wanderingstan

Forty-one years ago on July 20, 1969 two amazing first-ever phenomena happened simultaneously: In the first case, a human being walked on the moon—the first time we had stepped onto a world beyond Earth. It was the pinnacle of human technology and engineering. In this second case, five hundred million people around the world watched this moon walk on TV screens. It was the most popular media event to date.
As a thought experiment, imagine that you could go back in time and ask one of those TV viewers a question. Let’s call him Joe. You ask him, “Of these two momentous events, which one will make the bigger impact on life in forty years?”

My money says that Joe would pick the moon landing. And I think you’ll agree that that would be the wrong choice. This age of HD TV’s, Google, Facebook, video games, 3D imax movies, iPhones, and animated billboards. Rockets are cool, but the screens have won.

That night was a dramatic symbol of an ongoing titanic shift from the world of matter to the world of media.

The moonwalk represents humans’ extraordinary ability to manipulate their environment to chase material goals. It’s the same motivation that sent explorers looking for farmable land in the “New World,” and the same innovation that led eskimos to develop technology for surviving Arctic winters. Sure, bees build beehives and gorillas sometimes use sticks to dig out ants, but humans are the kings of taming environments. We have indoor heat and air conditioning, and create tools like tractors and rockets. We have a long history of learning to master the material world.

Joe probably expected a future that extended this trend; something like “The Jetsons” TV show, filled with flying cars, trips to Saturn, talking kitchens, and robot lawn mowers.

Those little shaded pixels on black and white TV’s represented a somewhat newer skill of humans: that of cheaply manipulating our senses so that we can have experiences without actually “being there”. Fifty million people could experience walking on the moon—or a good approximation—without actually having to fly in a rocket for three days. It’s certainly not the same as being on the moon, but it’s almost as good, and a lot cheaper! The moon missions cost at least $25 billion. Watching it on TV was free, apart from some advertisements. This was an important step—a giant leap even!—in our mastery of the media world.

Joe could not have foreseen the degree to which people immerse themselves in various media. Americans spend 46 billion minutes a month watching TV. And worldwide, people are spending 500 billion minutes a month just on Facebook.(3) Not to mention the time spent on telephones, video games, iPhone twiddling, and Twitter tweeting.

What is causing this shift in prominence from matter to media?

My hunch is that it comes down to values again.(1) Getting enough to eat is exponentially easier than even a hundred years ago. Same for shelter and other material needs.(2) When your material needs are met to a certain degree, there comes a point of diminishing returns: additional effort or dollars spent on better food, housing, toys, etc. doesn’t bring as much “bang” for the buck.

On the other hand, media experiences have been getting cheaper and better. People can often get more “valuable” experiences in the world of media—and for cheaper than the comparable material-world experiences.

This all seems intuitively right. If you’re a reader of this blog, you probably agree too. But are we just deceiving ourselves with our love of new media(4)? Where is the hard data? How would you prove (or disprove) this shift in human priorities? Here are some initial thoughts:

• Contributions to GDP from “matter companies” as opposed to “media companies”.
• Percentage of personal income spent on material needs versus media consumption.
• At what wealth threshold to people in developing nations begin to prioritize media? (Anyone who has traveled to developing countries has been struck by the sight of satellite dishes on shacks, and mobile phones on ox carts.)
• Mentions of media events and companies vs. matter companies in news headlines over time.
• Number of people employed, or net salaries paid, in “matter” jobs (manufacturing, farming, construction, etc) vs media jobs. (Though could be misleading, as many media have such low marginal cost as to require few workers.)

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(1) Yeah, that’s my theme these days: See also Musings on the role of values in a life and  When values go wrong: Surprising tales from cats, rats, bees, and Russian chat rooms.
(2) Primarily for western countries, but increasingly for the rest of the world too.
(3) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?_r=2&ref=magazine
(4)Yes, pinning down a definition of “media” is hard. I’ll tackle that in a future post.

Thanks to Peter Sennhauser for hashing out this idea with me. And thanks to Ken Reisman for brainstorming about ways to measure this.

Yesterday afternoon I shared a cold drink with a friend in one of Berlin’s beer gardens, taking a short break from the current heat wave to talk about my research. “I used to be on Facebook a lot,” she said, “but found that it left me feeling bad about my life.” It’s a sentiment that I’ve heard from lots of people over the last few months: you see others leading amazing lives, and wonder why your life seems so not-so-amazing in comparison.

My friend was quick to point out that she knows rationally that this makes no sense. Of course those people have problems too. Of course they post pictures of vacations (but only the flattering ones) and not of boring days at work.

In my trips back to Colorado, I have been struck each time by the discord between people’s Facebook lives and what they say in private. On Facebook they have been on an amazing vacation to exotic beaches. In person they confess that the vacation was a desperate attempt to save a marraige. On Facebook they have been to gliteratee tech conferences. In person they confess they haven’t been able to sleep for months, and are on anti-anxiety medication from the stress of financial pressures on their company. It is a strange case of schadenfreude for me to hear this, knowing that I had been jealous of their beach time and glamor.

What’s interesting is that this feel-bad Facebook effect seems to come from a distinct source: not-so-close Facebook friends.

In the case of true close friends, you know about all the crap that is going on in their lives. From deep interaction, you know the specific pains and doubt that lies behind the smiling profile picture.

No, the life-comparison danger comes from the weak ties; from those people you met at a conference, or the friends from High School that you haven’t interacted with since they friended you last year. From these people you get a constant stream of life, edited to show the good parts.

Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do intereseting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be pschologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.

So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertantly created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.

In the end, my friend’s strategy seems to be the right one: don’t spend too much time purusing the lives of people who aren’t in your life. And spend more time learning about the uncut, unedited, off-line lives that your friends are actually living.

[Another longish essay-ish post about my new favorite topic. About 10 minutes to read. The first essay is here.]

Why did you do what you did last night? Why did you open your computer today? And why, getting to the point, did you choose to read this post? This is my second post about “value systems.” That is, those little systems in you (and every living thing) that helps you choose what you do.

I said that talking about a value system is difficult because it is so obvious, like trying to point to air.  But we do think about air at times—especially when we don’t have it! Just last week my Berlin flatmate decided to stain some wood in our kitchen. The smell of those harsh chemicals burned my nostrils, triggered an instant headache, and had me running for the door in a desperate bid for fresh air.

Likewise, to see the importance of a creature’s value system, we can look for cases where the system leads them wrong. We can find these cases in fearless ill-fated rats, bumbling bees, lonely Russian men, and —just maybe— even in you as you read this.

