Winter Solstice 2013

 

Mobile: Brother Heinrich

By DJS & ml  

The English composer John Rutter delighted to tell the legend of Heinrich Susso, a 14th-century Dominican Abbot, who is credited with notating In Dulce Jubilo. 

One night, as Heinrich finished trampling the monastery's grapes with the help of Sigismund, the donkey, on the way to Sigismund's stable, they saw angels dancing in the sky and heard their song. Heinrich attempted to notate the song for the choir to sing at Christmas. Sigismund helped him remember the tune at a crucial point in the bridge.

We first heard this on Jurgen Goth's Disc Drive in the '80's on CBC Stereo.  Seven or eight years ago DJS knit Brother Heinrich as one of her Sillies. Now the cast is complete, ml built a mobile to display them all.  Melissa hung the mobile.
--ml

POV

Today's Guardian has an article about job interviewer's trick questions and riddles to winnow applicants.

Try this one. You're locked in a pitch-black, empty room with bare walls and no electric lights. You've got a book of matches, a box of tacks and a candle. How would you attach the candle to the wall for a light?
The best answer: empty the box of tacks. Take the box top, turn it upside down and tack it to the wall. The box top projects out like a little drawer. Then put a tack to attach the candle to the box's bottom. The tack's point, projecting through the box bottom, serves as a pricket. Finally, slide the box bottom into the box top on the wall. The nested top and bottom will be sturdier than either alone, and safely support the weight of the candle.
.

So that works.

If you are used to tacks distributed in full telescope boxes. (that's the kind where the bottom has sides that fit inside the sides of the top.)

In my observation, tack makers stopped using that style decades ago. The boxes cost too much and slowed processing which diminished productivity.

Reverse tuck boxes had a go. (That's the kind that is one piece and the top flap tucks into the side opposite the one it is integral to.)

These were disparaged when the blister pack appeared.

These permitted small quantity packaging in an easily handled form. Everybody appeared to win.
The customer is sold on the convenience; she can see the product, and buy as few as she needs. There is little excess to store.The blister pack's total retail cost is less than the box price.
The seller has an attractive low maintenance display which saves his clerks' time because customers find the options they desire on their own. The cards the blisters were on, make the product bulky enough to discourage shoplifting while they provide a good platform for price tags and, later, bar codes.
The maker can inflate the price per unit outrageously. The per pound price of a 100 count box might be $10 at retail. When repackaged in tens, those same fastenings might sell for $1.98 each. That makes $19.98 per hundred. The maker and seller  more than double their margins. The customer "saves" $8.00.

Neither blister packs nor reverse tuck boxes would be suitable to support the candle as the full telescopic box does. Given the difficulty I had finding the image of the telescopic box, I guess it would not be very familiar to today's job applicants.

The interviewer might think that these children just don't know as much as she did at their age. That would prove that the labor force has declined in quality?

