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For the last three years or so, I’ve been working on my employer’s flagship product, Logos Bible Software. It’s the 4.0 release of a mature product with a large, established customer base. The 3.0 version of the product has been out there for several years, and it works just fine, but it was built on an underlying technology1 that was better suited to 1999 than 2009. It’s starting to show its age.
(For those of you who don’t know, Logos Bible Software is a desktop application for reading, searching, annotating, analyzing, and generally playing around with Bibles and biblical reference works — dictionaries, lexicons, commentaries, maps, and so on. Think of it as Photoshop for pastors and seminarians: Required equipment for professionals, but very nice to have if you’re a hobbyist.)
So, we embarked on a ground-up rewrite of the software. Not only that, we attempted a ground-up redesign of the user interface. Sure, we re-used some of the code that shows a book on screen, some of the searching guts, some of the this and that and what-have-you. But the user interface, the part anyone ever sees, is as far as I know, completely new stuff.
I was the software designer for the project. I suppose all the cool kids are calling themselves “Interaction Designers” or “User Experience Experts” or some such. Well, if it looks good on your business cards, sure. But I prefer to be called a Software Designer, because that’s the simplest way to say what I actually do, which is to make pages like this:
Some typical pages from the Logos 4 specification. There are upwards of 1,000 such pages.
I like to think of it this way:
- If a software program is like a construction site, then I’m like the architect. I drew the plans. I didn’t build anything, and the core ideas weren’t mine. Still, I made a thousand tiny decisions every day, pondering such imponderables as: Link or button or link button? What happens when you click it? Where best to put it?
- The president of the company was like the owner/client. It’s really his baby, and he’s the one that wanted the thing built in the first place. He has ideas, let me tell you. Lots of ideas. My job as designer is to translate his ideas into workable designs. Sometimes that means telling him he’s brilliant. Other times, it means telling him he’s crazy. Sometimes it means doing what he wants anyway even though I think it’s crazy.
- The lead developers are like engineers. If an architect says, “We’re going to build a 10,000 square foot room with no support columns” the engineer is there to tell him that it can’t be done. Or that it can, but not with the budget we’ve been allocated. When it comes right down to it, the designs are just suggestions of what could be; once you get out to the job site and start sinking knee deep in the mud, your pretty blueprints may not count for much.
- The other devs are like the tradesmen and craftsmen who actually do the work. Like carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and painters, they are all highly skilled at making wonderful things. The Logos team is the best. Okay, I’m sure Google and Microsoft have great teams. But really, the Logos dev team is a highly motivated, highly intelligent, highly worthy group of men and women.
In going about my part of the job, I used three design principles that I shamelessly stole from the Shakers:
(1) Is it necessary? Not every great idea must come to fruition. This is all about prioritizing the design goals, and not getting carried away with the client’s exuberance. We were relentlessly minimal about the design of Logos 4; it’s fully featured, but it has just what it needs and no more. At every turn, we asked ourselves: What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?
(2) Does it suit its purpose? This is really the hard one, because you have to know what goals a given feature or application is trying to accomplish, and then you have to figure out how to measure whether or not they were, in fact, accomplished. You can fail at either end: Identifying the right goals won’t help much if you build something that doesn’t accomplish them. Testing a product to death won’t help much if you’ve identified the wrong goals. “Yes, it does the wrong thing entirely, but it does it really well!”
(3) Can it be beautiful? I don’t actually do the final art on projects I work on, but I usually go the extra mile to make my wireframes and mockups look as close to final art as I can. Why? Because I find it’s not that much harder for me to do,2 and it gives everyone, from client to dev to art designer a better vision for what we’re trying to accomplish. I don’t make pixel-perfect artwork, like some do, but pretty close. In any event, I try to do my part on the aesthetics of the thing, because as we all know, pretty things work better.
If you can actually achieve those three goals, you hit that sweet spot in design called “elegance.” With Logos 4, I think we did. And good. (I may be biased, of course.)
Oh, and we made an iPhone version of the desktop software while we were at it.
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1 DHTML and JavaScript, shudder.
