designcult

What I'm thinking about this week

1. Boots! In January 1996, I was in London briefly, following a semester at Glasgow University. I bought a pair of Dr. Marten's boots from the flagship store in . They were a sort of wingtip half boot, and I loved them. That's them up on the right there. I've owned various boots over the years, and these were worn more and over a longer period of time than any others. Only a pair of boots acquired from Stompers in the 90s came close. The latter have been relegated to "garden use only" for a while now, and the Docs are just thrashed. Neither model is still made (though there are some things that come close). So last week, we went over to the Haight St. and I picked up a pair of Langstons in burgundy. And I'm in love all over again ...
2. Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Despite being married to someone who knows a great deal about art history, I basically knew nothing about this painting or the painter (though I knew the image). I listen to the wonderful In Our Time BBC podcasts, so I got a thorough introduction from Melvyn Bragg's usual group of slightly dotty British academics. 
3. The history of finance, and investment theory. Not my usual area, but I'm being guided by Adam Nash's personal finance reading list and working my way through one by one. 
4. Visual (and to some extent audio) design in classic science-fiction movies. (And one newer one.) The ones with the white palettes, san serif typefaces and shininess.  Think 2001 and Saturn 3.  Also Tron Legacy, but the shiny white bits rather than the glowy black bits. Plus sinister computer voices like Hal and GladOS from Portal. The fun part is this relates to the previous item (at least in my head).
5. How most of the important developments & conflicts in online identity & authentication were predicted (sort of ) by Max Headroom. 
6. Occupy Wall Street. There's a lot to think about, but this post pointing out how strangely some of the OWS dynamic echoes Bruce Sterling's 1998 book Distractions I had to reread it. Sterling has a knack for predicting future socio-political events in ways SF doesn't usually quite do (see: drone assassinations in Islands in the Net). Distractions isn't nearly as good a book as Islands in the Net, but it has it's moments, and it certainly resonates today:
   
   

   “Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’tmake any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

   “A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

   “Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

The secret origin of "log in"

We do it dozens of times a day, every day, but why do we call it logging in?

"Log in" is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It's ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it's being slowly overtaken by "sign in" ^{[note 1]}. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?

Clearly, a job for the Oxford English Dictionary. Luckily you can usually access the online OED through your local public library site. Thanks, libraries!

Representative terminal, not actually a CTSS terminal, CC LevitateMe

The OED's earliest listed usage of "log in" in the modern sense of "to open one's on-line access to a computer" is from the 1963 publication Compatible Time-Sharing System from the MIT Computation Center. ^[2]  I'm not sure if this is truly the first usage of "log in", but it would make sense if it was, as CTSS, started in 1961, was arguably the first time-sharing operating systems, and so possibly the first system that you needed to log in to. (Before that we only had batch processing systems).

Whether it was CTSS or a similar system, I envision an engineer, probably at MIT, somewhere between 1959 and 1961, needing to describe a new user command for the system they were creating.We get a lot of neologisms from these situations, and it's very possible log in dates from just this moment in history.

CTSS Timeshare: A Programmer's Guide, MIT press

It's also possible that "log in" was used in a non-computer sense before time-share systems, but I haven't seen it in print. But of course the "log" part, meaning to record something or someone, predates computers by hundreds of years.

Ship's log CC David Churbuck

That usage is in turn a shortening from entering something into a "log-book", or ship's log, (or captain's log, if you're in Starfleet) which the OED defines as:

A book in which the particulars of a ship's voyage (including her rate of progress as indicated by the log) are entered daily from the log-board.

The first listed usage of log-book or  logbook is from roughly 1689 ( J. Moore's  New Syst. Math). By travelling back 250 years in time, we've gone from identifying ourselves within a computer system to entering the speed of a sailing ship into a book.

But why was it called a logbook? Because of this apparatus here, variously called a chip log, ship log, or log:

Chip log log line, & reel, CC Kate's Photo Diary

A log! Or at least, a piece of heavy wood, attached to a knotted rope. Which you throw overboard and time how many knots go by for a set period of time, or, as Wikipedia describes it:

When the navigator wished to determine the speed of his vessel, a sailor dropped the log over the stern of the ship. The log would act as a drogue and remain roughly in place while the vessel moved away. The log-line was allowed to run out for a fixed period of time. The speed of the ship was indicated by the length of log-line passing over the stern during that time.

This is also why we still measure nautical speed in knots. So, when you next log in to Facebook or Gmail, think about big hunks of wood being thrown off the side of a ship to measure speed.