Perhaps that is the real point?
--ml

The Stove, or Cooker, or Range, part II

The Hunter-gatherer life presents a daily problem: Where is the next mouthful to come from?
This frivolous question tended to blot out all thoughts about matters of import such as the nature of God, or why did the sun shine, or why did some colors go together while others gave you the absolute hab-dabs. These sorts of inquiries were left for postprandial discussion groups. Where they belonged.[Lest anyone think this is too silly, consider that this pretty is 35,000 years old]
If it happened that a large animal was caught, any part of it not eaten right then would call in the scavengers and other competition. If they were beaten off then the carcass promptly rotted. That was okay up to a point because the wise knew where to find the herbs that covered the taste. But after a point there was no keeping the meat down.
There were a couple of things you might do. Pull the meat apart into thin strings and hang them in the sun, or over a slow fire (if you happened to have one) until they turned dark and dry and brittle. This made for interesting chewing.
A better trick was to pound it to crumbs and mix with almost as much fat and add in fruit and nuts. This made pemmican and kept quite satisfactorily. With a few greens the nutrition was good too.
Another option was to salt the meat. With a lot of salt. That meant spending time at the sea shore drying water to claim the salt. Inland there were natural salt outcroppings, as well.
A third possibility involved stewing the meat in its own juice and storing it in skin bags well coated, particularly at the seams, with fat. With a layer of fat at the top to complete the seal, damaging air was kept out. Salt was still useful, but a lot less.
But one sees that the real problem is fire. Fire is not readily portable. Alchemists might acclaim it a near universal solvent if they looked in it's direction.
Our intrepid neolithic chemists were discovering the relationship of air (oxygen) and both animal meat and fire. Too much destroyed. Only a little preserved. (For more on cooking with fire see A Proper Fire.)
The major hurdle was starting a fire. Take away the fuel or let it be consumed and the fire would stop. To keep one going meant almost constant attention. How did you either preserve or start a fire while on the move? How did you start the fires at home if every fire in the village was out? Rubbing sticks together? Flint and steel? Oops -- no steel for a long time yet. How about stone on stone? (Ever try these boy scout tricks? They are not easy. They are not easy even if you have the 'modern' wherewithal of the eighteenth century. See Flint and Steel and Flint and Steel Fire Lighting Tips for an authoritative discussion of the problems and solution.)
These hunter-gatherer daily dilemmas were transmuted with settlement and adoption of a grain based diet. Villages soon developed the rudimentary concepts of Vestal Virgins to tend the flame that acted as the central repository for all home fires.
Meat could be eaten raw. Grain must be cooked to provide any nutrition for humans at all. So fire became a near neighbor. Moving in with fire was not done by any with a survival instinct. But a fire in the yard was acceptable. A large, smooth rock could make a griddle to fry some flour and water paste to make crackers, or matzos.
Here I am at a major subject branch. Let us leave the natural history of wild yeast for another post, and attempt to resume the present topic. You hadn't noticed there was one? Pay closer attention then. Strewth.
The major innovation at this point was the enclosure of fire within a stone or brick shell which concentrated the heat. The result was usually a beehive oven in the yard. With variations, as in Sumer about 2900 BCE:

Bread (Sumerian, ninda; Akkadian, akalu) must have been made, at least in some cases, from leavened dough. There are no direct descriptions, but allusions to its bulky size and to leaving the dough overnight to rest seem to be indications of fermentation. One may assume, however, that in most cases the bread was made from unleavened dough shaped into flat, round loaves, similar to the present-day Near Eastern khubuz. This bread was baked in a peculiar, ubiquitous type of oven called an öurin (Sumerian) or tinûru (Akkadian). It was a clay implement of cylindrical shape, tapering to a conical form in its upper part and with a side opening at its base. The whole was between 3 and 4 feet high. Once the oven was sufficiently heated, the flat, unleavened loaves were plastered to the side for baking. Salaries of the workers were often paid in bread. Roasted barley was sold in the streets and at the marketplace.

-- Ancient Mesopotamia, Answers.com

In the middle East there wasn't much push to bring the oven inside. On the wind swept loess of ancient China it was more interesting to have the heat inside the house. Particularly in winter when the well to do built ovens under the sleeping platform , called a 'kang', which made Morpheus so cozy.

Ancient Chinese earthenware tomb model of a stove, from the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 - 220 AD), Freer Gallery of Art.

Already from the Chinese Qin Dynasty (221 BC–206/207 BC), clay stoves that enclosed the fire completely are known, and a similar design known as kamado (かまど) appeared in the Kofun period (3rd–6th century) in Japan. These stoves were fired by wood or charcoal through a hole in the front. In both designs, pots were placed over or hung into holes at the top of the knee-high construction. Raised kamados were developed in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1867).

Wiki history of stove

So here is the stove: a box in the room which contains fire and surfaces or compartments which may be cooked in or on.
--ml
tags: Design, Dum Luks Ordinary, early cooking, paleolithic cookery

Will at Imagethief offers a disquisition of importance:

Granted that there at least two main types of censorship. One is loud censorship to set an example. Here is where the boundary is. Don't cross it. Kill the chickens to scare the rhetorically inclined monkeys. A second type is the quiet, subtle censorship that influences ideas in the public domain that you never here about. This is the informal guidance to editors that is never revealed, the changes to school curricula to ensure contentious ideas are removed, and the stories and books that never make to the public in the first place and that thus don't have to be noisily suppressed later.

What we can't know is already overwhelming.
That we willingly compound that by forbidding, or hiding, what we might know is our great shame.
--ml
tags: Design, Dum Luks Stockpot

The Longer the Title ...