2 I use Adobe InDesign to draw program screens; yes, it’s overkill, but I know how to bend it to my will.
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I don’t have much to say about this little trifle except: Watch it. It’s a little late to catch it in the theater, I understand, but if you see it come to your local discount theater or drive-in, or video store, go for it. It’s charming, lovely, surprising, warm, cheerful, witty, and endearing. In a word, winsome — as I suspect Julia Child was in real life. At least, this movie made me suspect so. That, and Meryl Streep simply inhabits the role of Julia Child.
Amy Whatsername was pretty good, too.
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No, this isn’t one of those apologies for not blogging more frequently. I never promised you people anything. However, I have been working on a couple of long term projects that have just come to fruition: One personal, one professional. I suppose I could write about those now that they aren’t top secret any more ...
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I watched District 9 Thursday night, and I’m still not sure what to think. Graphically violent and laced with profanity, it’s not alien invasion movie so much as a monster horror flick. By the time the film gets going, it’s just one shocking scene after another.
It seems to ask the question: What makes a person hideous? Or if you like, Who are the real monsters here?
- Are the alien “prawns”, with their chitinous shells, wriggling palps, shiftlessness and stupidity — are they hideous? They are certainly gross.
- Is Wikus van der Merwe, the mild-mannered and mildly stupid functionary who is charged with moving them out of their shantytown and into a concentration camp — is he hideous? He does some reprehensible things, but — well, I won’t spoil it for you.
- What about his employers, who are hellbent on learning how to use the aliens’ weapons technology, even if it means vivisecting a few sentient beings in the process — are they hideous? You tell me.
- What about the “Nigerian” gangsters who have exactly the same notion, only instead of using medical torture to get at the prawn secrets resort to sympathetic magic and cannibalism? (Well, prawn-ibalism, anyway.)
- And “Christopher Johnson,” the smartest (thus most noble, and most dangerous) prawn of them all — is he hideous? The film wants you to make the call.
That’s the question: Who’s more vile, disgusting, evil, stupid, self-serving, and (in a word) hideous than whom? You may find yourself surprised at how your opinion changes by the end. Speaking of which, the movie doesn’t give any pat conclusions, ending in much the same way as No Country for Old Men did: The world is filled with evil, evil is horrible, everyone is tainted, roll credits. Now you sort it all out. Courageous, that. The people I saw D9 with were excited by all the shooting and blowing things up, but as we were walking out of the theater, I overheard several expressing their disgust with the ending.
Several reviews I’ve read want to take the whole thing as an allegorical comment on South African apartheid. Those elements are certainly there, but that is reading the film too narrowly. It is a comment on human nature, as such: murderousness, greed, malice, gluttony, licentiousness, and a mad lusting after power. They’re all on display. Racism and bigotry are only one tiny sliver of the whole ball of guts we’re served up here.
Oh, and for goodness’ sakes, don’t take your kids to see this, unless you want them to see people and aliens exploding, medical experimentation without anesthesia, bodies ripped apart and gobbled down, and so on. The first half of the movie is merely gross; the last half, harrowing.
Was it a well-crafted film? Indeed it was. Special effects were amazing, and plot-serving. I never felt that it descended all the way into cliché or caricature, or that the pacing was off, or that the characterizations were not compelling. Did I find the film entertaining? That’s not the word I’d use, exactly. Did it make me think? Yes, yes it did.
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I’m sorry, but this is just cool:
Update: I finally got an iPhone, and I bought the app in question: Brushes. Here are a couple of my paintings. (Before you get too excited, the last two I did by painting over photographs.)
Fireboy Self-Portrait as a Mountain Man Bad Attitude
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My dad can’t spell for beans, but we love him anyway. Sometimes he chats me up for help. They’re like random little word puzzles that pop up from time to time.
This one stumped me for a minute:
Gary Evans: How do you spell Entridge
Pause while I google “entridge” ... no suggestion.
Eli Evans: Dunno. As in?
Gary Evans: a follow of people
Long pause. What? Longer pause. Oh!
Eli Evans: entourage
My dad is a lot smarter than that little chat transcript makes him sound. Like Thomas Edison, he can’t spell (or type) to save his life. Guess what, software designers and developers: You probably have a lot more users like my dad than you think.
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... may God have mercy on my soul.
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... is not a right, to be upheld by the state.