P.S. This was fun and entertaining for me to put together, but I'm sure there are holes and inaccuracies. If you know more about the origins of "log in", please chime in with comments, and I'll update accordingly!

Update 8/6/11: In a comment, Andrew Durdin points to some non-computer uses of "log in" from the 1950s. Awesome!

---

Note 1:  A couple of years ago I did a survey of top websites in the US and UK and whether they used "sign in", "log in", "login", "log on", or some other variant. The answer at the time seemed to be that if you combined "log in" and "login", it exceeded "sign in", but not by much. I've also noticed that the trend toward "sign in" is increasing, especially with the most popular services. Facebook seems to be a "log in" hold-out.

If the whole "sign in" vs. log in" debate is interesting to you, there are some debates here and here. My personal feeling is that either is fine, but "sign in" is marginally more friendly and probably the preferred usage, though I'll miss the nautical association. On the other hand, I feel strongly that "login" as a verb is an abomination and not to be tolerated under any circumstances.

If you're really interested, you might start noticing where sites show their own evolutions and inconsistencies of usage. For example, Twitter's web UI uses "sign in" but the URL says "login". But now we're probably reaching the outer limits of obsession and should stop.

Note 2. Here's a PDF of a CTSS manual from 1964. There's an underlined "log in" on page 6.
Interestingly, CTSS is also the system that gave us the first email system, as described by Errol Morris in his history of his brother's role in the creation of that system. The Wikipedia history of CTSS is pretty fascinating stuff as well, and contains links to oral histories of the creation of CTSS and Multics (the precursor to Unix).

 

 

 

Moral panics & things that we know that aren't so

I've been thinking about moral panics. A moral panic is "the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order."

There were a series of moral panics that I remember from my childhood and adolescence. In some ways the 1970s and 1980s seem like a golden age for moral panics (D&D is satanic! Rock lyrics are dirty!) but there were a set that seemed different, in part because they had more specific trigger incidents, and so seemed more concrete.

I'm thinking of:

1. The Central Park jogger case, predator youth, and "wilding" (1989)
2. Satanic ritual abuse, especially the McMartin preschool trial (1983)
3. "Crack babies" (1980s)
4. Poisoned Halloween candy (1970s and 1980s)

All of these were the subject of endless sentationalstic media coverage. All became linked to larger narratives of how terrible our society had become. All resulted in significant legal and societal changes aimed at combatting these terrible scourges (or punishing the perpetrators of the scourges). Wilding was used as justification for harsher sentencing for juvenile offenders. Ritual abuse led to background checks and fingerprinting for daycare workers. Women who used cocaine during their pregnancy had their children taken away or were prosectuted and jailed. And anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s knows how much fear of poisoned candy was instilled in our parents, leading many of them to stay up late checking our candy (and throwing away the homemade brownies from the nice old lady down the street).

And of course all of these things basically didn't happen. A confession and DNA evidence from another (adult) suspect led to the vacation of the convictions of the teenagers (most of whom had already seved their sentences) in the Central Park jogger case. In almost all cases of alleged daycare abuse worldwide, either charges have been dropped or convictions overturned. Babies born of mothers who did cocaine while pregnant are nowhere near as badly off as predicted. And Halloween candy? Only one case every found, and not from a stranger (the kid's father poisoned his candy).

We're still living with the results of these moral panics. While many (though not all) of the individuals wrongly charged have had their names cleared, the laws passed and social habits formed haven't really gone away. In part that's probably because lots of people don't know these stories have been falsified (falsification is harder to sensationalize), but I suspect that even if most people did know, societal inertia makes it hard to change things that have been normalized, and now seem common sense.

These are (relatively) straightforward cases. The convicted youths did not attack the jogger. Cocaine is no more (and no less) harmful to fetuses than other drugs (and probably less than alcohol). While some sexual abuse of children has no doubt happened at a daycare center, there were no Satanic cults, and no epidemic of abuse. No one has ever died from poisoned Halloween candy from a stranger. Most moral panics are probably not falsifiable; they may be triggered by a real incident but lead to overreaction.

Also, not all moral panics are about evil criminals. The 1980s also saw a backlash against "frivolous lawsuits", and the most talked about frivolous lawsuit of all is the famous McDonald's coffee incident. Which also may not be how it was represented at the time.

 

How do you know that something's a moral panic when it's happening? I'm not sure. For me, it helps to think about the things that I used to know were true, that I now know aren't.

Poison candy photo CC by Robbi Baba

 

 

San Francisco through other eyes

An indulgence: seeing my home, San Francisco, through other eyes. With music and video.

