20-some smart and interesting people were invited to Vancouver this weekend for a Nokia-sponsored symposium on the subject of Play. Some of the people I met there included Elizabeth Goodman, Pat Kane, Eric Paulos and Jessica Hammer -- and I saw many brilliant people I'd met in the past. Lots of lively discussion, dinners at excellent local restaurants, note taking, games of Set and Werewolf, and trips to Halloween parades added up to a great weekend. Similar to Digifoo, the premise was: invite a bunch of smart people with common interests, set up some tables, give them an opportunity to do presentations if they are so inclined, add some dinner and see what happens.

The invitees were nearly half women (9 women and 11 men), something of an achievement in and of itself, if you've been paying attention to who gets invited to these things. And 4 women were invited who couldn't make it, which, had they been able to attend, would have put women in the majority. Imagine that!

In this article about the difficulty of estimating how many words there are, I find this charming example:

Neb posted this.

• Hayden is coming to Vancouver tomorrow night, and Underbunny helped me get tickets.

• Unable to find cheaper Matcha in Richmond, Asian capital of BC, I went and got some tonight from Infuze Tea House, where Elizabeth and I decided we were going to go off coffee by drinking a lot of Matcha. But at $28 for 30 grams, its akin to giving up coffee for cocaine (but healthier).

• One of the many pleasures of having dinner at Kate and Mike's house on Saturday night was meeting Petunia who is one of my favoriter non-dos-pesos dogs. And having strawberry shortcake, which I haven't had for YEARS, made by Evann and Kevin.

Maura sent me this amusing piece on Structured Procrastination -- the method of procrastinating by doing other less important tasks instead of what really needs to get done. The writer, a Stanford Professor, claims that you can get a reputation for being an overachiever, all the while neglecting the items at the top of your list, and the trick to success at this game is finding the right tasks to assign importance to. He has some other essays about small discoveries he has made, most likely composed when he's avoiding writing a serious philosophical paper for a respected journal.

Blogging is a great thing to do when you are avoiding doing other, more important things.

Why do I love my job (even though it gives me no time to read)? Because i get up in the morning, and have a look around Flickr and find a bunch of bridesmaids in pink dresses doing the Charlie's Angels pose, great groups that people invent, like What's in My Bag, Stormtroopers buying salad and photosets like this one: Ringside.

Boxing is one of the most photogenic sports, and I think the reasons are many. To me, it's the purest sport of all -- it's completely unmetaphorical, man against man without all the pomp and circumstance. It's your body and your will against another's. Football, soccer, baseball, tennis -- next to boxing, they look effete and precious. The men who box are fighting for, sometimes literally, their lives. Many of them come from desperately poor backgrounds and the only means available to them to escape poverty, is sports.

I don't know where the kids in smith's photo set of boxing photos are from, but it's incredibly powerful to see these young kids taking up the gloves and showing their hearts. Their families stand ringside, holding their trophies, cheering them on. Ringside is great work.

(also posted to FlickrBlog)

In the interest of finally finishing a book, I have a new policy of only reading books that have fewer than 100 pages in them. This is surprisingly easy if you read avant garde literature, though the book that inspired this exercise was Death on the Installment Plan by Celine. I am reading Days and Nights by Alfred Jarry, Dr. Marbles and Marianne by Nicki Jackowska and something by Robert Irving (?) -- all of which were selected in a 10 minute period at the public library based on the slimness of their spines. Seriously. There are many criteria for choosing books to read, but at this point in my life, I'm seeking mainly brevity since otherwise, I'll read nothing at all.

From the Jarry, some stuff in the Introduction:

This reminded me of something I heard on the radio the other day, or perhaps that Stewart was talking about (?) -- that perception or experience is the same thing as memory, but memory that is happening to you immediately. An interesting idea to wrinkle your brain even further.

In other news, I cleared out approximately 10 million comment spams from my archives. This was both gratifying and horrifying. I had no idea there was such a thing as a grannies-in-pantyhose fetish until I undertook this project. This is one of the bad things about the internet. You think you have some small pocket of innocence left, and then the spammers find some obscure perversion to enlighten you about. And Holy Smokes, pornographers don't know how to spell. They should be ashamed.

