This entry is really just a pointer to a review of the warrior diet's science claims i did at Begin to Dig, a place where i talk about training. Some folks have asked me why i bothered with this critique, so i thought i'd touch on that here as a "before the blog post" post about a blog.
Because many folks whose training i respect say they practice the warrior diet, i wanted to check it out. It's thumbs down on processed foods and more up on whole foods. It is not unique in this approach. Many folks refer to the emphasis on getting rid of junk food, reducing processed foods of all kinds, and upping whole foods from veggies to legumes "eating clean." Clarence Bass has an entire series of books dedicated to this approach to eating.
So what is unique in this diet since eating clean is taken care of? and why did that end up being so annoying i had to write a big fat review?
The packaging is pretty special.
Technorati Tags: clarence bass, culture, diet, science
The diet in brief is to eat a wee bit during the day, and then have a big meal at night. It prescribes what kinds of things are ok to eat during the day, and the order of things to eat at night. It frames its rationale for this approach in two key things: the mystery of history on the one hand, and so called science on the other.
The mystery of history is to invoke the myth of the warrior, and to say this is how men on the move ate, how our fighting ancestors ate on the prowl, whether we're talking Roman Legions or Paleolithic hunters. Grr.
That the author's support for such claims is pretty thin on the ground historically and archaeologically is as nothing compared to what is presented as the science of how our bodies process food.
And so, i've looked at most of the key claims in the diet, shoved them up against physiology texts, and checked in with various researchers, nutritionists and trainers. The result of this discussion is at Begin to Dig, called "Review of the "Science" claims of the Warrior Diet"
I'll say again here as i do there that my intent is not to stop people from being on the Warrior Diet - many folks claim to have had life-transforming success with this approach, and that they resonate with the Warrior ethos - at least as it's painted in that book. And that's grand.
What i guess ultimately disturbs me is that folks are not being taken to this New Place with all the facts. The analogy i've used recently is that of someone with a screwed up motorbike - running on one cylinder. They encounter a mechanic who speaks to them of the Way of the Rider and the true path to keeping their bike running Pure.
Turns out that ya, the bike runs way better after the mechanic finishes with it, but it's only running on three cylinders. Buried in all the verbiage about cam shafts and high viscosity fuel is that it's just wrong info. The reasons the mechanic is giving for why the bike is running better is just wrong, and it's missing a whole lot of information that would help people maybe find out how to replace the gasket on that fourth cylinder to get even more power out of the engine, and run even better.
The response, i've been surprised to find, has been you know, mc, fuck off. This thing used to run like shit. and now it runs great. and i'm so happy because i barely have to think about taking care of it now, it's running so much better. So keep your theories about how the bike could run better to yourself, and oh ya, don't try to tell me that the Mechanic is wrong. No way. I have the results that say otherwise. My results say i'm getting three times the fuel response as before, it's not dying nearly as often, and i'm well pleased with that. And i tell all my biker buddies to go to the Mechanic too.
So, initially when i saw this response, i didn't get it. See, for me, i thought, well, i would want to know if someone is selling me the goods or is selling me a story, a con, a fake, snake oil - and if i found that they were doing the latter, i'd likely question any other claim such an author made. Not so here.
Fact is, the author's adherents trust him a heck of a lot more than they do me waving the flag of science - especially around nutrition. Books like Taube's Good Calorie Bad Calorie or Pallan's In defense of Food give a good historical kicking to the politicization of science in nutrition, and a casual read would make it easy for folks to say those scientists don't know everything; scientists get lots wrong - especially in nutrition. Fats used to be bad; now they're good. So much for science.
Consider the source. It's not "science" - it's usually the media or some federal agency selectively representing a single study or a sterilized position to the People. Science becomes the straw dog of these authors. In this case it's two journalists reviewing the history of various facets of what Pallan references as "nutritionism" - it's very interesting, and great reads, but also some unnecessary straw dogging of science to make points. And a lot of readers whose only view of Science is through such books are well satisfied to use it to dis science anywhere else. If it can't explain how a bee flies (myth), then i ain't gonna trust it to tell me how to eat.
Interestingly, folks who get p.o'd at my review for suggesting that the science claims in the WD don't stand up, and who criticize "science" in general, don't seem to get that it's their author that started it by asserting his position as founded on "science." Others just brush that part of the discussion of all together. Who cares about the accuracy or not of the theory; it's the results that count.
But what results? whose? Are they three cylinder results and three cylinder better than one satisfaction?
It's amazing to me that we can be so defensive and protective of our norms, to our current comfort zone, that we are reluctant to see, perhaps things could be better -we mayn't be able to imagine what that would be like, but what if it could be? What does that mean?
Many people say that satisfaction is a great thing to achieve - i'm satisfied, they may say, with my progress, with myself, with my health, with my practices.
Why? How? What is the basis of that complacency? What is the cost?
What i've seen here, besides a whole lot about the digestive system and the human energy system from doing this science review, is that new ideas can be experienced as threatening, dangerous; if they don't fit current paradigms, it becomes easy to dismiss them. This really isn't new. What question it raises for me that is new is why. Why the reluctance to consider another position? especially if satisfied with where one is? Wouldn't that make it that much easier to look at other ideas?
Dunno. i just dunno about that one, but i would conclude by saying that the discourse of the warrior diet is highly reminiscent of tales of don juan. And that's all the signifier i need on that one.
and so,
oh you tee, to paraphrase good buddy will williams.
Thank heavens for youtube.
The work of the artist is to make us see the familiar afresh - to defamiliarize and thus cause us to look anew at the thing conceptualized.
In the late 80's or early 90's (they blur), Laurie Anderson did a series of "public service announcements" from Women and Money to Jerry Rigging. One of these was about the Star Spangled Banner - the US of A's National Anthem. I had certainly never thought of the song this way - as she puts it - just a series of questions: heh, is that a fire? couldn't really say, it's early in the morning...
And that's it really: a nation's anthem is about someone noticing a place going to hell during a fire and a flag waving away. So important - no matter what. The brand label survives. X marks the spot. Let X, knock knock, equal X.
anyway, here it is:
I've said it before: the things that make a product great are not just the excellence of the product but also the information and engagement around the product while considering a purchase and then the support of the product after a sale is complete - especially if/when something goes pear shaped. Utilikilts, an American company that makes "American Made Utility Kilts for Everyday Wear" definitely stands in the company of Great Company because of its entire kilt culture experience.
The following post is a review of Utilikilts: it tells the story of why from the in-store experience (and ya gotta get the in-store experience especially for the utilikilt-as-changing room effect), support and post sales problem resolution is rock solid.
So if you're a guy and haven't considered a kilt before, why the heck not? Are you a sissy? If you're a gal, these put the fun into funky - far more fun/funk than jeans, worn low as hipsters.
Utilikilts makes the kilt experience a cultural phenomenon that is explorable, affordable and perhaps best of all usable. The following illustrates how and why that is so.
Technorati Tags: customer experience, customer support, kilts, utilikilt
"Welcome Home"
was the way i was greeted as i walked into the Utilikilt flagship store in Seattle. This from a
staff member whom i'd not met before. I had on a Utilikilt Workman's kilt (the model displayed in the Victoria and Albert museum (pdf) in London), a brown leather jacket and my hair down. Each point was commented upon as a totally righteous way for a gal to "crossdress" with a utilikilt ("cross-dressing" is what utilikilt calls gals who wear their gear). Not used to this kind of enthusiastic greeting from sales staff, i was both flumoxed and delighted - did this person know that i was coming into the store because there'd been a size issue with another kilt i'd ordered? No, it turns out, he did not. This is just the Way of the Kilted Men of Utilikilt greet members (of either gender) of the Clan.
So that was nice. And leads me to wax on a bit about the
In Store Experience of Utilikilt
It may be important to make clear that Utilikilts are designed for Guys, for those Manly Men secure enough in their masculinity to enjoy the freedom of going unbifrucated. Consequently they spend considerable time in their promotional literature to assert the Grr-ness of kilt wearing. To this end they have a suite of Mock-u-mercials made by Utilikiltarians protesting the manliness (and robust functionality) of their Kilt. This award winner, for instance, blends a sub plot of getting an upper chest tattoo with a main plot of carrying out metal work and welding while donning a skull-painted welder's mask (really nice paint job), and of course, wearing a utilikilt.
While in the FAQ they are quick to point out that "women look hot" in their kilts, this intense masculine vibe may suggest an atmosphere unwelcoming to those willing to "cross-dress." I was willing to risk at least crossing the threshold of the store for two reasons: i work out with guys who are nail bending bad ass Big Men, and they are some of the nicest kindest folks i know. So my guess was behind the Grr were sweet people. Likewise, i am passionate in my love of kilts. And pockets. My main kilt lust has thus far been sufficed by Howie Nicholsby's excellent custom made-to-measure 21st Century Kilts from Edinburgh - that have great pockets (shown left in blue pinstripe denim with Howie's custom Juggling Rooster Seat Belt belt).
Much to my delight, when i arrived at the store there were two really geeky guys trying on kilts (not quite the heavy metal rock poster children of many in the utilikilt photo gallery site). Right on. Kilts for All Men (and gals who love unbifrucated pocketed garments)
The customer base exemplified at that moment was not threatening. Indeed, the kind of clean grunge feel of the store itself was funky and inviting.
Blended with the atmosphere comes the in-store sales experience. I was immediately impressed by the fact that there was one sales person in the store, Andrew, and he managed several customers (including me) at once - and effectively so - balancing the awareness of when one of us had a question and needed attention, and when one us needed to mull . Impressive.
Waiting Room. My sense from the next experience in the shop is that this multitasking brilliance may be Andrew's forté. I would therefore encourage anyone planning to visit the shop to make sure you have time to browse, since having the full attention of people on the floor can be a bit of a wait. On this account it would be nice if there were a few more surfaces for sitting, rather than making do with various edges or tool boxes.
Once attention is had, however, it is full on YOU, and care of your sizing and specific kilt interests (utilikilt makes a number of models).
This attention is critical - perhaps especially when fitting women since, as the web site FAQ says, fitting a utilikilt for gals is different than fitting guys. As my hand went to grabbing a kilt close to my waist size, Andrew's hand was there to go further up the rack to larger sizes "these fit on the hips for women" and he was so right. They are hipsters.
