Printed Antimatter

Not the MacPhone but the M·A·C Phone

B2-blog stable-mate Third Screen is spotlighting the Bang & Olufsen Serene, the little cell phone with the big, big price. I'm a fan of B&O despite their luxury price points because they've made a business out of experimenting with the form of otherwise humdrum consumer electronics. But while I think some of their designs are amazing distillations of an object's essence, others are self-consciously Jetsons-esque. Though I've yet to see one in person, I'm afraid the Serene falls into the latter category, as it has an almost freakish resemblance to a powder compact. But I'm glad someone's trying.

(Also, what's up with the keypad buttons in a ring formation? Didn't Nokia try that with their 3650 and then immediately take it back with their 3660?)

It's just a matter of time

  Big Ben with Dali clock sculpture 
  Originally uploaded by lightbody.

If you're an American who doesn't live in Arizona, you just Fell Back to make up for Springing Forward last April. My laptop knew to fall back-- it adjusted its internal clock in the wee hours of Sunday. My cell phone knew to fall back too, as did my desk phone at work. So did my VCR, and TiVo, and even the weird little device Sidra hid in my office that plays a tinny, beeping version of "My Heart Will Go On" every day at 6:12 pm. But you know what didn't know to fall back? My clocks and watches.

That's right. The devices I have whose sole function is to tell time don't do as good a job as devices that only tell time as a sideline. That counts as irony, right?

Okay, there is one exception: My SmartSet clock radio knows when to fall back or spring forward. However, despite its cleverness and its ability to set itself after power outages, it is constantly ten minutes fast. I live with that error for the same reason many people set their clocks fast deliberately-- to fool myself into being less late. I'd replace it with a clock that syncs via radio to an atomic clock, but it has a really handy dual alarm that can be set for just Mon-Fri, just Sat-Sun, or all week.

But you know, now that I think about it, a clock being able to adjust itself twice a year is no great shakes. And now that I think about it, my computer, cell phone, desk phone, and watch never even agree what time it is. When it's time for a 10 am meeting here at the office, I have no idea when to go, because all my sources are telling me something different. And even if I did know, no one else in the office is going to show up at 10 on the dot either, except by luck.

I know that time is relative, and can speed up or slow down according to your frame of reference, but aren't we yet to the point where the majority of timepieces can sync up wirelessly into some semblance of accuracy? Actually, now that I'm sounding to myself like Paul Kedrosky, I'll just say it: There is a big opportunity out there for the person who invents a wireless atomic-clock sync chip cheap enough to put in gumball-machine watches but dependable enough to put in Big Ben.

Note that I'm only talking about timepieces for human consumption-- automated and electrical systems can continue at the beat of their own throbbing cesium atom, and we certainly don't need to cause some Y2K-style situation. But I'm a graphic designer; I like for things to line up and be consistent. And while die-hards will be free to continue setting their own clocks ten minutes ahead of Siry Universal Time, I hope our children will grow up in a world where the cinematic cliché "Let's synchronize watches" has become nonsensical.

Irrational and transcendental (or, An infographic solution in search of a problem)

  Pi 
  Originally uploaded by [P!]Wack.

Sometimes someone does something that makes no kind of sense, but you love them for doing it. (Usually we call that thing "art.") A fellow who goes by the handle [P!]Wack on Flickr posted a visualization of all the digits of pi (after the decimal point). Each pixel represents one digit, and is colored accordingly (see the key on the right).

The result looks like, well, static. And it has no value as an infographic because (1) each horizontal row is 100 pixels wide, which is a purely arbitrary number, and (2) each digit is assigned a purely arbitrary color.So looking at this tells us nothing about pi, except that it's pretty random.

But this technique could be adapted into an interesting infographic technique. Say each pixel represents a one hour period, and each row was 168 pixels long, representing a week. Then assign the digits as meaning 1,000's of page views for your web site, with 0 page views being pure black, 9,000 page views being pure white, and all the digits in between being shades of gray. Then stack 52 rows of pixels atop each other, meaning the 52 weeks of the last year. Presto, you can know see at a glance at what times during the week your site got the most traffic, and whether that time has changed or shifted over the last year.

You could do any variation on this, with the pixels representing a day or a month or a second or any unit of time. (Time is good for this because it is periodic, thus giving a reason to stack the rows-- unlike pi, which does not have any periodic interval.) The color of the pixel could represent sales or customers or temperature or any scalar value. Trends over time will be rendered eminently visible.

Every issue of Business 2.0 holds a lot of charts, tables, and infographics, so I'm always on the lookout for new techniques to display information. I hope I get to use this technique soon-- it should be pretty cool, though perhaps obscure.

(Title of this post taken from a comment on the Flickr pge by m0l0k0.)

UPDATE: My friend J points out that the row count actually does affect the visualization of pi. Here it is with a slight tweak:

Borat: The first 14 seconds of the first 4 minutes of his movie

I enjoyed this clip from the Borat movie on so many levels. Well, two levels.

1. It's freakin' hilarious
2. It has flawless ersatz-retro-Eastern-Bloc graphics at the beginning and the end. They even did the English subtitles in the exactly right crappy fashion.

Also check out the great map graphic between 00:34 and 00:42.