These are graphs that Tim O'Reilly just put up during his talk on trends in book publishing that analyze the Amazon.com "people who bought this book also bought this book" which basically demonstrates that the books are generally preaching to the converted, that people rarely read outside their political affiliation. i.e. if you are reading Dude, Where is my Country, you're almost certainly not reading The O'Reilly Factor. This is not a good state of affairs.

Kathy Sierra from O'Reilly is presenting on creating passionate users here at Digifoo, and on the whiteboard she listed the following rubrics, under which I've put my notes from her talk:

Brain neurobiology There are more demands on our attention now then ever before. Your brain is doing everything it can to stop you from remembering -- that is the main brain activity related to memory. Trick the brain into thinking that something is important. Repetition, rereading fail. But! Novelty, Beauty, Shocking, Surprising, Sexy, Fun, Story.

Learning theory Have to get people involved and motivated in order for them to learn.

Game design Very successful at keeping people's attention. So much is about getting the challenge right -- the challenge must be meaningful and doable. Challenge-experience-resolution cycle. You have new superpowers after each challenge succeeds. Addiction, seduction, getting to the next level.

Advertising Marketing, Positioning Providing meaningful benefits: this product was designed just for you! A good salesperson ask questions first then addresses your hot buttons. Three iterations in from "Why should I care?" Connect xyz to abc. Let them figure this out for themselves as much as possible. Meaningful benefits. Some books: The Culting of Brands, The Substance of Style, Lovemarks: the future beyond branding.

Entertainment Paying attention to story. 30-second heros journey in each commercial. Surprising, yet inevitable (filmmakers pay attention to this). People remember the beginning and the endings most...have a lot of little beginnings and endings. The Big Finish.

Design Need to hit someone on a visceral level. Getting past the brain's barriers.

The thread that runs through all of this is: It's not about you, it's about: how do your users think and feel about themselves after interacting with your product. Metrics of the success of their books on Amazon reviews: use of the word "love", how many exclamation points. Do reviews use their first names and how many times they they talk about themselves positively in the review: I learned it, I rule. Appreciation, the high fidelity experience.

• There is a really good biography of Philip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick
• Fascinating talk on biophony from Bernie Krause at Wild Sanctuary -- the sounds that non-human creatures make. Frogs chorus together because their predators can't find them if they're all singing at once. Anthrophony is the sounds that humans make. Spadefoot toads are becoming extinct because of anthrophony (cars, planes, logging, etc.) because they can no longer chorus together. He played the sounds of animals in a forest (birds, bugs, woodpeckers) before and after logging, and showed spectrograms of the sounds. After "light" logging, that people, visually, would see as virtually indistinguishable from the pre-logged forest, had a profound impact on how much sound the animals make.
• Ants can sing. Sea anemones make this sort of grunting sound. Snapping Shrimp puts out a 200 decibel signal out of their claw -- like shooting a gun right next to your ear -- and the sound is used to stun fish. He also played sounds the Cottonwood trees make. Check out their site for their audio archive.
• The scene in the Lord of the Rings where the Orcs are invading Minas Tirith -- the Orcs were beating their drums in 5/4 time for maximum disturbingness. British phones ring in 5/4 rhythm.
• Rapid prototyping. zero.algds.org/ http://www.algds.org and The Immersion Composition Society: buncho people get together for 24 hours and make as much music as they can, with the philosophy that if it has a track number, it is a song. You must create something, it doesn't matter how bad it is, locking yourself in a room for an hour. Benefits & Things Learned through this process: speed, adaptation, agility, better at scheduling and execution. The game designers at ALGDS had a post-mortem every month on what went right and what went wrong and posted it on their collaborative web site. They learned to balance speed vs. quality, and found this process was great for proof of concept. Apollo project. Handel's Messiah, Boeing 747 were all created under severe time constraints.

Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an excellent choice! She's barely known here -- her work has long been out of print, and hard to find -- it wasn't even available on ABEbooks or Alibris, but I managed to track it down last year at the Vancouver Public Library -- they had Lust, Wonderful Wonderful Times and The Piano Teacher. Her prose style is distinct: alternately bristly and hymnlike, it's hard to get to the heart of and fully grasp. Her subject matter centers on violence, sexuality, women and a profound disgust with modern society. It is great, fearless, deep and scandalous stuff, and I am very happy she has won this award, not because of the award itself, which has certainly highlighted some also-rans, but because of the wider audience she will now gain. Well done, Nobel Committee. They've posted a biography here.

Originally uploaded by b0

• Disambiguate: it's a word after all
• Forrest put his photos online, just one grouping, of Japan
• I like the fact that Dick Cheney directed everyone to factcheck.com instead of factcheck.org, which redirects to George Soros's site which has a piece on Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush.
• Pikmin 2 is really fun. Have to try the first Pikmin game.
• Stewart got me hooked on the sleeping tag. It's mostly babies, kittens and drunks.

The frustration, humiliation and ennui of airports has been much on my mind lately. I've had to spend time in airports 24 times in the past six months, not counting the times I've gone there to pick people up. Everything about airorts is unremittingly horrible: the absurd post-9/11 security measures, the lines, the strained humor of the passengers and agents, the sterile decor, the grey air, the Immigration and Naturalization computer systems that are perpetually going down, the peculiar and vaguely accusatory questions the IN agents ask, the comfortless chairs, the meaningless and nausea-inducing luxury of the Duty Free shopping, the luggage searches... And so, this book caught my eye: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. It's reviewed in Airport Angst (Washington Post, free registration required):

I was too wrapped up in my own abstruse theories to have heard the news until I saw this headline in Flickr, uploaded by Judith. I have to say I appreciate this quote from the obituary in the Washington Post: "The lack of fixed meaning in a text did not keep Mr. Derrida from publishing hundreds of books."

The title is a subtle dig that appears in theheadline of a local paper yesterday. There's a hotel strike going on in San Francisco right now, and across the street from the hotel where we're staying for the conference there is a strike at the Hilton. I guess Hotel Nikko doesn't hire unionized workers; most people working here seem to be Japanese.

But it's true that the protesters are very loud. They start at 6 AM and continue until Midnight -- which are presumably the legal protest hours. They beat on buckets and chant. This morning it was Ole ole ole ole ole ole...

www.flickr.com seems to be working again. But just in case it isn't, here's my post from earlier:

The first time I heard of Che Guevara was when I saw a huge poster of him on the wall of my friend's dorm room at our posh Connecticut boarding school when I was 15. My friend had grown up in a cavernous Park Avenue apartment, and the Che poster -- as well as his military-chic attire -- were mostly stunts to shock and confuse parents and teachers, as most teenage stunts are. I never knew much about Che, beyond the heroics implied in I am Cuba, but always suspected The Cult of Che was akin to The Manson Family in its belief for belief's sake, paranoia, and lust for blood. Now comes The Motorcycle Diaries, a buddy/road trip movie about Che, and a review in Slate, Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries, which confirms what I had suspected.

(photo by phoebe ficus -- those are dollar signs on his sunglasses)

In the interest of avoiding contracting athlete's foot at the gym, Stewart and I bought some flip-flops this morning. Flip-flops, in addition to having a great name, are a big topic these days, as one of the more persistent accusations Bush is making against Kerry is that he flip-flops. CBS News has taken the time to list the top ten ways that Bush has Flip-flopped, but I'd like to take the position that flip-flopping isn't all that bad of a thing. There are times when you think you're right about something, and you spread it all over creation that you're right about it, and you tell your friends and write editorials to your paper -- and then you discover you're wrong about it. At which point, if you have any guts or integrity at all, you fess up and say, well, actually what I thought before turns out not to have been right. Among the many things I've flip-flopped about: avocados, pointy-toed shoes, Kerry. Among the many things I've never flip-flopped about: Bush. (link via Tikkabik, photo by quox)

P.S. I love how you can find just about any image to illustrate just about any blog post by searching tags on Flickr.