have to keep quiet, or at best, wait to offer my insight. I wonder if other people notice this stuff and are as stimulated/aggravated/curious as I am?

CB2 offers a number of Buddha-themed decorator items, presumably for a broader audience than just Buddhists, who might regard this as a religious symbol. For others, it’s simply chic (or kitsch).

Why is it okay to do this with Buddha, but not Mohammed? Or even Jesus (who is kitschy, but not chic)?

The reports (and slow-to-appear-details for those of us that read RSS headlines) of yesterday’s gunman-rampage in Montreal raised an interesting detail question: how do we consider the loss of life of the perpetrator of a crime?

When I read that some asshole goes charging into a school with a gun, I don’t care what happens to him (except that he is stopped). If he commits suicide or is killed by police, does he get included in the total of dead?

If a suicide bomber detonates an explosive belt in the middle of a crowded marketplace, do we count her as well?

Headlines tell us “XX dead in Baghdad suicide bomb” or “Shooting rampage leaves Y people dead.” Do you expect the total to include only victims?

I’m not suggesting what is right, only what we are conditioned to expect. Perhaps there are some journalistic standards for accuracy here. Perhaps they vary by region. The headlines from Montreal are emphasizing that two people are dead, but one of those is the shooter.

It’s not even a moral judgement of the value of life, but just a reaction to the story “Oh my God – what happened – how many people were killed?” that focuses strongly on the victims of the crime.

Just some thoughts on mulitiple perspectives buried within a story…

Stones ticket prices take a plunge

“I feel like they’ve kind of been mailing it in for a while,” says Steve Portigal, who in ’92 started the first Stones Internet discussion group, www.under-cover.net. “I used to fend off comments about the band being too old, but I’m embarrassed to say I’ve changed my mind about that.”

It’s not word-for-word what I said, but I guess it’s close enough. And a little different than the previous Boston Globe quotes (here, here).

I’m feeling eagerness and trepidation over the upcoming Applied Improv Conference. Eagerness because I find improv has enormous potential for creativity and collaboration (and even connections to ethnography) and discussions of improv can be provocative and intellectually invigorating.

And trepidation over whether this event will be filled with earnest, clowny, extroverted, unprofessional flakes where I’ve just got no common ground.

We have an exciting Plenary Session planned for Wednesday evening with Nika Quirk of InterPlay.
InterPlay means “interaction” and what could be better to kick off a conference? InterPlay is easy, fun, and life changing. It is based in a series of incremental “forms” that lead participants to movement and stories, silence and song, ease and amusement. In the process, we unlock the innate wisdom of our bodies and in our relationships.

Nika Quirk is a lifelong mover and student of dance, starting with her interest in wiggling to TV jingles at age 3. She founded and directed a Dance Choir using authentic movement and a collaborative choreography process she developed. Completing the yearlong InterPlay Leadership Program in 1997, she earned certification in the methodology and has focused her application of InterPlay in small groups, individual coaching, and “labs” exploring business partnership. Nika’s career spans law, business management, non-profit program development, academic teaching and professional coaching. In August, she began a doctoral program at California Institute of Integral Studies and is following her curiosity about the connections between improvisational ability and social creativity.

I guess it’s up to me to bring some open-mindedness back and cover up my cynicism (which I oh-so enjoy). The conference is local, so no travel costs, and is relatively inexpensive, and is an experiment for me. I’m passing on some of the typical conferences my peers are attending this year (and that I have been regulars at in the past) in order to branch out, but I can feel the tension inside me over that decision.

In yesterday’s mail comes this silly glossy ad ahem magazine from Farmer’s (our insurance company) entitled you belong, with lots of great stories about how quickly they pay up after storm damage and so on.

And to really deliver the feeling that I do indeed belong, comes this highly personalized note from our local agent.

I like the transition from [soft TV voice on] “Please don’t hesitate to contact me. That’s why I’m here.” [soft TV voice off] to the ridiculous dot-matrix font that throws in consumer-irrelevant database numbers like

05968090

directly in my face. Yep, I sure feel like I belong. A real personal connection.

This is a technical failure, a design failure, but also failure of “getting it” – some folks at Farmer’s are missing the point in a serious way.

Metalocalypse is a new animated show on Adult Swim, featuring the ridiculous misadventures of a metal band, DethKlok. It’s filled with lots of irony and post-irony (as only can be done with rock music, especially heavy metal). Co-created by Brendon Small of the excellent (and improv-rich, at least Season 1) Home Movies. Home Movies had frequent knowing rock-and-roll winks and beyond; this series takes that theme full-bore.

And speaking of themes, YouTube (yes, a post about YouTube, including YouTube links. roll your eyes, everyone) has a number of examples of folks playing the Metalocalypse theme.

Not surprising that guitarists would learn and perform their own version, but still neat!

On Friday I became a first-time uncle as Talia Elyse Todd arrived. We’ll be headed up to Vancouver in a few weeks to check her out!

I’ve been running around evenings and weekends the last few days doing fieldwork. We did find a fun place for a debrief (listed as “Java on Judah” in my GPS) with a gregarious San Francisco-type proprietor.

Sunday was 3 hours of driving, to Bolinas and back, for an all-day faculty retreat for the CCA ID department. Really great session and I feel excited about this and upcoming semesters, but still.

Orinda, BART, Late Night Originally uploaded by DCVoyager.



This SF Chron article describes a weird piece of behind-the-scenes infrastructure – the nightly grinding of the rails on the BART system (emphasis here is on reducing the squealing noise but presumably there are other safety and function reasons)

“But we don’t do that. We have to grind the rails.”

And that can be done only in the middle of the night, roughly between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m., when the passenger operation is shut down for the day to allow for track inspections and maintenance. It’s one of the reasons BART doesn’t operate on a 24-hour schedule.

Each night, crews smooth about 1 mile of track, just a sliver of the 104-mile system. It sometimes can take a dozen or more passes along one small section to get the track “just right,” said Dave Alves, who has worked the job for eight years.

On a recent night, Alves was the track man. Like a tailor judging a fine piece of fabric, he relies a lot on touch to determine how the track should be reshaped. He creates a grinding pattern based on the track’s marred surface and keys it into a computer that controls 20 grinding stones attached to the belly of a specially made railcar.

“Sometimes we may do 18 or 20 patterns on one piece of rail.”

They’ve got one car to do this task, and it’s a decade old. A new car takes more than a year to build (at a cost of $3M) since the BART rail size/width is non-standard.

Thought this was an interesting process story; the slow, non-automatic, manual nature of the task, and the analogous challenges in creating the tool for this task.

I’m impressed and concerned by these ads for air travel that show the boarding bridge, only. Sitting on board a plane pretty much sucks, so why show that part of your experience? Show what you get, instead, by sitting on a plane – you get to be someplace else. This idea is not new, of course, but the choice to show the physical equipment being used with the deliberate exception of the plane itself is striking. How challenging it would be to try and sell people on the riding-of-planes, rather than the arriving-at-destinations.