Wonderful article about the work of J. Todd Anderson, who storyboards the Coen Brothers’ movies:

Anderson’s drawings have a jauntiness that seems absent from the more serious cinematic depiction; Anderson says he is simply trying to inject as much of a sense of action as possible into each scene.

Anderson describes the process of meeting about a new film:

“It’s like they’re making a movie in front of me,” he says. “They tell me the shots. I do fast and loose drawings on a clipboard with a Sharpie pen—one to three drawings to a sheet of regular bond paper. I try to establish the scale, trap the angle, ID the character, get the action.”

More in the article…

The top 100 most congested metropolitan areas, visualized as a series of tomato stems:

Includes links to PDF reports for each area which detail overall congestion and the worst bottlenecks.

Following up on an earlier post, The New York Times jumps in with more about California (and New York before it) shutting down personal genomics companies, including this curious definition of advice:

“We think if you’re telling people you have increased risk of adverse health effects, that’s medical advice,” said Ann Willey, director of the office of laboratory policy and planning at the New York State Department of Health.

The dictionary confirmed my suspicion that advice refers to “guidance or recommendatios concerning prudent future action,” which doesn’t coincide with telling people they have increased risk for a disease. If they told you to take medication based on that risk, it would most certainly be advice. But as far as I know, the extent of the advice given by these companies is to consult a doctor for…advice.

As in the earlier post, the health department in California continues to sound nutty:

“We started this week by no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California,” Karen L. Nickel, chief of laboratory field services for the state health department, said during a June 13 meeting of a state advisory committee on clinical laboratories.

We will not tolerate it! These tests are a scourge upon our society! The collapse of the housing loan market, high gas prices, and the “great trouble or suffering” brought on by this beast that preys on those with an excess of disposable income. Someone has to save these people who have $1000 to spare on self-curiosity! And the poor millionaires spending $350,000 to get their genome sequenced by Knome. Won’t someone think of the millionaires!?

I wish I still lived in California, because then I would know someone was watching out for me.

For the curious, the letters sent to the individual companies can be found here, sadly they aren’t any more insightful than the comments to the press. But speaking of scourge—the notices are all Microsoft Word files.

One interesting tidbit closing out the Times article:

Dr. Hudson [director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University] said it was “not surprising that the states are stepping in, in an effort to protect consumers, because there has been a total absence of federal leadership.” She said that if the federal government assured tests were valid, “paternalistic” state laws could be relaxed “to account for smart, savvy consumers” intent on playing a greater role in their own health care.

It’s not clear whether this person is just making a trivial dig at the federal government
or whether this is the root of the problem. In the previous paragraph she’s being flippant about “Genes R Us” so it might be just a swipe, but it’s an interesting point nonetheless.

Obscenity law in the United States is based on Miller vs. California, a precedent set in 1973:

“(a) whether the ‘average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,

(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and

(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Of course, the definition of an average person or community standards isn’t quite as black and white as most Supreme Court decisions. In a new take, the lawyer defending the owner of a pornography site in Florida is using Google Trends to produce what he feels is a more accurate definition of community standards:

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

Below, “surfing” in blue, “orgy” in red, and “apple pie” in orange:

A clever defense. The trends can also be localized to roughly the size of a large city or county, which arguably might be considered the “community.” The New York Times article continues:

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added.

Fascinating that there could actually be something even remotely quantifiable about community standards. “I know it when I see it” is inherently subjective, so is any introduction of objectivity an improvement? For more perspective, I recommend this article from FindLaw, which describes the history of “Movie Day” at the Supreme Court and the evolution of obscenity law.

The trends data has many inherent problems (lack of detail for one), but is another indicator of what we can learn from Google. Most important to me, the case provides an example of what it means for search engines to capture this information, because it demonstrates to the public at large (not just people who think about data all day) how the information can be used. As more information is collected about us, search engine data provides an imperfect mirror onto our society, previously known only to psychiatrists and priests.

Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps – Mark Simonson takes on historical accuracy of the typography used in the Indiana Jones movies:

For the most part, the type usage in each of the movies is correct for the period depicted. With one exception: The maps used in the travel montages.

My theory is that this is because the travel maps are produced completely outside the standard production team. They’re done by some motion graphics house, outside the purview of the people on-set who are charged with issues of consistency. A nastier version of this theory might indict folks who do motion graphics for not knowing their typography and its time period—instead relying on the “feel” of the type when selecting. The bland version of this theory is that type history is esoteric, and nobody truly cares.

(Also a good time to point out how maps are used as a narrative device in the film, to great effect. The red line extending across the map is part of the Indiana Jones brand. I’d be curious to hear the story behind the mapping—who decided it needed to be there, who made it happen, who said “let’s do a moving red line that tracks the progress”—which parts were intentional, and which unintentional.)

Identifying the period for the faces reminded me of a 2005 profile of Matthew Carter, which described his involvement in court cases where date was in doubt, but typography of artifacts in question gave away their era. Sadly the article cannot be procured from the web site of The New Yorker, though you may have better luck if you possess a library card. Matthew Carter designed the typefaces Verdana and Bell Centennial (among many others). Spotting his wispy white ponytail around Harvard Square is a bit like seeing a rock star, if you’re a Cantabridgian typography geek.

From A to Z, font designer knows his type – a Boston Globe interview with type designer David Berlow (one of the founders of Font Bureau), some of the questions are unfortunate, but a few interesting anecdotes:

Playboy magazine came to me; they were printing with two printing processes, offset and gravure. Gravure (printing directly from cylinder to paper), gives a richer, smoother texture when printing flesh tones and makes the type look darker on the page than offset (indirect image transfer from plates). So if you want the type to look the same, you have to use two fonts. We developed two fonts for Playboy, but they kept complaining that the type was still coming out too dark or too light. Finally, I got a note attached to a proof that said, “Sorry. It was me. I needed new glasses. Thanks for all your help. Hef.” That was Hugh Hefner, of course.

Or speaking about his office:

From Oakland, Calif., to Delft, Holland, all the designers work from home. I have never been to the office. The first time I saw it was when I watched the documentary “Helvetica,” which showed our offices.

The strange allure of making your own fonts – Jason Fagone describes FontStruct, a web-based font design tool from FontShop:

FontStruct’s interface couldn’t be more intuitive. The central metaphor is a sheet of paper. You draw letters on the “sheet” using a set of standard paint tools (pencil, line, box, eraser) and a library of what FontStruct calls “bricks” (squares, circles, half-circles, crescents, triangles, stars). If you keep at it and complete an entire alphabet, FontStruct will package your letters into a TrueType file that you can download and plunk into your PC’s font folder. And if you’re feeling generous, you can tell FontStruct to share your font with everybody else on the Internet under a Creative Commons license. Every font has its own comment page, which tends to fill with praise, practical advice, or just general expressions of devotion to FontStruct.

Though I think my favorite bit might be this one:

But the vast majority of FontStruct users aren’t professional designers, just enthusiastic font geeks.

I know that because I’m one of them. FontStruct brings back a ton of memories; in college, I used to run my own free-font site called Alphabet Soup, where I uploaded cheapie fonts I made with a pirated version of a $300 program called Fontographer. Even today, when I self-Google, I mostly come up with links to my old, crappy fonts. (My secret fear is that no matter what I do as a reporter, the Monko family of fonts will remain my most durable legacy.)

The proliferation of bad typefaces: the true cost of software piracy.

Before I even had a chance to write about personal genomics companies 23andMe, Navigenics, and deCODEme, Forbes reports that the California Health Department is looking to shut them down:

This week, the state health department sent cease-and-desist letters to 13 such firms, ordering them to immediately stop offering genetic tests to state residents.