... is not a privilege, to be withheld by the state.
... is not a duty, to be observed by the citizen to the state.
... is a a set of goods and services, exchanged between free parties, subject to the laws of supply and demand (like any scarce commodity), best left to those who need the services and those who provide them to work out who gets what, when, and for how much.
Discuss.
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Jeff Atwood writes at Coding Horror: Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers. Key grafs:
One of the (many) unfortunate side effects of choosing a career in software development is that, over time, you learn to hate software. I mean really hate it. With a passion. Take the angriest user you’ve ever met, multiply that by a thousand, and you still haven’t come close to how we programmers feel about software. Nobody hates software more than software developers. Even now, writing about the stuff is making me physically angry.
Isn’t that an odd attitude coming from people whose job it is to write software? How can we hate what we get paid to create every day?
I can pipe in by saying that software designers hate software, too. There are a couple of reasons:
(1) Innovation requires contempt for the past. Good software designers and developers are constantly trying to improve the state of the art, and as such, we must focus on everything that is wrong with the art as it stands. And if you really want to move the ball, you must be willing to destroy not only the things that don’t work, but those that do. If I can imagine a better world where none of the toxic waste we now call software is allowed to go on polluting us all, then I can start to think about what kind of software would (should!) exist in that better world. If I start to think, “Like the current version, only better,” I’ve begun working on an incremental improvement, which means I’m no longer innovating. I’m tweaking.
(2) Reality is a harsh mistress. When you actually sit down to write (or design) a piece of software, you realize how hopelessly idealized that last paragraph really is. So, you want to make software that is so intuitive that even a baby can use it. So lightweight and standards-compliant it’ll run on 100 different brands and models of mobile device: phones, wristwatches, HUD sunglasses. So powerful that even sophisticated urban elites will believe it runs on pure sorcery. So obviously necessary that nobody could imagine the world without it. Like Google, for your grandma, on her pill organizer. Then, when you sit down to work, reality hits you in the face: You have to work within the APIs you’re given, with the same old libraries, the same clunky hardware. Most computers are still spinning huge hunks of magnetized metal around to read and write information! You want to put it all in the cloud? Be prepared to build some plumbing.
They say design is just adding constraints until only one solution is possible. When you design software, you realize very quickly that there are a lot of constraints you didn’t choose — wouldn’t choose. Not in a million years. Nobody is running the latest OS. Nobody has a big enough monitor to let your UI really breathe. Nobody has a fast enough hard drive or enough memory to let you do the insanely great calculations that you want to do on the fly. Unicode still doesn’t have some of the niggles and warts you need, and even if it did, the fonts wouldn’t have the right OpenType tables, and even if they did, the OS would just ignore them. Sigh.
You’re a developer: You wanted to build a monument that would last a thousand years. An algorithm so brilliant in its elegance that it becomes its own proof. What came out instead was a series of brittle hacks that will shatter the next time the user updates anything. Leveraging third party technologies? Shoot me now!
You’re a designer: You wanted your software to seem so perfect that it’s reading your user’s mind and doing what they wanted it to do before they even knew they wanted it done. What came out instead was a irritating jumble of settings, modes, and wizards that calls into question whether you can think coherently at all. Backwards compatibility? No, please, I’m begging you!
Like Jeff says, we work in the sausage factory. Trust me, you don’t want to know. Just enjoy your sausage (shudder).
Yeah, I hate software, too. Love to hate it, that is.
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Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com writes about “last gasps for a dying medium” — large, paid funny pages.
Will these sorts of ploys work to save the newspaper? Probably not. My prediction: The newspaper is dead and will not be revived until electronic paper arrives in full force, which will be at least a decade yet, due to the usual supply-chain friction.
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Sauce. In a large pot, combine 1 pound dried blueberries, 1 pound fresh blueberries, 1 bottle of tawny port, 1/2 bottle cream sherry, 1/2 cup honey, 4 ounces of black currant jelly, 1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses, 1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses, 1/4 cup rose water, 10 threads saffron, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, a few drops of food-grade lemon essence oil, and a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil, then turn heat down to low. Simmer for 1-2 hours, or until reduced in half. Remove from heat, strain through a wire mesh strainer, and chill.
