Interfaces: Writing Utensils

For a while, a few years ago, I considered studying to become a linguist.  Then I met some linguists, and discovered that the discipline was either a) almost completely theoretical in nature, b) utterly bogged down in researching minutiae so obscure that no one would ever care, or c) completely shot through with loonies.  I then briefly considered linguistic anthropology as a field, but realized that I was too old to begin a career at Starbucks.

I guess what I'm saying is that I like the concept of linguistics far more than I like the actual practice of it.  I like studying languages and the differences and similarities in them.  I like the methods of communication created by humans, and how we create these shared, communal symbols, both written and verbal, in order to interact with one another.

I especially love learning about Japanese, by which I mean it drives me up a wall and I hate it.  That sounds like a horrible thing to say, but anyone who has ever studied Japanese knows exactly what I'm talking about.  Japanese has four very distinct and different syllabaries, each serving its own purpose and two of them stolen outright from other cultures.  Trying to figure out the written Japanese language is like trying to figure out, well, Japan.  It makes perfect sense right up until it doesn't.  You'll be walking down the street, seeing all the different yet familiar corporate logos from around the world.  People are wearing Adidas and staring at iPhones and listening to whatever racket passes for pop music these days.  It all looks perfectly normal and then BLAM GIANT ANIMATED CRAB HANGING OFF THE SIDE OF A BUILDING and then you're lost again.

I'm particularly fascinated by kanji, the Chinese ideograms that the Japanese use to express concepts and common objects, such as "love" or "water" or "economic analyst."  There's not a really clear number on how many kanji actually exist, and some of them have several different pronunciations, depending on usage.  These symbols serve a valuable function in Japanese.

But they are damned difficult to use, here in the 21st century, and here is where we come to my actual point, which is the interface of writing utensils and their effect on language.

The type of writing a culture uses (assuming it has a written language to begin with) is often shaped by utensils it uses to express that language.  The Sumerians, as far as we know, invented written language.  We know this because their language, cuneiform, is the oldest samples of writing we have ever found.

Except that that's probably bollocks.  Cuneiform is the oldest writing we have ever found because it consists of marks pressed into wet clay with a pointed stick.  Wet clay, left in the sun, becomes dry clay, which is really just a sort of rock.  (Sit down, geologists.)  It's the oldest writing because, well, it's the oldest.  There might have been earlier scripts than cuneiform, in other places, but those lost writings were scraped into tree bark that rotted away, or onto leaves that withered and crumbled, or onto dried skin that disintegrated.  Sumerian cuneiform lasted, because it was printed on a more durable medium, and went on to be adapted to serve a dozen other civilizations, before being pushed aside by the Phoenician alphabet.  There are still samples today.

Another example of historical writing, and one that I personally think belongs in the bin, is cursive.  Cursive script was developed centuries ago, back when most discourse was in Latin or Greek.  Writing utensils were generally some sort of quill or reed, dipped in ink and then drawn across the paper.  If you picked up the pen between each letter, you were basically just asking for ink spots and blots all over your nice clean letter to the Pope begging for a stay of execution for your uncle the fish merchant, who was in that part of Venice completely by mistake and had no idea how those sacks of gold went missing.  His Holiness could be put off by your sloppy penmanship and put an end to dear Uncle Heinrich ahead of schedule, even.  No, cursive handwriting was designed to keep the nib of the pen on the surface of the parchment as much as possible.

Once we had movable type, however, things changed.  The uniformity of type made it possible to make letters clearer and easier to read.  Spelling and grammatical rules became more uniform. Written communication was no longer an art form, but a clear method of transmitting ideas and concepts.  It is no mistake that the Renaissance and Enlightenment (not to mention the Protestant Reformation) all came about in the wake of movable type.  Information became more easily disseminated.  Cursive was dead at that point, it just didn't stop moving for some time.  You'll note that very few typesetters went to the trouble of creating typefaces to mimic cursive fonts.  Those were usually engraved by hand, and reserved for upper-class use.

