Daily Meh

Designer Blogs

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:59:00 +0100

Magazines and newspapers have had three hundred years to figure out the balance between content and form. Some of them still don’t get it. Some of them do. One of the many reasons I like magazines is the way they allow form and content to influence each other. Magazines usually contain different kinds of articles, some short, some long, some serious, some not, some heavily visual, some almost exclusively text, and a magazine is free to lay each article out in a way that suits it. Just like people: man and woman, young and old, short or tall, skinny or fat, black or white or yellow, gay or straight — people differ, and different clothes fit different people. You wouldn’t attempt to design a unisex outfit that fits both your grandma and the pimp down the street, the world’s tallest man and the world’s shortest woman, your kid and your mom, the supermarket clerk and the executive, the nightclub and the office. We recognize that different contexts and different physical properties require different outfits. And texts — perhaps I should say multimedia posts, in the case of blogs — also differ, which is why there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for laying them out either. Texts are written in different contexts and have different attributes, too. Labeling all the different layouts that well-designed magazines employ to present their content “visual experimentation” is absurd.

Rory Marinich disagrees with me when I say I want more “designer blogs”, where different posts have different layouts, different colors, different typography. He writes:

I find that a carefully-picked theme stays exciting no matter how long I look at it. The design of Hacker News still appeals to me like it did when I first discovered it; John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is as sublime a design as it was two years ago, with minimal changes. What makes those sites feel so timeless is the logic that went into their design. Neither site has structures or sections or appendages that they don’t need. The result is that their design fades gracefully into the background, leaving only the content.

I won’t say much about Hacker News, because I think its design is ugly and a poor rip-off of reddit, but I’ll hand it to him: Daring Fireball is beautiful. It’s one of the most well-designed blogs on the internet. The biggest change Gruber has done to the site in recent years is change the font on some of the headers, and that made the design worse (at least on Windows), not better. Even if I’m about to choke from the Mac Superiority Complex on display I can still look at that shit for a long time, because it’s so beautiful. But even so, I wouldn’t say that the site doesn’t grow stale if you stare at it too much. Everything does look the same, and I’m not convinced that every one of John Gruber’s articles are best served in their current layout, that none of them could be more effective if the design was more flexible. Not to mention the fact that any design is constraining in itself; certain layouts lend themselves better to certain styles of content than others, so that the template itself may be a constraint on the creativity of the blogger. Rory seems to understand this:

Perhaps I’m biased. I’m in the process of creating a unique site design for myself; the design I used last year was generic, so this is in many ways the first time I’ve created something for myself that was designed to fit me, fit my work, from the ground up. For a while I considered launching a blog like Dustin Curtis’s and styling every post differently, but I decided against it. I place more valuable in a consistent styling than I do in visual experimentation; rather than creating a bare-bones structure, I tried to create a single template that would fit everything I cared to write about. That’s the challenge of theme design. It’s the part of design that gets denied by those showier blogs.

I love designing blogs. I used to design for myself and release my old themes, but in the past few months I’m discovering a certain passion for it that I didn’t know existed. Now I approach the challenge of designing themes somewhat differently. I’m not giving a blog its look, I’m giving it its feel. I can’t control what appears on the final product, so instead I make something that’s capable of fitting certain things in a certain order. The design I create for a blog is going to influence what that blog’s capable of saying and how it’s able to say it.

You’re never going to create the perfect template that fits everything equally well. That means you’ll either have to constrain yourself or fight the template by putting content into it that doesn’t fit, that would be better served in another layout. I guarantee you, without major tunnel vision and interests so narrow even your fellow übergeeks can’t appreciate them, you’re not going to create a single template that captures everything you ever want to write about. It’s not going to happen. I can’t do it, you can’t do it, John Gruber can’t do it. Even if he could, that’s not the point: I never said every blog should be a “designer blog” where every post is custom designed, I only said I wished more people would try it. Nor did I even use the words “every post”, and if you check out the archives of the blogs I mentioned, Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis, you’ll find that both employ what are more or less post templates. They recognize that not every post is so totally different from everything that came before that it needs its own radically different design. They just think some do. I happen to agree.

