Drawing a perfect circle

The Kircher Society has a fabulous post about people drawing perfect circles freehand, with artistic and literary references. I prefer not to have this blog just be a link tracker but that post in its entirety is just, the penultimate example of what an informative blog post should be so I thought it merited a link. The society's site also seems exotic and interesting, like a blend of Damn Interesting and Three Weeks. (via)

Designers are people too

Yesterday I went to MoMA and happened upon their collection of all the covers of Emigre magazine. Designer's paradise! Hee, this one was quite cheeky too:



I actually went there to see the Jeff Wall exhibit, which was absolutely lovely. It's so refreshing to see real life portrayed in art, in full size, in full detail. Ok much of it was staged real life, but nonetheless, it was something recognizable and more relatable than abstract squares or interpretive conceptual video stuff. Also, having the photos mounted on lightboxes made them so alive, such that even the weeds growing from a sidewalk seemed interesting and poignant. There was this one photograph (heh I typed painting by accident; they kinda had the same aura about them) called "Eviction", which showed an aerial view of lower class suburban street, where in the middle there were two officers grabbing a man on a lawn and a woman running towards them. That was the focus, but you see three doors down a man holding his son with another son on his bike just peddling along. Then you go deeper in, and you see there's a monorail in the background, and between the monorail and the roofs of the houses in the foreground you see another street, where other people are just going about their day. Beyond that you see the taller buildings and a bit of the skyline. This is a suburban neighborhood, this is life! It was magnificent.

* * *

Random bits of designery ephemera:
- Children and Cameras, animated by Chris Ware!

- A type designer talks about his work, including stuff about using the first font digitizing machine. It's like hearing a master craftsman at work.

(both via design info)

Guns and Yoga

This week's Times' True Life Tale is really good:

Someone needs to open a combination shooting range and yoga studio. I’m serious. Maybe I should do it. Hose off a few clips of Glaser safety slugs, then see how deep you can go into Warrior II. The murder rate would go down. No, wait — it would stay the same, but people would realize it’s all part of a bigger plan. Or, no, it would go up, because people would realize the transitory nature of existence, and that everything that has happened or is going to happen is always happening someplace forever, so why not put a slug in that dude’s head who won’t stop talking during “300”?

I'd totally sign up for a shooting + yoga session! I loved the booth at amusement parks where you had fake shotguns and aimed at the small red light targets that set off little animations when you hit them.

Robot therapy: addendum

So in a previous post, I mentioned a snowman-like lil robot, Keepon, that was used as therapy for autistic children. Here're some adorable videos showing the robot dancing to music (very well chosen music too I might add).

Thanks Will for the link!

Baseball in Japan

My favorite three words in springtime are always "pitchers and catchers." That's the signal for me to dig out of my hibernation hole and vicariously sniff at the fresh green grass down in Tampa. So it was with too much glee that I found CJ Nitkowski's website and blog yesterday. He's pitching in Japan this season, and his site is really well updated with lots of fun pictures. Like those of Japanese players obsessing over the Rubik's Cube. +1 nerds w00t!

The link was via the Bats blog at NYT. I don't have nearly enough time to check that regularly, but it's cool that the writers who hang out with the teams all the time can give extra insight through the blog. It also makes me miss sports radio back in NY.

Human-Robot Interaction

Today Brian Scassellati from Yale came and spoke about his research in robot-human interactions. He said he was interested in how humans behave, and how to make robots act accordingly in their presence, so that one's grandparents can interact with them. His research also turned up theories about how humans learn certain skills that we take for granted, and things they learned about autism in children when experimenting with using robots as therapy or diagnosis tools. So here are some brief notes, from what I can remember:

• The most interesting I thought was the last section, about using robots as therapy for children with autism. Autism is the 2nd highest genetic mental disorder, about 1 in 250 kids are born with it (much higher than I thought). Diagnosing it is pretty subjective, as children are just taken into a room with a clinician who check if they do certain behavorial traits or not. The rate of autism in the U.S. has also multipled tenfold in the last 8 years, but that may be because there are more people being diagnosed with it, using these subjective measures that differ between doctors. So he wants to develop some objective ways to diagnose autism.
  
