ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society: White House Chooses New Homeland Security Chief
: ‘According to American University Law Professor and ACS Faculty Advisory Herman Schwartz, Chertoff is the second major Bush cabinet nominee to be involved in the scandal over abusive treatment of detainees. In an August 18, 2004 op-ed published in Newsday, Schwartz writes that “[h]arsh ‘stress and duress’ tactics used by the CIA in early 2002 – such as simulated drowning – were reviewed and apparently cleared by the Justice Department Criminal Division, then headed by Michael Chertoff.”‘
Month: January 2005
Seth Nickell – Design Fu : All Work And No Play
Seth Nickell – Design Fu : All Work and No Play points out that GNOME has done usability really well by this point, and that just doing usability well is boring. He also points out that usability is relative to requirements and expectations, and requirements and expectations are relative to people’s understanding of what the software is — which can be changed by reimagining and repositioning the application.
Haven’t read the article he links to, just the blog entry, as of yet. Premature blogulation. But it sounds cool so I’m blogging it as a reminder to myself.
Update: Yeah, read it, and it is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the way communities of developers grow and change, and the tradeoffs that are made as goals change. Seth’s introspection on this one is great.
How to be Creative?
GapingVoid has made some good noise lately by releasing a Creative Commons licensed book on “how to be creative.” It’s in PDF form and also on the web.
I’d say it’s partly brilliant and partly wrong-headed.
I think that depending on who you are when you read it you are either going to take away the brilliant parts and think it’s a wonderful book or the wrong-headed parts and come away the worse for it.
Wrong-headed: he doesn’t (at least on the face of it) shake the myth of Successful People vs Losers. He’s always talking about failed creative people who work as waiters and whatnot. But then he’ll turn around and say: “Even if your path never makes any money or furthers your career, that’s still worth a TON.” Well, wait a minute. Should we pity the pathetic losers working as waiters because they didn’t have sufficiently different or unique ideas, or should we realize that what they’re doing may be “still worth a TON”?
There is a lot of this kind of conflict going on in the work. He takes a broad “everyone can do this, it doesn’t take special talent, just hard work” tack in one section, and then he talks about how really talented people “don’t need props” and mere hacks do. Wait, does talent matter or not?
Again and again he equivocates on really important issues. I think he says some really deep & true & important things, things where society’s assumptions are wrong and harmful, and we need to see the truth, but then he lapses back into those wrong assumptions on another page.
This is frustrating. But I think it’s a good book nonetheless, and I am really glad he wrote it and made it available. Lot of very very good stuff in there.
And I must admit I wrote this before finishing it, so I may have missed some very important stuff before the end.
Boing Boing: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his
Boing Boing: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his “version” of Enron.
You know all those cool “click for charity” things where you can click to give a buck to hungry people or something?
Now the magic of the internet has given us a link you can click to deliberately cost a robber-baron corporate scumhole five to twelve cents for nothing. (Unless you start reading and believing his web site, in which case it’s not for nothing…)
Dowhutchalike
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ”Do you think I could be a writer?”
”Well,” the writer said, ”I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ”I liked the smell of the paint.”
Jeffrey Jones (classic fantasy illustrator), interviewed in the Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook from Vanguard Press:
P: When you’re drawing, how important is the content? How conscious are you fo that as opposed to the lines you’re putting down, or is it just shape oriented?
J: Well, content is generally way down at the bottom somewhere. Up at the top is, ‘How much fun am I having?’ That’s way up at the top. ‘Is the ink flowing off the end of this pen? How does the piece of paper feel? Am I having fun or am I not having fun?’ That’s what’s first.
Second thing is, as I’m making lines, ‘Am I creating something that’s solid? Is this convincing?’ And then, further on down the line, composition comes in. ‘Is my eye traveling around or is it getting hung up in a particular place?’ Somewhere near the bottom is content. But it’s important because if it were some other content I probably wouldn’t be doing all the stuff above it. If it was a drawing of an automobile, I probably wouldn’t be doing all the other stuff — the fun thing wouldn’t even enter into it. So it is important, but it’s way down the list.
Do you like what you’re doing? The smell of the paint? Do you like sentences?