Since I’m more comfortable criticizing myself than I am criticizing others (although I do enjoy that occasionally), I’ll continue harping on my own design. It’s “minimalist”. Minimalism being the one style that any idiot with a modicum of skill, a small dose of aesthetics, patience and some common sense can do well. Not that anyone can do it, but most could, if they’d just put in a little effort and had the sense to consider whether or not every element on their site contributed meaningfully to anything but their own ego. (Hint: few of them do.) Anyway, back to my own design. It’s not the best in the world, and it probably contains more elements than it needs, but it’s still reasonably minimal. This means it fits everything equally well, which is to say that everything looks equally mediocre. This design does not boost any of the content. If I’ve done well, it fades into the background and lets the content take over. This is an important point to make: so long as the presentation isn’t an eyesore, I won’t turn my back on good writing just because the presentation is unexciting; I will turn my back on beautiful presentation if what it’s presenting isn’t good content. I have no doubt, though, that some of what I write would be better served by another form. Because of technical and personal limitations — I don’t know how to make Tumblr do what Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis do, and I’m not a great designer, so I know I can’t come up with a significant portion of good, original designs — I won’t do it, but I wish more people would abandon the templates (or rather, stop leaning on them all the time — leaving them behind some of the time is enough).

Rory continues:

Those blogs where everything’s custom-designed work like compositions. They marry the visuals of what they’re saying with the language they’re using to create, hopefully, a finished and polished product. Everything has to work together. Usually it doesn’t: Either the images overpower the writing, or they’re inconsequential additions that work as eye candy but clutter the page.

It’s the problem magazines run into, too: Some are very good at consistently creating beautiful combinations of the two, but most are wasting a lot of time making blandly unique layouts that nobody cares about. When magazines made the switch to the web I realized how much I liked the consistency of having black text on a white background. When I read magazines I find myself irritated by the layout. It distracts me from what matters. (…)

Not everything you write is so important to deserve its own twee layout. If it was, I’d suggest that you revise how you write, because those unique typesettings work best to disguise a lack of content on the part of the writer. Those blogs I know that pay such attention to designs are blogs I don’t read. Without exception they lack consistency and fail to hold my attention.

I absolutely agree that this is really hard to do. That’s why more people should be doing it: the more people are doing something, the more shit there’s going to be, but there’s also going to be more gold. Even if only a few of these blogs are great, that’d still be wonderful. I also agree that moderation is key: not everything is its own special snowflake that needs its own special twee layout.

If the blogs that “pay such attention to designs” are blogs you don’t read, that create extravagant designs to “disguise a lack of content on the part of the writer”, that’s the fault of those blogs, not the form. Returning to the clothing metaphor, this sounds like saying every girl who has lots of outfits and enjoys dressing up is necessarily shallow. Some of them are, sure — but some ugly people are shallow too. Even if most of them are — and I’m not saying they are, but assuming that were the case — there would still be some who aren’t. The same thing applies to blogs. There’s no a priori reason why creating custom layouts for blog posts should serve only as a disguise for poor writing. Some messages are going to be better served by a different layout. Some “designer blogs” are going to be great; some aren’t. Some will be occasionally good and often bad; some vice versa. So it goes.

You could argue that your message is too important to risk crashing and burning by creating a bad custom layout. But chances are your message isn’t that important, and even if it is, maybe it’s worth the risk. Maybe you hit on a form that makes your message much more effective.

Perhaps the best would be to have the designer and the writer be different people. These “designer blogs” are run by designers, and the designers both write, layout and typeset their articles. That’s usually not how magazines work. People work better when they work on what they do best. Typographers and print designers respect the content, and the author of the article respects that the typographers and print designers know how best to lay the content out in print. Sometimes, with the right people, it works beautifully. Many magazines haven’t found the right balance, but some have, showing that it’s not the basic idea that’s faulty, just many implementations of it.

By the way, the two blogs I mentioned in my original post, although they may at times suffer from overdesign and although their designs may at times serve to obscure lack of substance, aren’t all bad. They do contain pieces I’d consider good writing, pieces that ironically may have been better served by a more austere design. I also forgot to mention another website that does this unique-designs thing: A List Apart, which Jason Santa Maria art directs and Kevin Cornell illustrates. Each issue is subtly different from the last, and most articles have illustrations, but ALA does it so subtly that you almost don’t notice. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that ALA is just as well-designed as Daring Fireball.