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Speaking of un-fresh air in my flat, it’s only fitting the first example begins in a cat litter box. Or shortly before the box, to be precise. Toxoplasma gondii, known as “toxo” for short, is a parasite with a fondness for cats.  They are so tiny that 10 could fit across the width of a human hair. And for reasons we won’t get into here, they can only reproduce in cat intestines. (Sorry, another story about little creatures in the digestive system!) Once some baby toxos have been made, its time for them to venture out in the big world for a grand adventure of their own. And if it was a family kitty, the first stop on that adventure is a litter box.

Toxos at play.
(Photo from Wikipedia.)

Once outside, the young toxos face a problem: how are they going to follow their dreams of settling down in a cat gut all of their own? They are far too small to make it on their own. The answer, it turns out, is with unwitting help from another creature, the second star actor in this story.

Rats, for reasons known only to them, eat cat poop. When this happens, it is a big step for the baby toxo. The next step in his life adventure. But remember that he can’t reproduce here–he needs a cat. But it is here, inside the rat, that toxo works his value-system magic.

Rats, as a rule, are terrified of cats. Their value system concerning cats might look like this.

Once in the rat, the young toxo makes his way to the rat’s brain. Once there, he does a little bit of tinkering that scientists still don’t fully understand. (They recently found that toxo DNA contains sequences related to dopamine production in animals, and dopamine is a big player reward systems.) In any case, the results of this tinkering in the rat are astounding. It is no longer is afraid of cats. Moreover, the smell of cat urine becomes sexually arousing!

This change of values, as you might suspect, doesn’t bode well for the newly fearless rat. Rats who enjoy a cat’s company are likely to become a cat’s dinner.

Typical toxo home
(Photo from ShutterSparks)

This sad truth for the rat brings up an deep point about value systems. To function correctly, they must be tuned needs of the organism and the realities of the environment it lives in. A rat who likes cats is not tuned to the realities of cats. [1]

In any case, the cat’s easily caught meal is a big win for our young toxo. He will soon find himself, along with the rat (now deceased), in the cat’s small intestine. He made it! And if this toxo is very lucky, the cat might have earlier ingested a different rat with a different toxo, who has been patiently waiting. You can imagine the scene. Two young toxos see each other from across the intestine. Their eyes lock. They come closer. “You complete me,” whispers the new arrival. And so, thanks to some value-system modification, the circle of life goes round once more, toxo-style.(Okay, that last part may not be strictly scientifically accurate…)

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For a second interesting case of value system misfires, consider the curious case of Ophrys Orchids, also known unflatteringly as “Prostitute Orchids.” Like most flowers, they rely on bees to get their pollen to other orchids. What’s different is how they do it. [2]

You see, these flowers look just like a very attractive female bee. And not only does “she” look great, but she smells great too. The orchid emits the scent of virgin female bumblebee pheromones. For the casual male bumblebee innocently flying by, all signs point to “Go!”. And indeed he goes, engaging in what scientists call “pseudo-copulation.”

There’s a reason one scientist referred to these orchids as the “inflatable love dolls of the floral kingdom.”

That’s one fine looking bee—or is it?
The Bumblebee Orchid, aka Ophrys bombyliflora. (Photo from Wikipedia)

After some time the male bee figures out the “pseudo” part of what’s going on, and flies away. Now he is (1) covered with pollen and (2) really in the Mood. So he flies off, doubly determined to find real romance. Yet if the orchids have their way, this next “bee” will be just like before. And the frantic moves of this second attempt, he now deposits the first orchid’s pollen onto the second, insuring a next generation of  flowers. What clever orchids! And what a seriously frustrated bee!

So what does this have to do with a value system? The bee, like the toxo-infected rat, is following the dictates of his value system. It looks something like this.

The difference between the sucker rat and the sucker bee is that the bee’s system wasn’t changed. He liked female bees just as much before the orchid encounter as after. Instead, the orchid tricked the bee’s perception. The rat in our first example still perceived cats as cats, but simply was not afraid of them anymore. The bee perceived the orchid to be a sexy bee.

The rat perceived the world correctly, but valued it wrong. The bee perceived the world wrong, but valued his illusion correctly.

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Sure, we can giggle at the foolish bee, and even feel sorry for the poor rat who perhaps thought he could be pals with the cat. But what about us humans and our value system? Are we susceptible to this?

There are hundreds of species of orchids, but scientist have found none that resemble life-sized, good-smelling supermodels.

But consider this. Online security experts have reported that there are now programs in Russia that can simulate flirting in chat rooms. The program appears in the chat rooms as a flirtatious woman eager to talk. With clever banter, it attempts to lure the conversation partner into revealing personal information or even to send photos. The user may be infected with malware, or the information used to commit identity fraud.

Thinking about that woman from the chat room last  night.
(Photo via Adam Jones, PhD.)

In comparison, it seems the bees got off easy. They lost lost only their time (and maybe their self-respect), but these chat victims could lose a lot of money (and definitely their self-respect).

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So human value systems can be tricked by perception problems, just like bees. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” you might answer. But could humans be affected by the something like toxo? Could your value system be changed by some “brain tinkering”?

Turns out we don’t have to look far for an answer. Scientists have recently discovered that humans are also affected toxo.

Toxo doesn’t live only in rats and cats. It can live in any warm-blooded mammal. That’s the reason pregnant women are advised to stay away from litter boxes—a new toxo infection can cause serious problems for a developing fetus. You can also get it by eating undercooked meat from an infected animal.

Wait, it gets more interesting.

Not only could you be infected, there’s a real chance that you already are. This is no joke. 11% of people in the United States have it. In France the number stands at 88%, 80% in Germany, 22% in Britain, and 4% in Korea. Worldwide, 1 in 3 people carry the toxo parasite.

Scientists have known this for years, but thought that the infection had no symptoms in humans. After all, toxo is specialized for rat brains. (You are a dead-end for toxo, as there is such small chance of you being eaten by a cat.) However, recent studies have shown that toxo does make subtle but significant and observable changes. To quote one study of those infected, “The men were more likely to disregard rules and were more expedient, suspicious, jealous, and dogmatic. The personality of infected women, by contrast, showed higher warmth and higher superego strength, suggesting that they were more warm hearted, outgoing, conscientious, persistent, and moralistic. Both men and women had significantly higher apprehension compared with the uninfected controls.”

Value systems are important. Just like I was in bad shape without clean air, the rat was in bad shape with a broken value system. Just like the bee was fooled into thinking he was doing something valuable, some Russian man was fooled into thinking he chatted up a girl.