And how does one try on a utilikilt?
"So, where is the changing room"
"The Utilikilt is its own changing room," states Andrew, opening out a kilt to walk into, have wrapped around one, and therefrom to drop one's drawers beneath. Goodness. What fun. When was the last time trying something on in a store was so risky (not riskee) - or that a guy helped you robe in such an intimate, if seemingly semi-public way.
After a couple of iterations, an OK fit in one kilt went to a SUPER oh ya that *works* fit version of the kilt. This is why buying online may be a *wee bit* problematic for gals - and why the web site also recommends "go to where the kilts are" for women trying them out.
Which brings us to the next story: the Incorrect Order : even when you THINK from having been in the store that you know your size, the material of the kilt *may well* have a significant impact on the actual size you (a gal) might get for your hipster, cross-dressing utilikilt.
This was an error: in my enthusiasm for these groovy garments, i ordered another model in the same size. The tricky bits were (a) i didn't realize that all sales were final and (b) i was rushed at the time (c) and was trying to avoid the cost/time of a cab ride from Bellevue into Seattle. My previous sale made me think that oh i must know my sizing.
Perhaps the wonderful Johnny with whom i placed this order might have interrogated me to find out either how i had arrived at my sizing or what kind of kilt i had purchased, since the materials may cause a slightly different fit. But perhaps this is an issue that had not actually come up before for fitting a gal (maybe few women buy multiple instances of these things?)
But then, something else that would have been useful to hear on the phone as well was "just a reminder: all sales are final." When i had been in the shop, the kilt i got was a special sale item and Andrew stated clearly "you realize this is a sale item: all sales final; no refunds or exchanges" - No problem: i had the kilt on and was wearing it out of the store. So realize this: all sales are final; only in store credits.
As said, when i ordered this kilt i was dealing with Shipping Jedi (their nomenclature) Johnny at the 800 number for the store. Why did i have more than one chat with Johnny other than to order the item? Because i wanted to arrange to have the kilt picked up by courier in Seattle and delivered to me in Bellevue - apparently this had never happened before. But they were up for it. I treasure the intrigued directions on how to get the courier to the right part of the correct alley to make the pick up. Johnny emailed me to confirm that it had been picked up, and the kilt arrived without incident. Shout out to FleetFoot Couriers in Seattle for their excellent service.
Arriving at the hotel, unpacking the kilt, this is when the concern started: was the kilt just too big, and thus too long from hanging too low on the hips? After a tough evening hemming and hawing about does it fit, does it not? oh gee i think it's too big...what am i gonna do, will i have to return it, i read the fine print on the sales slip: no refunds. And so i had to call Johnny again to say why does this kilt fit so differently? is there a solution? what might it be? If there isn't another right fitting, right colour kilt in stock, am i stuck with this gorgeous but not particularly usable kilt?
Here's where customer service goes to the Right Next Level. Johnny immediately recognized that the usual In Store Credit offered to someone from another country who might never be back in the state to claim it might not be the best customer experience. So "while we are confident that we can get you fitted into the right fit, i've talked with Ben, my manager, who's said yes, in these unique and extraordinary circumstances we'll drop the kilt if we can't get a fit for you." That's cool. So, transport arrangements made, the clock ticking (i had a flight to catch), i head down to the store being assured that the replacement color at the replacement size would be waiting for me.
Amazingly, when i got to the store late that afternoon, it seemed that the replacement kilt of the right size and color had gone walk about. Brett, the staffer who had greeted me with "welcome home" spent considerable cycles on attempting to locate that kilt that Johnny had previously asked Andrew who'd had to go home sick early to pull and set aside. I tired on a longer one with the right waist that they could "chop" - but then i had a plane to catch and their sowers had all gone home for the day. But they'd been willing to find a solution that way if it had been available. Andrew was even called at home, and pulled out of his sick bed to be queried on where he had put the pulled kilt. It just wasn't there.
In a proactive fit of excellence, Brett went down the road to the warehouse himself to go look for the wrap in question. Rather than come back empty handed, Brett came back with a kilt of the right waist and length - though not the color i had picked, but what the heck? Tried it on. Loved how it felt.
Fitting again: Here's an interesting thing: this right size/length but different color model i left with felt *better* in fit than the long version that was supposedly the same waist, just longer. Once again, this reinforces the point on their site: go to where the kilts are. I don't know why the difference - maybe it's cuz on a longer kilt, the pockets are lower down; maybe it's because each of these is hand machine sewn, so there's slight differences. Maybe it's because different dies create different textures. But in each case of each kilt i tried on, each felt unique unto itself.
Fitting Note 2: Women's Tanks. If you're interested in one of the few made-for-women items in the shop, like the hot ribbed tank, gals may find they wish to go up one size. These American Apparel made tanks fit *tight* - even when going one up from your typical, anticipated snug fit shirt. Likewise, go in with a bra/top cover you're happy to wear in public: this is one area where a utilikilt may not be its own changing room.
And, with the kilts exchanged, that was pretty much it. One might stomp and spit a bit: how, after all these conversations and assurances, could the bloody kilt have gone walk about? It was no small deal to come down from Bellevue to Seattle, etc etc. You know, i don't know. Stuff happens. In the worst case, my worst fear was addressed anyway: that if no kilt available, then i could just return this one for a full refund, which was totally off the song sheet of the shop in anycase, so really, no harm no foul, and these guys were working it. Honour and all that satisfied. In future they may keep their pulls better labelled and stashed, but as said, in this case, it worked out: there was a well agreed Plan B in place and for that i thank Utilikilt.
Wrapping Up. Brett also resolved the sale well, and just as we were packing up, even Johnny called over to see if all had been settled out ok, while Jason went on a mission back to the warehouse to get me a not-for-sale Utilikilt mug as a gesture to say thanks for the patience; sorry for the mix up.
The staff at Utilikilt have plainly drunk the Kool Aid, which lends to a super experience. These guys seem to live the product. Andrew had had utilikilts for 7 years; Brett had plainly gone through a suite of them, recounting various experiences with different models at different points in time. It's a strong testament to a retail store that it can hold staff for a long enough period that they know the stock so well and how to fit people and keep up excellent customer service, from phone orders to in store experience. It is a kind of culture thing, and that's cool, too.
So kudos to Andrew, Johnny, Brett for sales handling, Jason for backing up Brett in the store, Sam for connecting the calls and Ben for supporting Johnny on Plan B. Despite the bumps, a super customer experience.
Epilogue: Walking down the Street
The Utilikilt culture is in evidence around the store. As i was walking towards it, about a block away, another kilted person was coming out of it - same kilt model even. There seemed to be an initial disconnect on the gender: am i seeing what i'm seeing - a gal in a kilt? Is that ok? Then, the quiet nod of the head to each other in passing, acknowledging. It reminded me of how in Canada, where motorcycles are far less common than they are in europe, folks on motorbikes tend to nod at each other: we know we're a wee bit off the norm in this pursuit, the nod admits, and we support each other in that. The Utilikiltarian nod felt similar.
Also, the number of times while in the Seattle/Tacoma region someone said to me "Is that a Utilikilt?" or "I love your utilikilt" has grown more than i can count. Brand awareness of this local product seems pretty good. I learned that at Microsoft and Boeing, Utilikilts have the status of "authorized wear." Even at the airport going through security, one of the personnel asked the Is that a... question. I'm ready for it now, as it's kept happening well outside the Home State. Indeed, it's become clear to me why Utilikilt pads a pocket of a new kilt with their business cards: they're to handle the number of times a person gets asked about the garment. So now i just say "Yes it is. Here's a card for the site and how to order"
Some folks aren't ready to make the leap to unbifrucatedness. Some folks chat a bit. Others break out in a big smile, and say thanks, staring at that card like it's magic. It's interesting to see the array of guys who comment, and talk about wanting to take the plunge.
I'm running out of cards.
The most popular current Web 2.0 representation is geography: putting everything on a map. It's a powerful thing to do: when we can SEE how close registered sex offenders are to schools and day cares, we have certain reactions about where our psychic sense of "too near" or "too far" meets the legal/phyiscal interpretation of "appropriate distance." A little bit of information, as has been said many times, can be a dangerous thing. This particular offender/schools mash up does not provide a brushing interface that, say, relates re-offender statistics based on various distances from schools to help confirm whether our sense of dread is well-founded our not.
It is with this caveat in mind that, our group has been thinking about how adding not just mapping but temporal mapping might be for a project we have called musicSpace to integrate a variety of musicology sources for easy exploration. More recently in a project called continuum we'd been looking at how to map rich data sets like classical music onto timelines so that the visualization doesn't implode. That is, if there's lots of stuff going on at the same time in a time line, all the info looks like a big blob, or if you zoom out, you lose the surrounding context. Our challenge was to solve the "too much info=blob; too little=not enough information" dilemma. Inspired by that work, we'd like to take what we learned there and think map thoughts.
Mapping Time
What we are calling Temporal Mapping is not unknown but it's not common. to be clear, temporal mapping has one meaning in discussions of disease tracking for instance that doesn't involve visualizations; spatio-temporal mapping has another meaning in computing. The kind of temporal mapping we're considering is more akin to an example from the Land Cover Institute which on a map over a relatively stable geography shows how population density has grown and spread over 200 years. Other work shows how the geography of a place itself (such as a river valley) changes over time.
'Istanbul was Constantinople now its Istanbul" - They Might Be Giants
Our sense of temporal mapping it turns out is more complex than these example because it turns out we are looking at a variety or parameters that change: in terms of locations, borders change; names change and even the geography can change. One way to reflect this change is to use maps that can present borders/locations that are accurate for a given period - this assumes that various places recognize the same borders/place names. Consider the mapping of Taiwan as a political representation issue. To use the music examples, if a composer created something in the 1700s, the borders of the domains were different and the place names may be too, so we need to have maps with borders and place names that are accurate for that time. As we discuss below, there are other issues that come into play when, to coin a phrase, wanting to co-map points that cross times, and thus cross representations of locations.
Even if we don't want to co-map, but restrict ourselves to single maps, there are some challenges: if we know where a piece was composed we map that; if we know where a composer was born we map that, if we know where a composer first performed a piece we map that.