From Road trip by Christophe Kutner. (via artsandcrafts)

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:39:51 +0100

From Road trip by Christophe Kutner. (via artsandcrafts)

I’m feeling particularly galaxy today. (Sorry for chopping...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:40:38 +0100

I’m feeling particularly galaxy today. (Sorry for chopping this up — it’s the only way to fit it into 500x700 pixels.)

"If you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably..."

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:34:55 +0100

“If you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably not your fantasy, but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting or being it, to look like it.”

- Andy Warhol.

Speaking of old slides, this set of slides from the 1940s-70s is...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:03:00 +0100

Speaking of old slides, this set of slides from the 1940s-70s is also wonderful. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines was apparently showing in this picture from New York, 1965.

Truman Capote, 1947, by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Photo via this...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:35:33 +0100

Truman Capote, 1947, by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Photo via this brilliant essay:

Taking a photograph, [HCB] wrote, “is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.” When we look at his portraits, that head-eye-heart relationship is more evident.

Cartier-Bresson famously compared himself to a Zen archer. The accuracy of that comparison is truly apparent to those familiar with Eugen Herrigel’s short monograph Zen in the Art of Archery. Although the book of that title wasn’t published until 1948—after the end of World War II—the ideas contained in it were first published in a German magazine as an essay in 1936—as the social situation in Europe began to drift back towards war. HCB didn’t read it until June 6, 1944—the same day, coincidentally, the Allied Forces landed in Normandy and began the liberation of Europe. At the time he was given a copy of the essay, HCB was an escaped POW hiding in Paris. After he recovered from the shock of the good news about the Allied invasion, he read the essay—and received an almost equally profound shock. Herrigel’s essay was to have a lasting effect on Cartier-Bresson and his work.

Now I really want to read Zen in the Art of Archery, since I keep hearing it’s such a great metaphor for photography.

London, 1949. Photo by Chalmers Butterfield; his son uploaded a...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:47:00 +0100

London, 1949. Photo by Chalmers Butterfield; his son uploaded a bunch of his photos to wikipedia here, and they’re fantastic — be sure to view them in full resolution. (E.g., another view of this scene; Leadville, Colorado; Mexico City; Languedoc, France.)

Measuring meaning

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:44:00 +0100

Presumably, to be succinct means to cram a lot of meaning into few words. Best of Wikipedia (as always, thoroughly enjoyable) informs me that mamihlapinatapai is “listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘most succinct word’”. That must mean it’s the single word that packs the most meaning, in any language. Whenever I hear of someone quantifying words, I wonder how exactly they define a word; in this case, what’s troubling is that in many languages you can keep inflecting, deriving and generally adding suffixes and modifying stems and combining words forever, so that by simply adding more and more stuff you could create a word that has an absolutely insane amount of information in it. But let’s forget about that for the moment and just accept that the Guinness World Record people have a working definition of word that mamihlapinatapai falls under but not a compound of fifty different words into one in, say, German. Let’s forget, too, that Guinness World Records aren’t scientific, the way you might say that Hydrogen is the lightest neutral atom because all those words are well-defined and have been measured scientifically — let’s forget that the Guinness Book of World Records is simply entertainment for a moment, and explore just what it means for mamihlapinatapai to be the most succinct word in any language.

If we assume that succinct means “packs most meaning”, a natural question is this: what exactly does “most meaning” mean? If I were to claim that actually “cat” packs more meaning than mamihlapinatapai, which Wikipedia says means “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start”, how exactly are you going to refute me? If one word is the most succinct, that must mean there is some way of quantifying meaning. There must be some unit of meaning that allows us to put a higher number to “mamihlapinatapai” than to “cat”, or at least some kind of well-defined order, so we that given two words, we can always tell which one packs most meaning. What might this unit or measurement be? What are the atomic parts that meaning consists of?