And most surprisingly, human value systems can be changed from the inside as well. Yet those changes are different. Toxo isn’t getting people eaten by cats, just some other personality changes. If and toxo can change personalities, is this good or bad? Can there be good changes to a value system, just as there are bad? Some researchers have even gone so far as to suggest that toxo infection has shaped much of what we call human civilization. There is a deeper question here: What do words like “good” and “bad” mean if not within a value system?

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[1] “Evolution trained on data for 4 billion years, involving (as I estimate) perhaps 10^35 or more separate learning trials, and in a sense distilled all this learning into a compact expression in the DNA. The DNA program is quite compact compared to this massive training.”
[2] Strictly speaking, Orchids don’t need new pollen to make new Orchids. They can do it alone if needed. But pollen from others mixes the genes, and gives a better chance for the new generation.

More references and further reading:

• Toxoplasma gondii
• Radiolab podcast about toxo
• Effects of Toxoplasma on Human Behavior
• Orchids: Inflatable love-dolls of the floral kingdom
• Warning sounded over “flirting robots”
• Eliza - an simple example from the 1960’s of a chat program, this one emulating a psychotherapist.
• Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?
• Robert Sapolsky on Toxo

[This is a long essay-ish post, reading time: about 7 minutes.]

You could say I’m writing this in response to an email I received in the Fall of 1997. No, I don’t have a backlog of thirteen years in my inbox. (Tough if you’ve contacted me lately you might disagree!) But it’s no exaggeration to say the email changed the way I look at life.

At the time I was working as a game designer for a small startup in Boulder, Colorado. My previous game had been a minor hit; Ultracorps was the first multiplayer game you could play entirely within a web browser. Microsoft had bought it a few months before, and there was pressure to make a game we could sell to AOL.

So far, things were looking good. Our new game Evernight, shifted from sci-fi to fantasy, and already had nearly a thousand beta testers playing. The game was turn-based, similar to the board game Risk, or Axis and Allies. During the day you could inspect your armies, manage your factories, and exchange diplomatic emails with other players. By midnight you had to submit orders to your forces, and then for an hour the game would be closed while armies moved about and fought their battles. The next day you would log in to see the results and start the cycle over again.

I and team members play-testing Evernight on paper before computer coding began, a few months before the email.

The finished game in an ancient web browser.

We knew the Evernight was good. It had been play-tested extensively in the conference room before we even began coding. (Those were some hard days at the office!) And now that it was live on our website, we could see how much people were playing it by looking at the server logs.

One player soon pulled ahead in the game rankings, conquering foes left and right, making all the right alliances, and pitting his enemies against each other. He was spending huge chunks of each day in the game, sometimes over six hours at a stretch. He began sending us report bugs and ideas for improving the game, and thus began our correspondence.

But the email on this day was different. He wrote, “My boss says that I’m playing the game too much at work, and says I have to choose between my job and the game.” Ah-ha! So that’s how he had so much time to play—he’d been playing at work.

“Well it wasn’t hard,” he continued. “I choose the game.”

Wait. A. Minute. I was just a kid having some fun, right? For most of college I’d been a wide-eyed idealist, thinking I’d live some monkish existence while saving the world. And here instead a guy was quitting his job so he could spent more time playing with my creation. This I had not foreseen.

The question was not simply about addiction, not only about computers and pixels on screens. It was about how he was choosing to spend his life, and how I was choosing to spend mine.

The core issue here is our value system. What do you find important, and why? Maybe you spend six hours a day playing games too. Maybe you don’t. In either case, why? For that matter, why did you chose to read this post? As a first pass at understanding that system in us that decides, lets consider two far-flung examples.

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One hundred and sixty years before that email, another man was making another big decision. Charles Darwin, still twenty years away from publishing his famous theory of evolution, was thinking of asking one Emma Wedgewood to be his wife.

Emma Wedgwood

He did something that you probably have also done before some big life decisions: he made a list of pros and cons. Here is his note, probably written in July of 1838.

Darwin’s list. (Click for closer view)

Centered across the top is written “This is the Question.”  The left column is headed “Marry” and begins with “Children (If it please God). Constant companion (Friend in old age.)” And in the “Not Marry” column we read, “Freedom to go where one liked. Conversation of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives. Loss of time.”

You can almost see the the scores being added up in his head. Children worth 10 points. Freedom to go other places, lets say 7 points. Friend in old age, 5 points. Add up the scores and see what you should do.

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But people aren’t the only ones making big decisions. Right now, deep inside your large intestine is a humble Escherichia coli cell, better known by his short name E. Coli. (He has some cousins that are dangerous to humans, which also go by the same name. But all humans have helpful E. Coli which help with digestion.) He’s hanging out there with several million others just like him, looking for a meal. Like his pals, he has several long tail-like structures called flagella that he can spin like a dog wagging its tail. To do so costs a lot of energy, and propels him tumbling forward randomly.

An E. Coli cell spinning himself forward into the unknown.

He doesn’t have eyes or ears; he only knows how long it’s been since his last meal. If he could find a pen and paper down there in your gut, he might make a list like Darwin.

E. Coli’s note. (Artist’s interpretation.)

It might seem like a small deal for you, but this is the only decision that our little E. Coli friend makes, and that makes it the most important decision of his life!

His list is like Darwin’s, with but with simple points. Having food recently is a point for staying still. Not having food is a point for leaving.

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What do Darwin, E. Coli, and the online game addict all have in common? Yes, they are all making big decisions, in a way. But they also all posses a value system for helping them make those decisions.

The E. Coli values food. And if he isn’t getting any, it may be worth it to go tumbling into new territory. His value system is very simple, and a good scientist could deduce it by looking at the proteins and chemicals that the cell is made of. On the other hand, Darwin probably wouldn’t want anything from your large intestine. He valued food too (albeit different varieties), but he also valued children and companionship. He valued time, freedom, good conversation, and a million other things that you, as a fellow human, understand.

And the game addict writing that email valued my game. He valued it more than his paycheck.

The human value system is much more complex than that of E. Coli. Even the most boring soap opera plot require deep understanding of who wants what, and how they are pursuing those goals. Yet this complexity, the same complex value system working in your head right now, is not without patterns.  These patterns are being researched by scientists with clever experiments and increasingly powerful brain scanning technology.

Talking about the value system can be hard—like trying to point at air. It is something so close to us and so obvious: of course Darwin wanted both companionship and time, of course sugar tastes better than rocks, of course you want to watch a funny movie more than a boring one. Yet the system that gives rise to these values holds huge power. And in this age of the internet and so much new media, this power is only growing. It is behind online games, behind Facebook, behind advertising, and so much more.