Cream. In a large mixing bowl, wisk together 16 ounces honey-flavored Greek yoghurt, 3 8-ounce bars of Neufchâtel cheese, 4 ounces (a small jar) lemon curd, and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract until smooth. Chill.
Assembly. Add fresh blueberries to the chilled sauce. Stir through, coating the berries well. Pipe 1/2 teaspoon of cream into the bottom of an individual-serving phyllo shell. Spoon on two to three sauced berries per shell. Add one or two un-sauced berries on top for contrast. For the adventurous, add a wedge of sharp bleu cheese.
Happy eating!
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So I finally joined the legions of Apple fanboys (and girls) and bought an iPhone. And just to prove that I can, I’m writing this post on it. I wouldn’t want to write a novel this way, but I’m finding it amazingly easy to do. I imagine my one-finger typing speed is around 25 WPM or so. (I wonder if “there’s an app for that”?) The first night I had it, I spent several hours using Beejive, an IM client for the iPhone, again, just to see if I could. It worked beautifully, and my usual 80+ WPM was ramped down enough that I didn’t dominate the conversation the way I can sometimes do.
Update: There is an app for that. Several, in fact. I scored 20 WPM exactly.
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Mencius Moldbug (either that’s a pseudonym or that dude has some seriously cruel parents) doesn’t like the natural language query part of Wolfram Alpha. Go watch the fireworks, it’s fun!
Key grafs:
Like most hubristic UIs, Wolfram Alpha is operating with a completely fictitious user narrative. The raison d’etre of the natural-language interface, stated baldly, is to create a usable tool for stupid people who might be confused or intimidated by a tree of menus. The market of stupid people is indeed enormous. The market of stupid people who like to use data-visualization tools is, well, not. (And since the interface is not in fact easy but actually quite difficult, it achieves the coveted status of a non-solution to a non-problem.)
...
Strangely, to the developers of intelligent control interfaces, these interfaces appear to work perfectly well. Moreover, when the developers demo these interfaces, the demo comes off without a hitch - and is often quite impressive. This is not the normal result of broken software. This “demo illusion” convinces the developers that the product is ready to ship, although it is not and will never be ready to ship.
— The aforementioned Mr. Moldbug
And a particularly insightful comment:
[Wolfram Alpha] is meant to be used for combining the information in the database in any way you want, to create new information. It is hence not an information search-engine, it is a big calculator that happens to have a lot of constants defined. If I want to find information about Isaac Newton, WA is not the right place to be. If I want to multiply the number of years Newton lived with the current velocity of the IIS, WA is the place to be. Catch my drift? It is not meant for you to find the information you want, it is made so you can make new information via correlation and creative combining of objective information.
But as I said, the whole natural language thing is silly, and will almost certainly never work. They need a syntax, one that is close to natural language, but makes the job for the interpreter much easier. Then you can actually learn the syntax instead of just guessing all the time.
— Ole - André Johansen
Myself, I have never cared for natural language systems. If an NLP system is just performing a search query, then throwing any old bag of keywords at it usually works just as well. If it’s doing anything more complicated than that, it’s like trying to explain where babies come from to a four year old. You get a lot of “I don’t understand” and you’re constantly having to try and figure out: How can I explain this in a way that he’ll understand? But won’t be too upsetting to him? But won’t give him the wrong idea.
Like I say, that’s not making my life easier.
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Sample page from Why Daddy is a Democrat from Little Democrats. Now, I figure that in a free society parents should be allowed indoctrinate their children with whatever ideology they please, so long as it’s not actively destructive to others.
(Overheard in the Evans household:
“Okay kids, time for bed.”
“Read us a story! Read us a story!”
“Fine, fine. Which will it be? Reflections on the Revolution in France or should we read Road to Serfdom again?”
Because, see, my kids were always very very advanced for their age. Eh, nevermind.)
Nevertheless, I think that if there were an equivalent book for little Republicans1 I would personally feel very icky about reading it to my younguns.
1 There may well be — I’ve seen some pretty hardcore homeschooling curricula. “God wants America to dominate the world so the Communists don’t destroy the human soul” sort of stuff. Bleagh.
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Following up on my last post.