Take cat. You’d think it’d be obvious that “cat” packs less meaning than a word that means “a look shared by two people with each wishing …” and it goes on and on. But how can that be? Does that mean “cat” is an atomic part of meaning? That can’t be so, because you can split the meaning of “cat” into many different parts — all the properties of a cat that make a cat a cat and not something else are part of the meaning of the word “cat”, as are all the cultural connotations that arise in all the contexts that the word is used. A cat walks on four legs. It’s small, unless we’re using it more generally such as when a lion is described as basically “a big cat”. It’s a mammal — but if you’re into wacky hypotheticals, I’d say that if the DNA of a cat wasn’t mammalian in nature, if it was discovered that cats of were the only creatures on Earth whose genetic ancestry is extraterrestrial, but otherwise, cats are exactly like we imagine them, then I’d wager we’d still be calling them cats, so although cats are mammals and talking about a cat implies talking about a mammal, “cat” doesn’t necessarily mean “a mammal”. In short, there are all sorts of things that complicate any given word and makes it really hard to tease apart the “semantic building blocks” that make up the word’s meaning. And assuming you can give a clear definition of a cat that contains only other semantic concepts, then you can repeat the procedure with those semantic concepts, mapping their semantic building blocks in turn, and I can’t imagine you’d ever hit bottom and find that elusive indivisible building block of meaning, the semantic atom. (“Atom”, of course, being a word that illustrates how the meaning of a word can change based on scientific discoveries; the word meant “indivisible” and was supposed to be the most fundamental building block of nature, impossible to split apart into smaller constituents, and then we discovered they must consist of electrons and neutrons and protons and can be divided — atoms aren’t atomic.)

Maybe proving that “cat” is a more semantically fundamental or primitive is too much trouble. Maybe instead we could use succinctness to mean specificity. If cat is a more general concept than mamihlapinatapai, maybe that proves that mamihlapinatapai is a more succinct word. But if you want to define general versus specific concepts in terms of building blocks, you’re back to looking for semantic atoms. Maybe a better way to gauge the specificity of a word is to look at its extension: to be precise, the size of the set of all things that match the word. So maybe if the concept “cat” refers to includes more things than the concept “mamihlapinatapai” does, that means mamihlapinatapai is more succinct. Then you can argue that “cat” means simply a cat, but “mamihlapinatapai” means a look, but not just any look, it means a look shared by two people each of whom wish the other would initiate … and so on, which appears to be very specific. But then, a cat isn’t easy to define, either. It’s an animal, but not just any animal; it’s a mammal, but not just any mammal; and, as I suggested above, maybe saying it’s a mammal isn’t really part of the essential meaning (whatever that means) of “cat”, and in that case, what precisely are the defining characteristics of a cat? Should you find some defining characteristics of a cat, you could then start picking them apart by trying to find defining characteristics of the defining characteristics, and so on, ad nauseam. This looking at the extension idea might very well boil down to counting off each and every thing in the extension, but that means precisely defining the extension of a word, which is a thorny issue for all the reasons we’ve already encountered. Not to mention defining “thing”: do fictional cats count? Do fictional looks shared by two people with each wishing … and so on? What about metaphorical uses? Contextual connotations?

This way of measuring specificity is also rather arbitrary. If every cat on the planet died except one, and no one had ever thought about fictional cats, and so on, so that there was truly only one single thing (however defined) that falls within the extension of “cat”, while at the same time there are several mamihlapinatapais in any given moment, does that mean that cat is a more specific word, and hence more succinct? Does the “amount of meaning” in a word depend on the very contingent and seemingly arbitrary size of its extension at any given moment (or even as an average over time)?

Given all these complications, I think it’s fair to say that consistently and unambiguously measuring meaning is extremely hard, if it’s even possible. Maybe measuring the amount of meaning in any given word or text is a category error: maybe meaning is simply a fundamentally unquantifiable concept that it would be a mistake to even attempt to measure. This highlights what happens when you start to get rigorous about language and meaning: all sorts of things that seem to be very solid and well-anchored get really, really slippery. Whenever you think you’ve caught the definition of some kind of fundamental concept, like “meaning” or even “concept”, it finds a way to complicate matters. Language just wasn’t made for rigour. I find questions of semantics, of organizing the world into concepts and finding relationships between them, to be extremely interesting, but also frustrating, because everything’s so damn slippery. Granting all the above, though, when I wrote, in the first paragraph of this post, that you could “create a word that has an absolutely insane amount of information in it”, I’m sure everyone understood perfectly well what I meant. But if pinning down how much semantic information (or “how much meaning”) is in a word is so damn hard, it’s a mystery how we can really understand the above so well.

That reminds me of the Paradox of the Heap, which is this: how many grains of sand does it take to make a heap? The question has no definite answer. A heap is simply something we recognize when we see it (or don’t, as the case may be). And I’m starting to think that the most fundamental concepts that we use to discuss and define other concepts and meanings are all this way: indefinable and yet understandable. Hell, at this point I’m not even sure if “the most fundamental concepts” is something that makes sense to speak of, even if we seem to understand what it means. To borrow (again) a quote from Quine, maybe these are questions that are “paradoxically meaningless — ‘paradoxically’ because of the vividness of their apparent meaning”.

