In case you haven’t heard we are planning another Tweed Ride on March 27th in Berkeley. I am really pleased with the design for the flyer. It plays off my earlier flyer for the second SF Tweed Ride with some similar elements and uses the same typeface, but the balance of the layout is different as is the color palette. Designing the promotional material is one of the more fun aspects of these events that I put on. Of course, the most fun is the smiles I see on the faces of the participants!

The photo is of the J.D. as the fabulous Twettle, the Tweed Beetle by the excellent photographer juicyrai.

East Bay Tweed Spring Ride

March 27th, 2 pm

2 pm — Sally forth from Ohlone Park (near North Berkeley Bart)

Midpoint — location TBA (games, contests, and a special performance)

End (5-6 pmish) — location TBA (libations)

Spring is the air and the rain has let up, so it’s time to dust off your smoking pipes and take your tweed out of mothballs! Put that dapper cap on your head, oil your chain, and get ready to pedal with panache!

Join us for the first SF Tweed Ride of 2010, this ride will take place in the lovely town of Berkeley, CA. The ride will be anywhere from 5-7 miles with a break midway through. We have plenty of enjoyment planned for you all including games, contests, and a special performance by the wondrous Corpus Callosum! As always, the tweed ride will end at an establishment that offers libations and cheer.

Photo of the J.D. as the fabulous Twettle, the Tweed Beetle by the excellent photographer juicyrai

Reposted from my twitter as I listened to Bonobo’s latest album Black Sands.

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Listening happily to Bonobo’s latest album Black Sands. I don’t like all of it but the tracks that are good are damned good. 24 minutes ago via Tweetie

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I miss Bajka from Days to Come. Andreya Triana is a good singer but she’s almost too smooth with nothing to grab your ear and pull you in. 8 minutes ago via Tweetie

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1009 is my favorite song on the album. Chill, yet glitchy and always feeling as if it’s on the verge of rocking the house. [audio embeded below as a youtube clip] 3 minutes ago via Tweetie

BTW for those of you in the Bay Area, Bonobo is playing at the Mezzanine, April 23rd!

Dave Pell has an excellently written, if slightly melodramatic, post on forgetting telephone numbers, My Head is in the Clouds:

“…My head was once filled with bits and pieces of information like phone numbers, to-do lists, and addresses. I’ve ceded that responsibility to technology. Last summer, I forgot my friend Norman’s birthday. We’ve known each other since elementary school.

…Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper and more introspective thought.”

While the picture he paints is engaging and on the face of it convincing, he needs to get off the hyperbole horse. Seriously, think about it, how many phone numbers, addresses, birthdates, etc. did you use to remember?

Personally, I never had more than 3-5 phone numbers memorized at a time, but then again why would I have to? Pre-cellphone, the only place I’d normally make calls is from home where I had my address book; if I was out and about usually the only number I ever called was home. It’s only since the invention of the cellphone, where every single person we know has a phone number and we call people all the time from anywhere, that we need to have phone numbers with us at all times.

These days the only addresses I remember fully are my work and my home, but this really isn’t any different than before. I still manage to get to places just like I always have without an address, by remembering the street and knowing what their house looks like.

As to birthday’s, well I never had much of a head for dates so I never remembered more than my family’s birthdays and if I was lucky the person I was dating. Pell lamented forgetting his friend Norman’s birthday who he’s known since elementary school. He blames this on the fact that he’s grown used to being reminded of birthdays via facebook/twitter/etc and Norman isn’t as active online. But is this really the reason? When you are a kid, birthdays are huge deals, but when you get older they tend to pass on by. They become less important, with less celebration, and thus less reason to remember them.

Pell speaks of freeing up space like the brain is a computer with a limited hard drive, but this is not how memory works. The fact that we no longer remember phone numbers is not because technology has made our brains lazy—it’s because we don’t physically dial numbers any more. There is no data being off loaded; we are not freeing up storage. It’s just not something we do and without doing there is no memory. If Pell wanted to, he could start remembering phone numbers again by dialing it using the key pad. Just like he could reinforce the memory of Norman’s birthday by planning a birthday party for him next year.

Rob Foster’s recent post /the/path/of/most/resistance is a brilliant write up on the inherent lacking of the visual file system. as he says:

…for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

I think this is even true for many advanced users—even if they refuse to admit it. Even I have come to realize the more I have begun to use my iPhone, the more I see that I don’t need a file system for most of my tasks. I consider myself an experienced user and even I would love for the file system on my main computer to if not disappear at least further hide itself. Do I need to always have the system folder visible? No. Nor do I really need to see the applications folder as long as I can search and see a list. Actually come to think of it nor do I need the music folder or photos folder. A dedicated music/photo app does a better job sorting those file types then the I would manually creating folders.

