The Occasional Blargh

So, should I place a cryptic link here that readers won’t understand unless they hire a private eye to make sense of things? Nah, that’s not me. It’s just that I just read an interesting story on how IBM has blocked Siri because they fear she’ll leak secrets to Apple, and now I have an excuse to post another Zatanna picture. Honestly, I’m surprised that this story is taken as a surprise.

Now, if I’ve somehow gathered new readers they may be wondering what is going on where I’m not writing all that frequently. To those readers, I must confess that sadly, those long sabbaticals between posts are the norm around here. That said, I am in the middle of a move, which may be followed by a second move (because I can’t do anything the easy way). So for this time, I do have a excuse for not posting. I haven’t burnt out yet.

Still, given how I always make the “I can retire” joke when I find any other blog or site that tries to cast a critical eye, I can see how others can be concerned if I will abandon this place, too. I joke about it, but I know the feeling that can come when it feels like the hope of improving the conversation has faded visible and that you’re just snarking into the aether. It does help to step away, not to do this every day. (It’s funny that the point of this blog wasn’t initially to be the tech press critic, but I just stumbled into it.) I guess the above picture fits this statement as well.

Often there are two ways to tell a story.

Dustin Rowles of Pajiba has this to say about the unlikely success of The Avengers.

A collection of second-tier superheroes from a comic-book brand that had been churning out mediocre efforts in a marketplace suffering from superhero fatigue directed by a guy with a series of low-rated mostly unsuccessful television series and only one feature film to his name, a $25 million grossing cult film. That’ll never work.

A commenter to that very article takes issue with the “unlikely” part of the equation.

I, too, am completely blown away that a massively-hyped culmination of years of movies and a marketing blitz that most franchises would kill for combined with a director and property that the entire internet has had sloppy nerd boners over for years made money.

That sure showed them!

 

You don’t really notice this, but most iconic representations of actions and objects are based on objects from ten, twenty, thirty years ago or more. Scott Hanselman noticed this.

One of the funnier things from John Gruber’s blog was his ongoing crusade against the floppy-disk icon used to denote the Save action, which concluded with this post promoting the idea of doing away with the icon and saving altogether. (Ironically, when he got his wish, he had trouble coping.) Apparantly lost on him was that even his dear iPhone, iPad and Macs (along with almost every other device) also used icons based on obsolete items.  The phone icon of an iPhone is a curved handset. Voice mail is represented by a spool of audio-cassette tape. Electronic mail, and maybe other types of instant messaging is represented by pictures of envelopes, postage stamps or even outdoor free-standing mailbox. You’ll see a Larry King Live or game-show host microphone to represent audio input of most stripes. There are no gears in an iPad, an iPhone or a laptop computer (aside for perhaps the mechnical hard drive in many of the latter), but that is Apple’s representation for altering the settings in a control panel.

And about control panels, what we call that stuff betray that these concepts predated the iPhone. With machines, there once was a whole panel where the major controls of the device resided. Or dialing a phone number, a phrase still used even though dials disappeared from phones in the 1970s or 80s. Speaking of dials, Tiny Toon Adventures exhorted people to not “touch that dial”, even though dials disappeared from televisions (and most radios for that matter) roughly around the same time.

Icongraphy and pictography are very much like languages and as such the pictures, like words in languages, can grow on and outlive the the initial physical object or idea that inspired it. We still refer to lunacy even though we really don’t think the moon drives people crazy. We don’t think this day of the week, Sunday, has any closer connection to the sun than the other days. Likewise, despite decades of women wearing jeans without controversy and the continued existance of Scotsmen in kilts, pictograms will still distinguish men and women by placing the woman in a skirt/dress and the man in pants. Or to be much more cryptic, Venus’ hand mirror (♀) and Mars’ shield and spear (♂) could be used instead, though fewer men will ever make use of a spear while many do make use of hand mirrors.

In other words, it’s not really that big of a deal we still save to floppy. We are writing commentary about it using pictures even older than that whose original physical world meaning has long been lost. I am, of course, referring to these letters which have been put together in the words that populate this post and the posts I have linked to.

Embarassing.

(David Foster Wallace would not be proud.)