There are a few data subtleties there: do all objects in a classical music repository now need Lat/Long data associated with them, as well as a date? Even there the temporal bit is not so obvious: there are kinds of dates and kinds of locations: how tease these out so they are clear in the UI? so it's clear a person is choosing to see performance dates/locations rather than composition dates/locations. What happens if a work was known to have been taken out and put away over a range of places and times? How is that stored in an object in order to be represented?
If we put aside that question of the back end data representations and UI finesse for the moment, let's assume whatever it is we want to map in music we can map, the more glaring, basic challenges are how both borders and place names have changed not just over the centuries but even within decades. Maps that only map against geography lat/long have it somewhat easier than mapping against historically/politically accurate representations.
And as always, the question of how to represent the information is non-obvious. For instance, how handle multiple names or boundaries for a place? Only show the appropriate name for the specific time? Show all versions to provide context not only of place but between times? These kinds of decisions become critical when crossing domain representations. For example, what happens when looking for a location in europe that produced the most major compositions of the Romantic Era relative to location(s) in Europe of most significant performances in early 20thC. The borders and place names from the 1700s and indeed even between 1914 and 1920 change several times.
So Temporal Mapping is?
Perhaps a fast way to begin to think about temporal mapping in arts and humanities data that involves people, places and times is to be able to accurately reflect these places as they were interpreted both in their times, and in ours, and to be able view these comparisons from any variety of perspectives - comparatively, relatively.
Animation and Insight
A potential benefit of developing temporal mapping approaches for arts/humanities data is in meaning that is communicated through animation: if we can step through the various places by time of where Beethoven worked - see who else was in the neighborhoods at various points, and correlate that with specific works, and perhaps specific historical events and their key locations, can we begin, almost at a glance, to get a new appreciation of a domain space? Do seeing these patterns animated over time and space and politics and whatever else let us ask new kinds of questions - questions that would have been potentially intractable to ask before?
These are early days for our investigations, but from early scenarios domain experts have given us, the ability to step through time, and to see events of interest comparatively across time and space, is a thing devoutly to be wished. These representational desires are driving our current UI research efforts.
That local Call that was Free and Normal Service 18 months ago now costs Fifty Thousand Pounds
A few years ago when we arrived from Canada, we went to the bank branch close to where we would live, met with the branch manager and set up various accounts and credit cards. The manager, Simon, kindly gave us his card and said be sure to call anytime. He also told us about places in town for good eats, and places to avoid "Oh yes, that's where i got mugged." Personal service! It was great.
There were very few times we actually had cause to call Simon, but it was lovely to be able to speak with him. We were sad when he moved and wrote the head office a nice letter about how grand he'd been.
That was then. Over the past year or so our branch is no longer a "branch" - it's been re-designated a "service branch" which means it has no manager (if one thinks this downsizing is due to the bank losing money, it's not: they made £11.7BILLION profit last year). If we want to talk with a manager now we cannot call that branch up the road directly; we have to call a call center in India, answer a barrage of security questions ("But i just want a call back; why do you need my date of birth?") and hope that someone local gets back to us.
The main high street banks have now come up with a new Premier Service: they will once again give you a direct local line to your branch manager *if* you have either £50k in savings or make £75k a year AND have a mortgage of 250K or more (see any of the big 4 for their version of same). What was once free, and a default part of banking in England has now become the privilege of the well-heeled few. £50k. For a name and a local phone number.
12 billion in profit and the bank wants 50K for a local phone number. Is that the definition of obscene or have i missed something?
And if you haven't the money reserves to get you into this Premier league of service, count on continuing to be considered suspect each time you pick up the phone and want to ask a question. Your call center will be asking the questions here, bub. And you better be fast with the right answers, or suffer the consequences: getting your call dropped; having your internet access suspended, and/or having a note on your file that you refused to answer security questions.
Don't let anyone tell you there ain't no class system here. As far as UK's big banks are concerned, they've just re-enginered it with a vengeance.
I've been pondering what the paradigm for the Semantic Web is:
if the Web is like a page + links, what's the analogue for the semantic web?
Where i've come to recently after thinking "star trek next generation's computer in conversation with Geordi LaForge" is a researcher's notebook + memex: a place that blends work in progress with internal and external associations/contexts that become explorable for building new knowledge. The key to the analogy of the notebook is the notion of work in progress, where notes include scattered fragments of information where context/structure is often implicit, and can reach out to external sources, knowledge, references.
I've discussed this analogue in more detail (with pictures) in a blog piece called
"What is the Analogue for the Semantic Web? If the Web is like a Page+Links, the SW is like a..."
Technorati Tags: hci, interaction, mit, semantic web, southampton
I was just at a press conference where a lead figure in computer science was discussing Web masters - and Web mistresses too, he adds quickly in a bid to be inclusive.
Who came up with the term web MASTER? or the even more problematic, S&M flavoured web MISTRESS. As if anyone could master the web or even their corner of it (beat it into submission?)?
The master, the mistress. Lords and Ladies of the manner. The bosses. The classes. So much for the democratization of the infosphere. At least we talk about bloggers rather than blogsters and blogstresses (think aviator and aviatrix).
10 or so years ago when the web was just hotting up within university departments, i proposed the term "webster" as an alternative to web master. Webster, i proposed, is informed by terms like waiter, or server, or manager. Gender neutral; no claims to special class or authority.
I'd thought at the time that i was making up a word. On further lexical research, it turns out that the term exists, and has its roots in weaving culture. Even more apropos, no? So why not use it? Why is it still important for many to identify a gender with a role?
Just a question.
Technorati Tags: culture, language
As someone who studied Shakespeare as an undergrad and a grad, i'd been given to think of Antony and Cleopatra as one of the tragedies. Tragedy, i'd learned, at least from the audience perspective, has to do with our experience of a sense of loss: that by the tragic hero's death, no matter how problematic that hero, like Macbeth or Hamlet, their going leaves the world emptier than with them in it. The other accepted truism is that the tragic figure must also be something above and beyond ourselves. Hence, usually royal, but that royalty has some greater biggness to it than title.
This week i saw the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Antony and Cleopatra, and have been puzzling ever since, where's the tragedy? where's the loss? Does the loss overbalance what's left? is this play a tragedy? What made me think it was before?
Or maybe the fault is with the production: Is this a really crappy production of the play which misses delivering on the tragic; where all we get is a look at some particularly problem characters with more money than sense, or is this a really accurate presentation of the text, where we don't get tragedy, because who's sad to see either Antony or Cleopatra go if who they are are the self-interested, petty, monied shites they seem to be? At least with Octavian the last one standing, he at least seems to care about keeping the state running and ending civil war. What's happening here??
In the production, there's little opportunity to see grandeur of what is lost by Antony and Cleopatra's eventual death, even though we are left with Octavian - at least he seems to be more economical with the troops he spends in battle, where Antony's and Cleopatra's decisions cost lives carelessly.
In the early scenes of Act 1, where Cleopatra repeatedly entreats Antony to hear the messengers from Rome, there is an opportunity to see Cleopatra as at least somewhat politically astute, cajoling Antony towards dealing with a potential crisis in Rome. Not a spec of that awareness in the RSC production - the words are played literally: Cleopatra is saying that Antony's wife just wants to get him away from her - nothing else. There's no hint here that she is striving to use that as an excuse to get Antony to deal with his reponsibilities: the lines are played like this is exactly what she means: she's jealous of Fulvia's potential to provoke Antony into leaving her. That the personal actions of these people have highly political consequences seems either oblivious to Antony and Cleopatra or they just don't care. This portrayl of cleopatra has, however, been celebrated by some reviewers.
Antony is also played as simply reactive, and consequently dangerous, starting from his if Cleopatra says see the messengers then he won't see them - until he's alone. Not particularly appealing is his blaming of her for everything that doesn't go right for him, whether it's his enjoyment of egypt itself - bonds he suddenly feels he must break - or his fleeing after Cleopatra in the battle of Actium . She should have known he'd leave if she did. That's part of the problem: they act as if they're the only people involved. The social cost of their highly personal reactions to each other have a higher cost than anything Octavian does in the play. And perhaps it's that this production doesn't provide a way to see this self-involvement as anything particularly noble that makes it difficult to experience the deaths of either as particularly tragic.
Indeed, in the production, Stewart's Antony is in deep need of therapy: in the second half, post Actium, he starts yelling without much provocation. He goes from quiet recitation to full throated yelling. It's not a subtle performance, and that was a surprise and disappointment. There's also not much listening to others on stage. For instance, in the battle of Actium preparation when everyone is telling him not to fight by the sea, the line in the text is "Antony: The Sea, the sea" - and that's about how Stewart delivers it - a throw away. He's not listening, getting angry and responding with "if you tell me this, then i'll do that" - there's just no listening. He's in his own little world. No wonder so many soldiers abandon ship as it were: he's out of touch with reality and who wants to die for a delusion? Perhaps then, that's a reasonable interpretation of Antony: he doesn't care about how his orders are received. He can just do what he wants.
But likewise later when he has Ceasar's messenger whipped who has kissed Cleopatra's hand, Stewart's Antony just goes into a rant, looking like Mr Magoo in a kilt having a fit, arms flailing. We see no sense of jealousy; he's just a demented old man who thinks his plaything's being taken away, rather than someone feeling the sense of his loss. In a following scene, he'll insist that one of his own soldiers whose done well take and kiss cleopatra's hand. There's not one look on the stage that shows anyone -including Antony - is aware of the contrast.
Now maybe all that is a legitimate way to play the text, but it just puts us at an increasing distance from the character - and sure tragedy does that too: watch Macbeth or Hamlet at their worst - Hamlet causing the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for instance, but they recover their nobility by the end of the play; we are brought back to them, usually out of growing awareness of how much worse those around them are. In this production, we are never close to the characters, except perhaps in the first act, but that's more politeness around characters we don't exactly know, than any real feeling of closeness. On hearing of Enobarbus's defection, Antony sends Enobarbus's goods after him rather than keeping them to supplement his own war chest. Enobarbus and his new Roman cohorts recognize Antony as "a Jove" in this generosity. But the act is given short shrift in the production, such that again, any sense of Antony's nobility is cut off by his short-sighted, self-delusion and pettiness.