Yes, introverts like to just get away from the crowd, the hustle and the bustle, the rat race. The noise! That’s always been true; as I’m fond of saying: Human nature has no history. People are people, no matter where or when you go.
But what I love about these modern times we live in is that the intarweb has become a non-social society for introverts. You see, intros are not actually antisocial. They’re more anti-societal. For me, it’s the dance that exhausts, not the partners. The need to sit up straight and suck in my gut, to smile and nod and pretend to be interested when someone is making small talk. To remember that just because I have something stuck in my teeth doesn’t mean I get to pick it out right then. To remember who is related to whom in what way, and which lines of social interaction can’t be crossed.
It’s like there’s a game afoot, and nobody told me the rules. Or maybe they did and I wasn’t listening. I spent an afternoon one time watching curling on Canadian TV. I never did figure out what was going on. I’d think man, that’s a lousy shot and the crowd would cheer. I expect 3 points this round, but there were only 2 awarded. To the other team. Huh?
Being social is just like that.
I don’t think I’m saying anything profound here, but the internet is where intros can hang out together and be sociable without having to deal that much with society. If I’m feeling like I need some people time, the whole world is at my fingertips. Is it as good as being there in person? No, of course not. But it’s something. Most days, I’m up for either a little low-stress interaction (say, email) or none at all. Better I should have to choose none at all?
Everyone knows about blogs and forums and whatnot, right? Well, if I take the time to read your blog, it means I care enough about what you have to say to seek it out. If I’m stuck talking to you at a dinner party? Maybe, maybe not. Again, it’s not you, it’s me.
Another example: I love Facebook. You wouldn’t think so, given that I’m introverted and therefore supposedly antisocial. But no, Facebook is great, because I can keep track of the 150+ people that I am acquainted with at a glance. It’s as though everyone kept a log of the most important bit of small talk they wanted to share with everyone that day and then helpfully posted it to a bulletin board that I can scan through — at my convenience! I get to keep up with what my friends are doing (and vice versa) but I can do it when I feel like it, and I don’t even have to read it all. I can skip the boring stuff and go right to what interests me at the moment, maybe comment on it, and best yet, nobody has to get offended.
(Hey, let’s face it: Not everything everyone says is interesting all the time. We all have off days. If you’re boring me today, it’s not a moral judgment on you as a person. It’s really not.)
I haven’t gotten addicted to Twitter yet, but I hear it’s essentially the same thing, only better because there’s less clutter. It’s just the small talk, without any of the games or quizzes. Then again, don’t spread this around, but I actually enjoy seeing what games my friends are playing and what quizzes they’re taking. (I mean, who doesn’t want to know which Muppet that girl I only barely knew in high school is most like? Camilla the Chicken? I knew it!) It lets me into their world a little without me having to be, you know, in their world. Or them in mine, getting in the way. (No offense!)
Long story short: The social internet allows extroverts to connect with their friends constantly, but at the same time it allows intros like me to connect with others on my own terms.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
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My friend Jacob alerted me to an article by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic, “Caring for Your Introvert.” A key graph:
Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”
Exactly.
It’s probably no surprise, but I’m a one, too.
Being around people exhausts me. It drains my energy — the more there are at a time, the lower my MPG. Because of this, I figure I accept about a third of the social engagements I’m invited to. So, if I decline your invitation, it’s usually because my social batteries are depleted. I’ll be home reading a book, watching TV, writing music, or any number of the other things I do that don’t exhaust me, all of which must be done alone.
I don’t feel guilty about that, but sometimes I get the feeling that most people think I ought to. Staying home to read a book instead of going to a BBQ with friends is wrong — right? Well, no. As Rauch goes on to say, it’s not a choice, it’s an orientation. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
I have one bone to pick with Rauch’s article: He makes too much of the fact that political life is self-selected for extroversion, which means that the people in charge are more likely to feel comfortable kissing hands and shaking babies than we intros are. Well yes, of course.
On the other hand, intros control the things we find important: art, literature, music, design. One reason we intros aren’t as much into “just hanging out” as our extro friends is that we’re too busy building the kind of world we want to live in. I don’t mind if someone else steers so long as I get to build the boat!