Japanese writing does not come from the pen, of course, but from the brush.  There is still an art to writing Japanese correctly, not only in kanji, but also in hiragana and katakana, the phonetic scripts used where kanji is either not viable or is unusable.  Katakana, for example, is used almost exclusively to spell foreign words.  It doesn't work very well, however, because, instead of creating new symbols to express foreign sounds, they simply used the existing phonemes they already had and just created new symbols for those.  Which is daft.  It's like if we created another alphabet, ABC through Z, and just came up with different shapes for each letter, and then said, "Okay, this is the alphabet that immigrants use."

Each character in these different syllabaries must be written in a distinctive way, following what is called a "stroke order."  If you don't follow the correct stroke order, the meaning of the character can be reduced or even changed outright. This can and does cause problems.  Someone's address or surname might be mispronounced or misunderstood.  This could be a problem if you're trying to get the fire department to swing 'round your place.  (Don't get me started on Japanese addresses.)

So, on the one side, we have Western culture, with a written language driven by the pen; on the other, we have Asian culture and the brush.  Now, I'm not a fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which takes the position that language determines thought.  It seems a little too pat at least and borderline racist at worst.  (Also, it's kind of made up: Sapir and Whorf never co-authored any such hypothesis; later linguistic anthropologists [those guys again] made it up and stuck their name on it.)

But I do have to wonder if there is something to the idea that the way in which we put words on the page influences our way of thinking.  For example, I maintained throughout my entire academic career that taking notes by hand was a far more effective method of retaining lecture information than by typing on a computer.  (Purely anecdotal and not backed up by any data, although my GPA seems to bear it out.)  Does using a pen or pencil or brush change the way in which we process ideas?  What about a keyboard?  In just two generations, we have moved from writing on paper to the keyboard and mouse paradigm of the desktop computer to the trackpad/touchscreen gesture-driven language we use now.  Is it changing us?

And what of texting as a language interface?  Done primarily with thumbs, which is a new development; thumbs were previously used as a stabilization base for the fine motor control of a pen or pencil, or to operate the space bar on a keyboard.  Texting is different between cultures, as well.  In English, I text by selecting the letters on a virtual keyboard, much like a typewriter or laptop.  In Japanese, I text by entering the phonetic values of the Japanese word on an English-style keyboard.  I type in, "do-ko-ni-i-ki-ma-su-ka," and the computer in the phone uses contextual algorithms to translate that to "どこに行きますか".  It even selects the correct kanji for me, which is worrying some older Japanese, who think this is causing younger Japanese to forget how to write, a sort of parallel worry to Americans who think that an ability to write cursive is vital.

If I send a text in Mandarin, which is more and more rarely as I forget the language through lack of use, I simply write the characters with my fingertip on the screen.  The computer takes a good guess at what it thinks I was trying to write, and hits, most of the time, so that I say to a vendor in Guangzhou, "xie xie ni," and the correct characters are sent.  (True story: as I was writing this, every time I tried to switch the computer to my Chinese keyboard set, Chrome shut down, which is why you're seeing the phonetic words and not the characters.  My computer is getting old.)

I wonder if the homogenization of language input interfaces, brought about by the necessity of the vast majority of computers only using three or four operating systems worldwide, will result in a shift in thought?  Will we slowly begin to think in similar ways?

Would that even be a bad thing?

Inspirational Quote Goes Here

So recently, I've been on a bit of a personal journey that has involved losing a lot of weight and getting into shape.

I've gotta say, it's working pretty well.  I've had issues with body dysmorphia for as long as I can remember,  I've never been able to look at myself in the mirror and be happy, or even tolerant, with what I saw.

This all changed in January of this year when my cerebrovascular system, fed up with years of abuse and neglect, decided to seize up while I was interviewing a graphic designer in a Yokohama Starbucks.  I had a minor stroke and spent a couple of weeks in the hospital learning how to walk and use my left arm again, then another few weeks dealing with the clinical depression and such that inevitably comes as my brain tried to rebuild itself and reroute its circuitry.