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If you’ve talked to me in the past few months, you know that I’m considering writing a book around these ideas. I’ve collected a lot of fascinating nuggets this winter, and with a little perseverance I hope to write them up here before this blog rusts out from disuse.

By the time of Evernight, my company was beginning to shift away from massively multiplayer games in order to get into e-commerce. That was the cool thing in 1998. Sadly, this was just the time online games were beginning to take off and become the multi-billion dollar industry it is today.  Shortly after the player’s email, I transferred off of Evernight for other reasons. I never heard from him again. Recently I heard secondhand that he’s doing fine—and actually didn’t like the job that much in the first place.

However, we do know firsthand what happened to Darwin. At the bottom of his note, on the “Marry” side, he came to the final summation of his values, writing “My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. No, no won’t do. Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. … Marry, Marry, Marry.  Q.E.D.” He and Emma were married on 29 January 1839. They remained friends and companions into old age.

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Related links:

• See Evernight as it looked in old days at the Internet Archive. It was later purchased by rabid fans and continues to run to this day.
• UltraCorps was later resold to Steve Jackson games, where it is playable today.
• The E. Coli example, and lots more about the importance of values, can be found in the wonderful book Your Brain is Almost Perfect, by Read Montague.
• Curious about video game addiction? Tom Bissell recounts how he was addicted to video games and cocaine.
• Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin at Wikipedia.

It’s a cliche in entrepreneurial circles to say that your idea was “ahead of it’s time.” So let me feed fuel to the cliche by pointing out that Google’s new “Trusted Social Search” is exactly what I was talking about five years ago when I launched my Outfoxed project which, with many changes, went on to become Lijit Networks.

Google description of Social Search, on their help page:

The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.

About Outfoxed from 2005:

The essential idea of Outfoxed is that people make decisions based primarily on a few people whom they trust. The average person has a set of experts whom they consult in designated areas: the computer expert, the car expert, the fashion expert, the financial expert. If the opinions of these experts can be collected, they are incredibly useful: it is this metadata (data about other data) that gives the most intelligent filtering and sorting of the information on the internet.

It feels both validating and frustrating to see the idea finally coming to light. As a graduate student excited about my “discovery,” I couldn’t see why people just couldn’t grasp what I was trying to explain. Everyone heard “social” and immediately thought I was proposing a Wikipedia approach to work.

What has changed in the last five years? Most importantly, “Social Graph” has gone mainstream. Everyone now understands the concept which I struggled so hard to explain to would-be investors: people connecting to each other — as friends, as subscribers, as followers — creates a network of trusted relationships.

Just because Google has implemented my old ideas still doesn’t make it a success. As impressive as Twitter and Facebook have been at amassing social graphs, we still are in the early days of learning what can be done with a real live trust network among millions of people.

I can’t wait to see what the future looks like, even if it always seems to arrive late.

Nutshell overview of Outfoxed

Search Engine Land coverage of Google Social Search

Search Engine Land on next phase of search, eerily similar to my post on the Third Phase of Search.

In August 2008 my old laptop bit the dust. Everyone was raving about Macs and I saw some good developers using them. This, and the fact I was such an Apple fanboy in my youth, convinced me that it was time for this prodigal Mac son to come home. I bought an almost-new MacBook off Craigslist–which later turned out to be stolen. But that’s another story. (But interesting to note that New York police aren’t interested if you call tell them you think you have a stolen laptop.) I was immediately disappointed. And as I now knew it was hot, I couldn’t in good conscience resell it.

So for the past year I’ve kept a list where I express my frustration every time it slows me down. At the behest of many, I now present that list. (Please note that this list is compiled from moments of extreme frustration over many months. I’m generally a happy person!)

Overall User Interface

1. The menu bar on the Mac makes no sense. It is based on 1984 technology when only one program ran at a time, so every window on the screen belonged to the same program. This approach is ridiculous today when it’s not uncommon to have 15 or more programs running at once, each with several windows, spread across a multiple monitors. For example, I keep Skype and Adium windows open on the far right of my external monitor. To edit a Skype setting, I must navigate to the opposite side of the desktop, across two entire screen widths, just to reach a menu option.

For example, consider how Apple might improve a basic kitchen setup, where they’ve heard complaints of people not knowing where to find controls for their appliances.

That’s right: the controls for every kitchen appliance should really be in one place –no matter how far from the actual appliance– so that people always know where to find them!

(It’s hard to tell in this picture, but those dials are actually changing the microwave (to left of the picture), since thats the last appliance the chef touched. A small line of 12-point text explains which appliance is currently being controlled. It’s so intuitive, and the extra steps to walk across the kitchen are a small price to pay for always knowing where your controls are!)

2. Menu actions take effect on the “topmost” window of an application, but in an age of multiple screens, this is often ambiguous. If I have two screens, and each screen has a window sitting on top, which window is the one I’m operating on?

3. Ghost programs. Program can be running but with no windows, existing only as menu bar. Furthermore, when no windows for an app are open, you get the nonsense situation where many menu actions (E.g. “New Folder” in finder) make no sense at all.

4. Confusing situations when menu bar of window-less app is showing over window of other program. The natural instinct is to think that the menu bar relates to the window which is filling the screen, but the interface leads you astray.

5. No copy-n-paste from calculator widget or dictionary, or any widgets. Just today I needed to calculate the number of seconds in 2 years. It was easy to do use the Mac calculator and even get the answer: 63,072,000. But it is impossible to copy that answer into my file. Not only that, but it is also impossible to look at the calculator to transcribe the answer! The only solution is to write the answer down with a pen, or two flip back and forth to insure you remembered it correctly. Glad to have a $2K laptop for this. (See here for more info)

6. Undraggable. It is impossible to drag something (like a file from Finder) to an application which is not currently visible. You must carefully arrange windows ahead of time so that both are visible.  In Windows. you can drag to a program in the task bar, which then will bring that application window to the front. (Furthermore, in Windows when you drag to the task bar, you can even select from multiple windows of the application.)

7. The only hint that application is running is a few glowing pixels below it.

8. Impossible to perform a double-click and drag (or triple-click and drag) from the touchpad without using the button.

9. No Home or End Keys on Keyboard. Now before you start screaming about using Command-left and Command-right, simmer down and listen for second. The problem is these combinations don’t always work as Home/End, and this inconsistency is enough to make them useless. E.g. in Firefox, Command-left/right are also the shortcuts for navigating forward back/back pages. In Entourage Command-left/right means to jump forward or back by a word, not the entire line. In Terminal Command-left/right means to switch between windows. In Adium Command-left/right switches between Tabs. And in Google Docs, those key combinations don’t do anything at all. It is up to every program to decide if they will offer this super-duper feature, and to decide what key combination to assign. In Entourage, it’s Function-left/right. In the built-in Terminal program, you can only use the oh-so-intuitive Ctrl-A or Ctrl-E.