The smaller the pay check.

e.g.: President = 30 x median
CEO = 300 x median

-- ml
tags: aphorisms, Design, management

Out Of The Ether

Tiscali UK Ltd asks "Why do sailors wear bell bottoms?"

hmmm ...
Among the answers I know is that, after it became common for sailors to change their clothes (at all, at all), they sailed in ships that were likely to be:

• attacked at any time; or
• were likely to catch a fire

Fireman will tell you that sleeping in fire retardant pants is not pleasant. Yet, getting into one's clobber quickly is very important when the station house bell is ringing.
More so for sailors when a sudden attack lit the companionway to the magazine. Worse, when the oil bunkers caught afire, instant action was required.
For the watch on deck this is not a problem. They are dressed and ready to go.
Since it became acceptable-- and possible -- to sleep in something other then one's workaday clothes, the off watch was in a quandary.
Comfort called for divestment. Readiness called for assumables and shoon. That is: sleep comfortable and be ready to die putting on your clothes; or sleep in your boots and be ready to go without your pants; OR jump out of your hammock in your boots into your pants that get wider toward the bottom to go over your clodhoppers.

If that is too techno-babble an answer how about this:
The girls love a handsome sailor in bell bottoms.

For this reason the US Navy decided to retire bell bottoms as part of the uniform at the height of the winding down of the US-Vietnam conflict when capitalist fashion designers declared the bell bottom IN.

--ml
tags: Design, Bell Bottoms, USN

Parent Seminar

Wil at WWdN in Exile reports:

Ryan pointed to V for Vendetta, which was on top. "I've been thinking about it, and I think the book is better than the movie," he said.

"It usually is," I said.

"They should have kept in a lot of stuff that they cut, and they sort of changed the entire meaning of the story with the screenplay." He said.

If films were all maxi series and books were all short stories the problem might be less so.
Except:
When I read I see in my head what no director, no camera man, no set (costume, makeup, sound, color) designer ever thought of.
Certainly no producer, not even New Line, would ever approve the cost of bringing that vision to the screen / stage / speaker / museum.
Even if one did, you would accuse it of not being what I saw in my head, let alone what you saw in your own.
If an apple is wanted talk about which apple.
Do not quibble about the mikan.
--ml
tags: Design, adaptation

Superb

Roy says:

Remember, the blogosphere thing is just a bubble, and its skin, like that of the paramecium, is only semi-permeable: news may enter, but outrage mostly stays inside, which is of course the secret of both the blogosphere's growth and its ineffectuality: it swells without discharging.

--ml

Transition

Actually amazingly swift.
Once I figured out how to put the little scripts into the sidebar things smoothed out until the site almost looks normal (to me).
Despite my murpfhing of yesterday, this is an all around improvement today.
Principal gain is the ability to label, or categorize, posts. The reader has a more direct route to items of particular interest. I have a way to organize my scatter shot into the main venues I want to build here. See the sidebar about a third of the way down.

Feast of Holidays is a collection of recipes and table talk connected by the annual round of festal occasions. When completed the initial post for this would be "Time is just no thing." It is a quick way to find the directions for Seattle Brown Out Turkey.

Dum Luk's Ordinary is a second table talk/recipe book focusing on the rest of the year, the ordinary.

Supposedly this blog started as an exploration of design. Now those posts are collectible.

Dum Luk's Stockpot is just what you'd expect, the oddments that didn't go elsewhere tossed into a big pot to simmer and meld. A slice of life picture of my thought (hah!) process?

More may occur to me. Comments are always welcome.
--ml
Blogger beta,

Briar Patch

So today I suckered for the new blogger beta.
The turkey carpet salesman told me how easy it would be: I wouldn't ever bother my not so pretty head with HTML code again.
And they are right. I can use their template (none of which do what I want done.) and I can add and move with just a mouse drag.
'Course to do what I want done does re quire code. Not plain HTML, Brand spiffy new XML.

Today's Design Divergence

The old ice trays leak.

The new ones are serviceable with one exception: If you stack them after filling, water squirts everywhere as the upper tray nests into the lower.

Ok. The maker wants to save space. Space in the package; space in the container; space on the retailers shelf.

The manufacturer is rewarded for this design.

And the user has to find some sort of rack to keep the trays separate.

Annoyance.