Beyong the loss of greatness, in this production, they go for farce too frequently, including in the early scenes: Cleopatra's treatment of the messenger when his bad news (Antony's married) has Cleopatra potentially attacking him is played as comedy, not as seeing Cleopatra as feeling this news as a betrayl or loss. Why? this keeps Cleopatra as a joke; not as someone whose passions are so deep. Here she is portrayed as shallow, overall. An actress remembering her glory days of acts, not of a character experiencing depth of feeling. But that too may be a legitimate way to play the text - maybe the lines don't really give her anything other than superficial passions - it's just harder to care about her with such a portrait - it's also harder to believe that all these significant men from Ceasar to Dolabella by the end of the play would fall for her.
Some actions played as comedy seem more problematic than the above scene. In the scene where Antony botches his own suicide, and there he is dying, collapsed on the floor, immobile, because he believes Cleopatra has already killed herself, a messenger from cleopatra comes in, gets down at floor level to say right to antony, and says
"the queen has sent word to you" -
- when?
-now.
Even before Antony asks "when?", the audience cracks up. The interaction is played as comedy. Stewart's Antony also starts to laugh. In an open discussion with the cast after the play, stewart says that this laugh was the assistant director's idea - but that overall they wanted the play to be as human as possible. Others in the cast said that one of the ways they were looking at it was as a kind of celebrity expose, where we see behind the closed doors of the Royals, and this is what we get.
And as for Octavian's performance - it is one note: someone who's really really sincere. and pauses. alot. between words. of a line. to show. just how sincere. he is.
The actor says he wanted to play Octavian as less of a cold calculating fish and more of an emotional character who hero worships his enemy Antony. Not sure where he gets the hero worship, though Octavian certainly seems to parrot many of his actions, but the actor claims that several times Octavian is accused of weeping in the play so he must be a more emotional guy than most have given him credit.
He too plays Octavian literally from the text: for instance, he plays the scene of getting Antony to mary Octavia as if Agripa's "studies" proposal for marriage came as a surprise to Octavian. And if it did, Agripa doesn't even "ahem" and cautiously try to interpose the idea. He just sails into it. But Octavian, as soon as he hears that Antony considers himself free to marry, doesn't evan blanch at the idea. And yet later on, he's played the scene where Octavian bids farewell to Octavia and Antony as if he can't stand to let her go. The two scenes' responses to Octavia seem therefore inconsistant: the one throws away Octavia in marriage to an enemy; the next seems filled with almost incestuous reluctance to let go of her. Surely if that's how he felt, that first scene where the marriage is proposed should show at least some reluctance on his part to make this political bargain, if that's how it's to be played?
The only actor on stage who seems to hear the words he's saying, speak them like they are thoughts or interactions with other characters is Ken Bones' Enobarbus. His description to Agripa et al of Cleopatra's barge is the only moment of embodied poetry in the play. He conveys the sense that despite his Roman cynicism, he is moved by Cleopatra. She is a force for illusion and emotion. Pity the rest of the play lets that portrayal just ring hollow.
But is that what's in the play? Only moments of memory like these, cast against a smallness of Tony, Cleo and Ocky in the Big Brother House, having to perform ridiculous tasks to see who gets voted out first? Or perhaps it's more Survivor, where Sextus Pompei is voted off the island first; last to go are Antony, then Cleopatra and Octavian is the winner. How is that tragedy? Indeed, watching this version of the play felt more akin to watching an episode of the Sopranos: fascinated, occasionally hopeful, but simultaneously repulsed by knowledge of the leads' self-interested insensitivity/rationale of their tangential cruelties.
Joyce Carole Oates starts an interesting piece talking about the Tragedy of Imagination - that unlike in other tragedies where the tragedy comes of the hero having to confront his (ya his) illusions and confront reality, that's something that doesn't happen here. Cleopatra and Antony stick with their version of the world throughout the play. Though not said explicitly, for Oates, the tragedy seems to be the potential loss of poetry that goes out of the world when it loses its two best poets, Antony and Cleopatra. With them goes illusion of "sun drenched Egypt."
I dunno. That used to be sufficient for me to say, yes well, that's the big loss and we're left with Octavian who's so constantly contrived (tho he cries, and rages at Antony's message to him where "he calls me boy!" - oh how the audience laughs at this explosion onto the stage at the start of the scene). But again, the tragedy may be that the world is seen as so polarized: why are the practical poetry-less, and the poets useless at best or harmful at worst? Not a tragedy - an anti-Romance perhaps?
It's interesting that the RSC has put performances of Romeo and Juliet in the main theater against Antony and Cleopatra in the Swan: was the irony deliberate?
As for the production at the RSC, while the cast may have striven for something "more human" it seems they lost communicating something grand. Humanity does not have to be equivalent with vapidity, but that seems to be the case here. The venialness, the superficiality of cleopatra and the lack of awareness/hysteria of Antony make it seem like nothing so grand as poetry is lost when these characters suicide themsleves, rather, that this illusion-driven allowance for self-indulgence and social harm would be better for everyone if it slept with the fishes. And that's as close to tragic catharsis this production achieves.
Post Script
Re-reading the play didn't help get a better sense of the tragic. Indeed, the production could be a fairly straight reading of the text, though it still seems that Cleopatra could have been both more sensual and more politic, and Antony less extreme in his mood swings. But so? While i didn't experience a great tragic loss or catharsis, it was still awesome to see shakespeare live - with great costumes, sets, to hear the words spoken aloud, and at the Swan, which is designed similar to Elizabethan theaters. Jeez, Patrick Stewart paced past me four times as he (and others) used the theater patron's exits and entrances as well as the stage's own doors. Fantastic! A real opportunity to get up close with the play in the real as well as the round.
This play is part of the RSC's complete works year putting on shakespeare's complete plays. If you're anywhere around the UK this year, try to find a way to catch one of the plays.
When working in a lab or open office environment one gets used to the idea of listening to music with headphones. Anyone walking around with an ipod or other portable audio player also knows the charms of auditioning music in our own little worlds. But there's something else that can happen with headphones, especially if one enjoys music: one can get closer to an audiophile experience.
By audiophile experience i mean the audio experience one has when listening to awesome loudspeakers powered by awesomely clear amps in a space that can show them off (a colleague of mine in Music said that one of the best investments people could make in their stereo system is double glazing).
No but really, what *is* an audiophile experience? It's hard to describe unless you've experienced it. Or actually lots of people spend lots of cycles describing audiophile experiences (it is an industry afterall), but words like soundstage, air, black backgrounds, noise floor, etc etc mean little without some audio point of reference for them.
I had what i would call my first near-audiophile experience a few months back. I went into my favorite audio shop, Phase3 HiFi where i'd been getting stuff like rca connectors and bits and pieces, talked with Sam Lowe, a super friendly and knowledgeable sales person who i've watched give equivalent time and help to somebody asking about a £3 cable as to someone about to drop £3.5k on a cd player.
And that's part of what makes a store like Phase3 worth one's custom: every customer is important; the atmosphere is friendly, knowledgeable and not pretentious. And most especially folks are both keen about what they do as well as helpful. They convey a sense of passion, without ever feeling like you've walked into a scene from High Fidelity where you're made to feel like an idiot becuase (a) you don't know the difference between tubes and solid state or (b) you're not A Rich Audiophile Geek. An example of this kind of passion and easygoingness lead to this story:
I asked Sam if i could have a listen to the components he'd been saying were just oh so fantastic. So that's what we did. We went to their listening room (which looks like a normal living room - very sensible) and Sam sets up the £3K (in GBPs) preamp and £4.5k amp ("This is the set up the Royal Opera House uses") and that £3.5k cd player and the £3k speakers AND the £300 worth of cables to connect the amp, pre and cd player, and the £1000 worth of speaker cable.. (at one point Sam swapped out the £170 speaker cable he'd used for this £1000 Chord Signature UK cable. Don't let anyone tell you wire is wire: another myth shattered: there is a difference. and it's not subtle. Noise i didn't notice before was just gone. The effect that let the music stand out against a "black" background was jaw dropping in contrast. The effect of this absence was stunning).
When everything was set up just so, i was asked if i wanted a coffee while invited to sit on the couch and listen . We'd been benchmarking everything against the eric clapton's live and unplugged cd they had which was a revelation in itself. With this, Sam swapped around a variety of types of speakers and amps, too, just to show what effect each part had on the sound. And then he made one small adjustment (swapped one preamp for another) and my god (really) it was a religious experience. It was just so locked in, the combination. Then, going to another level, i popped in one of my fave instrumental tracks, and ok, i wept. It was piercing, the experience.
Now, i'm a musician and a music lover, and once upon a time i used to both gig live events and record music in actual real studios. I thought i knew what recorded music on a "good" system sounds like. I was SO WRONG. I had no idea that this sound experience of getting this close to (recorded) music was possible. You may be in the same position: you're heard the term audiophile, may have an idea that that means people with more money than sense, but perhaps you've not HEARD what a truly high end system can do to those bits on a cd (or to waves from vinyl for that matter). If you care about music at all, i am sure you will not walk away unchanged from the experience. It's an experience i'd pay for: to be able to use that room, that set up, say for an afternoon, just to listen to music like that.
Rent the audiophile experience rather than purchase it. Why not? Especially since not a lot of people i know are at a place either where they can or would think of heading into that heady space of forking out 7-10k for the "entry level" system above just to have that rush of an audio experience in their homes. They have kids to put through college; car payments, mortgages, student loans to pay off. And, just in passing, yes, £7-10k, the cost of a small automobile, is entry level. What would be "high end"? Consider something like the 75kUS/pair for british made Chord Electronics monoblock power amps and you go from price of car to substantial down payment on a house.
There is another way to get close to that heady audio experience: try headphones. Wiith a little help from some good headphone gear, which is about a tenth the cost for an equivalent speaker-based experience it's possible to get that kind of hi end audio experience. It's also potentially easier to check out this version of audiophile nirvana than requesting some private time in the room upstairs. Indeed, if you have a portable digital music player, there are some free ways to improve what you're hearing right now, too.
The following describes some approaches to audiophile headphone happiness - a word though, before continuing. Some engineers accuse "audiophiles" of being people who just get intrigued by the gear, not the music. That may be for true for some folks - like sports fans who care perhaps more about the player stats than about the joy of the game (and so what if they do!) What follows is not about gear intrigue: it's about getting closer to that ecstatic experience, the joy of hearing music. The french have a word for such folks - it's mélomanes: music lovers (thanks to Sam Tellig's Stereophile July 06 review of Quads for this term). The following story of headphones is offered up for les mélomanes.