Because of advances in genotyping, it’s possible for companies to detect changes from half a million data points (or soon, a million) of a person’s genome. The idea behind genotyping is that you look only for the single letter changes (SNPs) that are more likely to be unique between individuals, and then use that to create a profile of similarities and differences. So companies have sprung up, charging $1000 (ok, $999) a pop to decode these bits of your genome. It can then tell you some basic things about ancestry, or maybe a little about susceptibility for certain kinds of diseases (those that have a fairly simple genetic makeup—of which there aren’t many, to be sure).

Lea Brooks, spokesperson for the California Health Department, confirmed for Wired that:

…the investigation began after “multiple” anonymous complaints were sent to the Health Department. Their researchers began with a single target but the list of possible statute violators grew as one company led to another.

Listen folks, this is not just one California citizen, but two or more anonymous persons! Perhaps one of them was a doctor or insurance firm who have been neglected their cut of the $1000:

One controversy is that some gene testing Web sites take orders directly from patients without a doctor’s involvement.

Well now, that is a controversy! Genetics has been described as the future of medicine, and yet traditional drainers of wallets (is drainer a word?) in the current health care system have been sadly neglected. The Forbes article also describes the nature of the complaints:

The consumers were unhappy about the accuracy [of the tests] and thought they cost too much.

California residents will surely be pleased that the health department is taking a hard stand on the price of boutique self-testing. As soon as they finish off these scientifimagical “genetic test” goons, we could all use a price break on home pregnancy tests.

And as to the accuracy of, or what can be ascertained from such tests? That’s certainly been a concern of the genetics community, and in fact 23andme has “admitted its tests are not medically useful, as they represent preliminary findings, and so are merely for educational purposes.” Which is perfectly clear to someone visiting their site, however that presents a bigger problem:

“These businesses are apparently operating without a clinical laboratory license in California. The genetic tests have not been validated for clinical utility and accuracy,” says Nickel.

So an accurate, clinical-level test is illegal. But a less accurate, do-it-yourself (without a doctor) test is also illegal. And yet, California’s complaint gets more bizarre:

“And they are scaring a lot of people to death.”

Who? The people who were just complaining about the cost of the test? That’s certainly a potential problem if you don’t do testing through a doctor—and in fact, it’s a truly significant concern. But who purchases a $999 test from a site with the cartoon characters seen above to check for Huntington’s disease?

And don’t you think if “scaring people” were the problem, wouldn’t the papers and the nightly news be all over it? The only thing they love more than a new scientific technology that’s going to save the world is a new scientific technology to be scared of. Ooga booga! Fearmongering hits the press far more quickly than it does the health department, so this particular line of argument just sounds specious.

The California Health Department does an enormous disservice to the debate of a complicated issue by mixing several lines of reasoning which taken as a whole simply contradict one another. The role of personal genetic testing in our society deserves a debate and consideration; I thought I would be able to post about that part first, but instead the CA government beat me to the dumb stuff.

Thomas Goetz, deputy editor at Wired has had two such tests (clearly not unhappy with the price), and angrily responds “Attention, California Health Department: My DNA Is My Data.” It’s not just those anonymous Californians who are wound up about genetic testing, he’s writing his sternly worded letter as we speak:

This is my data, not a doctor’s. Please, send in your regulators when a doctor needs to cut me open, or even draw my blood. Regulation should protect me from bodily harm and injury, not from information that’s mine to begin with.

Are angry declarations of ownership of one’s health data a new thing? It’s not like most people fight for their doctor’s office papers, or even something as simple as a fingerprint, this way.

It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out. Or it might not, since it will probably consist of:

1. A settlement by the various companies to continue doing business.
2. Some means of doctors and insurance companies getting paid (requiring a visit, at a minimum).
3. People trying to circumvent #2 (see related topics filed under “H” for Human Growth Hormone).
4. An entrepreneur figures out how to do it online and in a large scale fashion (think WebMD), turning out new hoards of “information” seeking hypochondriacs to fret about their 42% potential alternate likelihood maybe chance of genetic malady. (You have brain cancer too!? OMG!)
5. If this hits mainstream news, will people hear about the outcome of #1, or will there be an assumption that “personal genetic tests are illegal” from here on out? How skittish will this make investors (the Forbes set) about such companies?