10. Lack of error reporting overall. E.g. No way to know when you have mis-configured exchange in address book and iSync. If you do enter password or any setting wrong, it just does nothing.

11. Multiple confusing ways of installing applications. Disk images, install programs, disk images with “drag this” instruction pages, install programs on disk images, Stuffit archives, Stuffit archives of installers, and god knows how many other permutations. All I know is that I always end up with disk images left over all over the place. And by the way, it is not at all intuitive that within a “disk image” you should have to drag one icon (”the app”) to another icon (”applications”) in order to install a program on your laptop. Sometime try explaining this technique to your parents or a non-technical peer sometime.

12. Can’t navigate buttons in dialog box with arrow keys (e.g. switching between “ok” and “cancel”) CORRECTION: You can, but have to turn this option on. (Learn how here.)

13. Can’t access dialog elements with keyboard shortcuts. Must use the Mouse or Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab to get around. Ridiculously slow way of navigating complex dialog boxes that you must use often. (E.g. The Find/Replace box in Eclipse.) In contrast, Windows dialogs may be quickly navigated by pressing Alt in combination of the underlined letter of the field.

14. Many (most?) lists cannot be navigated with arrow keys. Again you are forced to use the damn mouse for a task where keys are much better. The frustrating thing here is that works in some applications.

Want to go through a list of 500 fonts? Yep, you gotta click on each one in turn, and don’t forget to play with the little scroll bar to move new items into view. Ugh.

15. No auto-resize of columns. You can’t double-click a heading divider boundary (e.g. in a list of files) to have it expand to show all items. E.g. in Finder when a column is too narrow, you should be able to double-click the column divider which expands it big enough to show all data in the rows. In Mac you have to drag the column manually, which sometime means also having to re-size the window first. It should also remember the size when you change it.

16. Lack of OK and Cancel buttons in preference boxes. No way to undo when you know you messed up some setting but don’t remember how it was. For example, when I was midway through changing email settings and then realized I was editing the wrong account. Oops! No way to get back the values I’d changed. And in any case, merely clicking the close button just feels wrong, and trains people the wrong way. (This is not the right behavior when editing a spreadsheet or document, for example!)

18. Minimizing creates confusing flow. Minimizing window takes it completely out of alt-tab cycle. it appears only unreadable thumbnail. No way to minimize a window just to see window below. More on this later.

19. No universal keyboard shortcuts.  Every menu bar option in Windows interface is accessible via the Alt key. On Mac, if menu has no defined keyboard shortcut, you’re SOL unless you take the time to manually add one. Correction:  It is possible (learned about it here), but combination is l-o-n-g: FN-CNTRL-F2, letters of menu, down-arrow, letters of command, ENTER. For example, in Firefox let’s set the Zoom option to “text only”:

• Windows: ALT-V, Z, T
• Mac: CTRL-FUNCTION-F2, V, ENTER, Z, ENTER, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, ENTER.

20. Font bluring is lame. Kindofa  preference, but small fonts are still more readable under windows. MS smooths fonts to pixel boundaries, so small fonts look readable. No luck on mac. See here and here.

21. Zoom/Maximize button is absolutely ridiculous, as is the whole stoplight analogy. In iTunes, the “+” button actaully shrinks the window. In Finder, the behaviour is completely random, other programs expand to only most of the screen. This is a long-standing problem that many have complained about.

22. Confusing situation with programs that exist only as icons on menu bar. E.g. Mozy: Sometimes it shows a modal dialog box, but this box doesn’t show up in the Command-tab flow, nor does it show up in Exposé.  And yet, the program is halted (and all menu items disabled) waiting for my response. For months I thought the program had crashed and force-killed it.  One day with relatively few programs running I accidentally noticed the dialog box hiding there under all the other windows.

Browser

24. No icons for shortcuts in browser. Note that they actually removed this feature. I thought macs were about being graphical? Back in 1984 Apple was explaining “icons” to the world and how useful they were.  But now they’ve decided that shiny interfaces look better without your icons messing it up the vibe. You’re stuck with text.

Here is my browser toolbar in Windows:

And here it is on the Mac:

Instead of 19 shortcuts that I can identify immediately from an icon, I have 9 shortcuts that I have to parse as text. Blah. (Happy to note that Google Chrome for Mac, released for Mac last week, does show icons.)

25. Strange browser  tab UI: why does the tab connect upward to the favorites bar? This makes no physical sense.

Call me old fashioned, but I have seen actual physical folders existing in the real world. Yes they do exist. And in my memory, they look something like the image below. Observe the fine detail of how the folder title is connected to the folder itself.

Apple engineers are smart, but I think they remember folders working a little differently than I do. Or perhaps they grew up somewhere that used a different kind of folders? Ones that looked more like this, perhaps:

For example, here’s how tabs are shown in Safari:

(Again, Google Chrome for Mac gets this right.)

Finder and Files

26. No option to Cut files in Finder, only Copy.  A pain when trying to move a large number of hand-picked files to a new location. Again, you’re forced to mess with the mouse and multiple windows and dragging: the only way to copy files is to open and strategically arrange two finder instances. And really, why did they bother to implement “Copy” if they had no intention to implement Cut?

27. Renaming files only possible from time-consuming mouse gesture. “Rename” is not a possible action from the right-click menu. Nor is there any keyboard shortcut. Nor is there a menu option.  Nor is there an entry in a help file somewhere. One must just know that the correct action is “click-once and wait 2 seconds”.

28. No* way to copy-n-paste your current path. So frustrating when you can see it in window title!  (This guy is amazed to discover that this is useful )

*Correction! It can be done by following these simple steps:

• Select a file
• Go to finder menu
• Select “services” submenu
• Now select “textedit” submenu
• Now select “New window containing selection”
• Wait this for app to load
• Press Command-A to select-all
• Press Command-C to copy
• Close the textedit application.
• And now you have the path copied! Wasnt’ that easy and fun?!

As a general note, on the Mac I find myself writing down or trying to memorize long paths all the frickin time. So sick of this.

29. Mac Laptops cannot perform a right-click-and-drag, as they have no physical right button. (In Windows explorer, this allows you to drag files and then specify whether they will be copied or moved. Other programs use right-drag in other ways.)

