Migrants vs. idiots in Germany

A brilliant link (in German). For the non-Kraut speakers out there, the NPD, a far-right neo-Nazi party, sent a form letter to German politicians of non-German ethnic background. In it, they explained the Latin origin of the word "migrant" (and rudely addressing the recipients as such, instead of by name, claiming along the way that the Roman Empire fell because of too many migrants) and invited them to migrate out of Germany.

In response, a German politician of Turkish background replied by paraphrasing the letter, explaining the Greek origin of the word "idiot", reminding the writer that the Greeks invented democracy precisely so that idiots like the writer would never take power — and in a postscript noted that the German text of the original letter was full of punctuation and grammatical errors, which the respondent was kind enough to correct.

Nevermind that those "migrants" who destroyed the Roman Empire in the West were, uh, Germans.

Ze GERMAN Technology Museum is GERMAN

Yesterday, I was with the kids at the German Technology Museum in Berlin-Kreuzberg. On the whole, the exhibitions were well made, but I was irked at the strangely Germanophile emphasis of the things on display.

There were many examples of teutocentric stuff:

• In the aviation section, Hannover's Karl Jatho and Berlin's Otto Lilienthal are lavishly represented, in particular Lilienthal's gliders are all over the place, but the Wright Brothers get barely a mention (and a small scale model of their flyer) in spite of their critical role in the development of controlled aviation.
• In rocketry, no mention of Goddard, but plenty about the Nazi V2 and Saturn rocket engine used in the Apollo moon program (which of course was also from von Braun and a descendant of the V2's engine).
• In computing, you could easily get the impression Konrad Zuse singlehandedly invented computing - but barely a mention of Charles Babbage, nothing about Turing or ENIAC that I saw, no Apple I or II or Mac or IBM or UNIX, but Zuse machines everywhere.

Yet the museum is mostly bilingual and had lots of international visitors, and had an extensive display about the Berlin Airlift, emphasizing the positive role Americans played. Indeed the museum is topped by a "raisin bomber", one of the aircraft used by the US military to fly goods into West Berlin during the Soviet blockade and still fondly remembered here.

I'm used to American museums being very America-centric, but to have a German museum behave that way – where Germans in my experience are usually much more circumspect about being nationalist and are more prickly about not focusing too much on one country – is a little jarring.

One personal note was that the lobby has a Cessna plane hanging there. I immediately guessed that it was a very certain plane, and was right – the very plane that Mathias Rust flew and landed in Moscow in 1987, embarrassing the Soviet military. I remember it well, because at the time I had to write an essay in high school about what I would do with a million dollars. I found the topic dull beyond belief and didn't take it too seriously. Whereas the other kids wrote things like they'd buy an awesome car or donate it to the poor or whatever, I said I'd buy 100,000 pairs of Levi's at bulk discount and hire Rust to fly them into the USSR for sale at a huge markup, then use the proceeds to buy more Levi's and sell them in the USSR, and so on until I had gained economic control over the Soviet Union and would bring it to its knees. Then I'd seize control of the Soviet Union and use nuclear blackmail to take over the world. (I got an A. And probably ended up on some FBI watch list.)

On the whole I'd highly recommend the museum, in spite of its flawed emphasis on German achievements to the expense of other, historically more important figures. Kudos for the interactivity of the exhibits, but a big minus for historical context and scope.

Accents in English: All aboat moases in my hoases

Over on Slate, there is a fascinating article about how local accents in North American English are still on the move. Meanwhile I'm always amused when people ask me if I'm Canadian when I let a Virginian "aboat", "hoase" and "moase" slip out. But then again I'm probably a dying breed. And if anyone claims to not have an accent, I will smack you with a dead ghoti.

Design: I'm back in the GDR, don't know how lucky you are, boy

Over on this page you can see a fascinating collection of photos from the former East Germany or GDR. It really shows how the GDR was almost obsessed with "modern" design – and only supports my suspicions that Ikea designers just go raiding old GDR material for ideas.

Be sure to post in the comments about your favorite photos.