Then again, I’ve already proven myself terrible at predicting the future. But I’ll happily enjoy the foolishness of the present.

Apropos of the recent film graphics post, Jessica Helfand at Design Observer writes about the recently released Iron Man:

Iron Man is the fulfillment of all the computer-integrated movies were ever meant to be, and by computer-integrated, I mean just that: beyond the technical wizardry of special effects, this is a film in which the computer is incorporated, like a cast member, into the development of the plot itself.

I’ve not seen the movie but the statement appears to be provocative enough to elicit cheers and venom from the scribes in the comments section. (This seems to be common at Design Observer, are designers really this angry and unhappy? How ’bout them antisocial personal attacks! I take back what I wrote in the last post about wanting to be a designer when I grow up. Some thick skin or self-fashioned military grade body armor over at DO.)

On the other hand, a more helpful post linked to the lovely closing title sequence, designed by Danny Yount of Prologue.

I wish they didn’t use Black Sabbath. Is that really the way it’s done in the film? Paranoid is a great album (even if Iron Man is my least favorite track) but the titles and the music couldn’t have less to do with each other. Enjoy the music or enjoy the video; just don’t do ‘em together.

From a post by Dan Phiffer, an image by Adam Nieman and the Science Photo Library.

All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometers of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

More information at the original post. (Thanks to Eugene for the link.)

Someday I want to write like Ludacris, but for now I’ll enjoy info graphics of his work. Luda not only knows a lot of young ladies, but can proudly recite the range of area codes in which they live. Geographer (and feminist) Stefanie Gray took it upon herself to make a map:

You’ll need background music while taking a look; and I found a quick refresher of the lyrics also informative. More discussion and highlights of her findings can be found on Strange Maps, who first published Stefanie’s image.

In related news, someone else has figured out Rick Astley:

I’ve added the album cover at left so that you can look into his eyes and see his honest face for yourself. If you’re not a proud survivor of the 80s (or perhaps if you are), the single can be had for a mere 99¢. Or if that only gets you started, you can pick up his Greatest Hits. Someone also made another version of the graphic using the Google chart API (mentioned earlier), though it appears less analytically sound (accurate).

More from song charts at this earlier post.

This is from May, and the Design and the Elastic Mind show has now finished, but Paola Antonelli’s interview with Charlie Rose is well worth watching.

Paola’s incredibly sharp. Don’t turn it off in the first few minutes, however; I found that it wasn’t until about five or even ten minutes into the show that she began to sound like herself. I guess it takes a while to get past the requisite television pleasantries and the basic design-isms.

The full transcript doesn’t seem to be available freely, however some excerpts:

And I believe that design is one of the highest forms of human creative expression.

I would never dare say that! But I’ll secretly root for her making her case.

And also, I believe that designers, when they’re good, take revolutions in science and in technology, and they transform them into objects that people like us can use.

Doesn’t that make you want to be a designer when you grow up?

Regarding the name of the show, and the notion of elasticity:

…it was about showing how we need to adapt to different conditions every single day. Just work across different time zones, go fast and slow, use different means of communication, look at things at different scales. You know, some of us are perfectly elastic. And instead, some others get a little bit of stretch marks. And some others just cannot deal with it.

And designers help us cope with all these changes.

Her ability to speak plainly and clearly reinforces her point about designers and their role in society. (And if you don’t agree, consider what sort of garbage she could have said, or rather that most would have said, speaking about such a trendy oh-so-futuristic show.)

In the interest of full disclosure, she does mention my work (very briefly), but that’s not until about halfway through, so it shouldn’t interfere with your enjoyment of the rest of the interview.

