Hippo Dignity

…and, on a much lighter note, a video that finally reveals what all of post-Enlightenment culture has been leading up to, had we but known it: a combination Roomba/animatronic chimp ape.

As my coworker Josh put it, this makes you want to run out and buy both of them, together.

In the past week, I have had both an MRI and a CAT scan (both for entirely unthreatening conditions, worry not). So I feel qualified to tell you that if you have a choice between the two, choose a CAT scan — it’s faster, quieter, and you get to ride back and forth on the little exam table inside something that strongly resembles a donut.

The MRI machine, on the other hand, is loud, oppressively small, and takes a lot longer. It did, however, give me time to think about Gertrude Stein.

In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein talks about flying all over America during the book tour for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and looking down from the plane.

Quarter sections make a picture and going over America like that made any one know why the post-cubist painting was what it was. The wandering line of Masson was there the mixed line of Picasso coming and coming again and following itself into a beginning was there and the simple solution of Braque was there…. [I] always wanted the front seat so I could look down and what is the use, the earth does look like that and even if none of them had seen it and they had not very likely had not but since every one was going to see it they had to see it like that.

Or, as she put it in an earlier lecture, “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.”

Why was I thinking about this?

Well, the MRI is, as I said, loud. But it was loud in a particular way — a persistent thunk thunk thunk, with a ch-ch-ch-ch-ch bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp layered on top of it at irregular intervals and varying pitches for the bomp. That is, it sounded a lot like a minimalist composition.

It wasn’t a particularly good minimalist piece of music: it was more like a first draft by a novice composer. But it brought home to me how much Reich and Glass and all the rest were completely of their time, in all the ways Stein was talking about. And in the same way that when Stein looked down from an airplane and could see art where others saw an incomprehensible otherness, I owe the hours I’ve spent with Glass and Reich for the ability to find beauty while lying utterly still in a magnetic-resonance imaging chamber for half an hour as my arms and legs slowly fell asleep.

Here is how crazy last week was — there was something even better than seeing the Pogues live in concert.

And that was the launch of the IQ MAX, the new turret (a specialized financial trading-floor communication system) from IPC. I was lucky enough to be part of the team of industrial and interaction designers at frog who spent most of 2005 working with IPC to understand and design for the intense communication needs of financial traders. The whole frog team was invited to the launch party, which was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time-Warner building, and everyone who we’d worked with on the IPC side was there as well. (Missing in action were the extremely flattering David, who was lured west by the call of the open road and new information visualization problems to solve, and Ian, who was en route to a meeting on another continent.)

It’s a rush to finish a project and see the final result go live. It turns out that it’s even more of a rush to see a final physical product: the difference between an appearance model and the final object is so much stronger. It’s three times the rush to be at a fancy party, listening to salespeople touting the improved user interface as a sales point.

(The Hats reading this will be amused to know that one of the sample names on the prototypes we produced was Ewan Kirk, Goldman Sachs. Which reminds me, I owe him an email.)

IPC’s user-centered development process, and their work with frog, is already getting press: Businessweek Online interviewed Michael Speranza from IPC and frog creative director Robert Fabricant for a piece that went live the day the turret launched. A white paper on our internal process is, I know, being written, and if it’s made public I’ll post the URL here as well.

I had this post half-written in my head about how Daily Kos’s implementation of an Ajax-based commenting system was proof that the typical knock on Ajax technology — that it’s not yet ready for heavy-volume commercial sites — was totally wrong. Daily Kos isn’t a commercial site per se, but it’s hugely high-traffic, so if they’re doing it, that means it works, right?

Unfortunately, the new commenting code is slow and ugly. So, uh, perhaps not ready for prime-time yet after all.

From the iChat logs:

Friend: so, I tried to look at your blog.
Friend: It is blocked from my work network as pornography
Misha: ?
Misha: !
Friend: yeah.
Misha: ROCK ON
Friend: ahahaha
Friend: I thought you might appreciate that
Friend: of course this is the company that blocked linked in because it was a dating site

Last week, I went to the dentist, and he suggested that instead of living through a lot more not-necessarily-successful dental work on two dodgy back molars, I “proactively” decide to pull the suckers and get implants.

I will admit, I was kind of freaked out by the idea of it — both the thought of undergoing the removal, and the thought of walking around for the rest of my life with prosthetic teeth. Then, after about half an hour, I calmed down enough to realize that I was having this freakout while wearing glasses on my eyes, an iPod around my neck with its earphones in my ears, a partial denture in my mouth, a brace on my right wrist, and my cellphone in my pocket, where I could be certain to feel it if it rang. I am already living my life with a whole mess of detachable artificial parts I either can’t or wouldn’t want to do without*: adding a few that would at least consistently be where I left them would be a nice change of pace.

* allow me to add to this list my work notebooks, which are my outboard brain in the office. I briefly misplaced the current one and was twitchy for hours till I found it.

Seen on one of those “interactive” taxi ads: “Multitaskers ♥ robots.”

It was, of course, an ad for Roomba.

Seen on the streets of Glasgow

Check me out on today’s Gizmodo:

Question (is) Everything: Design that answers unimagined questions

Note please the Half-Life shout-out at the end (hi, Harry!).

If you want to read Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, cited in the essay and a major inspiration for my own thinking on the topic, it’s available from his site under a Creative Commons license.

The essay began as some idle thoughts, while drawing several variant sitemaps for the same project, about everyone’s favorite theoretical trope, the problematic (defined by noted Marxist-structuralist wackjob Louis Althusser as “the system of questions commanding the answers given.”) There is no sign of Althusser in the final version, or indeed of sitemaps, in case you were worrying.