The Barchetta prophecy

You know the Rush song "Red Barchetta"? Of course you do. And if you don't, I hereby proclaim you to be a philistine and order you to buy "Moving Pictures", the greatest album of like forever, and burn several Lady Gaga CDs as an offering to Geddy Lee. By that I mean really burn with lighter fluid, not burn them onto a physical CD. Then again Lady Gaga probably never sells CDs anymore anyway, just MP3s, so, er, burn your hard drive containing the Lady Gaga MP3s. And if you just buy an MP3 of "Red Barchetta" and not the whole album, I will personally hunt you down and...well, do something you really really wouldn't like but for which you couldn't press charges. But I digress.

The song is a kind of sci-fi geek's ballad, telling the story of a guy in some unspecified future where cars are banned who visits his uncle to race an (illegal) red barchetta (that being a type of Italian sports car for those not aware). He is soon hunted down by the cops for doing so. I always knew it was based on a sci-fi story, but could never remember which one, then stumbled across a site which has the linked story at the end of this post.

The reason I link it: OK, it says it takes place in 1982 – which is about as (sadly) hilarious as "Blade Runner" with its flying cars and deep-space colonies taking place in 2019 – but the story is otherwise eerily prescient, especially considering it was written in 1973. I quote:

The valley roads were no longer used very much: the small farms were all owned by doctors and the roads were somewhat narrow for the MSVs (Modern Safety Vehicles). (Note: Or, as we say today, SUVs.)

The safety crusade had been well done at first. The few harebrained schemes were quickly ruled out and a sense of rationality developed. But in the late Seventies (Note: or maybe late Nineties...), with no major wars, cancer cured and social welfare straightened out, the politicians needed a new cause and once again they turned toward the automobile. The regulations concerning safety became tougher. Cars became larger, heavier, less efficient. They consumed gasoline so voraciously that the United States had had to become a major ally with the Arabian countries. The new cars were hard to stop or maneuver quickly, but they would save your life (usually) in a 50-mph crash.

[...U]nforeseen complications had arisen. People became accustomed to cars which went undamaged in 10-mph collisions. [...] But the damages and injuries actually decreased, so the government was happy, the insurance industry was happy and most of the car owners were happy. Most of the car owners – the owners of the non-MSV cars – were kept busy dodging the less careful MSV drivers, and the result of this mismatch left very few of the older cars in existence. If they weren't crushed between two 6000-pound sleds on the highway they were quietly priced into the junkyard by the insurance peddlers...

That, my friends, is downright spooky, especially for 1973 in the midst of the OPEC oil shocks and the Cold War – allies of the Arab nations in exchange for oil? Naw, it'll never happen. And trade MSV for SUV and whaddya got? Ford Exhibitions driven by soccer moms with iPhones plastered to their ears, driving 'till they tip over then blaming Firestone, ¡olé!

You can read the (fairly short) story, A Nice Morning Drive by Richard S. Foster (along with the story of how Rush was inspired by it to write "Red Barchetta") at the Rush fan resource site 2112.net. And tell them I sent you.

My uncle has a country place / that no one knows about / He says it used to be a farm / Before the Motor Law...

Gospel of St. Cuthbert to return home

Cuthbert of Lindisfarne:
Fresco in Durham Cathedral

I am delighted by the news that the Gospel of St. Cuthbert is returning home to Durham Cathedral.

Rather ironically, I was just reading about this very book in "In Search of England" by Michael Wood – an excellent book, by the way, for anyone interested in English history and heritage.

I would love to see Cuthbert's Gospel in person – it is said to be remarkably beautiful, and was worn by St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (my favorite saint, pictured at right) around his neck while on his travels around Northumbria. So I'm delighted to see the book returning home to Durham, and hope to someday see it in person in the world's most beautiful cathedral, which is home to the shrine of Cuthbert. It would be a return trip for me as well, having visited the cathedral and shrine in 1994, and I've been wanting to go back for a long time – now I have an even better reason to do so.

[Cuthbert] was wonderfully forbearing and his courage in bearing hardship in body and mind was unsurpassed [...] . Such was his zeal for prayer that sometimes he kept vigil for three or four nights in a row without ever sleeping in his bed. Whether he was praying alone in some hidden place or reciting the psalms, he always did manual work to fight off the heaviness of sleep.

