Punya Mishra's Web

Scott McCloud is a pioneer in his field – the field of comics. (I had previously posted about him here). I just discovered (via Presentation Zen & Matt Koehler) a TED talk he had given back in 2005. It is a wonderful introduction to McCloud the man and his ideas. Worth viewing in full.

Of particular interest to me (given my TPACK leanings) is his idea of a “durable mutation” by which a old genre (that of comics) can realize its true potential given the capabilities of this new digital medium. This connection between form and function, style and substance is not easy to achieve, and McClouds ruminations on this issue are profound and inspiring. Watch the video, below:

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Interesting article in Scientific American about how flaws in our biology reveal our evolutionary history. Steven Gould talked about it in his famous essay on The Panda’s Thumb.

This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection (which the deniers of evolution can point to as well as example of divine intervention) but rather to imperfection (which is somewhat more difficult to explain by non-evolutionists – why would an all-powerful deity make mistakes). The lesson here is that imperfections point to a contingent historical past. Tracing these imperfections allows us to make inferences about how things came to be. Think of the Qwerty keyboard, to take an example from technological evolution, an artifact from the days of early manual typewriters, that actually required a design that would slowdown people’s typing speed to prevent the keys from getting stuck.

Just came across another page devoted to the same issue, just with more examples.

T. H. Nelson coined the word “hypertext” and more than anyone else, and much earlier than anyone else, truly understood how computing technology would change the text and print. One of my most treasured possession is a copy of his double-book (“Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now” and “Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens — a Minority Report”) that I bought from a garage sale back when I was a student at Illinois. These books in their choppy, “cut-n-past” and fragmented design seem to invite browsing (rather than reading) and in some strange way (at least it seems so in hindsight) foreshadow the kind of reading we do on the web today.

However, there is one significant way in which the web today is different from TH Nelson’s original idea. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an interesting article in today’s NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are wrapped and presented, in short they require the development of new genres. As the article says, and I quote:

This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.

There is a parallel here to the way in which Matt Koehler and I have articulated the TPACK framework.
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Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, “what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation, and wealth?”
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Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay in a recent New Yorker on the relationship between genius and age. It is popularly believed that genius is often tied up with precocity. There are two aspects to this. First, creativity requires the energy and brashness of youth. Think of Einstein publishing three key papers in 1905 at the age of 25, or Picasso, or Galois. Second, as a corollary to the first, once you cross a certain age there is no hope of a truly original idea.

Gladwell reports that there may be certain fundamental problems with this perceived connection between genius and age. He argues that there are two kinds of genius, the prodigies and the late bloomers, and that most of the attention has been paid to the former. Read the rest of this entry »

I do not understand David Brooks. Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the NYTimes. For the most part his columns are right-of-the-political wing nuttiness, garbed in some erudite clothing. I am not linking to them here but his past few op-eds suggesting that McCain would make a great president despite the shallow, erratic and negative campaign he has run have become somewhat repetitive and tiresome.

And then, once in a while, when I have just about decided not to read his columns any more, he throws out some really cool and interesting stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Corpus 2.0 by Marcia Nolte is a set of seven portraits illustrating how the human body could adjust itself to the design of products, including a hole in the lips for smokers and an extended shoulder for holding a phone. Very strange and very interesting, check it out

A quote in today’s oped in the NYTimes, about how this current financial crisis is difficult to understand since many of the decisions were taken by computer programs. The author quotes someone as follows:

the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. … Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Who is this mystery author?
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Noah, one of the students in my design doctoral seminar sent me this video by Ze Frank. Read the rest of this entry »

A NYTimes story about Spore, the new game / toy designed by Will Wright (Playing God, the Home Game) speaks about its connection to evolution. As the article says,

Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some scientists merely for making a game about evolution (though it will be fascinating to see how the game fares among people who do not believe evolution is real).

This raises the interesting question as to whether this game can be used to actually teach evolutionary theory.

However, I am not sure just how much the game truly represents evolution as biologists think about it. Read the rest of this entry »

… it will.

