"When the mind is evolving the abstractions which will lead to physical comprehension,
all of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand." worrydream.com/refs/Hawkins…
★ I was one of the keynoters for this year's Global Game Jam. vimeo.com/58204548 (3 min, no words.)
The Global Game Jam was last weekend, and I made a short film to kick it off. It's about IMAGINATION. vimeo.com/58204548 (3 min)
This Friday at Stanford, I'll be presenting some new work on dynamic drawing. The seminar is open to the public.
hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/…
A geometric construction for Fourier coefficients, found in a book from 1929. worrydream.com/oatmeal/fourie…
(My favorite technique of this sort has always been the (hand-sketched) Bode plot. 3 seconds with a pencil, you've got a transfer function.)
★ Showreel 2011-2012. Two years of projects, in three minutes. (With many sneak previews of upcoming material.) vimeo.com/62049081
Really impressed by some new visual mathematics books, especially in comparison to their classic predecessors.
Needham's "Visual Complex Analysis" was good, but Wegert's "Visual Complex Functions" is fantastic. amazon.com/dp/3034801793
Grossman and Magnus' "Groups and their Graphs" was good, but Carter's "Visual Group Theory" is really great. amazon.com/dp/088385757X
Every talk I've given was created for a specific audience. Set in their domain, focused on their interests. Tomorrow's talk is for myself.
An MIT prof after my talk: "It's as if you showed us how to climb Everest, and then at the end you say, 'We need to go to the moon.'"
I gave a few talks over the last year. Here's when they'll be online: worrydream.com/May2013
★ Stop Drawing Dead Fish. A talk about art and computers. (1 hour) vimeo.com/64895205
Tomorrow's video on data visualization builds on the geometric programming techniques in "Stop Drawing Dead Fish". worrydream.com/May2013
★ Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. A talk about a new approach to creating data graphics. (35 min) vimeo.com/66085662
★ Additional notes on "Drawing Dynamic Visualizations". worrydream.com/DrawingDynamic…
An ill-advised personal note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable". worrydream.com/MediaForThinki…
★ Media for Thinking the Unthinkable. A talk about a medium for science and engineering. (40 min). vimeo.com/67076984
"... that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives." cantrip.org/gatto.html
"the real curriculum was What Shall We Do In Here? and it really was an important question and maybe the only important question." -- James Herndon
"He doesn't want to be happy. He's definitely better off having made this thing that has made him so unhappy." kotaku.com/5846080/the-li…
"It seems like most people ask: 'How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?'" -- Stewart Brand
“The intended customers for this product have not been born yet.”
@EdwardTufte: A+ 2006 essay on interface by Bret Victor:
worrydream.com/MagicInk/#case…
See also ET 1995 + 2008iPhone interface essay
edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a…
#ux
worrydream.com/MagicInk/#case…
See also ET 1995 + 2008iPhone interface essay
edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a…
#ux
Trying to do HCI research with no design background is like trying to do physics with no mathematics background.
In both cases, you *can* -- you can form theories and test them -- but you're just kind of blindly stumbling around.
I'd like to see a history of the Great Inventions in the form of a dependency graph, rather than tales of lone genius.
.. Steven Johnson's (super-great) book amazon.com/dp/1594485380 has some of that, but I'm thinking of something more encyclopedic, less theory
In honor of the death of Doug Engelbart -- watch his talk dougengelbart.org/firsts/dougs-1… and read his paper dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3…
People often compare Engelbart's work to today's tech, but that misses the point. Ignore today; just think about it in terms of his goals.
★ I tried to write a few words about Doug Engelbart. worrydream.com/Engelbart It's the best I can do right now.
For a great history of Engelbart's lab and the culture it was part of, I recommend John Markoff's dormouse book: amazon.com/dp/0143036769
Engelbart thought of modern easy-to-use UIs as crippling. bit.ly/76WSVo Please please listen to bit.ly/15kBj4q
NLS was hard; it required training. That killed it. But Engelbart was missing a piece of the puzzle. Today we have something he didn't have.
How can we learn a powerful but difficult augmentation system? Maybe... the same way we learn to navigate 4D space. marctenbosch.com/miegakure
I guess this is what I wish I could have said to Doug Engelbart: worrydream.com/Engelbart/quot…
"Send your little book upon the waters, and hope. Your will may be worked beyond you in another, more favorable age." worrydream.com/Engelbart/quot…
well, I guess even einstein won his nobel prize for explaining the photoelectric effect
Albert Einstein, Discoverer of Photoelectric Effect, Dies at 76
It's time to repost one of my favorites: How Many Households (or, how to design an interactive information graphic) worrydream.com/HowManyHouseho…
look, I don't normally call attention to these things, but Tufte picked me and @mbostock as the Future, I can't even www.ft.com/content…
★ The Future of Programming. A talk about revolutionary new ideas for programming. (30 min) vimeo.com/71278954
★ References and follow-up notes for yesterday's "Future of Programming" talk. worrydream.com/dbx
If you're curious about what I'm actually working towards (and actually care about), see vimeo.com/67076984
There's also an ellipsis in here which may be significant: worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction
Can't stop thinking about this. "The tools we employ at once *extend and limit* our ability to conceive the world." geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMed…
I think that's why linked representations across abstraction levels matter. worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction Where one rep limits, another rep extends
Has someone written the "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" of synthetic biology? (If not, who should?)
I've been assuming that clicking the "delete tweet" button swaps out the universe for one where the tweet never existed
★ The "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" talk, redesigned as a skimmable, browsable page thing. worrydream.com/MediaForThinki…
Most surreal @indiecade moment: panel w/ @gabesmed @hengineer @JaneTingley @kahodesu on physicality and real-world human interaction in...
... digital games. Ten feet away, a field of motionless oblivious zombies, masked off from the world.
An "Industry vs Research" dichotomy that I sketched at a conference. I probably should elaborate on it sometime.
(FWIW, a lot of current academic work wouldn't be considered "research" by these criteria.)
(It seems for many young "technology" people, the world of products is all they know, and they assume all progress comes from industry.)
Say you must choose whether your career will contribute a few Photoshops (widely-used tools), or a few dozen Sketchpads (influential demos)
The key words here were "a few" vs "a few dozen". Life is finite, for both creator and audience. The creator's influence can outlive both.
You have to check out this amazing new tool that lets non-programmers quickly build fully-interactive web apps. goo.gl/i3IWhg
#cardroll'd
Alternate history: What if our 20-year coprocessor arms race had evolved FPGAs not GPUs? Would there be a distinction between hardware and software today?
Who's doing magic? Give me some names.
Watching Chuck Moore gives me the same feeling as watching an Aikido master: gracefully powerful, spare, otherworldly infoq.com/presentations/…