The doctors were able to easily identify the source of my problems: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and Type I diabetes brought on by obesity.

I had to lose some weight.

I had plenty of time, lying there in bed with an IV in my arm, body monitors taped to my chest, and occasionally rolling over on to my side to pee into one of those humiliating plastic pitcher things, to think about my next step.  For the past four years, I'd been throwing all my OCD at doing well at university; having graduated, I was ready for a new challenge.

So, I decided this would be it.  At 52 years of age, I would get into the best shape of my life.

I post photos every day on Instagram and Facebook mostly as a way of showing my progress and documenting my work, and also because I'm slowly starting to be happy with the way I look and I want to share that growing confidence, which is, to me, just as important as my new health.  Every day I post these photos, and at least once a week, somebody sends me a message, and they all ask variations on a single theme:

"What's your secret?"

There is no secret.

Here's what I did.

1. The diet aspect is really simple: I just count calories, and log them into MyFitnessPal.  I eat between 1200-1400 calories a day, which maintains enough of a caloric deficit to lose weight.
Now, because that's admittedly not a lot to work with, I try to make each calorie count.  I eat a lot of protein, but I make it mostly vegetable proteins, because those digest more efficiently and keep the hunger pangs down.  This also helps keep me from losing muscle mass.
This also means that certain foods are just, as it were, off the table.  No booze, no potatoes, limited sugars, no breads.  I wind up eating a lot of grains, seeds, and vegetables.  I make a week's worth of lunches in the slow-cooker on Sunday and get through those.  I use a lot of chickpea (besan) flour, quinoa, and chia seeds.  On rare occasions I'll have a bit of fish or chicken, but I basically eat vegetarian most of the time.  I also have a protein shake after my workouts.

2. The workout: join a gym.  Go to the gym.  Go every day.  Actually, five days a week should cut it.  I don't go on Tuesdays and the gym is closed Wednesdays, so those are my two break days.
I do a simple, really simple, workout.  Every session, I do one exercise to work each of the five basic groups: core; arms; chest/shoulders; back; and legs.  Because I really need to lose around my stomach, I do a lot of ab exercises.  (Abdominal muscles, I'm told, are also different from other muscle groups in that they can handle daily exercise and don't require lengthy recovery times.)
I switch off every other day between two types of exercise, so in effect I have a Day A and a Day B workout.
Day A
Crunches
Planks
Helicopter Crunches (my name; not sure what they are actually called)
Chest or Shoulder Press
Bicep Curls
Back Extension
Leg Curls
Cardio 45 minutes

Day B
Crunches
Planks
Helicopter
Fly
Tricep Extension
Lat Pulldown
Leg Extension
Cardio 45 minutes

I also ride my bike to and from the gym.  This all together takes about two hours a night.  I get caught up on podcasts and news while I do the cardio.  Bluetooth headphones and an iPhone are your friend.

3. I ride my bike as much as I possibly can, especially on weekends.

That's pretty much it.  Just a complete and utter paradigm shift in diet, ten to twelve hours a week of exercise, and no excuses.  There is no secret.

Every single person I have talked to regarding this has said the same thing: "That sounds really hard."
It isn't.  For reference, here is a partial list of things that are difficult:
-Trying to walk a mile back to your office after having had a cerebral infarction;
-Lying on your back wide awake in an emergency room not knowing if your head is going to literally pop a blood vessel and bleed out, killing you;
-Learning how to walk again;
-Occupational therapy to regain basic motor skills;
-Climbing stairs when fifty pounds overweight;
-Not being able to directly look at yourself in the mirror.

These things are all hard.  What I'm doing now is simple.

I detest inspirational quotes.  But here's one, courtesy of the late Sir Terry Pratchett:

"The dwarfs figured out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way.  The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works."

