Monday, July 13, 2009 - Posts
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For those of you on the island of people who actually like to read stuff on the Web, point yourself toward Readability. The original post describes it best: Imagine a "Peace & Quiet" button on your browser. Readability strips away all the ads and links and visual clutter and leaves you with a minimalist igloo of text. It makes the Web appear like Harper's Magazine.
Designers have achieved some consensus on how to make screen reading softer on the eyes: bigger text, shorter (but not too short) lines, and just the right amount of white space. Go here for a definitive take.
In a light irony, I installed Readability while doing research on attention span. The program helped me get to the end of many of the articles—a rare event in my Firefox window. So perhaps Readability will help you focus more and curtail Web-induced ADD. But, as my Readability-enhanced reading revealed, try not to fall prey to "the myth of the concentration oasis." That's the coinage of the research psychologist Vaughan Bell, who asks us to stop whining about electronic distraction:
The past, and for most people on the planet, the present, have never been an oasis of mental calm and creativity. And anyone who thinks they have it hard because people keep emailing them should trying bringing up a room of kids with nothing but two pairs of hands and a cooking pot.
Check.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 2: "TV tropes." The joke of today's installment of XKCD, a popular Web comic, rests on the addictive properties of tvtropes.org. Tvtropes is a sprawling wiki cataloging the various hackneyed devices TV writers use to advance plot and outline characters while instilling in viewers the warm glow of expectations fulfilled. Some examples: The Childhood Memory Demolition Team tears down main character's quaint childhood home and replaces it with a parking lot, and the Erudite Stoner "is always a font of wisdom despite the fact that they're completely fried from years of drug abuse."
No. 14: "Jackson 3." Today the British tabloid the Sun is reporting that Joe Jackson wants M.J.'s kids—Prince Michael, 12; Paris, 11; and Prince Michael II, aka "Blanket," 7—to tour the world as the Jackson 3 next year. In other Jackson news, LaToya Jackson is claiming Michael was murdered: "Michael was worth well over a billion in music publishing assets and somebody killed him for that. He was worth more dead than alive."
No. 35: "Shawshank Redemption." A spike in searches for the 1994 film stems from the sentencing last week of two prisoners who pulled off a great escape, Shawshank style. In 2007, Otis Blunt and Jose Epinosa broke out of the Union County Jail by digging through the concrete walls of their cells, hiding the holes under pinup photos. It took almost 20 hours for authorities to notice the vanished duo, who were captured four weeks later in Mexico City.
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Rating the live Webcam's value as a tool of procrastination is a tricky proposition. Once the initial thrill of spying on strangers thousands of miles away fades, it's hard not to notice that traffic looks pretty much the same in Lagos, Nigeria, and Seattle, Wash. Still, if you're trying to avoid distractions, boredom is generally a good thing. A few seconds staring at Lun Lun, Yang Yang, and Co. Co. on Zoo Atlanta's Panda Cam is enough to drive even the most determined time-waster back to work. But a thwarted distraction is no distraction at all. If pachyderms fail to entertain, the blocked writer will soon turn to computer solitaire or culture blogs, and nothing productive will be achieved.
Friend, I have the answer. From July 6 to Oct. 14, London's Trafalgar Square is providing 2,400 people with 60 minutes of fame. Rather than erecting one of his sculptures on the square's empty plinth, artist Antony Gormley instead decided to "create a living monument." He invited U.K. residents older than 16 to apply to spend one hour on the platform, "a space normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals." According to Gormley, "They will become an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity." Meanwhile the rest of humanity can watch the spectacle via a live Webcam. The production values are higher than for most Webcams, and the scenery is much better—cameras also take in the crowds, the National Gallery behind the plinth, and the square's shockingly clean fountain.
Most of the time, the plinthers show themselves to be all too ordinary. There are endless banal cell-phone conversations, far too much meta-photography ("and here's one of some people taking a picture of me taking a picture of them"), and a lot of high-concept justifications for doing very little. (My favorite, Graham from London, claimed to pay "homage to middle-aged fathers by assemblying a flat-pack deck chair, and then sitting in it and reading a Sunday paper.") It's mostly boring and awkward, but every hour on the hour, there's an audience-participation version of the changing of the guard when a cherry picker brings up the next plinth-sitter and carts off the old one. Take my advice and skip everything but these often awkward interactions. Here you can see Graham packing up his deck chair, newspaper, and potted plants while Alistair, his successor, prepares to take the first of what must have been hundreds of self-conscious stretches during his hour above the square. Or check out the moments when Heather, dressed as a giant pigeon, traded places with a considerably less outgoing young woman.
It's all downhill from there, so set an alarm, turn to oneandanother.co.uk at the top of the hour, and after two minutes have passed, you can close the window and go get some damned work done.