Headphones can offer a potential audio experience that is earth shakingly good, and possibly better than what many of us would be able to or want to invest to replicate in a freestanding loudspeaker system - especially if your accommodation won't let you let those speakers rip. There are several stages to this: data source, player source, amplification source, digital to analog conversion, and of course, headphones.
Improvement One is Free. The Data Source.
Most folks listen to data now either off a cd or off an mp3 file. Bit rate can and does make a difference, and you don't have to have the golden ears of a 22year old (you're golden ears are over the hill after 25) to appreciate the differences. There are encodings like FLAC or Apple Lossless that really do replicate what's on the cd, but at half or less than the size of the original recording. Try playing back a lossless file against a 128bit mpg out loud over typical external computer speakers and you'll hear a difference on these very not audiophile components. So that's a for-free audio improvement - or largely for free - larger files take up more space, but that space becomes less of an issue as larger and larger drives become common - why not try Apple Lossless or FLAC with some of your fave CD's and see what you think.
Alternately, there is a school of thought that says 128 AAC Variable Bit Rate (aac, not mp3 and VBR on) on itunes, combined with great headphones (discussed below) yields results that are indistinguishable from CD's - and that's the opinion of a recording engineer - who also councils to be SURE to turn on ERROR CORRECTION in the prefs/advanced/importing if you rip your cd's with iTunes. Truly, it's great to have smaller file sizes for one's ipod - smaller file sizes means less harddrive spin up to access all the data and therefore better battery performance, but try it yourself: put a 128 AAC VBR, error corrected file you know really well next to an Apple Lossless or FLAC encoding or your system of choice and see what works for you.
An advantage of Apple Lossless is that you have all the data and can later encode down from there to 128 or whatever AAC you want at some future point - that's thinking archivally.
Improvement Two - Headphones.
The next part of the experience of course is a good set of headphones. What are good headphones? That question is the subject of endless discussion at head-fi Let's just say that Sony rarely gets mentioned, but German companies are very well represented (Beyer Dynamics, AKG, Sennheiser, Ultrasone...), with each flavour of headphone presentation having their partisans. Discussions range around qualities like sibilance, sound stage, color, neutrality, micro and macro dynamics, harmonics - all to do with how much of the recorded experience your headphones replicate and how.
You can find many comparative reviews of various "cans" online. One exemple is the sennheiser HD 650 which does very well in
non-comparitive reviews likethis by Wes Philips of Stereophile, or this interesting one on CameraHobby, but throw them in with others, and the flavours in the review space show up. A great source for such reviews that's free is Stereophile , but again a keyword search on your fave search engine for "review headphone x" will pull up a plethora of information.
>Will that be Closed, Open or In Your Ear?
There is also the issue of whether you want in ear phones or closed back or semi closed back or open. There are excellent versions of each, and reasons for choosing one form or another. Closed cell headphones like the Ultrasone Pro 750 review pdf ) for instance are not by default better than in-ear (canal) phones like the very decent Etymotic 6i , or open phones like the Sennheiser HD580 . Hi Impedance headphones like AKGs (600 Ohms) are not always better than low impedance phones (Ultrasones at 75 Ohms). They do have different qualities tho. What to do? try great versions of each kind. Understand the pros and cons of any form and make your decision.
The point is, good headphones (usually in the 75£ plus zone, tho price is not always indicative) will let you hear MORE of the audio signal coming from your system.
Headroom has a list of their 10 top fave headphones of various stripes. I don't agree with all their findings, but it's a great way to get a sense of the ranges of types. With these definitions in hand, why not hit an audio shop and head for the pricier models (just as a first pass indicator) and experience the difference between say the Apple default ear buds, and some really good cans - just so you can gage the degree of difference - and if that difference is meaningful to you.
Improvement Three: Plugging them In - to what?
When you try different kinds of headphones, make sure you have an appropriate source driving them: an ipod on its own will not show off a 300ohm headphone like Senheisser HD600's - it just doesn't have the power to drive these things, as explained very well at Dan's Data. A 600ohm AKG will struggle with the ipod cranked to full. An ipod will be adequate for canal phones: they're low impedance devices. A good audio shop will make sure you're hooked up to an appropriate source to drive the phones you try. But don't think the fact that an ipod can't easily drive hi impedance phones means you can't use them with your ipods - we'll come back to that in just a moment. in the meantime...
Let's assume you've picked something you enjoy in the headphone space. Let's also assume you have an ok stereo - or at least an ok cd player (one that has a digital out of some kind will come in handy later in this discussion) but it doesn't have a headphone jack (most stereo components increasingly do NOT come with headphone out jacks) or you do want to use those high impedance phones with your ipod or your computer. What to do?
Enter the headphone amp.
A headphone amp is a dedicated box (read: with its own power supply) that amplifies the music signal from whatever source, and sends it directly to its headphone jack. There are many kinds of headphone amps: some have tubes in them; some are
solid state, like UK's Musical Fidelity X-Can-v3 (fantastic review by Edwin Leong). Some are hybrids of solid state and tubes.
Some amps are built for living within a stereo system, like those just listed, but there's a whole breed of portable headphone amps, too, built to go with portable players. Some of them are designed to reuse candy/coughdrop tins as the casing! As Dan's Data says, every geek needs a tin with a light on it.
One of my faves in this space is made by Robert Gehrke in Germany, taking up the Amp in A Tin concept, but taking the circuit design further, cleaner ( see description ). So far Gehrke has been selling these fine designs on EBay for both US and UK/EU customers in your choice of penguin tin design (he also sells the caffeinated mints that come in the tins, too, at penguinenergy ). As said, the design fundamentally lets you drive higher impedance headphones on an ipod (or from a laptop). They can also have some nice effects for even very low impedance cans sold specifically for ipods and similar devices. They can help open up the bass, eliminate audio clipping down there, especially on less well encoded tracks. Mainly, you notice that you can drive the headphones louder while maintaining very good clarity, without the amp coloring what you're hearing.
Depending when you find this page, he may not have many on offer, since he's hard at work on a Next Level design that will be similar to the
Total BitHead amp , with USB in, excellent DAC (see below), crossfeed, and digital optical out (very hard to get in the UK/EU). Can hardly wait. But i'm getting ahead of myself. And just to mention one more portable (tho slightly larger) amp that has lead to incensed debate among those who care is the Ray Samuels Emmerline SR-71 ( 6moons review ; stereophile review ).
The main thing about a headphone amp, whether a stereo/stationary one, or a portable, is what it does for listening via headphones. Using a headphone amp means that a dedicated amplifier is handling the volume of the signal, and can, especially in the ipod case, do so more efficiently than the ipod - can drive more demanding loads than phones designed for portable players. easier drive is smoother sound. Now a lot of audio geeks can tell you why this is the case, suffice it to say, it really is.
You may wonder about sound. A good headphone amp will help the audio "breath" so that your high quality headphones can get all those nuances out of the audio that's in that stream but which a less effective amp mayn't be able to deliver. Again, this is something to try out at your favorite audio shop - maybe when you try out the headphones.
Bottom line: with excellent headphones and a good source to drive them, along with well-encoded tracks, you are now in a position to experience that audiophile's experience of "wow, i heard *new* things in that recording i thought i knew - that's stuff i've never heard before; it sounded like they were playing with new instruments, in a better room, right beside me. "
And you could easily stop there. But in case you were wondering if that's it, it's not. You can also do things to squeeze those 0's and 1's better so that you get even better sound. Enter the role of the DAC.
Making it Better - External DAC for the computer or home stereo (or yes, your ipod, too).dac
So you've got a good audio source, you have found the headphones you enjoy, you've found some way to plug them in, and now you'd like to go to the next level into your ears. We now circle back towards the data source. If it's digital, the DAC or digital audio convertor of either your computer or your cd player is the thing that turns the zeros and ones into audio signal. The circuits used to do that conversion do make a difference to the sound you hear. If you want to check this out, head to your favorite audio shop and ask them to set up an ok (100-200£) cd player, and have a listen on their sweet stereo system. Then ask them to hook up a dedicated DAC to their system using a good coax cable between the cd and the DAC. The Musical Fidelity X-DAC v3 is one well-regarded example of such a beast. On the somewhat portable side, there's the mainly USA-only Headroom Micro DAC . On the USB silly money side, there's The Brick . There's also chord electronics DAC 64 (review). Now listen to that set up. Take in your headphones and listen to that cd player with and without the external DAC. See what you think. Take in your own cd player for the comparison - that will show you, too, how to get better value out of your current cd player, using it as a transport only. Hell, take in your computer or laptop if it has an optical out, and do this comparison!
Why should you care about an external DAC? your CD player has a DAC as does your computer anyway! Yes it does, but as with anything, there's more than one way to skin a dac. Different quality parts make a difference. One issue addressed in translating zeros and ones into analog audio signal is "jitter" ( see this 1990 article for a clear discussion of info on a cd, how it's pulled off, and the jitter effect on the waveforms that make sound ; or here's a less intrigued discussion of what happens inside a cd player to create jitter ) - jitter is about timing of the read of the signal on a disc. If the timing is a wee bit out for whatever reason, it effects the sound. Timing of what? when a sample of the music represented by those zeros and ones gets played. Imagine a fence with pickets. The pickets get nailed against a fence rail at exactly the same distance apart. Now imagine someone marked the rail where each picket is supposed to go, and occaisionally gets bumped when measuring so the pencil mark gets pushed ahead. The spacing of the pickets is no longer regular. Rather than being regularly spaced, some are further apart; some a bunched up. The visual effect is that the pattern of the pickets gets changed. That's what can happen with digital audio: samples of sound are supposed to be exactly and regularly spaced. a clock is used to synch the samples up so that they'll be regularly spaced, like the pickets. Various things can happen, however, that the clock gets slightly out of synch (and there's not just one clock involved). The result on the wave pattern of the music is like the picket fence: the pattern changes, and consequently so does the sound or fidelity of the music.