Another philosophical question is whether there can be such a thing as apparent meaning. If people all have pretty much the same idea — leaving aside issues over how to define “pretty much the same idea” — when they hear a string of words, doesn’t that mean the string of words has a meaning, namely, whatever idea people get in their heads when they hear or read it? Perhaps it should be noted that Quine probably is using a more technical definition of “meaningless”, where things that have no definite truth values, like “what time is it?” or “ouch”, are “meaningless”, even if they do have a meaning. Not even I would say that only 1+1=2 and other definite statements are meaningful, while the rest of communication, which is almost all of it, has no meaning at all. I do believe that communication is meaningful, even if it’s hard to define the concepts used, and even if I am at this point confused about what “meaning” even means.

Newton’s laws of motion, from a 1729 translation of the...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:42:50 +0100

Newton’s laws of motion, from a 1729 translation of the Principia.

Word-o-Matic

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:17:00 +0100

Word-o-Matic:

Make your own Markov Chain generator. Like Norse gods or organic compounds. It works better if you have lots of words. I made one that generates names of Tumblr staff members, but there are too few names to really create anything interesting: it keeps cycling between some, like “Armentain”, “Davidani”, “Marcob”, “Chrice”, “Jaco”, and the input names, unaltered. Tumblr simply has too few employees with too few syllables in their names to make anything interesting. It was the first thing that came to my mind, but I’m sure you can think of something better. Like Biblical names, dinosaurs or US states (my third try, I got “Alas”).

Technical details here, via reddit.

Sup, dawg?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:16:31 +0100

Sup, dawg?

I wish more people were doing stuff like this: Guest post on Jason Santa Maria’s...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:42:51 +0100

I wish more people were doing stuff like this:

Guest post on Jason Santa Maria’s blog.

Post on Dustin Curtis’s blog.

Article in The Bold Italic.

One of the great things about magazines is that all the articles don’t look alike. They’re free to expand, subtract, multiply, divide, paint, rotate, spin, glare, surprise and amuse, not only in content but also in form. This is lost on almost all blogs, because every post is forced into the same template. I mean, look at this! Posts about steam engines fucking, T-rex coins, photographs of bizarre medical equipment and existential despair all look the same! Everything’s sterile. There’s no variety. Hopefully the content isn’t boring, but the presentation sure is. And even the most beautiful template is, finally, only a template. You tire of it when you’ve seen it a hundred times. This is why stuff like Jason Santa Maria’s and Dustin Curtis’s sites is so great. There’s effort behind the presentation of each piece, and it looks great. That’s one thing you could say about GeoCities: subpages usually didn’t look like carbon copies of each other. These blogs are that, only with taste and skill and a sense of aesthetics. That’s great.

Medical Apparatus (!), by Kirill Kuletski. From a series of...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:13:38 +0100

Medical Apparatus (!), by Kirill Kuletski. From a series of photos taken in the salt therapy clinic in Solotvyno, Ukraine, which is interesting in itself:

The therapy which takes place at Solotvyno is based on a method known as Speleo- therapy, an alternative therapy for asthma and other respiratory diseases. This therapy was discovered in Poland in the 1950s when it was noticed that salt mine workers rarely suffered from tuberculosis. Scientists found that the salt-permeated air of the working salt mine helped to dissolve phlegm in the bronchial tubes and also killed the micro-organisms which caused infections – and that this greatly helped patients who were undertaking treatment for asthma.

The clinic at Solotvyno salt mine is unique because its tunnels, which are 300 metres below ground level and remain at a steady 22°C (72°F) all year round, are the deepest in the world to be used for such purposes.

“Sometimes I pretend to be Neptune.” Wonderful. The...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:31:00 +0100

“Sometimes I pretend to be Neptune.” Wonderful. The death of Marat, by Kate Beaton.

The above is a very snappy graphic floating around the web that...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:16:00 +0100

The above is a very snappy graphic floating around the web that supposedly illustrates why net neutrality is a big deal. It delivers its message effectively. It will leave people properly horrified. It’s also a boogey man that doesn’t reflect the real dangers of a world without net neutrality.