Booster club

ASME (the American Society of Magazine Editors) announced its selections for Best Covers of 2006. A worthy bunch, all of them. One cover showed up thrice: in third place for Cover of the Year, third place for Concept Cover, and winner of Cover Line of the Year. It was the July 8-14 Economist's depiction of Kim Jong Il launching on a column of rocket flames. Very clever, you guys! Glad to know you had the May issue of Business 2.0 kicking around the office.

Aw, I'm just busting your chops. Congratulations to all, seriously!

• 2006 Best Cover
• 2006 Best News Cover
• 2006 Best Celeb Cover
• 2006 Best Concept Cover
• 2006 Best Fashion Cover
• 2006 Best Service Cover
• 2006 Best Cover Line

(B2 cover photo-illustration by C.J. Burton.)

Outlawing a symbol (or, Hot button issues)

So there was a bit of an uproar recently concerning the fashion company Esprit:

Fashion firm Esprit is under investigation in Germany after accusations that British-made buttons appearing in their new collection have swastika designs.

The firm has agreed to pulp over 200,000 autumn collection catalogues after complaints that the leather folding on certain cardigan buttons resembles the Nazi insignia...

"We have known about these traditional English buttons for years," said Kroger. "That's why nobody ever dreamt that they could be associated with such a thing.

The investigation was dropped before long. But the reason for the investigation in the first place is that depicting a swastika is illegal in Germany. That an actual symbol has been outlawed regardless of context results in strange cases like this, or this (from the first link):

Last month, a court in Stuttgart fined a 32-year-old man more than 7,000 euros (8,700 dollars) for selling anti-Nazi badges that showed a swastika with a line through it. In Germany, all depictions of the Nazi cross are forbidden.

It's a good thing we're not like that here in the US of A, because by now we'd have had to outlaw the letter W.

(Note: I could not find any photos of the buttons in question, but I believe they are the style pictured here.)

Burn, baby, burn

My dad, he doesn't want to be a bother. And he's a pretty unsentimental guy. That's why he's made arrangements so that, when he dies, he'll be taken straight to the crematorium. No funeral, no viewing of the body, nothing like that.

I'm fine with this. Cremation is, in my opinion, the way to go. Actually, it's not just my opinion: According to a 2005 survey, 46% of Americans are planning to toss themselves on the barbie, up from 31% in 1990. And as with any trend, as it gets more popular, the market expands in new directions. In this case we're talking a veritable Cambrian explosion of cremation urns.

Back in April Business 2.0's Bottom-Line Design Awards chose the Uono Cocoon coffin as its Best of Show. (Apparently the judges were big fans of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.) I took a little stroll around the internets to see whether anyone was creating anything comparable for those of us who'll be needing smaller digs. What I found ranged from the interesting to the tacky to the strange to the totally bizarre to the actually quite beautiful.

Seen And Not Seen is pupating

You may notice two new things about this blog.

1. It now has advertising!
2. It now looks like shit!

Point 2 is just temporary, while I adjust to the sudden arrival of point 1. Right now, SANS looks hella awkward in Firefox and downright mutated in Safari. It's nothing a little hammering and emergency CSS lessons won't fix. Your patience in this time of transition is appreciated. Thanks!

A note about the advertising... It is served to me by my corporate masters. I do not get a say in what appears or doesn't. So no endorsement or anti-endorsement should be construed. Conversely, my subject matter will not be affected in either way whether a company advertises or not. I noticed Apple ads popping up; their appearance on this site has nothing to do with the fact that I've been a Mac fanboy since 1984. Similarly, I've noticed Verizon ads too, but that's not going to stop me from excoriating the Chocolate in a future post I have planned. And I'll tell you if Verizon sends me a Chocolate to change my mind. (God dammit, Volkswagen, where's that Eos?!)

The Device

This is exactly the kind of near-useless geek-bait that I intend to avoid discussing on my blog. And when a subject has been blogged by Make AND BoingBoing AND Gizmodo AND Engadget it's as dried up and useless as a condom on the sidewalk the day after the Folsom Street Fair. But The Device Patented Process Indicating Apparatus is completely up my alley with its 1924 styling and its customizable science-lab dials. When it comes out (eventually) I'm going to expense one and hook it up to my work computer as a blog dashboard. My future settings:

Analog Dial 1: Number of page views the blog is getting

Analog Dial 2: Time elapsed since last post

Test Tube: Glows more intensely as the magazine work I'm ignoring piles up

Red Light: Activates when Irene the Photo Director gets annoyed at me for slacking

The Art of the Kludge

  Train entrance 
  Originally uploaded by seadipper.

Reader Paul Reynolds sent in this hilarious essay by Bartosz Milewski about profoundly bad user-interface design. The door handle on the train car has to be seen-- or rather, not seen-- to be believed.

The British School of User Interface

Bartosz is a software guy, but principles of user interface design are universal. Whenever I accidentally print a QuarkXPress document instead of saving it as a PostScript file (or vice versa) because I didn't switch modes in the "Printer..." dialog box as opposed to the "Print..." dialog box, it's like reaching through that train car window.

(Incidentally, this kind of train was called the slam-door train, since you had to slam the doors shut. They have all been retired and replaced with trains whose doors slide open automatically, since too many people fell out of the slam-door trains while in motion. Click on the photo to learn a bit more... My favorite thing about blogging is discovering crazy stuff like this. I bet if I asked resident Brit Future Boy about them he would expound upon all the ways slam-door trains are better than uncouth American trains.)