Interfaces: Doors

Ironically, I was held up a bit in writing today's entry thanks to Google's new login system, which, in its efforts to be more user-friendly and secure, actually now requires me to log IN to one Google account, then log back out of it, and then log in to the one that I use to write these.  Google enjoys using the tagline, "One password, all of Google," conveniently forgetting that some of us have several Google accounts: one for work; one for other work; one for friends; one for networking; the one we created back when we got our first Gmail invite and thought that a jokey-sounding email address would be great, not realizing that very few university librarians are going to respond to research requests from "xXxBaDaZZ420xXx@gmail.com" and that you'll need something a bit more professional to put on the header of your resume.  (Yes, I just checked.  It's available, for now.  Knock yourself out.)

Unlike Google, which shares with Adobe Photoshop the very definition of the term "feature creep," the simple door, which humans the world over operate on a daily basis, has maintained the same basic form and function for millennia.  (Unless you were born in a barn, as my mother would say.  This makes no sense.  I've spent a bit of time in barns; they also have doors.  I keep meaning to ask her about that.)

Doors work pretty much the same no matter where you are in the world.  A panel of some material is placed over a basically human-shaped hole in the wall; said human then manipulates the panel in some way in order to swing it or slide it or fold it open.

You can tell a lot about a society and a people by its doors.  Big, heavy doors indicate that passage from one side of the wall in which the door is installed to the other is strictly controlled at best and contraindicated at worst.  There could be anything on the other side of the door that we want to keep out (or in): miserable weather; wild animals; prisoners; zombies; a particularly cunning goat. Lighter doors indicate a level of civility while still marking a boundary.  Thin panel doors, such as those found in American homes, provide a semblance of privacy while still allowing access, in case of an emergency or if the father of a sleepy high school student wants to kick it open at 7 AM and turn on the lights while shouting in German.

Doors, like any interface, both mirror and alter the object passing through them.  Imagine an alien species examining an empty American house.  They would be able to make a series of basic assumptions, simply by examining a standard door.  They would notice that exterior doors provide more security, in the form of sturdier construction and heavy locks, and conclude that the inhabitants lived in a society in which others could not be trusted fully.  They could examine the dimensions of the doorframes and make a basic guess at the size and shape of humanity.  (Even more so if they had our gravitational constant and the composition of our atmosphere to calculate from.)  They could even deduce quite a bit from the study of doorknobs: hand size and shape, strength, arm position and radial movement required.  A sufficiently clever species could probably work out the basic size, shape, and composition of a human being without ever seeing one, just from examining a door.

Japanese doors can be similarly studied, especially in terms of their effect on non-Japanese.  The doors in my apartment, for example.  From them I can conclude that doors, interior ones at least, serve a purely symbolic purpose, as the ones in my home keep out neither sound nor extremes of temperature nor small-to-medium sized insects.  They only barely manage to prevent the passage of light by being just dense enough to prohibit the passage of photons.

I can also conclude that Japanese people are somewhat shorter in stature than the average Westerner, another statement that is blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever spent over fifteen minutes in Japan.  The shorter Japanese doorsill means that anyone over 5' 9" here begins to walk with a permanent hunch after a while, unless they want a permanent dent in their skull at about forehead level.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see the doorway of an alien home, and I wonder how much I could deduce from it.

Interfaces: An Overview

It could be said that virtually everything we encounter as we make our way through our day-to-day life could be considered an interface of sorts.

This statement seems, on the face of it, to be so utterly facile and useless that the temptation is to dismiss it out of hand.  Of course interfaces surround us; you'd have to be practically comatose not to interact with the world around you.  That lede is so ignorant that I might have inadvertently made you slightly stupider just by reading it, and I apologize.

But that's kind of the point.  Everything we encounter is an interface, yes.  But not everything we encounter is a control interface.  My manipulation of the screen on my iPhone in order to send a text message to a friend is a control interface.  I'm directly controlling the outcome of the interaction between myself and the phone, and this is the sort of interface we mostly tend to think of when we consider the word.  My swearing in incoherent rage at the iPhone when it autocorrects "plastic" to "placid" for the seventh time is another sort of interface, and, generally speaking, a less productive one.

