Category: learning

Constrained writing

~ Mark ~ 5 Comments

The other day I hacked a little skit based on Austin’s mini-comic about writing with the Fibonacci sequence. So then I got to thinking about other arbitrary limits. What else could I do, just to get the brain wiggling? Still in math mode, my first thought was to do some writing based on pi. Each word would use a digit’s worth of letters. A bit random, but it could be fun.
As happens so often in Wikipedia, I found another cool thing—an article about piphilology, techniques and devices used to memorize pi. But even better…

That led me to the Cadaeic Cadenza. Mike Keith wrote the full text of the Cadaeic Cadenza with the restriction that each word would have as many letters as its corresponding digit of pi. It’s a full 4000 words, and along the way he mimics some other poems like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Jabberwocky. The opening of the book borrows from The Raven. Keith’s rendition:

One
A Poem

A Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary,
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap – the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antedoor.
“This”, I whispered quietly, “I ignore”.

Check out Mike Keith‘s page for more (like The Anagrammed Bible). And the Wikipedia entry for constrained writing has a bunch of other great stuff.

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

Alright, here’s a rendition of my own personal info-designer chart:

  • 20% easy access to both sides of the brain
  • 30% curiosity about pretty much everything
  • 10% drawing and writing treated as equals
  • 15% a wee bit of perfectionism
  • 10% tech savvy
  • 15% sense of humor aka sense of proportion/balance

For those of you just tuning in, I’m talking about how Austin described his self-portrait in response to my snippet referencing Michael Surtees’ post about an image from Steven Heller’s book, Nigel Holmes on Information Design, which I probably ought to buy.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Anil Dash noticed the recent popularity of pixel graphs, citing an awful example in the New York Times and a not-as-bad one in Wired Magazine. I also recall this one from Business Week a while back, and another commenter mentioned one at Curbed today. It’ll take some time and trial & error to figure out what kind of data sets works best with the technique. I can appreciate the trend, but the only example I really like is the one from Business Week. Looks like a happy marriage of table and graph.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

If you cut up a large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers, loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, its attention distracted and drawn off from the matter in hand; for its superiority depends upon its power of concentration—of bringing all its strength to bear upon one theme, in the same way as a concave mirror collects into one point all the rays of light that strike upon it.

From Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay On Noise. I think maybe he might have appreciated GTD, were it around in his day.

I Went to a Bookbinding Workshop!

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

This past weekend I went to a leatherbound bookbinding workshop. I spent 4 hours learning from the wise and affable Berwyn Hung of Praxium Press, which is just outside of Atlanta. Berwyn does workshops for a bunch of other book forms, as well as teaching letterpress and boxmaking. I’m absolutely going back as soon as I can fit it in. Here’s a look at my finished product. It’s about 6 inches on either side, bound in pigskin:
photo of the pigskin cover of my book

Here’s a glimpse of the nifty blue endpapers:

photo looking down the spine of my book, with pretty blue endpapers

So yeah, I had a blast. You can see the full documentary of the workshop process in my Flickr photo set.