From the "Life of St. Cuthbert", The Venerable Bede

Where web design and print design intersect

I programmed my first website way back in 1995 or so. (Somewhere I even still have a copy. No, I won't show it. Must save myself the embarrassment. ;)) Since then, the Web has grown immensely, and the technology has changed dramatically as well – the way we use HTML today has little in common with the methods used back in 1995. Cascading style sheets, or CSS, were not even on the radar screen, and separating design from content was laughably impossible: the design and content were so intricately and hopelessly mixed up together that any changes had to be done on each page, and the content couldn't be easily reused anywhere else. Maintaining a site of more than a few dozen pages quickly turned into a major headache, because it generally involved editing pages by hand or using roll-your-own template systems of limited use and often requiring substantial computing power (by the standards of the day).

I'm not going to make any predictions – as Yogi Berra said, never make predictions, especially about the future. But I can see some trends that I find very exciting, both as a designer and as a programmer (which I tend to be in roughly equal parts).

First and foremost, it is increasingly the case that Web pages can be (and increasingly are) designed with the same level of precision and consistency you would expect from a DTP program like InDesign. That might not sound all that amazing to someone not familiar with the underlying technology, but believe me, this is huge. It used to be that any sort of layout had to be cumbersomely chopped up into manageable bits and then painstakingly put back together again using HTML code elements that were never intended to be used that way. The result was one big messy kludge that somehow worked, and often didn't work the way the designer wanted.

Typographical control was almost nil – you were stuck with whatever fonts the user happened to have, but worse, the way CSS was interpreted and displayed by the various browsers was often wildly different. This meant spending a lot of time testing on all the various browsers and being forced into a sort of lowest common denominator, limited by whatever the crappiest browser on the market was capable of doing, while also having to use non-standard tricks and kludges just to get it to work. Even the most trivial of layouts often involved ridiculous amounts of effort to achieve, frustrating designers and clients alike.

Today, though, the current browsers are all more or less standards compliant, for the first time in like ever, though this was promised back in the mid-90s when Microsoft was still worried about Netscape, only to ignore the issue once Netscape was suitably crushed. With true standards emerging, this means web designers can spend lots more time concentrating on creative design and less worrying about whether this or that design idea is even possible, or would take too much time to implement, or be forced into that lowest common denominator because so many users still use Internet Exploder 6 or Lotus Notes.

On top of all the possibilities in layout, with HTML5 and CSS3, combined with some useful tools like WebINK, Cufón, FontSquirrel, jQuery and others, there is far more freedom in using elements like fonts – there are dozens, if not hundreds, of free web fonts available (such as Google’s excellent collection), and it is also readily possible to use existing fonts as Web fonts, provided of course you've got the right license or at least figure out a way of protecting the font from being downloaded.

Because of the way CSS supports print-oriented units like inches, centimeters, and points, it is at quite possible to readily design "normal" page layouts using HTML and CSS for printing on any current platform. That would have been unthinkable as recently as five years ago. The reason this matters is because until now, if designers or clients wanted to present content to users and ensure the complete and total consistency in the way the content is displayed, there were only proprietary options available – namely PDF and Flash. And to use PDF or Flash content, the user had to have the right additional software, which on more obscure platforms may not even exist or only in a very patchy way (like PDF was for ages on Linux) and more often than not just increased the instability of the whole thing.

Now, though, it is increasingly becoming possible to present such content with nothing more than a simple browser – no more being tied to one company's software ecosystem, be it Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or anyone else.

Long ago on Slashdot in the late 1990s, one of the more notorious trolls, called Meept, gloriously said he would like to take all the many divided factions of Linux and combine them into one big divided faction. Replace "Linux" with "web development", and he was oddly prescient. Yes, the platforms are still fragmented and divided, and there is still bickering amongst Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and your Aunt Reba (who really should get around to fixing those bugs I sent to her). But now we web designers are no longer forced to effectively build multiple versions of websites in the name of consistent presentation, speeding up development times and unleashing a lot of creative potential – while also increasing the overall pool of design talent working in that one big divided web development faction.