Most systems have robust measures in place to address jitter and keep timing errors to a minimum (some are better than others). So, after timing, the next part of the process is translating the zero's and one's into electrical pulses to create the sound. There are different qualities of digital audio converters that do different things to make the 16bit audio of a cd sound richer, fuller. Remember that digital audio is composed by taking samples of the frequencies in an audio stream - it's not continuous like analog recordings. So, even though it is taking samples very rapidly within very short periods, there are still gaps between those samples. The size of the sample also effects how much information it can hold about that sample. The CD is 16 bit. Interestingly, most high level recording systems record in 20 or 24 bit, and audio is downsampled to fit the CD format.
Just to put 16 vs 24 bit audio in perspective, on a computer screen, once upon a time they were only black and white (or orange and black, or black and green...) That was what two bit color could do. Early color monitors were 8bit, giving 256 (2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2) colors. 16bit color came next, giving thousands of colors. The difference between 8 bit and 16 bit color can be seen when looking at color gradients (one color fading into another): the more bits, the smoother, and less noticeable the transitions from one color to another. Now, 24bit color (millions of colors) is common. The transitions are even more seamless. Same in audio: the higher the sample depth, the richer the information about the audio that can be stored in that sample. So, some of the newest DACs take that 16bit audio from a CD and up-sample it to 24bit sample depth and 192 khz samples a second - calculating/simulating richer information both in the sample and filling in the holes between the samples. Indeed, upsampling can help address jitter errors introduced by the sampling process itself.
It wouldn't be fair to say that there isn't debate in the engineering vs audio community about the role of such technologies , whether up sampling or oversampling in dealing with audio signals. But no matter what the magic is in the box, the only thing that matters is whether or not you hear a richer audio presence: does it sound like the musicians you love are playing better? suddenly have even nicer instruments? If you can't hear a difference, there isn't much point. I tried a DAC recently that didn't seem to sound any better hooked into the CD player than without it. I was using the CD players optical out. Someone suggested i try the coax out from the cd. WOW! that made a difference. The optical out (toslink) on the player was shite. Glad there was the coax. Suddenly a cheap-ish cd player was competing with players hundreds of pounds more expensive than it.
DACs aren't just for CD players - they can be applied to any digital audio source that has a digital output (toslink or coax). If you have iTunes coming out of a mac with a digital audio out (new macs, including the laptops, do; g5's also have optical out), you can feed that optical out right into something like the X-DAC. Indeed, because of the way the x-dac works, you can hook up a toslink from your computer (monster makes the appropriate cable as part of the airport express cable pack) into the optical port on the x-dac, and have a coax connection going from the cd to the dac as well. The box detects which machine is on and locks onto that source. Magic. But again, hear it for yourself (or read the pdfs of copious reviews but much better to hear it).
Review: putting it all together.
Audio recordings played through really good stereo equipment does make a difference to the audio experience. It improves the audio experience on so many levels - whether it's the clarity of bass as it becomes distinct notes rather than a low thump, or the real silence of the spaces between notes, or the presence of the scratching of bow against string.
Hi Fi audio experience is possible in the headphone space at a fraction of the cost it would take to create a similar stereo system. There are four parts to consider, particularly for the ipod/computer based source to move closer to music nirvana.
And yes sure you don't NEED any of this to be moved by music (just like a photographer doesn't need the most expensive digital camera on the planet to take great pictures) . Some of my best memories of music have been of cheap nearly worn cassettes played during long roadtrips on gnarly car stereos with one speaker bust, BUT it can be emotionally very satisfying as well, moving even, to really hear something the way some better gear can bring out that experience.
Indeed, being able to hear a recording on good gear can make you appreciate stuff you may otherwise have brushed aside. This has certainly been the case for me with brahms string sextets . I'd passed it over. even said "yuck" and then i accidently heard it with a headphone amp plugged into the cd player and it was a revelation. It's since become a favorite recording.
So, yes, two main things, then two bonus bits:
(1) decently encoded data - whether AAC 128 Variable Bit Rate, or, my preference, Apple Lossless
(2) great headphones - closed, open, canal; high or low impedance
(3) a good source to drive and open up whatever cans you're using - headphone amp!
(4) and finally, if you're getting really into this, a dedicated DAC to squeeze the most from your digital source.
Lest you think this is the end, it's not: there's external power supplies to drive the devices better; there's the quality of the cables connecting the bits (don't let an engineer tell you cable is cable: it's not - you can hear the difference. It doesn't mean the most expensive stuff is the best, but you can hear the differences between cables - try a blindfold test with different ones. For example, with an x-can v3 hooked up directly to your fave store's cd player, and your headphones on, ask to hook up that cd player to an x-dac using, for instance, UK made
Chord Electronic 's CoDac cable then try the same set up with their prodac cable - just don't let them tell you which is which, and see what you think. And that's not all: there are a myriad of aftermarket headphone cable upgrades that tune the sound of the headphones themselves for AKG and Sennheissers - see groups like Cardas or Stefan Audio Art for examples).
But before getting super intrigued about the path towards perpetual upgrades, the simple truth is, a really good pair of headphones can go a long way to openning up music in ways that you may not have experienced before, and in a way that only could be approximated for 10x's the cash to set up an equivalent speaker-based system.
Headphones to try for starters?
- Sennheiser HD 600's or 650's - open cans
- Beyer Dynamics 770's - closed cans
- Etymotics Research 4s - canal phones
There are all sorts of others in here - AKG, Grados, Ultrasone and more
The thing is, this is also a relatively cheap proposition to test: first, improve the encodings for your own current portable digital music set up; next, take a few cd's to a good local audio shop (someplace not pretentious, but knowledgeable, helpful - you'll get the vibe as soon as you go through the door) and give it a whirl. If nothing else, you'll have a grand audio experience, so not a waste of time. If music is important to you, you'll be glad you tried - it may be a revelation.
Many thanks to Sam Lowe of the most excellent
Phase3hifi for his time in walking through the differences between cables, dacs, headphone amps and other components, and letting me experiment with different combinations.
It never fails: get into a cab anywhere in the UK, and within minutes, i'll be asked "so, how long are you here for?" There are variations, "Are you traveling or on business?" - then the delicate probing to discover whether the accent originates from the US or Canada. This is followed by either "i have family in Canada" or "what part of Canada are you from?" - never mind that either (a) the person has never been there and so has no knowledge of what being from any region means or (b) their knowledge of the country is that they have relatives invariably either in Vancouver or Toronto. "They wanted me to come out there too, but...."
The surprise is the automatic assumption that if one has a north american accent, then that person is either a tourist or just in the UK on business. Even within a work context, i regularly get asked first if i am working over here and then "how long have you been here?" For a Canadian who's grown up around a sea of voices, such questions have never occurred to me to ask. But in the UK it seems it's the opposite. The assumption is first and foremost that you're visiting at most, and that if you're working here, it's just a quickie.
Is it so shocking to the UK psyche that someone from the New World/colonies would move to the old country?
In Canada, you're surrounded by accents, not the least of which is English of some sort. I've spoken with many many canadians about this: not once have any of us, on hearing a non-local accent EVER asked "so, how long are you visiting for?"
It's not that there's an assumption that the person either lives here (in Canada, say) or not. It's simply that to question someone about their locality would not occur as a question.
I was in yet another taxi awhile ago, and asked by the driver (a) where i was from and (b) how i liked it in the UK. When i asked her if she liked it in the UK, the reply was she hated it and wanted to leave. This is not the first time i've heard such admissions about wanting to get out.
I can't lay hands on it now, but there was a survey a couple years ago about Brits feelings about their home and native land - and nigh on 50% of them wanted to leave. Increasing numbers who can afford to are retiring to Spain and such warmer Euro climes - to the point where the local communities are getting quite miffed at the adamantly english invasion and lack of sensitivity to local cultures/languages.
Having only been here a few years now, i could only speculate about this angst to get out, whether these folks have ever been out or not, but it goes some ways to explaining the seeming mental hurdle that UK nationals seem unable to overcome when faced with a North American accent - a perspective that can't believe anyone who could chose to be elsewhere would be here.
The US still has mail on saturdays. Canada dropped saturday mail decades ago. In Canada it can take a week for a piece of post mailed from an address in Toronto to reach another address in Toronto. It recently took five weeks for an air mail envelop (light - contained a scarf a cousin had knitted for christmas) to arrive from california to the UK. "Typical" was the only reply.
In the UK, you can order a parcel from Scotland on Monday, and it will be with you in England by tea time on Tuesday.
To a Canadian, such postal service is just this side of miraculous; it's this kind of service that makes internet shopping something equally magical: order something from electronic scales to sneakers at a UK internet shop and it's there the next day - two days at the most - and at a savings from buying "on the high street." And there it is: brought right to your door. For those who are not keen on the hurly burly of heading into stores (the get in and get out types) this kind of shopping service is heaven sent.
And really, in the UK, there is an online store for everything. A colleague was telling me about a place that just sold hassocks. Another, that i wrote about earlier, just does light bulbs.
I thought perhaps this kind of internet service was a global phenom. It isn't.
i wanted to get a pal in the US a gift, so was looking to order something from a US online shop to be delivered to him - in the US: it would take 3-5 days to process the order and then another week for delivery of the goods. A ten day to two week process. The business processing the order was one part of the hold up; speed of the post is another.
Now maybe it's just that the UK has hit the sweet spot between geography and population density, such that it can move mail with such alacrity. After all despite Canada's land mass is three times the size of the US (the UK would likely fit inside the province of Alberta) it has a low population (about 33mil) compared to either the US (295mil) or the UK (60mil). Too few people to form a chain to pass the mail from one end of the country to the other?? And in the US? Just too many places for mail to get to, to be delivered efficiently? Dunno.
There's a lot of problems with services in the UK, as there seem to be in any country. Ask someone about trying to get an NHS dentist in the UK; where the concept of a semi-private room in a hospital is a complete non-starter (wards - just multibed wards here. does canada have wards in hospitals outside of Intensive Care Units?).
But when it comes to the mail, and what an efficient mail service enables for local trade, it seems quite untouched. I don't know what the rest of Europe is like, but compared to North America, the Royal Mail is a wonder.