-- ml

Technorati Tags: design, design considerations

Secrets of a Tech Master

Del said:
"Read the screen. Then do what it says."
Harder than it sounds.
-- ml

Technorati Tags: tech secrets

Absurd Decisions

Looking a gift book in its binding is, no doubt, an impolite act. Yet am I so pig-ignorant that that was my first response when friend Kenji very kindly sent me a copy of his latest book. As you can see it is all in kanje and kana. As I mentioned earlier, Japanese is one of the languages I can be misunderstood in. That is a silly way of saying I don't it speak well. At all. But my speech is fluent -- not to say mellifluent -- compared to my undeftness at reading the characters. I did, after much searching, Identify the glyph for Yama or 'mountain' which forms part of Kenji's surname. It is in the line closest to the devil at about the height of his belly button. It is three upright stokes joined by a horizontal stroke at the bottom, rather like a letter 'E' on its back. That made me pretty sure that Kenji had something to do with making the book because the yama was in the right place for the translator's name. On the reverse of the title page are the only words that appear in Roman characters, and very informative they are, to. They announce that "Les Decisions Absurdes by Christian Morel" is copyright 2002 by Editiones Gaulliard and is published in Japan by permission. Okay. That checks out.

But ... What's it about?

The picture on the front is suggestive ... Of all the wrong things, no doubt. Is the Devil hectoring that poor maid because she loved her man and he done her wrong? i.e. the usual sex and violence artistic types are always shoving in our faces while claiming it's cultural uplift? That sorta fits with the title.
Alas! Inside there are diagrams. One looks like two boats with their courses plotted as they collide and lots of explanatory remarks
Not so much of the sex. Just the violence.
So I turn to a more academic pursuit. Look at the marvelous economy of design in the making of this paperback book. The front cover consists of the title, author, translator and attention grabber image. Standard paper back layout. Then there is the bottom section which appears to be marketing. A teaser, perhaps, or a handful of rationalizations for purchasing the book.
Now it gets interesting.

The marketing is on a band that is tucked around the cover. That makes it easy for the publisher to change the copy if needed. It also allows the purchaser to remove it to have an uncluttered cover. What I particularly relish is that the cover art does not extend beneath the band. Why waste the ink?

Now it gets elegant.
All that glossy cover is a dust jacket. Slip it off to reveal a very sober, not to say plain, cover.

Well this was good for an afternoon's fun, but I was still stuck with the need to embarrass myself to death by asking what it was all about. So I Googled.

Turns out Christian Morel is a PhD in Poli Sci who directs Renault's Commercial Vehicles Division HR. He researches negotiation and decision making in a sociological context. "Les Decisions Absurdes" is one result of that research.
Suppose you rejoice in the bosom of your family group when a suggestion is made: "let's go to X" X happens to be an unpleasant journey away, but, no matter, it is a place that some members enjoyed in the past. So, having discussed the plan, off you go, across a dessert in a car without air conditioning to X. Well, conversation gets to this point:

"Hope you enjoy this."
"Why? Don't you?"
"Not really"
But you said ..."
"I only said because you said"
"But I just went along with everybody else. I didn't want to come here today."

An absurd decision. But one which the group agreed to after discussion.

It could be worse: Two oil tankers on a passing course. One decides there is no need for action and continues. The other decides to divert but goes the "correct" way (which is irrational in this case) causing a collision.

Absurd decisions are those made through errors of reasoning, group think, or loss of direction.
Everybody at NASA knew that the joint seals would degrade in freezing temperatures. Everybody at NASA knew their part of Florida rarely if ever froze. So when it did freeze nobody thought to take the responsibility to check the seals before launch. The result was the Challenger disaster.
A jetliner was on final approach into Portland in 1978 when the Captain became suspicious of the landing gear. They made several tests and circled the tower for some time. They were still trying to get the gear down when they run out of fuel and crashed. Nobody took responsibility to monitor the fuel level. There was lots at the start of the landing.

Or here is Kenji's favorite head shaker. A Swiss pilot was landing in New York after crossing the Atlantic. I imagine the radio conversation as something like the following:

"GCA, this is Swiss pilot requesting landing instructions." Spoken in a hyper professional calm voice.
"Swiss pilot please wait."
"Roger, GCA."
Time passes.
"GCA, This is Swiss Pilot. Our fuel is low." Spoken in a very cool, hyper professional calm voice.
"We hear you Swiss pilot. Maintain."
Time passes.
"GCA This is Swiss pilot. Our fuel is exhausted.' Spoken in a superbly cool, way hyper professional calm voice.
"Roger, Swiss pilot. Maintain."
Time passes.
"Swiss pilot? Swiss pilot? Where are you? You are off our scope. Swiss pilot?"