30. Can’t search external drives. I have an external hard disk with many gigabytes of music in a folder called “Music”, sorted into many subfolders. I plug it in, try to do a search for “gabriel”. But guess what? I ask the impossible!! Yep, this powerful Mac can only look for files that it has pre-indexed.  How friggin retarded is this? Earth to Apple: finding files should not be a problem for a GUI in the 21st century. (Note: some have suggested that this is because the drive was formatted for Fat32. But (1) that’s still no excuse for inability to do a simple file search and (2) if that is so, a message saying “I can’t do that” would be preferable to saying “Zero items found.”)

(More on Mac Search Suckage)

31. “Move to Trash” is confusing. First word of menu is “move”, and “moving” files is not what you’re thinking of. Minor, but annoying.

32. Right click doesn’t show all available options available on the target. You just have to know that some things are in the right click menu, some things you have to find in the menu bar, and some things are only available as mouse gestures.

33. Cannot permanently delete an individual file. (See this applescript hack.) In Windows this magical feat is accomplished by holding the Shift key while deleting. (See here)

34. Can’t right-click file to email it. Not even a menu option. You must open a mail program, and navigate the file system to re-find the file which you have sitting right there in front of you.

35. Can’t right-click file to print it. Not even a menu option. Again.

35. Apple’s Mail Application is always default for sending mail. Preview has a handy menu item, “Mail Image.” Too bad Apple decided that the only mail application you can use is their own built-in Mail. Thanks Apple! Even more bizarre, Apple does let you change your default email reader. (See here) So, you may read emails in any app you like, but you are expected to send all your email from Apple’s. Great. Awe-some. (Microsoft pulls this kind of crap too, of course. But for at least the last five years you’ve been able to change your default email program.)

36. No shell extensions. Finder has only a few feeble means to be extended, so there is nothing like Tortoise, or “open-command-line here”, or resize images, or 7zip compression.

37. Impossible to move mp3s from Documents to Music folder. Finder always wants to copy. No way to force it to just move, without going to command line.

Open/Save Dialogs

38. Open/Save Dialogs suck big time. From an Open/Save dialog, you can’t re-name an incorrectly named new folder, or move an incorrectly placed new folder. One wrong bit of typing, and the only way to fix it is (yet again) to open a finder window and navigate your way through the file system back to where you already are in the dialog.

39. Can’t add columns of info when opening files. E.g. when trying to upload photos to Wordpress, the “Open File” dialog box shows only “Name” and “Last Modified”, but what I really need to know is the size of each file. However, there is no way to show this information. Only way is to select “Get Info…” on each and every file. One. At. A. Time. Argh! Other useful categories include “Date Created”, “Resolution”, “Song Length”, etc… (And of course, there is also no way to jump from the dialog to Finder, as a simple “Explore Here” option in Windows will do.) See here.

40. Doesn’t remember your selected files when switching views. For example, in Icon mode you start Command-clicking a few thumbnails of files to upload. Then you need to switch to list view to check a date. (See above.) Well, thank goodness that clicking lots of little file names is so much fun, because after switching views you get to do it all over again! Hope you remembered them all!!

41. Can’t perform common operations in a dialog. For example, to preview or resize images before uploading, or compress large files before emailing, or rename, whatever…

Look at what happens when you right-click a file in an Open/Save dialog in Windows:

Behold! The amazing ability to manipulate files when you see them! And lo, even to rename, compress, or re-size them as needed before emailing. Behold! The amazing ability to see the sizes of more than one file at a time! What terrible genius dwells in Redmond that gives Windows XP such truly awesome and fearful powers?!

42. Not extensible, e.g. no revision information. Mac does not allow extension of how files are represented, which means tools like Tortoise simply cannot exist. If you’ve never used it, you don’t know how much time you’ve wasted by not seeing at-a-glance which files have been changed in your repository from any program, not just an IDE.

For example, if I’m editing some images in Photoshop or whatever, I wonder which one of these files has been modified since the last commit?

In Windows the task is a teensy bit easier, as you can see.

The main point is not so much to sing the praises of Tortoise (which is a great program) put to point out that Mac OSX cannot be improved, cannot have better tools, since it cannot extended.

43. Thumbnails are tiny, and no way to preview at full size; the tiny icon thumbnails are tiny and un-reiszable and only can be seen in impractible icon view. Nor can you right-click to preview the file. (See below.) For good measure, Files can only be viewed in alphabetical order when you are in icon view.

Quick: Can you spot which of these thumbnails is different?

Here is the same dialog box in Windows. Woa, look at the size of those thumbnails!! It’s like you might actually be able to see what’s in the picture. And lo and behold, what’s that?? With a mere right-click, you can actually preview the image full-size if you like. Or rotate it, or resize it. All this, and you don’t even have to write down the path on a scrap of paper so you can re-navigate to the file in Photoshop.

And speaking of Photoshop. Is it any wonder that Adobe ditches the usual Mac open/save dialog box and replaces it with it’s own, which looks remarkably like Windows?

44. Impossible to open hidden files from an “open file” dialog box. For example, today in an emergency I needed to upload a “.htaccess” file via a web interface. It was impossible to so. The time-consuming workaround was to rename the file locally to remove the ‘.’, uploading it, then renaming it back both locally and on the server. Ugh. See full description here. (And again, it is impossible to rename the file from within the upload window, so I had to open an instance of Finder and re-navigate to the obscure directory that I was currently working in.)

45. Interface inconsistencies. Hitting “Enter” to open a file works in an “Open” dialog box, but not in Finder where opening is “Command-O” and enter means “Rename”.

46. When typing file name in “Save Dialog”, it doesn’t auto-complete with existing filenames. Sucks when you have a long file naming pattern that you want followed. (E.g. printing PDF’s of everything for my Berlin Trip.)

Applications and Windows

47. Alt-tab only goes through applications, not windows. This small difference makes a huge negative impact on power users. Takes longer and is more complicated to find an old window that you need. To illustrate, I mapped out the routine that I and other power users go through hundreds of times a day: Switching from one window to another using the keyboard.

48. Alt-` has behavior that is completely different from Command-Tab: Alt-` is used to switch to windows within an application. However, instead of returning to the last window used (as Command-Tab does with applications), it cycles through all windows in order. So if you have 20 windows open in an app (not unheard of to have that many open in preview or terminal) then you would have to hit Alt-` 19 times to get back to the window you were just on! Just today I was trying to copy bits of a webpage in one browser window into a blog compostion in another window. Unlucky for me, I had 5 other browser windows open. So each back-and-forth required hitting Alt-` 5 times, and running completely counter to Command-Tab behavior we’re all accustomed to.

