jeneralize

Via clusterflock: “Pick up the work of fiction closest to where you are sitting right now that has 123 pages or more, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence, then post it and the next three sentences.”

From Kim, by Rudyard Kipling:

‘When first I dealt with Sahibs, and that was when Colonel Soady
Sahib was Governor of Fort Abazai and flooded the Commissioner’s
camping-ground for spite,’ Mahbub confided to Kim as the boy filled
his pipe under a tree, ‘I did not know how greatly they were fools,
and this made me wroth. As thus -,’ and he told Kim a tale of an
expression, misused in all innocence, that doubled Kim up with
mirth. ‘Now I see, however,’ - he exhaled smoke slowly - ‘that it
is with them as with all men - in certain matters they are wise,
and in others most foolish. Very foolish it is to use the wrong
word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence,
how is the stranger to know that?’

Probably, if bigotry and sexism are defined as having implicit mental associations between specific behaviours and roles and specific sexes or racial groups.

Find out: http://www.implicit.harvard.edu

The Implicit Association Test measures reactive relationships between human distinctions (male / female, black / white, gay / straight, etc) and characteristics (entrepreneur / homemaker, tragic / happy, humiliate / pleasure, etc). The test measures how quickly you associate distinctions and characteristics: when the word “entrepreneur” flashes on the screen, does it take you longer to associate that word with “female” than with “male”? Do you associate negative words more quickly with pictures of black people than of white people?

Probably yes. Probably yes, even if your negative associations regard your own sex or race.

Malcolm Gladwell says in his book “blink” that fifty percent of black people have stronger positive associations with white people than with people of their own race.

WTF is that all about? It’s about the way our mind - our “subconscious” - does its own thing, sucks in its own information and makes its own judgements, regardless of our sensibilities, our analytical abilities, our choices our freedom our concerted efforts to rise out of ignorance and nastiness.

Frankly, this whole subconscious business just pisses me off.

…to use a rhyming dictionary?

367.1.2: filiate, affiliate, humiliate, conciliate.

516.7.1: agonize, antagonize.

17.203: antler, dismantler.

17.218.1: monomer, gastronomer, astronomer.

I’m prepping a book for Project Gutenberg: Stephen Graham’s 1922 Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies. Graham was a British journalist and travel writer; Vachel Lindsay was an American poet.

In one of their conversations, Graham teases Lindsay, a poet of the proletariat, on his membership in Oxford’s “Society for Pure English” and on his (contradictory) use of slang and vernacular. Lindsay remarks that he’d give up the slang “if I could get rid of ‘motivate’ and a man’s ‘implications’ and ‘the last analysis’ and ‘the twilight zone’ and ‘canned metaphor’ and the dollar adjectives, a ‘ten-million-dollar building’ and a ‘million-dollar bride.’”

I re-read Stranger in a Strange Land recently. As I recall, it was much maligned by the space-hero crunch-head Heinlein fans as being insufficiently crunchy and space-heroic - how dare Heinlein mention a warp drive without providing a detailed explanation of its fuel system? Where’s the obligatory galactic Bogart?

Re-reading the book, I was reminded about the degree to which Heinlein (and me, and probably mostly everybody else) expected the future to be mechanical rather than digital. I was in my early teens when I first read Stranger in a Strange Land. It was the late seventies, I’d eaten a steady diet of Star Trek (I truly believed that Space Academy would be a post-secondary option), I’d watched the boys from Apollo 11 plant a flag on the moon while I sat on my dad’s lap - the future was all about doors that opened with a “whooosh” as I approached and vehicles with mechanical legs.

What a surprise.

“It was the kind of landscape that had a particular type of story attached to it … a story that flapped wings against the moon…

‘Der flabbergast,’ muttered Nanny.

‘What’s that?’ said Magrat.

‘It’s foreign for bat.’”

–Terry Pratchett, “Witches Abroad”

“It is true that Internet Explorer has been increasing market share from 1997 to 1999. But I predict that IE will never reach the same market dominance as that enjoyed by line-mode, Mosaic and Netscape from 1991 to 1996.”

Dr. Neilsen was basing his prediction on the assumption that browser usage would be determined by rationial choice, rather than monopolistic business practices. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

Added March 4: Oh yeah - monopolistic business practices and the whole Netscape / AOL debacle. Can’t forget that.

It was interesting to take another cruise through Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability, the seminal book that, when it came out in 2000, defined design standards for web pages.

One interesting aspect is the evolution by which web metaphors become things that everybody knows. An example is the hyperlink: Nielsen recommends using default hyperlink colors (blue for unvisited, purple for visited). At the time of writing, the navigational components of the web weren’t so deeply ingrained that the designer could take for granted that the user could spot and understand hyperlinks.

Among current prevailing design fashions, the link metaphor is the underline, colors are optional, and page layout is sufficiently standardized (with navigational elements usually located in side and top panels) that some links don’t even have special visual characteristics that indicate that they’re a link.

On Nielsen’s site, however, unvisited links are blue and visited links are purple. Is Nielsen an anti-aesthetic curmudgeon? I doubt it. Rather, I expect that he remembers something that the savvy always and forever forget: He remembers that not everybody is savvy. (more…)