s03e04 · 28 March 2016
Unordered List
This issue weaves together observations on how digital interfaces manipulate user choice (through aggressive confirmation dialogs), recent scientific breakthroughs in physics and mental health technology, and longer meditations on infrastructure—both the physical kind (naval computing systems, city design) and the psychological kind (therapeutic apps and hospitalization program friendships). The connecting thread is a fascination with systems, whether they're designed to shame us into compliance, engineered into destroyers, or built into our cities and minds, often revealing something about how we're shaped by the structures we inhabit and create.
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0.0 Station Ident
Sitting in a grocery store cafe at 11:40am on Monday, 28 March 2016.
1.0 Unordered List
- Confirm Shaming[1], a tumblr collection of applications/services/sites that use passive-aggressive, borderlining on actually aggressive language to make it pretty clear what the desired action is; you know the kind "Sign up for a subscription/No I'd rather pay full price and be an idiot" that relish taking agency away from users and making them feel stupid. Because hey, I like feeling stupid.
- There's a chance that LIGO, the observatory that detected colliding black holes, might have detected dark matter, too[2]; there's a theory that dark matter is actually made up of primordial black holes[3]. This has nothing to do with brand design, however.
- The set/product design[4] that went into Ben Wheatley's new film High-Rise is hands-down gorgeous. High-Rise comes out on general/online release in the USA in late April. I have no idea if it's already available in the UK.
- If you've ever been in a partial hospitalization program for mental illness, you might recognize some of the techniques that Well-Adjusted Batman[5] uses. Meanwhile, while it's known [citation needed] that animals can help with depression, I'm intrigued by the potential a domesticated BB-8 unit might offer[6]. And speaking of partial hospitalization programs, I've been (fortunate?) to have met and made friends during treatment with people whom I might never meet during my regular life. One thing I noticed? Everyone has smart phones, and everyone trades tips on apps that can be used to help with mental health. One hands-down recommendation is Headspace[7]. Oh, and a giant study on post-partum depression[8].
- I fell down a hole and ended reading a whole bunch about the US Navy's Total Ship[board] Computing Environment, which is about as Star Trek: The Next Generation as it seems. Here's a Foxtrot Alpha article (Trigger warning: Gawker Media) about the DDG-1000 Zumwalt Class destroyer[9], an article about the "six million lines of code" that were required for integration[10] and a paper on the DDG-1000's Engineering Control System[11], if you're into that kind of thing.
- I'm vaguely thinking about visible/perceivable infrastructure debt after having read this post on Metafilter by Charlie Stross about how you might go about building a new Concorde[12]. There's something about the infrastucture of cities (our battlesuits, right?) having a useful half-life of around, I dunno, forty/fifty years? More to come on that, I expect
[1] confirmshaming
[2] Did LIGO Detect Dark Matter? | Sean Carroll
[3] Primordial black hole - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[4] Inside High-Rise – Creative Review
[5] Well-Adjusted Batman — Medium
[6] Could This BB-8 Bot Help People Cope With Anxiety? | Motherboard
[7] Headspace
[8] Can Apple Change The Face Of Postpartum Depression
[9] The Navy's Newest Linux-Powered Command Center Is Right Out Of Star Trek
[10] Raytheon TSCE software delivered to U.S. Navy for DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer testing - Military Embedded Systems
[11] PDF: esrdc.mit.edu/library/ESRDC_library/Henry-DDG-1000.pdf
[12] Supersonic flight - from a startup | MetaFilter
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11:57am, and time to meet a friend for lunch.
Best,
Dan