David Foster

Metaphors, Interfaces, and Thought Processes

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My post today is inspired by In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson, a strange little book that will probably be found in the “computers” section of your local bookstore. While the book does deal with human interfaces to computer systems, its deeper subject is the impact of media and metaphors on thought processes and on work.

Stephenson contrasts the explicit word-based interface with the graphical or sensorial interface. The first (which I’ll call the textual interface) can be found in a basic UNIX system or in an old-style PC DOS system or timesharing terminal. The second (the sensorial interface) can be found in Windows and Mac systems and in their respective application programs.

As a very different example of a sensorial interface, Stephenson uses something he saw at Disney World–a hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.

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“The Self-Designing High-Reliability Organization”

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An interesting article about aircraft carrier flight operations from the standpoint of organization design.

A hundred things I have no control over could go wrong and wreck my career . . . but wherever I go from here, I’ll never have a better job than this. . . . This is the best job in the world.–Carrier commanding officer.

I printed this article out a while back, and recently found it again…If I remember correctly, I first discovered it via Chapomatic.

I wonder if Neptunus Lex would agree with the article’s portrayal of carrier life.

UPDATE: Thoughts on the article, and on the current challenges in carrier operations, in comments at this Neptunus Lex post. Follow the link to the article on the “millenial generation” of sailors and read the comments to that article.

Thanksgiving and Temporal Bigotry

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(This is a rerun of a 2003 post at Photon Courier. New links added at the end.)

Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said “Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?” (“She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source”, Stuart comments.)

She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it’s an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?

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Electronic Paper–Finally a Commercial Proposition?

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I’ve written several posts about the emergence of electronic ink / electronic paper technologies. In a nutshell, these technologies allow information to be displayed on a medium which is (a) thin, (b) flexible (to at least some degree), (c) readable in bright sunlight, and (d) power-efficient (power is used only when changing the page, not for display per se.) As I wrote in 2004:

“These technologies could have major implications for the display of long text documents, eliminating the current undesirable alternatives of reading it on the screen or going to the trouble of printing it out, and I think they could have tremendous influence on the future of the media industry (especially periodicals.)”

A couple of years ago, Sony launched the Sony eReader, a 9-ounce product that can store about 80 average-sized books. Downloading is via an i-Tunes-like interface from a PC. My perception is that eReader has not been a runaway success, although it has developed some niche markets–it seems to be popular, for instance, among fans of romance novels, especially really hot romance novels.

Today, Amazon launched a product called Kindle, which has some interesting attributes:

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Academics and Entertainers

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I find it very intriguing that academics and entertainers are–at the present time in the U.S.–generally on the same side of political and social issues.

Because superficially, at least, the typical college professor and the typical (rock star, actor, etc) would seem to be very different kinds of people.

Thoughts on this? Anyone? Bueller?