The last point says it best. The visual file system is a generalist tool (like the CLI). We’ve moved away from the concept of sitting down to use a computer; instead now, we are sitting down to do a specific task: i.e., write a report, listen to music, post a tweet, check out facebook, watch a show, build a website, etc. The computer itself needs to get out of the stinking way so we can just do what we sit down to do. Having a global visual file system is just more clutter and doesn’t really help any of those tasks—not even webdev.

Yes you heard me: I do not need access to my computer’s file system to do web development. All I need is access to the project’s files on the server and a local store of the same, both of which I really only need to see when I’m in my IDE. I don’t really need to even know where this local store is as long as I can just click on the name of the project and it loads (like Coda and other IDEs). The local store could for all intents just be archive that opens when I open my IDE. Well there is the photoshop graphic editor issue but that could be easily solved by having a list of web projects show up when I “save to web.” You know how much time I’d save if I could just select from a project list whenever I “save to web” rather than have to dig around in my folders for where ever the images folder is for a certain website?

Speaking of, Panic please make an iPad version of Coda!

p.s. this brings to mind one of my gripes about Windows—fonts. To install fonts on OS X you click on it and then click install font. On Windows, even the new Windows 7, you have to copy it in the font folder (usually C:\Windows\Fonts), which is a granted not too hard but it’s still annoying to have to manually dig into the system folder to install a font.

Compare Apple’s slick new iPad ad…

with the new HP Slate ad (warning: blaring techno)…

Seriously HP, Could you make the fingers and interface look even more fake? Even the blipvert editing, lens flares, and pounding retro techno can’t cover up this post-production hack job.  I mean I know Apple’s ad has some weird rotoscope moments—physically impossible zero-friction lap spin—but theirs at least seem deliberate choices for effect. Yours on the other hand seems like it was done by somebody’s cousin who just downloaded a pirated copy of After Effects.

And while we are at it, who is your target market here? Ya got a bit of a confusion going on here blaring old 90′s techno and user searching for modern indie rock. Though since the person using this device seems to need to search wikipedia to find out what “indie rock” is, maybe you are targeting people who are completely ignorant of music? Or maybe you are just targeting people who had horrible thumb surgery accidents as children?… that would explain the Tim Burton-ish font choice at the end.

Someone needs to rewrite Johnny Got His Gun for the modern era. In a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness” researchers used fMRI machines to attempt to determine the level of awareness in persistent vegetative patients.

The researchers put people in brain scanners and, in one condition, asked them to imagine standing still on a tennis court while swinging an arm to “hit the ball” back and forth to an imagined instructor, and in the other, to imagine navigating the streets of a familiar city or to imagine walking from room to room in their home. These were chosen because they show distinct patterns of brain activity on a scan. (via Mind Hacks).

Out of 54 patients only 5 showed patterns of distinct brain activity. This sort of research has been done before but in this study they took it a step further.

One patient, who had been in a vegetative state since a traffic accident seven years ago, was asked a series of six yes or no questions about simple personal details such as: “Do you have any sisters? Is your father’s name Thomas? Is your father’s name Alexander?“ The researchers instructed the patient to imagine tennis for yes and walking for no.

To blind against the effect of bias, the researchers who asked the questions did not know the answers and they each ended question with neutral word “answer.” Also, the results of the fMRI was read by researchers who were not aware of the questions asked.

The patient’s brain activity indicated the correct answer for 5 out of 6 questions—the last question resulted in no measurable activity to correlate with a response. Now statistically anyone can get 3 out of 6 yes/no questions right, but given the fact that the patient was seemingly able to follow instructions something was going on. This doesn’t mean that the patient is fully conscious and trapped in his body. Something is going on up there but given the state of the patient his level of awareness is likely fleeting and limited at best.

All this sets up an odd legal quandary as vegetative patients already exist in a legal grey area. Most legal statutes rule that it must be ruled by a medical authority that no recovery is possible before—to be crude—the plug is pulled. This sort of evidence casts more light on the state of the individual but it also makes the situation even more unclear: What if the other 49 patients never played tennis before? What if they didn’t quite understand the question? What if they are deaf?

And what if… what if they had asked the patient if he wanted to continue living like this… and what if he said “No.”

Would this classify him as minimally conscious rather than permanently vegetative? If so they would no longer be allowed to abide by his wishes. Maybe this isn’t a modern telling of Johnny Got His Gun, maybe it’s actually Catch 22.