“Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.” — Niklaus Wirth

From the Programming Quotes Archive

I recently received my first vegetable basket of the year from my farm sharing program (I’ve decided to try and stop using the term “Community Supported Agriculture” because I find it a little unclear).

Besides being delicious, it’s also such a refreshing experience to feel even a little more connection to our food. Take, for example, the following excerpt from an email they recently sent out:

. . .we are blessed with a dynamic and efficient team, which includes Manuel, a foreign worker from Guatemala who is really friendly and adapting to his new environment. In these parts, May 20th is usually the date after which risks of frost have dissipated, but the day before yesterday, the mercury fell very low and affected several tomato plants we had recently planted as well as basil plants. The flea beetles, a tiny coleopteran that emerges from dormancy when the temperatures reach 18ºC, really love our asian greens and have caught us off guard and left little holes in the tender leaves. In the sheepbarn, many lambs have come this spring and we are waiting for a flock of laying hens.

The farm also encourages people to come and visit so they can see exactly where their food comes from. They’ve got a great website too (en Français).

I dropped-by my local pharmacy to buy a new pillow, but was rather flabbergasted to find every single one in a big sturdy box, with no demo models to be seen. As someone who has to be careful about my back, I found this made buying the proper pillow nearly impossible.

The simple fix would be to package them in thick plastic, so the customers can at least get a sense for them. A pillow is a piece of equipment I’ll use more than anything I own. It has to be perfect.

Far too many things are over-packaged—most of the time I want to be able to pick them up, feel them in my hand, and get a sense for how they’re made. I’m no longer satisfied with a photo of the product on the box—photography and Photoshop can make anything look good.

“With type, as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.”

- Robert Bringhurst in the Elements of Typographic Style.

A good lesson for everyone, and one that we can extend to many facets in life.

I’ve been working on developing the habit of never buying things on price alone. My goal is to de-commoditize my consumerism as much as possible, to work towards having less stuff, but of a higher quality.

Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling. Luxury goods are organized waste. They say, “I can afford to spend money without regard for intrinsic value.”

Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more.

I’m not always a fan of Seth Godin, but he nails it here.

When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins. This is why one never gets the important things done because there is always something else one has to do first. Naturally, we will always tend to do the most urgent task first. In this way, the slow and long-term activities lose out. In an age when the distinctions between work and leisure are being erased, and efficiency seems to be the only value in economics, politics and research, this is really bad news for things like thorough, far-sighted work, play and long-term love relationships

Eriksen, The Tyranny of the Moment, 2001

Taken from No Time to Think

A histogram is a graph that shows how colour or brightness is represented in an image. It should be familiar with anyone who has opened up Photoshop’s “levels” window.

Histoface is a typeface of sorts, which creates an image with a hidden message in the histogram.

Here is an image created with HistoFace. As an image it looks just like a white to black gradient:

But open up the histogram in photoshop, and you get:

Taking this a little further, I created three separate images, and put them into the red, green, and blue channels of an image. This created this image, which has “red”, “green”, and “blue” as hidden messages in each respective colour channel. You’ll have to check for yourself though.

You can make your own on the HistoFace page.

(Thanks Jay!)

¹

Herman Daly, ecological economist, in an interview with Seed Magazine:

Elementary economic theory describes something called a circular flow diagram: Firms supply goods and services to households, which in turn supply labor and capital factors of production back to the firms. This flow goes around and around, and money flows in the opposite direction to pay for it.

The way it’s usually depicted is as a closed circulatory system. What’s imagined is the economy’s digestive system: the input of low-entropy raw materials from the environment and the expulsion of high-entropy waste products back into the environment. A fundamental assumption of those who treat the economy like a totally circular exchange is that the environment is infinite relative to us, that natural resources and space absorb our waste are not scarce. The assumption is no longer valid.

. . . we’re faced with two impossibilities. On one hand, it’s politically impossible to stop growth. On the other hand, it’s biophysically impossible to continue it ad infinitum.

1. Diagram via Sparknotes

Here’s a fantastic set of re-imagined movie novelizations. Every single one is great.

See also: Elephants and Dinosaurs, by the same artist

(Thanks Vinnie!)

I have the feeling that just about everyone has experienced going into a chain restaurant and asked them to make an exception on something, only to have it rejected.

“could I get an ice cream cone instead of onion rings? They’re the exact same price”.

“I’m not allowed to do that, sorry”.

Can’t open the cash for change. Can’t even be trusted to put the right amount of ketchup on a hamburger, so they had to engineer a caulking gun-like device to do it exactly the same every time. Want a large glass of water? Too bad, because the management counts the number of cups. This is a serious deficit in trust, and it’s a problem.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the lowly endangered shopkeeper, and her family-owned business. They can’t always compete with the big chains on price, but in many cases the service more than makes up for it.

We might have to pay a little more, but once you find a good shop, you’ll be more likely to get what you want. Getting what you want means more intelligent and effective consumption, which I believe is better for us, and the environment, in the long run.

Jane Jacobs, famous urban planning critic, was also quick to point out that the shopkeeper plays an important role in the neighborhood—watching the street, creating a hub for communication, and keeping money and business local.

Of course, we shouldn’t deify the shopkeeper too much. There are plenty of family-owned stores and restaurants with terrible products and services. The chain business does have consistency going for it. If you go to McDonald’s, you’re virtually guaranteed to get the same meal each time. It will never be completely terrible, but it will never be good either. Locally-owned restaurants might be terrible, but they might also be fantastic.

Part of me thinks we’re simply a society that doesn’t care anymore. We drive through ugly suburbs to mediocre restaurants, and buy cheap crap from the biggest, simplest, most obvious stores, run by people who don’t care, and aren’t given any real responsibilities or incentive to do the sort of real work they could be doing. We have little to no quality public space, and we’re too busy watching television to talk to our neighbors to find out what the good local restaurants are.

So, in concluding this long rant, I’d like to urge you to support locally-owned business. Eat their food, buy their stuff, and enjoy their services.