One. Mike Skinner visits briefly.

 

Two. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs bust out of the Warfield (presumably) and wander (with some magic geography jumps) through a rainy downtown.

 

The latter captures, perfectly, how magical this city can be, especially when it's damp and rainy and you're wandering downtown at night. (With your leather on.)

 

 

 

Bits and pieces from Empire of Liberty

I just finished Charles S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. It's an awesome book, and since I don't think any American history from this period stuck in my head from school more than "blah blah XYZ affair blah blah Hamilton Burr duel blah War of 1812" I really needed to read it.

Three unrelated quotes struck me enough to preserve. The first is Madison's description of Jefferson, which I think could apply to half the genius geeks I know. (Or me, excepting the genius part.)

Madison knew his friend and knew that Jefferson's fanciful and exaggerated opinions were usually offset by his own very practical and cautious behavior. As Madison later remarked, Jefferson had a habit like "others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment." Indeed, it was often the difference between Jefferson's impulsive opinions and his calculated behavior that led many critics to charge him with hypocrisy and inconsistency. (p. 150)

Expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment. Awesome. I love that.

The next bit starts by relating the fad of calling things "mammoth" and ties it in to a subject that will be slightly familiar to West Wing fans, the Big Block of Cheese. (I say slightly familiar because this story relates to the Jefferson cheese, and the West Wing episode to the follow-up Andrew Jackson cheese.)

The most exciting scientific find of the period was Charles Wilson Peale's exhumation in 1801 near Newburgh, New York, of the bones of a mastadon, or mammoth. Peale displayed his mammoth inhis celebrated museum and in 1806 painted a marvelous picture of what was perhaps the first organized scientific exhumation in American history. Peale's discovery electrified the country and put the word "mammoth" on everybody's lips. A Philadelphia baker advertised the sale of "mammoth bread." In Washington a "mammoth eater" ate forty-two eggs in ten minutes.  And under the leadership of the Baptist preacher John Leland, the ladies of Cheshire, Massachusetts, late in 1801 sent to President Jefferson a "mammoth cheese," six foot in diameter and nearly two feet thick and weighing 1,230 pounds. The cheese was produced from the milk of nine hundred cows at a single milking, with no Federalist cows being allowed to participate. The president welcomed this gift from the heart of Federalism as "an ebullition of the passion of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy persecution" (p. 393)

I do not know how the cows were checked for Federalism. Perhaps their stalls were checked for copies of the New York Post. (Did you know the New York Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton?)

I can also recommend A Big Cheese for the White House: The True Tale of a Tremendous Cheddar to folks with kids who'd like to learn more about this important cheese incident in our nation's history. It's a great book with awesome illustrations, and totally answers any practical questions you might have re: how you make a cheese that size and transport it.

Finally, a bit that tells us American politicians weren't always enemies of science:

When am American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying the United States did not make war on science. (p. 544)

"Don't blame me! I voted for blood."

Bruce Sterling just posted this transcript of a talk he gave in 2009. I read in on my phone on the BART this afternoon, cackling to myself like a crazy person. There's a lot of good in here, but this bit:

Why are Gen-X goths? Why are they goths rather than hippies, beatniks? Why do they like to dress up like dead people? That’s their temperament.

When you’re a young goth, you dress up like a dead person because that’s something grownups do. Dying.

But if you’re an adult Gen-Xer and you’re dressed up as a goth, it’s like “Don’t blame me — because I’m already dead! I’m not morally responsible, I’m not a political actor, it’s not my fault, look, I’m a vampire. Don’t blame me! I voted for blood.” Or, whatever. It’s gothic.

Ow. That hits home. Followed by:

Okay, I want to offer you a general principle here. For a Gothic generation like yours, this is going to be painful for you. I mean, really a cognitive upset.

“Stop acting dead.”

Now, you think that acting dead is a virtue. Because you’ve been trained to behave as is if you were dead for a long time, and it actually appeals to your temperament as a generation. It’s your default position.

But you have to stop it. Because Hair shirt Green, which is most of the things that you had on your action list there, Hairshirt Green just changes the polarity of the twentieth century.

It’s just the opposite of consumer culture. It’s like Satanism for a consumer culture. And all Satanists are actually Christians. It’s not really a different way to live. And it’s not something that’s going to fulfil you.

Now, how do you know if you’re acting dead? Well, there’s a test for this. It’s the Great-Grandfather Principle.

You’re saying: I’m going to do something morally worthwhile that’ll make me feel proud of myself. But does your dead great-grandfather do a better job of it than you?

