Author: JP

Of keyboard waffles and Tetris ice cubes ….

Some of you may have done your time on the “Sharper Image meets I Want One of Those” circuit. I know I have, but largely vicariously so far. I’ve tended to look but not buy, for the most part. There have been exceptions, though: the most recent was a Bauhaus birdhouse I just had to have, obtained from The French House.

But nothing prepared me for these contraptions:

Keyboard waffles. Tetris ice cubes. Pixelated sofas. Loo paper notepads. Toast printers. What can I say? Should you be so inclined, you can find out more here.

Musing very lazily about copyright

My wife and I have been married nearly 24 years; a long time ago, when she was pregnant with our first child, I remember her saying “You know something? It’s amazing just how often you notice pregnant women just because you’re thinking about pregnancy”. I’m sure psychologists have a term for the condition, some sort of bias I guess.

That’s the way I feel about copyrights and trade marks right now, in fact that’s the way I feel about intellectual property rights in general. Somehow I’ve become sensitised to noticing stories that have something to do with copyright, ever since my blood began to simmer while reading the nonsensical arguments related to the Harry Potter lexicon lawsuit.

I was on the plane to Shanghai, doing my usual read-and-tear-out rituals with the analog press, and I noticed this story, in the Independent on Sunday, about Len Deighton and the Fleming family. Until I read the article, I had no idea that James Bond films were a completely “separate enterprise to the novels, and Ian Fleming Publications, run by the surviving members of Fleming’s family, has no control over or copyright of the movies.”. Now I’m not entirely sure how accurate that statement is. If there was anyone other than Fleming I would associate with the James Bond films, it’s Cubby Broccoli, and usually Harry Saltzman as well. It appears to me that the guys at the Independent got it wrong: while McClory and Whittingham won the right to share screenplay credits for Thunderball as a result of their lawsuit, that has very little to do with the separation between Bond novels and Bond films. That happened ostensibly because Fleming placed all his book rights in Glidrose/Ian Fleming Publications as early as 1952, and sold all his film rights to Saltzman and Broccoli.

The article itself wasn’t really about this: it was about the apparent heavy-handed (and ultimately successful) attempts by the Fleming family to censor a book called The Battle For Bond. Ironically, it is now due for release at around the same time as Devil May Care, the Sebastian Faulks addition to the Bond stable.

While I was musing about this, wondering about a world where we have such strange copyright arguments, I carried on with my analog read-and-tear sessions. Soon I was ensconced in the New Statesman: my eye was drawn to an article by Becky Hogge, whose blog, machine envy, I read reasonably often; she’s been quiet-ish of late.

This time around it was the now-famous story of Mazz, the knitting blogger who published patterns for Adiposes and Oods on her web site. [Note: If you ever wondered what happened to the byproducts of liposuction, now you know. I guess you wish you’d never asked…].

Mazz, a self-confessed Dr Who fan, designed the patterns herself, and published them for all to use. But she hadn’t allowed for the BBC Worldwide Brand Protection Team, who were on to her immediately. She was politely asked to remove the patterns, which she did. Her case has now been taken up by the Open Rights Group, where Hogge is now the Executive Director.

She makes a fundamental point:

If Mazz’s case were to go to court, the BBC would stand an excellent chance of winning, and Mazz could be bankrupted. Because the law at present makes no distinction between Mazz and somone selling fake Louis Vuitton handbags on a street corner.

I am generally not in favour of any law or regulation which starts from a premise that everyone’s guilty; sadly, much that I see in today’s Intellectual Property regime (I hesitate to call them rights; regime sounds more plausible) looks that way to me. An assumption of guilt that makes laws unworkable.

That’s what I was thinking about when I saw this story: song lyrics from Amy Winehouse included in a third-year Cambridge University English Literature paper on practical criticism; her lyrics were alongside the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Why ever not? [I remember how chuffed I was at being allowed to read Cat Stevens‘ Father and Son as my Elocution exam “poem” in 1971.]

The article also makes references to Bob Dylan and Billie Holliday in the same paper, and to the Bee Gees in an earlier one.

So. I guess we can all look forward to Cliff (of Cliff’s Notes fame, whoever he may be) being sued for copyright; or maybe the person to be sued is the person who sat next to you in class, laboriously writing out sections of prose and lyric as preparation for her exams. [Is there a statute of limitations for copyright breaches?]

This stuff is broken. And it needs to be fixed. Fixed in a way that doesn’t treat every one of us as criminals. Am I right in thinking that in the UK, people who pay for a CD and then import it into iTunes are technically committing a crime? But don’t despair too much, at least every one of the articles I referenced in this post was not hidden behind a paywall, something that just wouldn’t have happened a few years ago.

The Times, They are A-Changing.

Musing lazily about time-shifting and personalised news

“Whatever you do, don’t tell me the result, I don’t want to know”.

Thus goes the refrain.

The refrain of people with a new problem, a problem that was nascent for maybe thirty years, but one that’s been maturing for nearly a decade, and is full-blown now.

A problem caused by time-shifting.