Where it gets interesting is where this will start to encroach on PDF and with it InDesign. Given the cross-platform possibilities, it will start to make more and more sense to use HTML and CSS as the platform of choice for presenting designed content, rather than additionally creating PDFs and DOCs and whatever else comes to mind. While InDesign will be with us for some time yet – just as Dreamweaver continues to be in use today, in spite of it really being totally unnecessary. (OK, so I'm a hand-coding fascist. BBEdit is good enough for me, should be good enough for anyone. *grin*) But by wiping out being dependent on one software provider, more and more potential will be unleashed, and change in both the Web and common printing will continue to accelerate.

Where will be be in 2013? I dunno, maybe we'll be looking back on the world's destruction thanks to those pesky Mayans and their calendar, but it will certainly be the beginning of Armageddon for proprietary platforms for print and the Web. Flash is on its way out (helped by iPhone and iPad), PDF's end is readily imaginable, and looking a bit further, even operating systems could be opened up by this. What's more, it is becoming ever easier for the non-technical to create stunning products without gobs of obscure knowledge, and with online collaboration ever easier, the possibilities for a creative explosion look ever greater.

I could now lean forward, peer out of my good eye, stroke my long white beard and wave my walking stick at all the young whippersnapper web designers who never had to work in such unspeakable conditions like we old-timers, but in fact it's truly exciting to see where we are now in such a short span of time. This is a Gutenberg moment we're experiencing, where media are becoming radically personalized and democratized in ways unimaginable as recently as the 1980s.

Die, PDF. Die, InDesign. So that more wonderful things may be born...

How God heals through music

I feel closest to God when singing or chanting. I serve as cantor in our parish, and often enjoy singing just for the sake of singing. I have a pretty strong bass-tenor voice that carries well, so my neighbors will no doubt appreciate my booming renditions of American patriotic songs in the shower. Then again, maybe this is why they always give me weird looks. But I digress.

The following video strikes me for two reasons. The first is my own delight in music. The second is that I briefly worked for a media company specializing in nursing care, and of course treatment for dementia was a major topic: It is immensely difficult to get patients suffering from dementia to re-emerge from their shells. It is rare to see someone so dramatically transformed, and the man's reaction is wonderful indeed – as is what he has to say about it at the end.

A man resurrected, if only briefly, by God's power in music. Enjoy.

More Xanity Design websites featured by Extensis WebINK

I am pleased to announce that Extensis has chosen another two websites I designed for their WebINK Showcase. The Xanity Design site itself was already featured (see previous blog entry); now the sites for the International Children's Fund and the Old Catholic parish of Hannover, Germany, both designed and programmed by Xanity Design, have also been added to their showcase.

Additionally, the website for Fuchs und Hase, which Xanity Design programmed and built, is also featured there.

Thus no less than four Xanity sites are now in the showcase – huzzah!

Xanity Design site prominently listed on Extensis WebINK Showcase

I am pleased to announce that Extensis has listed my Xanity Design website on their WebINK Showcase, currently third on their page, which you can see at www.extensis.com/en/WebINK/showcase/.

Live map of fonts being bought

There is a really nice tool for seeing what fonts are popular these days – a live world map showing what fonts are being bought where, in real time. Pretty slick idea, nice execution, and fun to watch.

As my typography professor and I once joked with each other, "he who dies with the most fonts wins".

Click here to see the map.

John Cleese on creativity

The next best thing to a Transporter: a 3D virtual world

Going back to the topic of computer graphics, here is a video on YouTube that is even more mind-boggling, both in terms of the sheer genius behind it and in terms of the applications.

The remote collaboration example is particularly eerie. But for someone whose kids, sadly, have pretty much only had contact with Grandma and Grandpa through telephone and Skype, it raises hopes that maybe more is possible while remaining thousands of miles apart. A Star Trek-like transporter is still ages away, but this would do for now...

(Hat tip to Lael Tucker for the link.)

Computer graphics: You've come a long way, baby

This is a truly stunning video, the opening credits of the Spanish movie Eva.

Eva / Film Main Titles from Dvein on Vimeo.

When I think back to the mid-1980s, when I was so awestruck by the IMAX movie The Magic Egg, or a bit later The Lawnmower Man, it just makes this all the more incredible to see how far computer-generated graphics have come. Now if only they could finally get people's faces and body motion to look more realistic. Something about the eyes is just still...wrong...