raytraced

“With respect to clarity, simplicity, and boldness of line, the Japanese have been a thousand years ahead of us in fine art and graphic design. Our best painters learned minimalism, cartooning, and much else from the Japanese during the “Orientalism” period of the late 19th century. Before that, western fine art was judged in part on its complexity and detail. And our posters and advertisements! Don’t ask.”

 Great article and comments many of which have touched on the visual complexity of newspapers & other media, the Kanji writing system, and the places people live.  One factor I have not seen mentioned is the effect of the population density on Japanese comfort levels with visual complexity.  

I go to Sapporo regularly, and while it is considered a smaller city, I’ve been exposed to such large numbers of people in concentrated spaces that it makes NYC appear sparsely populated.  There was one festival in Odori Park where there were so many people, most of who were in motion, that I could not visually track my fiancée who was a foot or two in front of me.  I had to hold on to her physically because my brain was in overload.  It took a while to get used to that kind of thing, but I would imagine growing up in such an environment would account for the high visual complexity that you see in media: lower complexity would reduce the concentration of information to below accepted levels.

One other factor I should mention is that many of the truly minimal and peaceful places in Japan are meant for special occasions such as a vacation or to take a quick rest from the frenetic pace of daily life.  These are exceptional places rather than the rule and there is usually a place like that not too far away.

Lastly Japan is a contradiction.  In many ways it is still the 1980’s there, while at the same time feeling like the future.  Sometimes this is detrimental, but it is also part of what makes Japan great.  People still make things in Japan, and hopefully the current wave of caring about the provenance of  things we buy will reinforce that and prevent them from repeating our mistakes in that area.  At the same time, not always the people making things are specialists in their field.  Sometimes people within a large company are assigned projects in an area where they have no experience.  I could see the company website falling under this category. :)

mrgan:

Apple has a new page with dimensional drawings of iPods, iPhones, and iPads. It’s a resource for businesses looking to build cases for these devices, but it’ll also come in handy to those who are modeling said products for marketing materials and such. I love Apple’s single-serving pages of this sort.

(va Jacob Bijani)

For people who are making cases for Apple products, this kind of documentation is perfect for their needs.  

My little contribution to the Treme music documentation: 

When Davis broke into Tower Records to recover his consigned cd’s, he stole a few extras, the most interesting of which was The Spirit of New Orleans: The Genius of Dave Bartholomew, which is unfortunately out of print according to the dialog.  

John Gruber says

But whether Gates would have done a better job than Ballmer is a different question than whether Ballmer has done a good job. Apple’s growth this past decade can largely be accounted for with two words: iPod and iPhone. Microsoft wanted in on both those markets, and got smoked. That’s on Ballmer.

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

“The first thing you see at the beginning of HBO’s new series Treme are the superimposed words that define the setting for David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s New Orleans drama: “Three months after.” It doesn’t say after what, and it doesn’t have to.”

Can’t wait.

This is something I’ve noticed for a long time but could not put my finger on it: the preponderance of Canadian hockey players shoot left-handed, while in the US the opposite is true and majority of players shoot right-handed.

What this article does not say, but which I think is true and important is that this comes down to much of the competitive differences between the two countries in international tournaments with the advantage tilted in favor of the Canadians: the same percentage of the population that is naturally right-handed* should shoot left-handed in hockey (and golf, archery, billiards, etc).  While some players in Canada default to shooting left-handed when they would be better served by shooting right-handed, an ever larger amount of US players shoot right-handed who would be better off shooting left-handed.

Perhaps the downside of shooting with the dominant hand low is minimal, but many things in the world are decided by tiniest of percentages in favor of one side.  Basically over time these small percentage biases accumulate and to provide a significant long-term advantage.   Examples of this are Casinos and Evolution.

(*) AFAICT the percentage of left-handed people in the world is 10%.  I wonder how much of this is influence by cultural bias against left-handed people, aka me, aka southpaws, aka left-handed people are at a disadvantage in the world, etc.

… Paul Krugman says:

“And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

I wish President Obama would swing for the fences with his policies and if congress or the senate let him down, take those uselesses to task at every opportunity rather than making them cocoa.

I think Ron MacLean overstepped his bounds on this one.  It is only natural for someone to make a mistake publicly once in a while and I hope that he will own up to it so we can all move on.  Ron has made many great contributions to hockey and they far outweigh his mistake(s).