49. Alt-` brings all other windows to the front. E.g. in phpMyAdmin, trying to cycle between an “Edit SQL” window and the underlying results (so you can compare your query and the results side by side) is impossible if you have any other brower windows open. (Same thing when in Entourage you’re trying to keep the main window open in background while edited an email — impossible if you have any other email windows floating around, because they always come to the top also when you hit Alt-`)

50. Weird side effects with unwanted windows coming to the top. E.g. if multiple terminal windows are open, and you need to read info in browser while typing in ONE of them, all of them will appear, covering your browser. Example: In browser, click to download a pdf file or something. It loads in preview, you take a look, and then you close it. Of course, you’d exepect to be back in the browser where you were. But no! Because now that you are in Preview, all the other random preview windows have now come to the top. Confusing! It’s as if you’re working in the kitchen and take out a screwdriver to fix a loose door, but when you set the screwdriver down, suddenly you are surrounded by everything from the garage that you recently used a screwdriver on.

51. Exposé is not a substitute. A lot of Mac people don’t get this, so let me say it again: If you are working fast, you do not want to mess with a mouse. And if you are really doing a lot of work, you’re going to have a ton of windows open and then they all look the same. Can you tell the difference between a pdf, Word, and blog version of the same document at this scale?

52. Tools like Wich try to cover this limitation, but bog down if you have too many windows. (Wich would slow to 5-10 seconds when tabbing between 20 windows.)

Missing Tools

53. No Tortoise. SCplugin is nowhere close. And the true lack of shell extensions means that it can *never* work in Open/Save dialogs like Tortoise does.

54. No good NetDrive equivalent.  (Mapping FTP to the file system.) MacFusion is buggy as hell, and even when working, takes several *minutes* to work on folders with sizable number of files.

Physical Defects

55. Always plays the startup sound even if volume was turned off and *even if headphones are plugged in*. In other words if you have to re-start your laptop while in a meeting, there is NO WAY to avoid blasting the room with that sound and looking like an idiot.

56. Bad ergonomics of Macbook: keyboard too close to screen, too far from front edge. This puts sharp corner of edge directly on the wrist.

57. Limited Screen Tilt. Screen only reclines to about a 60 degree angle. Thus making it impossible for even slightly tallish people to ergonomically position their hands at the keyboard without  hunching their back to view the screen. (Elbows should be bent nearly at 90 degrees, with forearms level to the floor. See here. )

58.Keyboard and surface are completely flat so very uncomfortable to type on with sharp edges that your wrist rests on.  (I guess this is why so many mac users use those little tilt gadgets to increase the angle?)

59. Goddam a MacBook Pro gets hot! Could burn my left knee to a crisp.

60. No equivalent of right-click key on keyboard.  (Windows has a key on right side of space bar.) Again, you are always forced back to the mouse, slowing you down.

Misc

61. No key combo that will quit any application as Alt-F4 does in Windows.

63. With trackpad, cannot select by word. Correction you can but it only works in some programs. E.g. works in Safari but not Firefox.

64. Most programs that have a Mac version, it is incredibly crippled or behind in features. Picasa doesn’t have Geotagging, Mozy is missing most options, Chrome is unstable, etc…

65. Poor supply of good free apps, and Mac apps are always more expensive. Compare the paltry but expensive TextExpander ($30.00) with the much more powerful AutoHotKey (Free).

So there’s the list.

I guess I should say that I have come to love some parts of the Mac experience. Two finger scrolling is amazing. The overall hardware of the machine is top-notch. I would consider getting another MacBook only for the quality of the camera and microphone in Skype video calls. Now if they can just get about to some items on this list, I could really get some work done!

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(Thanks to Mario Negrello, Cliona Quigley, and Luke Howard for reading versions of this post.)

This summer in Berlin I took a vacation from making choices, and let my friends run my life.

Really.

For one week, anyone who was my friend on Facebook could edit my calendar, and I ran my life according to that calendar. Inspired by the popularity of “The Sims” game series, a friend of mine dubbed the project SimStan.  In this post I want to give a little bit of the reasoning behind SimStan, tell what it was like to live that way for a week, and share my feelings of why the project “didn’t work.” (And for any nerds reading, at the end I’ll talk about how it was built and give you the code if you want to build a SimYou.)

Starting almost two years ago, I became obsessed with the idea that people had too many choices. This came to a head in reading Barry Schwartz’s excellent book The Paradox of Choice. You have more choices than ever these days, and this excess of freedom paradoxically leads to unhappiness as you regret all the things you might have done. One trick to avoid this is to use an agent. If anyone or anything makes the choice for you, and you trust the agent, then you’re spared all the research into alternate choices. It’s why I only go clothes shopping with my friend Steph in New York; she’s my clothing agent. The original idea was to write a program that would similarly tell you what to do, but it would need some initial data of things it could suggest. I hit upon the idea of letting friends feed “possible events” into the system. And soon thereafter realized that the friends would be enough–it would be like Wikipedia, except friends editing your life! Or, in the parlance of Web 2.0, a “crowdsourced calendar.”

With this enthusiasm, I finally set about building the software last July. It took about three weeks of sitting in Berlin Cafés to put it all together. It involved creating a dynamic calendar interface similar to Google Calendar, meshed with Facebook’s login system. It looked and worked great. (More on technical construction in the postscript.) The site is still up and running today. You can play with it at http://simstan.com. Click the “Connect with Facebook” button to log in as a Facebook user. Last summer you had to be my friend to edit anything, but for now I’ve changed it so anyone can play around.

If you click on “Stan’s Calendar” and go back-back-back-back to July, you’ll see the schedule for my one-week trial at the end of the month. It looked like this.

I emailed about 40 friends who had expressed interest in the project, and pretty soon my designated week began to fill up. It was an interesting week! I visited a lot of museums, did some writing for a book project, did a scavenger-hunt through my neighborhood, wrote a letter to myself 10 years hence, and watched a Spanish space-themed wordless comedy show. You can read the exact details on the project blog, (First day, 2nd and 3rd days, and remaining day) but I won’t rehash it all here.

SimStan wasn’t “successful” in the sense that I’d hoped—more like an experiment where the scientists hypothesis is not confirmed! In a not-so-scientific off-the-cuff way, here were the problems I found.