Yes, in the extreme, without net neutrality, ISPs could offer internet access modeled on cable tv: you pay for the “channels” (websites) you want to see. But this isn’t going to happen. People are too used to how the web works. No one would buy the above plan. ISPs aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to make a move that separates them from ninety nine percent of their customers. The above will never be the norm, for perfectly obvious commercial reasons.

The real danger with the lack of network neutrality is the idea that packets aren’t created equal. ISPs will never blatantly censor every website except for a few hundred that you paid for — that would simply make no business sense at all. But what they might do is a lot sneakier: they might subtly change the internet under us. By prioritizing packets from certain servers or to certain places, the openness and competetiveness that we all know and love on the internet could be destroyed. If YouTube videos suddenly load twice as fast as videos from every other video site, everyone else is at a tremendous competitive disadvantage. Suddenly it isn’t enough to create a superior service to eat market share from one of the big players; suddenly you need to bribe the ISPs to get your packets equal priority, because there’s no way anyone is going to use your web service when the big players are loading twice as fast or half your packets are lost. The low barrier to entry on the internet would be gone. The openness of the internet would vanish. Competition between websites would be reduced. And yes, it might very well be that your ISP decides that packets containing criticism aimed at them should be downprioritized and ones that praise them should be given the deluxe treatment.

A better analogy than the “channel plan” above might be a bunch of mobsters who demand protection money. If the internet is a street, then the mob will hamper those stores (websites) that don’t pay, while favorizing the big players who can afford to pay huge sums in protection money. A small mom-and-pop store isn’t going to have much of a chance at competition, despite better pricing or superior products, if the store keeps getting break-ins, fires, muscle types skulking at customers, or if customers who shop at the store keep getting mugged so that on average, only half of what is bought there ever makes it to the customer’s home. Those chain stores are going to look mighty tempting in that scenario. Internet packets are the same way.

Or perhaps someone invents an entirely new use of the internet, but the ISPs put the technology at such a disadvantage that it never sees widespread adoption. Google, which is championing net neutrality — though China continues to be a blemish on their reputation for opennness — thinks that prioritizing the type of data contained in a packet is ok. While this is less severe than the mob-like system above — video might get priority over text, but not YouTube over Hulu — it does mean that entirely novel uses of the internet that we can’t even imagine at the moment could be at a disadvantage.

These, I think, are the things that could realistically happen in the near future. They might not happen, but so long as there’s no legislation that prevents it, they could, and whatever is potentially profitable will probably come to pass at one point or another.

"Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more..."

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:34:00 +0100

“Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.”

- Louis Menand. (via 3qd)

Darwin Among the Machines (1863)

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:14:00 +0100

Darwin Among the Machines (1863):

We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species, varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, of pointing out rudimentary organs which exist in some few machines, feebly developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type which has either perished or been modified into some new phase of mechanical existence. We can only point out this field for investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and talents have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay claim to. (…)

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Many have written about machines overtaking humans, What’s curious about this articel by Samuel Butler, from 1863, is how literally it takes the metaphor of machines as life. The lever is compared to the primordial cell from which organic life developed; “the mechanical kingdom” is contrasted with “the animal and vegetable kingdom”, there are mentions of “rudimentary organs” of machines, “perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type” — “the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl of our tobacco pipe”, say. In other words, at the current rate of development, machine life will simply evolve. It won’t be the result of deliberate efforts to create machine life, it’s simply the inevitable consequence of the explosive rate with which we advance mechanical technology. We are busy building our heirs to the throne of Earth as we speak. The potential for steampunk porn is staggering:

Each race is dependent upon the other for innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be ultimately developed, inasmuch as man’s interest lies in that direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is true that machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our feeble and imperfect imagination.

Steam engines copulating! (Remember how literally this entire article treats the analogy between organic and mechanical “life”.)

Finally, echoes of the modern world:

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.

"Always remember to close all parentheses. We’re not paying to air condition the entire..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:54:11 +0100

“Always remember to close all parentheses. We’re not paying to air condition the entire paragraph.”

- Fake AP Stylebook.

Super Osama Bin Laden Kulfa Balls, Pakistani milk and...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:59:00 +0100

Super Osama Bin Laden Kulfa Balls, Pakistani milk and coconut-flavored candy. Image from here.

Canadian $4 coin depicting Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:30:50 +0100

Canadian $4 coin depicting Tyrannosaurus Rex.