  He's been studying how autistic children interact with robots, and the results are incredible. There are children who are completely asocial, who don't speak, who ignore their parents completely, but when placed in a room with a robot they exhibit many social behaviors. Even if their parents are in the room with them, they ignore their parents and focus on the robots. The researchers are trying to figure out why this is the case. They've ruled out that the robot is responsive to the child by having a robot that plays back a series of actions that have no relation to what the child is doing: the normal children get bored of it pretty quickly, but the autistic ones don't. Also they've ruled out that an anthropomorphic robot is the reason by having robots that have facial features misplaced or that don't resemble people at all. (One of the cute ones is this snowman creature, Keepon, from Japan; watch the brief video at the bottom!) So they're still working on why the children react to them, but when they leave the room, revert to their formal selves and stop social interactions completely. (One child has been seeing the Keepon robot weekly for 3 years, but still is only social in its presence). They're looking at what the children pay attention to when they say look at a scene in a movie: normal kids focus on the faces and the eyes, the autistic kids look at seemingly random things.
  
  Isn't it fascinating how those kids perceive the world? They don't seem to recognize human-ness/life in other people, but do in robots. Or they don't see the value of interaction with people. The researchers seem to want to fix them, to make them see things differently, but maybe there's some bit of truth, something valuable, in how they perceive.


• Study in Vocal Prosody: teaching a robot to recognize speech is hard, but training them to recognize emotion should be easier. People can recognize is someone is angry or happy even if they're speaking in another language, and animals can do that too. So they trained a robot to do so (Kismet from MIT), and from the video it seemed to be doing pretty well, lowering its eyes and ears if it was being scolded. The strange thing was was that when they trained it using voice data from one gender, they could not get it to recognize the same emotions when the opposite gender was speaking to it, but it did well with members of the same gender. This was the case even when corrected for differences in pitch and such btw male and female. So that suggests that humans might have separate learning schemes for different voices, something for developmental psychologists to test.


• Study in Gazes, in Language patterns: teaching a robot to figure out what/where a person is looking at. Studies were done before by teaching the robot by looking thousands of iterations of people gazing. But he improved the method by having the robot reach for an object, and then study a person who looked at it. It only took a couple hundred trainings to get that right.
  
  With language, his students taught a robot how to distinguish between pronouns when making a sentence like "I have the ball." One can easily teach the robot to recognize tangible objects, but it's hard for them, like for children at first, to learn how to use pronous properly. So they had two people toss a ball between them, saying "I have the ball", "Now you have the ball", etc. And by the end the robot could look for where a ball was and say "You have the ball" or "I have the ball".

Media in constellation form

We can imagine that people first made constellations to humanize the sky, to make the infinite darkness seem less foreboding. Now that we live in cities of light, bathed in the glow of televisions, headlights, shops, signs, and streetlamps, our battle with darkness seems to be won. But the things that darkness represents — the unknown, the unconquered, and the endless — live on as ever, and we continue to need mythology to help us reconcile that which science and technology cannot answer. So, what is the mythology of today? What are the great stories? What are the great journeys? Who are the heroes and villains? When we step back and look at life, what are its overarching themes?

Go view the amazing Universe. I only wish they had data more centered on culture and less on politics and celebrity. The creator Jonathan Harris has a really impressive collection of works.

Now, I have a lot of time wasting to catch up on..

Redesigns

The New Yorker has recently gotten a facelift. Though I think it looks a bit too much like New York Magazine's site, it's definitely much better than before. I like the little box on the right with the links separated with semicolons, but it doesn't really look like a box of links.

Other notable recent redesigns: AIGA and White House. Hooray, the web is becoming prettier! Though designer Andy Rutledge had some choice words to say on the former, and pointed out the shortcomings of the latter a long time ago:

The fact is that this site has a host of design problems – real design problems that I’ll examine and suggest remedies for. Also, there’s that business of the website for a seat of world power conveying very little in the way of gravitas..