• Turns out that running a life involves much more minutia than I expected, and this is compounded by people not planning for all the minutia that goes into even simple life planning. If I’m going to a show, I’ll need to buy tickets. If I’m going to buy tickets, I’ll need some time in front of a computer and internet in order to buy those tickets. And sometimes, like when you’re in a foreign country, you’ll need a few hours to straighten things out with your bank to buy those tickets. For a friend casually putting something on a calendar, they can’t be expected to think of all these contingencies.
• Having just moved to Berlin, a lot of my state-side friends didn’t know what sorts of things to have me do.
• I had hoped that SimStan would work out like Wikipedia, where many people making small edits end up making something amazing. But it turns out there is a critical difference: A Wikipedia article doesn’t have a deadline, and can slowly accrue usefulness over years. A plan for next Tuesday, on the other hand, has a very real deadline! And is basically useless after Tuesday.
• On a related note, friends were conservative in time-grabbing. I suppose no one wanted to seem “greedy” or overly domineering, so people tended to schedule using best-case-scenarios of how long some event might take.
• Friends would not edit each others work. I had hoped that when there was something “wrong” in the schedule, that friends would step in, Wikipedia-like, to fix thing. But this didn’t happen, for example, when I was scheduled to both get up early for walks and to go out to clubs until 4am. Then one time when an event was moved, it just left the original event creator confused.
• Turns out that I, and I think most people, need a lot of “down time” during a day. To be following a schedule hour-by-hour means to be continually “on.”  I found myself monitoring my time in the same way you monitor your fare in a moving taxi. It’s stressful.
• All of the above meant that I was often running out of time. I realized after a few days that I was actually keeping two calendars, the official one on the website, and an internal one where I planned out all the prep-work and recovery time that I would need.

So when the project ended on that Tuesday, I was actually quite relieved. At the same time, a little embarrassed, since I had been telling people about my hopes for the project for so long. How could I now say that I was happy it was over? So I just dropped it and moved on to other projects. It wasn’t until I visited my friends Steph and Ken in New York a few weeks ago, and an email exchange with Neil Robertson, that they encouraged me to do this write-up.

I’m glad that I did it. It’s all too easy to let a project idea grow inside of you, and you become ever more convinced of how amazing it would be if only you built it. In that sense, I am “free” of SimStan. Perhaps I’ll revisit the idea someday with some fresh ideas. In any case, I learned a ton: technically from building the software, pragmatically about  events and scheduling and how a person actually plans out a day, and existentially about all the little parts that go into “making a day” that we usually take for granted.

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Gory Technical Details

For all it’s faults, Drupal is still a fast way to prototype. SimStan is based on a standard Drupal 6 installation. The wonderful FBconnect module gave me an instant and easy connection to Facebook. The Event Module added basic date information to nodes, and iCal export that I could load in my iPod touch. However, it’s interface is awful. The fantastic JQuery Week Calendar by Rob Monie has the look-n-feel of Google Calendar. Most of my work was modifying his code into a custom Drupal module which would modify Event nodes, while displaying things like Facebook avatars. Of course lots of theme integration to give everything the same style, and little things like Cron jobs to email me my schedule each day and make backups of the database.

Download the entire project source code here: SimStan Project Download

A TED Talk from Cynthia Schneider about “Idol TV” reminded me of a paragraph from Niel Stephenson’s  In the beginning was the command line:

We [Modern Western Culture] seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

That was from 1999. Here is her talk, given this year. (If you don’t see it, you can watch it here.)

(And on a related note, China is coming to grips with race issues because of a mixed-race contestant on it’s own Idol Show.)

I love the fact that Hollywood, which is blamed so for so much of what’s wrong in the world, is actually changing the world for better* in more powerful ways than many “direct” approaches such as NGO’s or military action.

*In this case, “better” meaning more democracy, and the general spread of concepts like equality and human rights. Hollywood’s “payload” contains many other ideas, such as materialism and moral relativity, that aren’t so universally loved. Stephenson is ambivalent on this.

Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And–again–perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other.

That’s the question: It is perhaps ‘good’ that the world is becoming more homogenized and that ideas like equality and democracy are being spread into every nook and cranny. But what is it we are losing in the process? And will this loss still be considered a loss for the generation that grows up in this new world?

The general thought in user interface design is to make the interface (webpage, software, physical device, whatever) be intuitive to the user. In other words, when the user performs an action in the interface, the product should do what the user expects the device to do. For example, if you press a right-facing arrow button on a music player, you expect this should start some music playing.

This is usually presented in absolute terms, where newer iterations of an interface get closer and closer to behaving as users expect. For example, the when the iPhone is rotated to horizontal position, the screen changes orientation as well. That’s fantastic.

But there’s something deeper at play. The users are learning too. Their expectations are getting more sophisticated and build on what they’ve already learned.

I thought of this the other day while contemplating some of the new interface features on my iPod Touch, and contrasting this with how the original iPod was lauded for it’s brutally simple and intuitive interface.

Has Apple discerned deeper truths about our expectations for interfaces, or have we the iPod users been enrolled in a multiyear training program? We’ve been learning about podcasts, about gestures, about tap-and-hold, about push interrupts, and much more.

If the iPod touch of today was shown to users of the original iPod in 2000, they would be incredibly confused.

In fact, users are always locked in an intricate interface-expectation dance with any device.

This works because their are enough users enrolled in this “training program”, and they are happy to help new initiates get up to speed on the interface basics.

Consider another example: even into the late 90’s, most computers manuals came with instructions on how to use a “mouse” and how to click on virtual “buttons” on the screen. You don’t see this anymore, because these skills are now so widely dispersed that any poor sole who doesn’t know them can learn from a colleage or friend.

Facebook with its constant user interface updates is wresting with this learning curve too. I’d wager that the Facebook of today, if launched 6 years ago, would never have become popular because of it’s extreme complexity. But again, there are millions of pupils who have been learning bit by bit along the way, and initiating their friends into the ways of Facebook.

Bottom line: If you are designing an interface for a new type of system, you must start incredibly simple. But if you grow the interface complexity slowly, you can build up a body of experienced users who will help newcomers. Grow too slow and you become stale, grow to slow and you leave your users behind.

RC4 is little bit of computer code that you probably use every day without knowing. It quite possibly made the web into a viable business platform by providing a means for secure monetary transactions online. The original code was created by RSA Systems and has never been released. But one guy figured out some code that works exactly the same, and in 1994, posted the code you see above to a mailing list. The rest is history.

Recently I’ve been fascinated at how important computer code has become to our lives, yet is so unknown by most people. So lately I’ve asked techie friends what they would nominate as the most “important” code. RC4 was the suggestion of Luke Howard.

(Sorry for the low quality and distortion. I couldn’t find a scanner so just used a digital camera and photoshop.)

Previously in lettering:

• Sleepwalking through time
• Somewhere in the Colombian Jungle