The pilot was so professionally laconic that the tower failed to understand what he told them.
This analysis of how absurdities creep into decisions is fascinating to a story teller like me. Lots of potential scenes to show character and move plot. But it is essential for any manager who wishes to avoid such absurdity in his bailiwick.
Christian Morel published his book in France in 2002. Kenji translated it into Japanese in 2005. But there is no notice of an English translation that I could find. Distressing.
Here's what I did find:
The French Publishers Agency
Le Journal du Management (in French)
But the most extensive is a talk Christian Morel gave to L'Ecole de Paris
--ml
Technorati Tags: Christan Morel, Les Decisions Absurdes, Absurd Decisions

Nobody Likes Science. He's Weird.

From DarkSyde at Daily Kos

While the demotion of distant Pluto has attracted considerable press, the news that Dark Matter Exists was virtually invisible. Sean Carroll discusses it on NPR's Science Friday.

Of course what we call a frozen rock is much more important than the discovery that there is a quarter of the universe we have only one clue about: it is.
--ml

Technorati Tags: Dark Matter, Pluto

Science is a Bitch

The Observer:

Sean McCarthy says that no one was more sceptical than he when Steorn, his small hi-tech firm in Dublin, hit upon a way of generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields. ... But when he attempted to share his findings, he says, scientists either put the phone down on him or refused to endorse him publicly in case they damaged their academic reputations.

Successful science must not stray too far from conventional wisdom.
--ml

Technorati Tags: science, energy, magnets

Conventional Wisdom Digitized to Foolishness

Conventional wisdom: A picture is worth a thousand words.

Hmm. A thousand words. That's about a kilobyte, right?

How many megabytes is that Jpeg?
--ml

Etiquette

top-post

How nice.

-- ml

Performancing Test

Wil Wheaton has started using Performancing at WWdN: In Exile so I thought I would try it.
It integrates with Firefox and has a number of bells and whistles, lots of help and tips on its site, and if this publishes to blogger will be very dandy.

--ml

How to Wrap

From the Guardian's Observer Magazine:

At Evian the way they've structured the flutes and the way they've webbed the outside of the bottle means the consumer can easily compress it. It's good branding, too,' he says. 'They've reduced the materials by redesigning the flute, but managed to give it an iceberg shape which conveys the meaning. Every aspect performs a function, giving strength and rigidity to the bottle, and you can crush it at the end of its life. I'd class that as brilliant eco design.'

An interesting article which nicely illustrates the play of conflicting goals in design.
The purveyors want things bright, cheerful and tidy. The buyers go along until confronted with the import of their choices. Those who must deal with that impact despair. Only the shortest of short term goals are met in most cases because 'we can't afford frills.'
What might a culture that valued simplicity and biodegradable packaging offer? How about this from How To Wrap Five Eggs by Hideyuki Oka, Bijutsu Shuppan-sha 1965. (English edition Harper & Row 1967)

-- ml

Authority is Given

Universal education is not an impractical ideal; it is a prosaic commonplace called life. I call it Universitas de Harden Knocken. We all attend will-he-nill-she. What we make of it is very much up to ourselves.

American culture in the past few generations has learned to despise experience and any wisdom it might bring and favor academically certified expertise. Less than a century ago most lawyers learned the law by clerking for a member of the bar. Managers rose from the factory floor. Modestly educated tinkerers invented world changing technologies. Today any one without a high school diploma is all but unemployable as a janitor.

Auto didacts are derided because they lack credentials. Some deserve derision, but not all. Fools are given credence because they have pieces of parchment noting their extensive residence in the groves of academe. Some appear foolish only because their theorizing is so far in advance of convention. Yet others because they are fools.

My point is not some defense of luddism or blind tradition. Rather let us closely question any assertion of knowledge. As Ben Franklin said: "It is the first duty of every citizen to question authority."

Authority may be given ... Skepticism is demanded.

--ml