The entire header area is crowded and ugly. Yes, ugly counts, especially when you’re talking about typography...

The bottom line is that this page’s design fails to communicate anything except inconsistency and blandness. While it should be engaging, it’s boring instead. While it should be intuitive and affordable, it’s confusing instead. Oh, and the code and construction of the page is utter crap (to use developer lingo).

He always reminds me of why design is so important.

The Current Cinema

This week's A.O. Scott is just too delectable. Some choice quotes from his review of 300:

“300” is about as violent as “Apocalypto” and twice as stupid.

Devotees of the pectoral, deltoid and other fine muscle groups will find much to savor as King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) leads 300 prime Spartan porterhouses into battle against Persian forces commanded by Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro)

The big idea, spelled out over and over in voice-over and dialogue in case the action is too subtle, is that the free, manly men of Sparta fight harder and more valiantly than the enslaved masses under Xerxes’ command. Allegory hunters will find some gristly morsels of topicality tossed in their direction, but you can find many of the same themes, conveyed with more nuance and irony, in a Pokémon cartoon.

He's so good with terrible movies!

I'll follow up with one of my favorite music reviews ever, on The Chap by Matt Weir on tinymixtapes:

Geez, if any car company puts this in a commercial, phones will shake and internet search engines will sizzle as people everywhere search for this astoundingly perfect piece of dirty '80s-inspired dance-funk. "Baby I'm Hurting," they'll type into Google, and then it won't come up because that's not the name of the song! Ahh!!! Poor people!!! I hope everybody figures out that it's "Hurt'n"! For their sake!

"Baby I'm Hurt'n" makes me wish I had a girlfriend who was bored with me. Because then, at that moment when she walks into my apartment unexpectedly—without calling—and says, "Matt, we need to talk...," I can just turn on "Baby I'm Hurt'n" and prolong the relationship by three minutes. This is a stop-your-life song, folks.

After that I actually went to buy the song. It was pretty funky, but it didn't change my life. :/

Chinese and American Higher Education: Challenges

Last Friday, Professor William Kirby, former Dean of Harvard college, grandmaster of all things Asia, spoke about the challenges facing Chinese and U.S. universities in the 21st century. He was, as usual, very well spoken and brought up some interesting points. Here are notes: (yes this is belated; work never ceases)

• There has been a huge growth in higher ed. in China over the past 7 years, a revolutionary growth comparable to that which occurred at the beginning of the 20th century when the examination system was overthrown. After education was slowly rebuilt in the 80s after the cultural revolution, there was a steady increase in college enrollment (from ~800K in 1989 to ~3 million in 1999), but then a sharp increase over the past few years (to ~15 million in 2005, some estimates around 26 million right now), as for the first time China is commited to democratize higher education.


• More stats: 15% of young people are in school, this is projected to grow to 40% by 2020. China now produces more PHds annually than any other country in the world. The government spending on education is several times larger than that spent by European nations.


• Criticisms: as the number of students rise, the number of faculty has not been increasing proportionately; the quality of the faculty is feared to be poor.


• Brings up the question, what does it mean to be an educated person?


• Kirby was asked by Chinese university leaders about the Harvard education, the core curriculum. Though American universities are now regarded as the best in the world, they were not always so. 100 years ago the leading schools were German, and Harvard only became superior by copying the German models in the 19th century and by other international borrowing. So though Chinese schools are not regarded as leaders now, it may change (Beida University is already ranked #14 in the world by the Times Educational Supplement).


• Though Harvard is regarded as a model for education, it has had a history of changing models, of presidents who think everyone should take a set of foundation courses to those who didn't want any requirements.

What is the role of general education? This is an important question especially for those universities who are distinguished for their faculty research, not teaching.

• Should seek to cultivate values in students different from those of the professions they will inhabit, foundation values, awareness of public issues. Should not just train specialists, but promote a commitment to lifelong learning, so one can be truly independent of mind when one graduates.


• One has to recommit to the humanities at the core of education, and keep institutions open to ideas from many sources; important in this age of increasing specialization


• Have to figure out how to value teaching as well as research when most awards out there are concentrated in research (or consulting). Without students, the faculty wouldn't be there.