For instance, saving water. Okay, water is indestructible, first of all. You cannot possible damage water unless you turn it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then it just spontaneously recombines.

But you’re trying to save water, because you’re told to save water. All right, your dead great-grandfather is saving more water than you. You cannot possibly save any more water than a dead guy. He’s greener than you in that regard.

Saving electrical power. Okay, you should be using less power, power’s bad, you need a lower footprint. Okay, your grandfather is not using any electrical power.

He’s much greener than you, you cannot compete with that. If you move into a smaller apartment, your grandfather is in a very, very small apartment. It’s underground, there’s no lighting, there’s no heating, he doesn’t have any broadband.

Recycling, okay, recycling is useful in some ways. Your grandfather is literally being recycled. You can’t actually out-recycle your dead grandfather.

And furthermore, in a pretty short amount of time compared to the length of the problems you’re tackling, you’re going to be dead, like your grandfather.

You’ll be saving everything at that point. You might be alive 70, 80, 90 years. You’re going to be dead for hundreds of millions of years. Billions of years of saving water, billions of years of having a light carbon footprint. It was carbon sequestration. You’re full of carbon, they buried you.

So you need to do things that you can do while alive. Do things you can do while alive. If your grandfather’s doing a better job at it, you can put that aside for later, when you’re dead, like him.

I'm so happy that I'm going to see him speak at SXSW this year -- the last time I went was one of the few years he didn't speak, and that seriously bummed me out.

 

The end of November and fading technology

It's the last day of November, 2010. I realized today while talking to a coworker over lunch that I couldn't remember the last time I used an analog phone on my end. And it was only with a bit of thinking I could say that probably when I called my grandmother (one day late for her birthday, but in time for Thanksgiving) she answered on an analog phone. Unless her retirement community switched to VoIP, which they might have.

Last weekend I was sorting out cables in my office. The (internal, PCI, unknown baud) modem went in the trash. Just typing the words "PCI" and "baud" feels ancient to me. Some of this is personal, rather than technological: poking around inside of computers is something I did for fun and for pay in the late 20th century.

Typing the words "late 20th century" feels ancient to me.

I remember reading in the 90s, with some excitement, about Bruce Sterling's Dead Media project. At the time, I knew him as a science-fiction writer. The idea that media I was then using could die in my lifetime was compelling. It made sense to me.

I think it's routine now. I am not saying anything new (and I think I'm writing here mostly about old) but really just marking this moment, the end of the month of November in the year 2010. One of those future-sounding years we hit every year now. Marking it as a moment in the passing of the old, as is appropriate for Fall.

I probably chucked a half-dozen dead or dying technologies just sorting cables. Kept a few as well, because I'm bad at throwing things out. The miniature cassette recorder stayed. The CueCat stayed. I kept that thing (acquired from a Wired subscription, natch) with the intention of using it for something cool like scanning my book collection. I held onto it past when folks had written software to do just that for an individual, past when social book collection sites appeared, past the point where I wouldn't be able to use it with my computer without an adapter, and right up to the now, when I own a pocket-sized device which, when combined with an app (which is now owned by a company that was young when the CueCat appeared and which I worked for for a time) does that which I thought I might be able to get the CueCat to do as a narrow subset of its function.

(That sentence got a little tangled. History is tangled.)

I have one device which plays full-sized music cassette tapes in the house. It's  not a tape player, it's a hacky thing which fits into a PC drive bay (again, this sounds like I'm talking about vacuum tube diodes) so you can theoretically record your old mixtapes to MP3s. That's just one of a large number of possible old media projects taking up space in our house right now.

My children will probably never ask a stranger for spare change so they can call me from a payphone to ask if I can pick them up. Unless they're in a play, I guess.

This is normal. This is always happening. This may be happening at an accelerated rate, but that might also be an artifact of our inevitable Presentism.

In a few weeks I'm going to dress up in deliberately archaic clothing and walk through a pretend London. A few weeks ago, I dressed up in deliberately archaic clothing and danced at a club night that plays only music from a single decade but has been running for almost two. When I was a kid and visited London, it seemed to be a magical place where all the youth cultures of previous decades (at least the ones I cared about) kept on, incarnated in actual people.

I don't know if it's age, or the times, or the Internet, or whatever, but more places than London seem like that to me now.