Excellent article from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine on how parents of teenagers are handling their over-connected kids. Cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging, Facebook, MySpace, and to a lesser extent (for this age group) email mean that a lot of information and conversation is shared and exchanged. And as with all new technologies, it can all be tracked and recorded, and more easily spied upon. (More easily meaning that a parent can read a day worth of IM logs in a fairly quick sitting—something that couldn’t be done with a day’s worth of telephone conversations.) There are obvious and direct parallels to the U.S. government monitoring its own citizens, but I’ll return to that in a later post.

The article starts with a groan:

One mom does her best surveillance in the laundry room. Her teenage son has the habit of leaving his cellphone in the pocket of his jeans, so in between sorting colors and whites, she’ll grab his phone and furtively scroll through his text messages from the past week to see what he’s said, whom he’s connected with, and where he’s been.

While it’s difficult to say what this parent was specifically hoping to find (or what they’d do with the information), it worsens as it sinks to a level of cattiness:

Sometimes, she’ll use her own phone to call another mom she’s friendly with and share her findings in hushed tones.

Further in, some insight from Sherry Turkle:

MIT professor Sherry Turkle is a leading thinker on the relationship between human beings and technology. She’s also the mother of a teenage girl. So she knows what she’s talking about when she says, “Parents were not built to know the kinds of things that technology makes possible.”

(Emphasis mine.) This doesn’t just go for parents, it’s a much bigger issue of spying on the day-to-day habits and ramblings of someone else. This is the same reason why you should never read someone’s email, like a significant other, a spouse, a friend. No matter how well you know the sender and recipient, you’re still not them. You don’t think like them. You don’t see the world the way they do. You simply don’t have proper context, nor the understanding of their relationship with one another. You probably don’t even have the entire thread of even just this one email conversation. I’ve heard from friends who read an email belonging to their significant other, only to wind up in tears and expecting the worst.

This scenario never ends well: you can either keep it in and remain upset, or you can confront the person. In which case, one of two things will happen. One, that your worst fear will be true (“he’s cheating!”) and you’ll be partially indicted in the mess because you’ve spied (“how could you read my email?”), and you’ve lost the moral high ground you might otherwise have had (“I can’t believe you didn’t trust me”). Or two, that you’ve blown something out of proportion, and destroyed the trust of that person: someone that you cared about enough to be concerned to the point of reading their private email.

Returning to the article, one of the scenarios I found notable:

…there’s a natural desire, and a need, for teenagers to have their own parent-free zone as they get older.

As a graduating senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Sam McFarland is grateful his parents trusted him to make the right decisions once he had established himself as worthy of the trust. A few of his friends had parents who were exceedingly vigilant. The result? “You don’t hang out at those kids’ houses as much,” Sam says.

So there’s something fascinating about this—that not only is it detrimental to your kid’s development to be overly involved, but that it presents a socialization problem for them because they become ostracized (even if mildly) because of your behavior.

And when parents confront?

When one of his friends was 14, the kid’s parents reprimanded him for something he had talked about online. Immediately, he knew they had been spying on him, and it didn’t take long for him to determine they’d been doing it for some time.” He was pretty angry,” Sam says, “He felt kind of invaded.” At first, his friend behaved, conscious that his parents were watching his every move.” But then it reached a tipping point,” Sam says. “He became so fed up about it that, not only didn’t he care if they were watching, but he began acting out, hoping they were watching or listening so he could upset them.”

I’m certain that this would have been my response if my parents had done something like this. (As if teenagers need something to fuel their adversarial attitude toward their parents.) But now you have a situation where a reasonably good kid has made an active decision to behave worse in response to his parents’ mistrust and attempt to rein him in.

The article doesn’t mention what he had done, but how bad could it have been? And that is the crux of the situation: What do these parents really expect to find, and how can that possibly be outweighed by breaking that bond of trust?

It’s also easy to spy, so one (technology savvy) parent profiled goes with what he calls his “fear of God” speech:

Greg warned them, “I can know everything you’re doing online. But I’m not going to invade your privacy unless you give me a reason to.”