The UK Government wants to push through ID Cards to use biometric data to connect the card, its data ("basic personal information") and its owner. Uh huh. While one can theoretically imagine how such a scheme would work (and the govn't is dealing in theory since its own site says it doesn't know yet what the cards will actually be like), you would be hard pressed to find any technologist (not funded by a biometrics company) who would say that such a scheme is practical at scale. Indeed, the summary of the consultation exercise on ID cards, which found largely against the practicality or efficacy of such a scheme is - no longer to be found on the Govn't web site. You can still find news articles quoting various computer science experts who spoke to the committee on the multiple problems with ID cards.
And you'd think that such concerns might be part of why the house of lords chucked out the ID Card Bill yesterday. Apparently, though, they were worried about costs - the fact that they weren't well enough defined by the government. Who knows, maybe that's a really good first act rejection: because if the government comes back with a better cost breakdown, perhaps the House will get to the gnarly question of "how can we trust those figures."
Why would they ask such a question? Because the Government has a lousy track record when it comes to specifying and delivering - no matter what the budget - national IT systems. And if they can't get a national database right on the smaller scale of specialist IT systems like the Magistrates court, Ambulance Services [additional research paper pdf], doctor's surgery systems, the police's IMPACT program or Tax Credits, how on earth can they be trusted to get an even more complex system like an ID registry with databases, specialized hardware for collection of biometric data, specialized hardware and software for matching biometric data, specialized training, and specialized secure documents delivered?
So the question is pretty simple the next time the house of lords gets the ID Card Bill back: even if delivering an excellent ID Card system were possible, and even if there were no questions about the technology, about the biometrics, the database security, the security layers between the system itself and humans accessing it, the hackability of the cards, and never mind the social, moral, or economic issues, or for that matter the political ones about whether or not such a system could even stop a terrorist [look here for a list of all these issues and the organizations that query them], disregarding all that and cutting to the chase, would the UK Government simply have the wherewithall to deliver it?
In Canada, where i hail from, the term "brilliant" is gnerally reserved for truly outstandingly genius-like demonstrations of talent, intelligence, wit - whatever. It's not a term you hear often. If someone says "that was brilliant" or "she is brilliant" it's pretty much the highest degree complement with respect to intelligence or excellence one can achieve.
Not so in Britain (not prepared to generalize to the UK yet...).
In Britain, everything and anything can be "brilliant." Brilliant seems to be used in a way very similarly to the way "excellent" is used in most parts of North America. The one difference between the interchangeability of brilliant/excellent is the rather ironic way that brilliant can be used in the uk to indicate its opposite: you'll hear "oh that's just brilliant, isn't it" when something's really "a complete cock up" (to use another great brit'ism).
You'd rarely find a Canadian saying "oh that's just excellent" when it's a disaster. "That's just great...just great" is more common when going for reversal.
So if you're in the UK and someone says something you've done is "brilliant" - it's still a compliment, but it's just not as hot as you think were that epithet to be used back home. Alas.
Another expression that seems to have no Canadian equivalent is "bless 'em" or "lord bless 'em" or more simply "bless"
It's been harder to get a handle on when and how this particular expression gets used, but it seems to have something to do with covering one's ass after offering a critique of a person. Someone might say something to the effect of "he's not the sharpest tool in the shed" and follow this immediately with "bless him." The desired effect of the apostrophe "bless him" seems to be to mitigate the perceived harshness of the critique - so much to say "doesn't mean i don't like him or that he's not in other ways a nice person, no doubt."
The above interpretation is just deduction on my part based on the contexts of hearing the expression, and also the cultural context of observing the british reluctance (relative to canadians) of saying anything critical of anyone or anything.
This could well lead into an observation on canadian/british behaviour rather than word usage, but it's interesting to see how the two might be related.
It's just these small kinds of differences between english word usage that is part of the culture shock a person coming from Canada experiences when hitting the UK: the word differences become clues to deeper cultural differences that are more challenging to decode, because it's not a case of equivalences like "biscuit" in britain means "cookie" in Canada; it's a case of differences where there aren't parallels between the two places. So it sounds the same, but it isn't the same.
Even being in Britain for a few years now, i don't know how to interpret all the differences, but am better at recognizing them, and the recognition at least allows more comfort; less disorientation. I'll have to think of some examples anon.
Who'd a thunk it, eh? that two such supposedly historically close nations would have these, what would you call them, gaps in connection? I'm not sure what it's like for Brits going the other way, from here to Canada, if there's the same sort of sense of slight twilight zone off set. I have the impression of Canadians being so exposed, our heart, thoughts, everything on our sleeves, without being boisterous about it, that there'd be no difficulty getting a read on Canadian customs, practices and rationales for same. huh.
Mind you, try asking a Westerner why a Quebec'er may be a "separatist" and you'll soon see that we're not always so clear about our own culture(s), either...bless us.
Wow.
wow
wow
I suppose that could be me quoting a Kate Bush song, but it's not - or not only that: it's the response after half a dozen listens to the new (double) album. It's been great reading other folks' reviews too because they're pulling out things (this one at Play Louder is great)- a flamenco at the end of Somewhere in Between for instance; the lyrics of Mrs. Bartolozzi - that get missed in the first listen- make a track worth going back to, and there is so much to go back to.
My current fave is Nocturn/Aerial. Two songs but they blend into each other in a way that just makes a listener want to run and run and run, the build is so expressive, so explosive. Bush's vocal layerings - her mixes in these her productions are so compelling. Find Nocturn, find someplace where you can play it loud and see if it doesn't make you want to yell! (in a good way).
Here's one thing i haven't found other reviewers talking about but in passing: Bush's laughter in Aerial, or just the recurrence of bird song throughout. In an interview this month in Mojo, Bush talks about her interest in this other language. The album asks repeatedly what is this language - either explicitly in Sunset, or implicitly just by its presence throughout the album Aerial Tal is filled with it), or Bush's call and response laughing against bird calls in Aerial "all the birds are laughing, come on let's join in." Excuse me? Not the way i'd thought of bird song, or what to do with it, before, to be sure. it's GREAT!.
One of the best lines (why, i dunno) in a song i've heard lately is Bush singing in Aerial "i feel i wanna be up on the roof; i feel i gotta be up on the roof up on the roof up on the roof" With its insistent ryhthmn, it's another yell, another ya ya ya!
Bush has a small web site to support the album. One of the best attributes of it (one of the only ones so far. Where's the back button, Kate?) is access to the lyrics to share with people while you're playing your tunes.
Though the site currently has very little content, the way it's put together sets a tone, creates a pace: the animation is subtle (birds flying over the water).
The cover art completes the whole: the frequency pattern on the cover of the cd connects to the theme of the aerial, and also - as shown on the site - blends/fades into the shape of a honey colored sunset across the water.
There is such a completeness or connectedness to each of these elements, that again, the pleasure just grows in the seeing a little more each time. If you're into these tunes, do search for other reviews. They'll help find those precious bits in Bush's a sky of honey a sea of honey.
wow wow wow
In the vein of stating the blindingly obvious:
designing useful and usable tools isn't just about good widgets. There can be great widgets that will let a person carry out a task.
But what if the person doesn't want to carry out that task?
For insance,
In the UK there's a requirement to make publicly funded research publicly available - many places are turning to repositories like Eprints that will enable this process to happen. But right now, getting papers into Eprints is a manual, tedious process: filling in fields and fields in forms.
The "pro bono" argument is that increased access to the data will enable better access to cutting edge research.
A slightly more self- interested benefit is that there is research to show that openly available papers are more than twice as likely to be sited than those that are not.
But that petition to self-interest to leverage future benefit to off-set current pain does not have an immediate, perceivable benefit for the person stuck with uploading papers. We've seen that people just don't do it.
As Alan Dix might put it, the perceived cost is higher than the perceived benefit. The What's in It for Me effect only works, it seems, when that benefit is immediately perceivable. For instance: take these steps now to upload these papers and you'll never have to add them to your cv again: they will automatically update; also, one line in a web page will let you publish all your papers formatted anyway you want.
So either the benefit must outweigh the cost or the cost must be reduced to the point where future benefit is sufficient to cost. Seems obvious, eh? But the idea does suggest that usability is about perceived usefulness as well as usable-ness.
about "what's in it for me - NOW" not just "what can i do with it"
This might also be seen as where affect meets effect. This again is not new in the design community: Dillon's proposed model for assessing applications, Process, Outcome, Affect, formalizes the role of affect - how the user feels about their experience in using a system: do they feel empowered. Ethnography has also always looked at what is the cultural context of the planned artefacts to be developed?
One thing that may be new, however, about using "what's in it for me" as a design query, is that it asks the question of affect before the system is developed - but i won't claim that for certain. What i will suggest is that putting design issues in terms of "what's in it for me" is an easy way to translate the iimportance of effective/affective design to non-hci specialists (ie, software engineers).
If your software cannot pass the test of what's in it for me? of the perceived cost being balanced by the perceived benefit, then it's time to rethink the design.
i was at a talk lately where an interesting tool was presented that all the people in the audience said "wow that looks really complicated to try to set up" - and these were rocket scientist type people. The challenge to the presenter was "would it perhaps not have been better to talk with your stakeholders about how they already do what they do and then design the tool to support that, rather than what seems to be the other way around: designing a tool and asking the community to adapt to it?"
The response was a gob-smacker: that if we had designed for one community, then we would have a custom tool not a general tool.
Perhaps having a tool that was useful and useable by one community would provide a path to a tool that was more generally useable - rather than a tool which now is general but that puts the fear of god into anyone who goes near it - where the what's in it for me - the perceived benefit - is (a) unknown and (b) not even approached because the perceived cost is far too obvious.
So, take away: start with finding a me to whom you can ask "what is in it for me" - and test the answers against the push back of cost. it'll likely end up being pro bono, too.
My one previous experience of an apple store had been in a boston shopping center last summer when i watched in amazement as people came into the store, went straight to the cashier, pulled out a wad of hundreds, and requested an ipod. "Windows or Mac?" was the only question. More often than not, the answer was, interestingly, Windows. The cashier would turn to a wheeled cart, loaded with nothing but ipods, ask next "20 or 40" hand poised. The size was given and the exchange made. It mayn't have been a rush on the till, but it was a persistent and steady stream. And at least a transaction was taking place.