Really. Someone has to sit quietly and chase all those details around, or else you don’t get a ”Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose“ or a Beethoven’s 7th Symphony to admire. Or an iPod to listen to it on. You have to get away from the hurly-burly if you’re going to get any of that kind of work done. That’s not antisocial, it’s just true. What’s unsettling, perhaps, is that we intros are perfectly comfortable with that arrangement. What you think of as play, we think of as work. And vice versa.
I think I’ll let someone smarter than me say it better:
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.... Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.... We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
So, if I haven’t talked to you in a while, it’s probably just that I’m taking time to acquire new value for you. Yeah, that sounds a lot better than, “I just felt like doing something else that required me to be alone.”
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Here’s the review of Star Trek I just posted to Fandango.com:
Incredible! Cast: Pitch-perfect. Pacing: Never drags, too swift in spots. Effects: Plot-driven, stunning. Plot: Holey, but forgivable. Design: Simultaneously like everything that came before and unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Faithfulness: Yes, but. It all seems REAL in an un-Trek way. I mean: Since TNG, Trek has been so sterile. Homogenized, both in design and outlook. Technology. Social structures. Ethos. Pathos. It’s always there. What’s been missing is humanity — ironic since “what it means to be human” is a perennial theme. Until now, Trek has been telling us “what it means to be human — in theory.” So! Didactic! New Trek is the polar opposite, recapturing the verve and (yes) raw humanity of the 60’s TV show. This franchise gets just what it needed: an IV full of New Blood. Here’s a vision of a future I can suspend disbelief in, peopled by complex characters I would love to meet. REAL (ish) people who RELISH their work. And why not? They have the best job in the galaxy.
4.5 widgets out of five, but I’m a very tough grader. I deduct the half star for two things: 1) The plot has some coincidences that are just too pat, and some “No, really?” moments. For example, the villain’s method of attack is very creative,1 but basically requires that planetary defense systems are non-existent. 2) There are a few scenes that are just there for summer blockbuster appeal. Though well done, I would have been happier without the creature-chases-creature-chasing-Kirk sequence.
But never mind all that. I really liked this movie, and what I liked about it can pretty much be summed up by the irony implied by this video from the Onion.com:
I’ve been a Trekazoid since I was a wee lad (Trekling?). I’ve seen all the movies, and most of the TV shows. I even tried to watch Enterprise. I never put on plastic ears, but I did spend a summer learning Klingon. (In some ways, that experience put me on the career path I’m on.)
I blame my mom. Yes, oddly enough, in my family it’s Mom who is the Trekster and Dad who could take it or leave it. She enjoys a good fantasy pic now and again, but he only likes realism, the grittier the better. He fell asleep during all three Star Wars prequels. In the theater. Yeah.
He clapped at the end of this film.
Abrams and company really went out of their way to make the world of this film a believable one. Well, as believable as a Trek movie possibly could be, given the conceits they had to work with. Once you get past the conceptual hurdles, the picture exists in a very comfortable, “realistic” space.
With, you know, real people in it.
That’s always been my biggest beef with the Star Trek franchise, which I hinted at in my Fandango review. Trek presents us a vision of a future that, frankly, I wouldn’t want to live in. It seems like the most ponderous, politically correct, and (quick! think of another word that begins with “p” ... yes!) and perfect place. Too perfect.
It’s as if we finally found that socialist utopia everyone keeps talking about. (Everyone works, people seem to own things, but there’s no money?!)
It’s as if the UN were running the world — no, the galaxy — and (get this) they’re doing a bang-up job. Suspension of disbelief, indeed.
James Tiberius Kirk always rubbed against the grain of that society. Why? Because he refused to evolve beyond his petty human ego. He realized that human nature has no history. People are people, no matter where (or when) you go. Kirk is an un-reconstituted man in a world that is entirely reconstituted, right down to the replicated coffee and doughnuts. (Wait, no. Starfleet personnel definitely do not eat doughnuts. Unless they were square and made of a substance resembling balsa wood.)
Much of the dramatic tension in the 60’s TV show came from the conflict between the adventurer Kirk and his bureaucratic surroundings. Starfleet command is chirping on the subspace frequency? Don’t answer it, Lt Uhura. We have aliens to fry.