The fact that my iPhone looks and functions in a very similar fashion to every other cellphone on the market, however, is a very different sort of interface, as is the fact that the little icon on the button that I press to start and end the call looks like a telephone that hasn't been in general use for thirty years and that most cellphone owners have never even seen outside of a movie, or, for that matter, the button design itself, which is designed to evoke its mechanical ancestor.

Interface design both programs and is programmed by us.  We say that an easy-to-use interface is "intuitive," when in fact the "intuition" is years of programming passed down from previous technologies and ingrained usage.  I am currently typing this on a laptop computer that weighs about three pounds (about 1.4 kilos).  It is thinner than a pen when it is closed, and maintains a wireless connection to a worldwide network that provides me with research information at a moment's notice.
Yet I still enter text into this amazing device via a method derived from a mechanical invention over a hundred years old: the typewriter.  The keys on the computer are even arranged in the same manner as on my mother's old Brother portable machine, which used no electricity.  The QWERTY system was designed specifically to slow down professional typists, who could enter text so quickly that the metal slugs of type, each one on the end of its own little arm, would jam together.

We don't have handset telephones anymore. We don't need a button on a touchscreen.  We certainly don't need to keep the keys from jamming together on a MacBook Air.  Yet we are constantly using these interfaces, and thousands of others just like them, on a daily basis.

Not only that, we replicate the old experiences, expending time and effort on reverse-engineering objects with the verisimilitude of the obsolete.  I personally know people who insist on having "mechanical" keyboards for their computers, and who will pay extra for them.  Apple has created a haptic-touch feedback system for their watches and phones that duplicate the sensation of touching a mechanical button.  Some cars are so quiet and well-insulated now that their designers have created a function that plays back the sound of a car's motor back through the sound system.  And everyone has that friend who goes on about the superior sound qualities of vinyl.

Don't get me wrong.  Everyone has a right to the experiences they enjoy (within reason), and if enough people like something, the market will find a way to bring it to fruition.  Not every single change has to be adopted wholeheartedly and immediately.  That's not what this is all about.

What I hope to examine are the ways in which we operate and are in turn are operated by these interfaces, both great and small.  I want to look at interfaces at both ends of the scale, from the very small, such as typography and iconography, to the very large, such as architecture, and the very largest interface of all: religion.

This may have all been done before.  In fact, I know a lot of it has, because I'm certainly not smart enough to think it all up.  But, it hasn't been done by me.  Who knows?  I might accidentally discover something.

Research Notes 1

I'm beginning to work on my research topic, which is about the political structure and evolution of sociopolitical systems in open space.  On the one hand, I could write this as a straight-up research paper, with citations to support my theory and historical precedent to back it up.  On the other hand, I could just write it as a novel, which would give me more leeway in expressing myself and possibly make the process much more interesting both for me and the reader.

Of course, if I do that, I might just be re-writing The Expanse, which seems to cover that ground to some extent.

Basically, the theory, as it extends to orbital and deep-space platforms, posits that availability of resources is the major driving factor in the potential development of self-governance structures in space stations, and that certain inherent limitations on set resources (oxygen, for example) will limit or otherwise curtail the development of what we consider to be inalienable rights.

I see a station going through several stages of development, each one dependent on a few factors. For example, the International Space Station will most likely never be an independent political authority. It is simply too small to have any sort of independent existence, and is completely reliant on the supporting agencies of the controlling nation-states for sustenance resources.

So it appears that what I should do to start with is posit a fictional station, most likely located at a LaGrange point, that has been self-sufficient for some time and is now beginning to take its first tentative steps towards political autonomy.  That seems like a valid framework in which to explain the concepts of the research.

I need to explain the stages of sociopolitical development on a space station, and the factors that both inhibit and enhance development.  Many of these factors will be similar to development factors found on Earth; others will not.  Also of note is the difference between military outposts, scientific outposts supported by Earth nation-states, and corporate development and resource exploitation stations, and how these different management styles can result in differing political systems.

Maybe three stations, then, with three different economies.