By relying on the threat of intervention rather than intervention itself, Greg has been able to avoid the drawbacks that several friends of mine told me they experienced after monitoring their teenagers’ IM and text conversations. These are all great, involved parents who undertook limited monitoring for the right reasons. But they found that, in their hunt for reassurance that their teenager was not engaging in dangerously bad behavior, they were instead worn down by the little disappointments - the occasional use of profanities or mean-spirited name-calling - as well as the mind-numbing banality of so much teen talk.

And that’s exactly it—tying together the points of 1) you’re not in their head and 2) what did you expect to find? As you act out in different ways (particularly as a teenager), you’re trying to figure out how things fit. Nobody’s perfect, and they need some room to be their own age, particularly with their friends. Which made me particularly interested in this quote:

Leysia Palen, the University of Colorado professor, says the work of social theorist Erving Goffman is instructive. Goffman talked about how we all have “front-stage” and “backstage” personas. For example, ballerinas might seem prim and perfect while performing, only to let loose by smoking and swearing as soon as they are behind the curtain. “Everyone needs to be able to retreat to the backstage,” Palen says. “These kids need to learn. Maybe they need to use bad language to realize that they don’t want to use bad language.

Unfortunately the article also goes astray with its glorification of the multitasking abilities of today’s teenagers:

On an average weeknight, Tim has Facebook and IM sharing screen space on the Mac outside his bedroom as he keeps connected with dozens of friends simultaneously. His Samsung Slider cellphone rests nearby, ready to receive the next text message…Every once in a while, he’ll strum his guitar or look up at the TV to catch some Ninja Warrior on the G4 network. Playing softly in the background is his personal soundtrack that shuffles between the Beatles and a Swedish techno band called Basshunter. Amid all this, he is doing his homework.

Yes, in truly amazing fashion, the human race has somehow evolved in the last ten years to be capable of effectively multitasking between this many different things at once. I don’t understand why people (much less parents) buy this. We have a finite attention span, and technology suggests ways to carve it up into ever-smaller slices. I might balance email, phone calls, writing, and watching a Red Sox game in the background, but there’s no way I’m gonna claim that I’m somehow performing all those things at 100%, or even that as I focus in on one of them, I’m truly 100% at that task. Those will be my teenagers in the sensory deprivation tank while they work on Calculus and U.S. History.

And to close, a more accurate portrayal of multitasking:

It’s not uncommon to see two teenage pals riding in the back of a car, each one texting a friend somewhere else rather than talking to the friend sitting next to them. It’s a throwback to the toddler days, when kids engage in parallel play before they’re capable of sustained interaction.

Douglas Adams addresses “What is the Question?”, the mantra of Visualizing Data, my Ph.D. dissertation, and hopefully haunts any visualization student I’ve ever taught:

The answer to the Great Question…?
Yes…!
Is…
Yes…!
Is…
Yes…!!!…?
“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought with infinite majesty and calm.
“Forty-two!” yelled Loonquawl, “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years of work?”
“I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

(Found at the FontForge FAQ)

As much as snickering about computers in movies might make me feel smart, I’ve since become fascinated by how software, and in particular information, is portrayed in film. There are many layers at work:

1. Film is visual storytelling. As such, you have to be able to see everything that’s happening. Data is not visual, which is why you see symbols that represent data used more often: It’s 2012 but they’re still storing data on physical media because at some point, showing the data being moved is important. (Nevermind that it can be transmitted thousands of kilomteters in a fraction of a second.) This is less interesting, since it means a sort of dumbing-down of the technology, and presents odd contradictions. It can also make things ugly: progress bars are often full screen interface elements, or how many technology-heavy action flicks have included the pursuit of a computer disk? (On the other hand, the non-visual aspect can be a positive one: a friend finishing film school at NYU once pursued a nanotechnology thriller as his final film because “you can’t see it.” It would allow him to tackle a technical subject without needing the millions of dollars in props.)
2. Things need to “feel” like a computer. When this piece appeared in the Hulk, they added extra gray interface elements in and around it so that it didn’t look too futuristic. Nevermind that it was a real, working piece of software for browsing the human genome. To the consternation of a friend who worked on Minority Report, on-screen “windows” in the interface all had borders around them. If you have a completely fluid interface with hands, motion, and accessing piles of video being output from three people in a tank, do we really need…title bars?
3. It’s not just computers—anything remotely complicated is handled in this manner. Science may be worse off than software, though I don’t think scientists complain as loudly as the geeks did when they heard “This is UNIX, I know this!” (My personal favorite in that one was a scene where a video phone discussion was actually an actor talking to a QuickTime movie—you could see the progress bar moving left to right as the scene wore on.)
4. There’s a lot of superfluous gimmickery that goes on too. There’s just no way you’re gonna show important information in a film without random numbers twitching or counting down. Everything is more important when we have know the current time with millisecond accuracy (that’s three digits after the decimal point for seconds). Or maybe some random software code (since that’s incomprehensible but seems significant). This is obvious and sometimes painful to watch, except in the case of a talented visual designer who makes it look compelling.
5. Finally, the way that computers are represented in film has something to do with how we (society? lay people? them?) think that computers should work.

It’s that last one that is the fascinating point for me: by virtue of the intent to reach a large audience, a movie streamlines the way that information is handled and interfaces behave. A their best, it suggests where we need to go (at their worst, they blink “Access Denied”). It’s easy to point out the ridiculousness of the room full of people hunched over computers at CIA headquarters and the guy saying “give me all people with last name Jones in the Baltimore area” and in the next scene that’s tallied against satellite video (which of course can be enhanced ad infinitum). But think about how ridiculous those scenes looked twenty years ago, and the parts of that scenario that are no longer far-fetched as the population at large gets used to Google and having satellite imagery available for the price of typing a query. Even the most outrageous—the imagery enhancement—has had breakthroughs associated with it, some of which can be done by anyone using Photoshop, like the case of people trying to figure out if Bush was wearing a wire at the debates in 2004. (Contradicting their earlier denials, Bush’s people later admitted that he was wearing a bulletproof vest.)

That’s the end of today’s lecture on movie graphics, so I’ll leave you with a link to Mark Coleran, a visual designer who has produced many such sequences for film.

I recommend the large version of his demo reel, and I’ll be returning to this topic later with more designers. Drop me an email if you have favorite designer or film sequence.

Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, speaking at the “Future of Web Apps” conference in February:

Spammers are “the terrorists of Web 2.0,” Mullenweg said. “They come into our communities and take advantage of our openness.” He suggested that people may have moved away from e-mail and toward messaging systems like Facebook messaging and Twitter to get away from spam. But with all those “zombie bites” showing up in his Facebook in-box, he explained, the spammers are pouncing on openness once again.

I don’t think that “terrorists” is the right word—they’re not taking actions with an intent to produce fear that will prevent people from using online communities (much less killing bloggers or kidnapping Facebook users). What I like about this quote is the idea that “they take advantage of openness,” which puts it well. There needs to be a harsher way to describe this situation than “spamming” which suggests a minor annoyance. There’s nothing like spending a Saturday morning cleaning out the Processing discussion board, or losing an afternoon modifying the bug database to keep it safer from these losers. It’s a bit like people who crack machines out of maliciousness or boredom—it’s incredibly time consuming to clean up the mess, and incredibly frustrating when it’s something done in your spare time (like Processing) or to help out the group (during grad school at the ACG).

So it’s somewhere between graffiti and terrorism, but it doesn’t match either because the social impact at either end of that scale is incredibly different (graffiti can be a positive thing, and terrorism is a real world thing where people die).

On a more positive note, and for what it’s worth, I highly recommend Wordpress. It’s obvious that it’s been designed and built by people who actually use it, which means that the interface is pleasantly intuitive. And not surprising that it was initially created by such a character.

And now, the opposite of the Amazon plot posted yesterday. No sooner had I finished writing about their online aptitude that they have a major site outage, greeting visitors with a Http/1.1 Service Unavailable message.

Plot from this article on News.com.