• How to promote opportunity, increases access, fairness in admissions. How to engage in self criticism; to review how, what, and why of what we're teaching. Each generation can craft their own idea of what a general education means. (Beida faculty were surprised when Kirby brought up the idea of their voting on curriculum changes.)

Why do we have higher education at all?

• Some reasons: to serve the state, society. To have better citizenry. To get a job (not a bad reason)


• American education is special: there is a stubborn commitment to liberal education.


• Need to promote general education because otherwise researchers and students will keep interacting on more narrow ground.


• Chinese modern experience has shown what life can be in the absense of humanities: before under the examination system, a humanities education was the only education that statesmen received. From 1905 to now, education has drifted away from humanities, to science and engineering, to promote state power and technology. The government has an enormous faith in the power of technology and applied sciences. (Technocracy was translated by Chinese to mean "dictatorship of the engineers") In 1949, 4% of students were majoring in humanities.


• Now, there is the beginning of a return to liberal education in China. Beida, Fudan, Peking Universities have introduced general education curriculums. They recognize that an education without the humanities is incomplete.


• John F. Kennedy speaking at Amherst: "When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

Then during the Q&A:

• The rewards for pedagogy are much lower in China than in the U.S. Levels of financial aid are also much less, even at elite universities. There is no system of federal loans or other financing available.


• When Premier Wen Jiabao came to speak at Harvard, he wanted to speak at Sanders Theater, where Jiang Zemin had spoken previously. But at that time Michael Sandel was having his last Justice class, and refused to move even when Kirby asked. Another option would be Memorial Hall, but the last person from China who spoke there was the Dalai Lama, so that was out. Finally the Premier spoke at a place most fitting for a Chinese Premier in the 21st century, Burden hall at Harvard Business School. [transcript of the event]


• Though there are stories of corruption in the admissions process in college and high school levels, of students being admitted in exchange for "donations," there are not many stories about corruption of the examination system. If one does well, one will be admitted to a school of the expected level.

Overall, a fantastic talk.

On Fashion

If you’re a girl in New York and you don’t have bangs, you’re kind of in trouble.

From the Vice Global Trend report. The key themes seem to be skinny pants, black leggings, tweed. Beyond that it all just seems kind of weird and ugly.

Meanwhile, on the runways..

Valentino’s set looked like something out of the Playboy Club from the 1970s, with a broad marquetry runway leading up to a suggestive floor-to-ceiling “V,” and bits of Bette Davis dialogue from “All About Eve” piped into the jazzy music as a topless woman writhed on the floor. (Truth be told, the woman was a fur protester, and she was being held down by security at the time, but it all had a very sexy retro vibe.)

And finally, a bit of wisdom from the Times Magazine and Style editor to try to justify all of this:

To explain why I do love T, and why I was eager to launch it here –- maybe sometime in the future Stefano Tonchi, the editor of T, will answer readers' questions and give you his take -- I am going to float back up into the high ether again, and bring in one of my heroes (I don’t have many), the Czech playwright, dissident and eventual president Vaclav Havel. Among his voluminous writings is an essay I remember in which he defends the preservation of a number of villas in Prague, villas denounced by the Communists as the old palaces of the grand bourgeoisie. (Raze them for workers’ housing!) Havel writes warmly of the villas, and counsels his fellow citizens -– whom Communism delivered into block after block of drab, Soviet-style housing – to try to understand that much of the best of the West’s cultural legacy was produced by the wealthy and, at least originally, for the wealthy, and that should in no way undermine the truth that these objects or things are interesting and beautiful – interesting and beautiful, potentially, for everyone, even those who don’t own them.

I think T is interesting and beautiful, potentially, for everyone – even those who will never own a suitcase that cost a thousand bucks. I think fashion, like wine (which I do shop for, alas, from magazines, or, anyway, newsletters), is something you can learn more about and thus appreciate more, even if you feel a little silly saying so.

So there! *pets bangs lovingly*