We have all see CAPTCHA’s (aka Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). They are images with somewhat garbled text on them that websites used to tell humans from automated programs. The idea is to prevent prevent accounts being created until a user correctly identifies letters in an image – something computers have a hard time doing. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you react to this flash animation?
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I should really visit Salon.com more often. Every time I go there I find something interesting, challenging and thought provoking. My recent foray there led me to a book review written by Laura Miller (The road to Wikipedia). Miller reviews “Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet” by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton. The book focuses on the “production, preservation and transmission” of knowledge and how that has changed over time, from an oral culture (such as in ancient Greece) to today’s world of the Internet and Web 2.0. Though I haven’t read the book the review has some interesting insights worth thinking about… Read the rest of this entry »

I had posted about this really cool video I recently found (see Life is about editing). Behold my surprise when one of the comments on the blog was from none other than Allee Willis (see her wikipedia page here, and personal website here). Read the rest of this entry »

In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Read the rest of this entry »

A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled “Editing is Cool.” The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee Willis as saying, “… you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more.”
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Today’s NYTimes story about an economist ranking art by the numbers (see A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks) bothered me a bit. As the article says, David Galenson’s method is based not on the aesthetic qualities of the artwork but rather on “how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.” His method is simplicity itself, and I quote: He tallied the number of illustrations of each piece in the 33 textbooks he found that were published between 1990 and 2005, on the assumption that the most important works merited the most illustrations.” By this method he argues that Picasso’s, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as being ranked as number 1. There are two main concerns I have about this methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

Learning through play has been an important part of my philosophy of teaching (and learning). In fact I have argued that play is far more important than games (though games have been receiving a great deal of educational interest lately). [You can read a previous posting about the relationship between play and games here.

Play in my mind (and in my teaching) if often connected with humor. As it turns out, recent research indicates that this connection has an evolutionary history. As this article argues, humor is a part of our "mammalian inheritance, and [is] closely related to rough-and-tumble social play.” Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago Sachin Kalbag, then at Digit, contacted me to write an article for a special for the magazine’s fourth anniversary issue. The topic at hand was Digital Convergence, what it is, and what does it mean for our future? Read the rest of this entry »

Two interesting articles about religions and magical thinking. The first from the Economist is about how scientists are attempting to explain religion in evolutionary terms. As the article says, “religion cries out for a biological explanation,” though previous attempts have not been very successful. However, it looks like that may be changing Read the rest of this entry »

PCWorld article on the The 10 Most Disruptive Technology Combinations. As the article says, “Often, even great new technology needs a partner to really change the world. Here are 10 marriages of technologies that have shaken the digital world over the last 25 years.”

A rumination on goofy sketches, the perils of reproduction as it plays out in a children’s game, a B-list Hollywood movie, and botany textbooks I read when in high school, all leading up to some thoughts on the history of scientific illustration. If this sounds even barely interesting read on…
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Olivia Judson has a great column in the NYTimes about evolution. Today’s column titled “Stop the mutants” is a thought experiment on how evolution would fare if all mutations were to magically stop. It is an interesting article, and in keeping with her previous writing, it is well written, thoroughly researched and extremely thought provoking.

That said, this blog posting is not about biology but rather about something relatively mundane, a mention of East Lansing, MI in Olivia Judson’s column. East Lansing of course is the home of Michigan State University! Read the rest of this entry »

Some thoughts on play and games inspired by a recent article in the NYTimes Magazine titled “Taking Play Seriously“. Based on the article I argue that play is essential for learning… I also throw in some thoughts about the distinction between play and games, and why I prefer one over the other. Read the rest of this entry »

In blogging Kevin Kelly’s piece on “Better than free” (read that post here), I came across another site that he maintains, titled “Street Use,” self-described as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

There is an absolutely dull and pointless story in today’s NYTimes on creativity. Though it is titled Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work, this story clearly did not take much time to write. I agree not all articles in the Times are (or need to be) hard news… but even opinion pieces should have something new to contribute. Read the rest of this entry »

I just discovered through the PhD-Design list an online book titled “Design: Creation of artifacts in society” by Karl T. Ulrich. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicholas Carr has an interesting post (titled Rewiring the mind) on the findings of a recent study into the information seeking behaviors of scholars. (The full study in pdf format can be downloaded here.) Carr seems to suggest that these results indicate a fundamental change in human cognition. I have to agree that new technologies do generate (and require) new forms of literacy – but I am not sure I completely agree that interaction with information on the Internet is changing how we think. Worth reading and discussing…

Image credit: breezeDebris via Flickr

This piece was written sometime early 1996 when we were expecting our first child. I posted it to the web when we were expecting our second. It still reads well… Read the rest of this entry »