Changing the audience

Still curious what the band was doing exactly during "Realize," and where all that melody came from, I press him about it. "There was no melody!," he exclaims. "Every melody everyone had  was in their head." The group played "all the strings on the bass at the same time and then me with this whammy pedal able to go two octaves lower and then bring it up and down like that. And then with various distortion pedals I could change the texture of the noise whenever I wanted so it wasn't just like one sound, it was just sort of moving along somehow. It was the best part of the night always and each night it was an experiment to see how long it would take for the audience to turn from like one state to another. A certain percentage of the audience would start sticking their fingers up at us or they would put their hands up in the air with their eyes closed, or do somethig physical. I pretty much would always go on as long as it took to change the audience."

"When it was clear that the audience was changed, totally--even if it was one person left with their fingers in the air or in their ears, we would wait for them to give into it, " Kevin explains. "Sometimes it would take forty minutes for that one individual to give up. When the audience was fully and utterly done, we had the signal process where I would look at Debbie and we'd go back to the final parts of the song."

-- from "33 1/2: Loveless", by Mike McGonigal, a book-long essay on the album Loveless by My Bloody Valentine

Kevin Shields (of My Bloody Valentine) goes on to explain that they had to stop "experiments" like this because of accumulated hearing damage. Although I'm pretty sure they did it when I saw them just a few years ago ...

eBay Blogs

A quick note to point out that Shri Mahesh has put together this nice wiki of blogs by current and former eBay employees. There's some good stuff in there -- and if you fit the description, you should add yours as well!

Non-Design Year-End Book Wrap-up

I've been enjoying my extended winter vacation and have few thoughts about design to share at the moment, it being more of a sleepy end-of-year tree and gifts and food and friends and family time.

So, instead, I give you my unscientific top 10 non-design books of 2006. I've been keeping track of and writing mini-reviews for all the books I read for just over a year, and it's interesting (to me) to look back over them. They're mostly science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels (which is not a surprise), but fantasy seems to be outpacing science-fiction by a bunch. Also, there are very few non-design non-fiction books, even less I ended up liking.

In no particular order, my favorite non-design-related books of 2006:

Three Days To Never - Tim Powers
Excellent Tim Powers book. If you're not reading Tim Powers you really should be. Contains the same crazy secret history stuff as the recent books (in this case the Mossad, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, out-of-body-experiences), but with characters you care about a bit more.

Spin - Robert Charles Wilson
Best Hard-SF book I've read in a LONG while. Really amazing concept. Feels very like classic SF while totally contemporary -- like some odd combination of Isaac Asimov and Gwyneth Jones.

Never Let Me Down - Kazuo Ishiguro
One of the most depressing books ever. Beautiful, yes, nice to see someone who is thought of as 'literary' tackle science fiction and do it really well, yes, worth reading, yes. One of the nice reviewers on the back called it 'elegiac' which is NY Times type reviewer code for both "goddamn depressing," which it is, and "kind of boring," which, while it is excruciatingly slowly paced, it is not.

His Majesty's Dragon - Naomi Norvik
Napoleonic wars with dragons. Excellent fantasy candy reading.

Lamb - Christopher Moore
Subtitle: "The gospel according to Biff, Christ's childhood pal." Look, NOTHING could live up to that subtitle, right? But it almost does. Between the mostly historically accurate details mixed with the wildly inappropriate anachronisms and theological banter, I enjoyed it a ton.

Five Crazy Women - Carla Speed McNeil
By far the best graphic novel I've read yet this year. Set in an ongoing SF world, this book is about one man and his relationships with crazy women. You can read most of it here: http://www.lightspeedpress.com/

The Fate of the Artist - Eddie Campbell
Absolutely brilliant. Eddie Campbell is now pretty much my favorite comics author/artist -- I have never figured out why navel-gazing autobiographical stuff works for me in comics form but doesn't (usually) in prose. But this odd mix of bits and pieces and things -- funny comics, interviews with his daughter, historical meanderings -- all dancing around some personal revelations -- is just wonderful.

The Colorado Kid - Stephen King
184 pages of original pulp with an excellent, and perfectly inappropriate, pulp cover. It is now apparent that Stephen King really, really, really doesn't care if his books will piss people off by not being what they expect.

50 Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson
Sequel to 40 Days of Rain. I'm assuming that "60 feet of melted Antarctic ice-shelf water coming to KILL YOU" is next. Technically about the dangers of radical climate change (and what we could do about it) KSR valorizes (realistically) the DC bureaucrat, the urban homeless, lunatics who live in treehouses, and rogue liberal Senators. This book did, in fact, scare the pants off me.

Perfect Circle - Sean Stewart
Perfect Circle has ghosts, punk rock, and Houston. It's the most amazing, sweetest, saddest novel I've read in a year or two, and will break your heart in parts.