Now, I like “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and I have a lot of respect for Patrick Stewart as an actor.2 But then and there, the Trek producers pretty much de-fanged the franchise. Picard is a man settled into his society. Yes, he pops out of gear now and then, but for the most part, he’s a cog in the Starfleet machine. It’s all kinder and gentler. More politically correct.
More dull.
The new Star Trek film recreates the brashness of the original TV show, while at the same time completely transcending it. The characters are people, and they haven’t evolved beyond their essential humanity at all. They’ve embraced it. And they’re enjoying the hell out of it.
One of my favorite scenes involves Chekov: Hearing over the conn that the transporter team is having trouble with a very delicate maneuver, he lights up and says, “I can do that!” Then he leaps from his station and runs through the hallways yelling in his thick “Russian” accent: “Get out of the way!” That’s a guy who won’t quote “policy” at you if you have a problem. That’s a guy who knows when to abandon his post and fill in where he’s needed. That’s a guy who genuinely loves his work and is enthusiastic about doing it. That’s a guy with creativity, courage, and dare I say it, spirit.
That’s a guy I would want on my team.
That’s true of all the bridge crew. They’re professionals, but they’re not boring. They’re all brilliant, enthusiastic people. The sort of people you wished you worked with. (I do, by the way.)
In short: People I wouldn’t mind meeting, in a world I wouldn’t mind living to see. Which is what “optimistic” sci-fi is all about. What the film lacks in logical coherence it more than makes up for in raw enthusiasm. And that’s what Star Trek is all about, again.
Bravo, all.
1 As my sister and I were were leaving the theater, she asked me what “red matter” was. I said I didn’t know for sure, but that it was probably made from pure baloney-um.
2 Patrick Stewart’s turn on the HBO-series “Extras” is some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen in years: “You’re not married and you don’t have a girlfriend and you’ve never watched Star Trek? ... Good lord.”
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If you’re wondering whether or not we’re living in different times, we are. Now, I’m one of those who firmly believes that human nature has no history; that is, that no matter how far back you go, people are people. The human condition is what it is, no matter when it is.
And one of the most humany of human qualities is the need to express, through whatever modes are available. Say, music. First there was that fellow jamming on the wall at Lascaux, then Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles, blah blah blah, then the carrot ocarina guy, and now this. Thru-you is musician Kutiman’s take on bop for our post-post-post-everything times. He takes snips and snaps from YouTube videos, and tosses them into an incredibly yummy salad.
It really must be seen as well as heard. Kutiman slyly uses the grainy, webby videos to full effect, showing what clips he’s used to create the music you’re hearing, sometimes using them to anticipate what’s coming next (ooh! here comes a theremin!). Track 4, ”Babylon Band,” starts with a long clip of a doofy teenager (sorry, kid, but you know it’s true) just messing around on a set of drums. Kutiman waves his magical cut-n-paste wand and transforms him into a prodigious part of the percussion pantheon. Track 1, ”The Mother of All Funk Chords,” is cut to make it look like a live session — when it ain’t.
As an album, I don’t know if this would work. As a piece of meta-performance art, though, it’s incredible.
Like I said, human nature has no history. What changes, though, are the technologies we use to express ourselves. The internet, it seems to me, is a vast wasteland, filled with all sorts of detritus, some good, some not so. And the intrepid beachcombers like Kutiman are wandering through the internet landfill thinking, “Hm. I bet I can make something out of this.” They are the ultimate bricoleurs, the übermenschers of postmodernism. Kutiman’s YouTube mashup album is like an item of found-art: Bits and pieces of this and that, artfully arranged.
It’s a lovely piece of un-design.
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A controversial fertility doctor claims to have cloned human embryos and implanted them into four women’s wombs. And while none of 11 embryos he claims to have cloned resulted in a viable pregnancy, Dr. Panayiotis Zavos said he’ll continue trying to clone a human embryo. — ABC News
This ain’t some Raelian crackpot, folks. This is a real fertility doctor, and apparently he made this claim in a documentary which aired last night (April 22, 2009) on the Euro-Discovery Channel.
First of all, while our Discovery Channel was airing re-runs of old Mythbusters episodes (not that I oppose that!), theirs was making news. No fair. Secondly, what the what?!
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