In London at least on this day, the grand Apple Regent Street Store was useless, unless of course your idea of a great store is something that disguises itself as an internet cafe - albeit one with some massive screens and the occasional ipod or digital camera attached. Maybe it's sale by virus? It was a pain in the ass. But since i seemed to be the only one in there interested in purchasing anything other than an iPod, maybe it's no big deal. Who am i to argue with a company that holds 2% of the PC market?
If you haven't been, the London Regent Street store is all open plan, pale wood floors, aluminum trim and glass panels, two floors. The crowd on the day i was there was largely 20-somethings taking over all the computer demo stations - to do email on a web browser or to configure IM to do fast chats. It was amazing. MSN messenger is certainly THE IM client - not ichat. There was a lot of IM'ing in spanish going on. Had word gone out to the backpack tourist crowd that this was the place to connect up with home? Something in the casual sashay of the staff suggested, however, that this was par for the course.
I had gone in to check out a new midi keyboard Apple was vending: it was attached to a 12"powerbook on a very short leash - and the guy "looking" at said power book was also just running a chat. When i asked about it wanting to check it out, the black shirted, black trousered "apple genius" was not particularly helpful: i wanted to try it. Like maybe to buy it. Oh well, too bad. Someone doing their email was using the space, so the customer can stuff it. Excuse me? i mean it must be a business plan right? Let people come in and use all this techno as a free internet cafe and that'll build brand loyalty. Don't ask them to move over because an actual customer might want to buy something or look at something. email/websurfing access is too important to the culture.
Two glorious 30" monitors set up side by side running off a g5 were not showing the marvels of final cut pro (aside: surely one 30" would do? have you seen these things? it's like swimming in a screen - just one - two is a jaw dropper. Who has a desk this wide? an office this wide??). No, these beauties were occupied by another person checking their mail. And that seemed to be just fine with all the staff.
And i mean all the staff. No shortage of the lads (i didn't see any women employed there: maybe they were all in the bathroom) who could point over the shoulders of the internet cafe-ers to try to paint a verbal picture of what the system would be like if you could actually get close to seeing it.
There were what appeared to be queues in front of many of the machines, but when i asked someone if they were in line (to try out the machine?) they said no. What they were doing, standing, staring, is still a mystery to me.
On the second floor is the theater. Some poor soul was giving a tutorial on the image editing software photo elements and doing some cool stuff. No one seemed to be watching - or listening; they were im'ing on their own laptops. Maybe the apple store is an open wifi point? so why not on a hot day come into the Xanadu of computer design, sit in a comfy chair, in a semi-darkened area, headphones on, and surf? Perhaps that's another subliminal message: Apple is so cool it provides free wifi; it is the internet cafe location (though there's no coffee on site) of choice. You don't need to come here to shop; just to absorb.
I'm trying to think of any other store where people could just come in an use the stuff for nothing to do with the store, actually stand in the way of potentially paying customers. Does this actually add, not lose sales?
Upstairs there was a line up not for the till, (like boston, ringing up ipods only there) but for the "genius bar" People with laptops, with questions, earnestly pouring out their hearts to another load of lads in a row, asking for healing, for vision, for confirmation that this was the end of their personal techno hell, the summit of wisdom had been reached.
At another round version of same, people sat in a circle looking earnestly at digital video cameras as the geniuses there walked the inner circle, helping decisions to be made.
While the first floor was the land of the internet cafe twenty-somethings, the info bars were the realm of people who looked like they already had substantial mortgages. Who might actually buy something - a digital camera not made by apple at the round bar - or who had actually bought something - at the line dance on the other side of the glass stares.
At uni i recall the rationalization for either selling software cheap at education rates was to build brand loyalty. Similarly, the looking the other way if someone had "illegal" software on their deck was rationalized as "heh, when i get a job and i can afford it, i'll buy it" - that's generally held true.
Maybe Apple's store is trying to build this kind of deferred product lust. Maybe that's a bigger market than the too few of us who might actually walk in to try something specifically with an eye to buy. Maybe it's working for apple. And the value of the many in the future exceeds the possible purchase at that moment by the one? Does this work? Or was this just a blip in the day of the life of a "flagship" Apple Store?
From a cultural perspective London Regent St Apple Store was an interesting experience, but as an individual consumer, it was a turn off. And if i wasn't already a long term apple customer, i could say one of those kinds of turn offs that make you feel you won't be back.
What happens when technologies go transparent? when they become so common that we no longer think about them? What's happening with mobile phones in some countries is a case in point: the techno has gotten to a place when it's only noticed when someone doesn't have it: "What do you mean you don't have a cell phone?" This is an example of a technology in the process of going transparent.
One technology that is pretty much transparent in most of the "first" world is oil - and its derivatives. Oil based products, whether energy, plastic or synthetic materials, have gone effectively transparent. We rarely see these technologies any more: we take synthetics for granted; although the price of gas has goes up, we don't think that the gas will run out.
But what happens when it does? or as it does - run out, that is. Because it will - and according to at least one expert, it will run out a lot sooner than most of us would care to believe.
Salon recently published an interview with James Howard Kunstler author of "The Long Emergency" to discuss his predictions/scenarios of what life will be like when the "oil fiesta" is over - in 15 years.
Try to imagine all the things we do - including looking at this Web page - that presume abundant energy. The plastic in the computer you're using; the milk jug in your fridge; the clothes in your closet; the shoes on your feet; the cheap flight you took on holiday; the food in your grocery, trucked in from god knows where, but not your back yard, the dvd you rented.
Now imagine it gone.
Kunstler suggests that people at least in the States are too overwhelmed when presented with a scenario postulating the immanent demise of a way of life that they are in a state of denial. They won't consider it. And consequently the opportunity of a "smooth transition" from the Way It Is Now to the Way It (Soon) Will Be has been effectively lost.
Thus the question may worth be considering, what would we need to rebuild, reknow, relearn, regenerate, to get along in a world that may be more like the Victorians (or at least Neal Stephanson's digital version of that era [see the Diamond Age]) than the Space Family Robinson. Danger danger, Will Robinson: you're running out of oil.
What would we hate to lose most? how would we keep it?
What would it mean to become again far more locally/community oriented?
What would it be like not to be able to travel at the drop of a hat? or if Pirates once again became a formidable thread to global exchange of goods?
What would it mean if the suburbs collapsed?
These are hard things to imagine. Or not - there are periods of history that reflect these ways of being; there are parts of the globe today that live in this disconnected (but highly impacted) way. But we like to think of them as a part of the past, not our future.
How do we psychically and practically prepare for such a transition?
It's the British Elections tomorrow, and thanks to the Iraq War becoming the issue of the election, the Labour Party under Tony Blair is not assured the cake walk into a third term that was anticipated.
So it seems there's a real opportunity to feel one's vote will have an impact. As in the states election, however, it seems that the youth vote is an under tapped resource for any party. In the states, despite major effort by a variety of venues from the parties themselves to MTV, student numbers weren't any higher than the previous election. What's with that? In the UK, there's been no such out reach. Perhaps they feel it's not worth it? It doesn't seem that 20 somthings in or out of university care to "get out the vote." Why not? What's different here? Various programs featuring interviews of 20 somethings in pubs have shown them saying "there's nothing interesting for me" and "i have to go somewhere to vote? i'm not doing that" or "it's the politicians fault: they're not offering me anything." This seems to be a bit of a surprise. For youth contemplating an education, there does seem to be an issue.
The Labour party introduced top up fees for university. The Liberal Democrats have said that they would scrap them. For selfish reasons alone, wouldn't it be worth voting for a group that would kill your major debt burden?
I've heard some mature adults here say students will just get used to fees being part of their lives. Ask some North American students how they feel about getting used to student loan debt and how crippling it can be for decades following graduation. It will be interesting to see if students who protested top up fees this past year will take the opportunity to create change here.
[Update: students ARE voting] more...
Perhaps the media has been rather misrepresenting the Youth vote - at least the Student youth vote. I've had the chance to speak with first years, third years, fourth year students and researcher assistants and they've each said, but one, that they're voting, or for that matter have postal voted already. Walking down the hall today, i heard my first political argument: it wasn't about voting or not, but about who these two "youth" had decided to support. Fantastic (the grown ups have seemed far more reluctant to "talk politics:" is that a British cultural thing, this reticence?). One of them was talking about how he's been proselytizing the need to vote to his peer group.
So what's with the media portraying the Youth of the UK as apathetic and uninterested in the election? Perhaps heading to the pubs isn't the best place to ask these probing questions?
Or is there a divide between students and employed 18-21year olds? Dunno. But today i heard if not overflowing joy at the opportunity to vote, at least a commitment among student youth to do so.
A colleague of mine, Jeremy Cooperstock, has a rigorous email policy: once a day, and that's it. His emails always include a link to this policy so that folks know where they stand. That's polite (Canadian, eh?). But why have such an explicit policy?
There's an implicit, cultural expectation of immediacy with email: it can be sent and received at near light speed; a response should be just as rapid, so the logic seems to go. If one does not abide by these expectations, an explanation needs to be proffered. Hence an email policy. Based on Jeremy's example, i offer this note as a first draft of an evolving policy.
I'm pulling back from email. It's getting to be too much. Maybe you see this too: email, combined with a laptop and wireless, seems to have become the great distractor: i sit in talks and conferences and watch my colleagues and myself "multitask" - doing email while the speaker attempts to be more engaging than the current virtual exchange. There's nothing inherently wrong with these capacities, but i'm noticing that there does seem to be something problematic with my own practice of them: too much response mode to email rather than to the bigger picture.
So, over the next month at least, i'll be limiting my email reading to one or two set periods in the day, during the week, and likely zero on the weekend. As a result, replies to emails will likely be more like within a day or so, rather than an hour or so.
The reason for setting these limits is to reclaim my day from the reactiveness that is email. I find myself in open response mode - Pavlov's dogs come to mind: the email chimes and i respond. This can't be right.
Indeed, i know from experience that pulling away from email can be a positive, effective thing. My laptop keeled over last year, and had to go to warranty repair land. I remember the look of sympathy and horror that came over my colleagues' faces when i told them my laptop was in the shop - sympathy that this must be a terrible experience; horror at the thought of how awful that would be if it happened to them. I took the time as an opportunity to see what life without constant access to email would be like.
For what ended up being six weeks last year, i reclaimed my space from email and my world became a more relaxed, more effective place. Rather than have email on all the time while at work, i had it on twice a day only. I