On this day

October 3rd

Microstructures

October 3, 2022

We are well aware that structures such as buildings and organizational policies and operating processes support and constrain our activities. We tend to be much less conscious of smaller structures that influence our interactions with other people. In contrast to more tangible macrostructures, we call them microstructures. You have no choice. Every time you have a conversation or a meeting you are using microstructures.

~ Keith McCandless from, https://www.liberatingstructures.com/design-elements/

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Once you see the solutions, you can’t unsee them. You—like me—probably think you do a good job of engaging other people. But there’s a great explanation in this little introductory article. It listed off all the ways… ways for which I was congratulating myself knowing… in which the microstructures we use today fail. And then it goes on (in brief in the article and at length through that web site, and a book) to show some beautiful ways to create and use structures which liberate us. That’s rather nice.

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For all who come

October 3, 2021

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

~ Christina Rossetti

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Evaporation

October 3, 2021

This was a sample data set from 1996 through mid-2019, but maybe the most shocking number is the 2018 one: after just a year, one in every sixteen links from the Times’ website to an external source had stopped working. The Times already has an attribution problem; this just makes it worse. The researchers point out that URLs within U.S. Supreme Court opinions fare even worse, with about half of links not working as originally intended.

~ Nick Heer from, https://pxlnv.com/linklog/rotting-hallucination/

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I’m not picking on the Times nor the Supreme Court, link rot is everywhere. Heer does a nice job of laying out what’s really going on; it’s not just that the links are ceasing to work, but also that the actual contents of digital stuff is changing. (And that’s all in addition to problems with data corruption and degradation.) However, his article is really about highlighting some of the neat things people are doing to preserve things. It’s worth clicking through just for the anecdote about how “Nookd” curiously appears in one edition of War and Peace.

And on the other hand, we’re all painfully aware that our lives are becoming more public and we’re losing our privacy. If you put it anywhere on the Internet, we can generalize and assume it’s eventually going to become public. In some cases, it’d be exactly what we want for things to rot— or maybe it’d be better to say:

In some cases, it’d be exactly what we want for things on the Internet to evaporate.

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Note from future self

October 3, 2020

In a weekly team discussion, where we start with someone leading with a prompt, we were asked what we’d like to tell our past self if we could pass a note. My response was…

I think I’ll go with a short note intended to shake my foundations, rather than convey particular information. Presuming I’d be certain to believe the note was from future-me, please pass this note to ~18-year-old me:

There are no perfectly correct answers.
There are, however, perfectly wrong answers.

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Hard surfaces

October 3, 2018

The assumed paradigm is that a mattress is essential to good sleep just like a chair is essential to sitting. But why did mattresses become mainstream? When did the buffalo robe and pile of leaves go out of fashion? Could a good night’s sleep be had if, for instance, we slept on a sandy beach or the equivalent? Why did ‘they’ start saying a firm bed is best, and still provide a two to three foot thick ‘system’ of mattresses just to get you to that ‘firm bed’ effect?

~ Patrick Clark from, https://zafu.net/sleep-therapy/sleepergonomics

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I wish I’d found this 12 years ago. It took me forever to figure out a lot about sleep. I’m still working on the shoulder range-of-motion required to side-sleep without a pillow. (I still wake up feeling like I’ve dislocated my sternoclavicular joint.)

…anyway, yes, harder and flatter is unquestionably, always better for me. If I’m having trouble sleeping, I sometime get up, and get out my favorite, 1-inch-thick, inflatable air-mattress on the floor—so so comfortable . . . with my fave silk-cotton-blend sleep sack . . . and my fave little pillow . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz every time.

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Smile back

October 3, 2015

Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.

~ “Marcus Aurelius“

Note: This was not written by Marcus Aurelius, but rather said by the character in the movie Gladiator. The closest thing which Aurelius did say, is in Meditations: “Accept death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed.” at 2.17, and “So make your exit with grace — the same grace shown to you.” as the final line of 12.36.

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People need to travel

October 3, 2013

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

~ Mark Twain

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