More and more people record things for viewing later; many of the things recorded are contests based around elimination: knockout tournaments, Cup finals, boxing matches, Come Dancing, X Factor, Who’s Going to be <Pick One from : Maria, Joseph, Oliver, Nancy,> the list goes on.

And once they’ve done the time-shifting, they’re trapped. They don’t want to know what happened. Not until they get the time to watch what they recorded.

They don’t want to know what happened.

Now there’s a real challenge for news personalisation. Letting me pick the things I specifically don’t want to know about. So when I get my paper online, I should be able to pick the things I want to hear about (my preferences), the things that my community’s doing (my news feed, as it were), the things my community recommends for me (actively and onymously as well as through profiling and collaborative filtering).

Filtered, of course. By my choice of filter. Shaken, not stirred.

And explicitly not containing things I didn’t want to read about.

Possible? Likely? It’s happening now.

So what next? I can just see it. In ten years time they’re going to be saying: Don’t tell me who won the election. Don’t tell me who won the war. I might want to go back and watch it.

In two words, Im-possible: The problem with counterintuition

Nearly 40 years ago, we were asked this question at school:

Imagine a string tied around the middle of an orange, in effect forming a circumference. Now imagine another string, this time tied around the middle of the earth, at the equator.Okay? Now increase the length of each of these strings by a foot. Imagine each string now suspended around its sphere as an annulus. Tell me, which string will be further away from the sphere it contains?

And we all answered “the one around the orange, of course”. Or words to that effect. And we wondered why someone would ask such a silly question.

And then we did the math.

  • C=2pi r
  • C+1=2pi R
  • R-r=(C+1)/2pi -C/2pi
  • Or (cancelling out the Cs), R-r=1/2pi

What?!?! How can this be? How can the change in radius be independent of the circumference of the sphere (or for that matter the radius)? You mean that both strings will be the same distance away from “their” sphere? Im-possible.

It didn’t matter how many times we invoked Sam Goldwyn (he was still alive at the time), the answer did not change. No hidden tricks. No small print. No scams involving oranges and geoids. Just the facts. When you increase circumference by X, the radius increases by X/2pi. Regardless of what the original radius was. Regardless of what the original sphere was. One string round a table tennis ball, the other round the sun, same answer.

I tell you, it kept me up nights as a boy, it just didn’t make any sense to me. I had to drill the answer into my head, drag it there kicking and screaming. It took time, but the pain subsided in the end.

And then.

And then I bought two fascinating books by Julian Havil: Nonplussed and Impossible. Books that were tailormade to fit in to that odd space in my library, between Martin Gardner and John Allen Paulos.

And went through all that pain again. From “does not compute” to “im-possible” to “I don’t believe it”. So if you’ve got a similar penchant for mind-masochism, go out and buy the books. Both of them. You won’t regret it.

I need to keep challenging my biases and prejudices, the anchors and frames I cannot see. And books like these help me exercise my mind, they ensure that I don’t reject ideas just because they’re counterintuitive.

Musing about design and convenience

I’ve just got to Shanghai for the first time, and despite working through what passed for night in China and in the UK, I found myself bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of beans. Having been ensconced in design strategy papers for a good few days, I think I’m looking at everything through “design” eyes, and trying to make sure I’m not jaundiced in any way.

The first thing that made me feel good was the socket (or what I used to call a “plug-point” in India). At the hotel here, they have sockets that look like this:

Wikipedia (which is where I got that illustration, by the way) tells me that this is a Type G (British 3 Pin) plug and socket, conforming to BS 1363. Which means I didn’t need an adaptor for once, a nice feeling. Strange, that I have to come all the way to China to get that feeling. Incidentally, just take a look at this map, available from Wikimedia Commons:

What the map does is set out the plug type in use in a given region, and it’s interesting to see some sort of colonial history laid out in the process. We’d probably get something similar if we looked at rail gauges, I guess, and I can’t help worrying that there’s an internet variant just waiting for us, a 21st century map of standards and protocols that reflect colonies of lock-in.

Enough worrying. There are so many things in this hotel room that make me feel good, that make me realise that someone’s applied thought to the design of the room, that someone’s actually considered what the customer may want.

There’s the ethernet point just where you would look for one, built subtly into the desk and covered with a little removable leather pad; there’s the cups and saucers and tea bags loudly signalling the existence of a kettle somewhere, and the kettle turns out to be where you would look for it, and the socket turns out to be where you would look for it. And the tea bags included a selection of green tea and jasmine. Something I guess you would expect in China, like the torch thoughtfully placed in the wardrobe almost at eye level.

Lots of little things that show that someone thought about what people want. My favourite is the wardrobe itself. It’s in the usual place, to my right as I enter the room, along the passageway to the area where the bed and desk are. What makes it special is what they’ve done to the back of the wardrobe. Sliding doors, accessible from the bathroom. Now that is useful. And simple.

Putting things where people would intuitively look for things. Looking at, and catering for,  all possible uses when designing something. Using open standards wherever possible. Building things with the customer in mind, actually thinking about how the customer would use something. Precisely how. Thinking about where a customer’s eye would fall, what his reach would be.

When we design systems, there is much we can learn from people who take customer service seriously. Like the hotel in Shanghai I happen to be staying in.