a selection of cycling's sunglasses and weirdness

Was there ever a more strange and ubiquitous item than the frames of eye glasses? They range from the minimal wires that hold the lenses where they need to be, to the extravagant eye-enlarging shades of the seventies and recent revivals. Fashion clearly has a lot to answer for. Some of my favourites are the sunglasses sported by cyclists since the 1980s. These are amongst the most ostentatious designs. Why would that be? Surely in the case of athletic eye wear function must take precedence over fashion?

Fortunately not. Whilst function may originally dictate the form, this becomes the fashion and from there the designers seem keen to push things to extremes, especially the Italians. Thank goodness for the Italians! Certainly there are an abundance of sleek visor-styled lenses that protect the wearer from glare and dust whilst smoothing the airflow over the eyes. But these are often so dull. The best designs make a statement that, despite (or perhaps because of) their weirdness, represent an era. These are to me the most interesting.

At the start of fast mechanised transport motorists, motorcyclists and aviators were certainly in need of eye protection. Tour de France cyclists' goggles resembled these in style. Of course when riding a bike things tend to fog up a bit. How long would it be before specialist eye wear was designed for this activity?

I guess it was somewhere in the early 80s that I first saw a pair of cycling specific sunnies — on the eyes, actually on the face, of Phil Anderson. At first glance these looked quite bizarre. But there was no discouraging a teenager mad keen to emulate Anderson. The wide field of view, the sweat band across the top, the large single lens, and the fact that Skippy himself was wearing a pair, all made these highly desirable. As far as I know, from these Oakleys springs the weird world of cycling specific sunnies.

There were various forms of these glasses and lots of imitations for the next few years. I know. I could only afford the cheap imitations :-(

As far as I am concerned it was the Italian Briko manufacturer that next defined an era... the 90s. Cipollini and Pantani, two of the most colourful members of the peloton at the time were both seen sporting Briko Stingers and Jumpers. The Stingers remain my favourite glasses of all time for both their visual appeal and functionality. Stingers transformed the clunkiness of the 80s into a very Euro-cool but equally bizarre, alienesque face for the times.

At one stage or another Pantani sported a pair of Briko Zen specs which are reminiscent of the earliest goggles, only with a much wider wrap-around lens. These were not as iconic as the Stinger but distinctive nonetheless.

And then nothing much happened for nearly 10 years. Various companies experimented with snap-in lenses, including many from Taiwan, but none was a notable or particularly distinctive design.

Maybe the last couple of years have seen the introduction of the next classic: the Oakley Jawbone. They are competing against Oakley's other popular design, the Radar which I feel lacks any innovative features over and above those offered by the myriad of other blade-style lenses. They just aren't wacky enough to make an impression.

The Jawbones also feature interchangeable lenses, but more importantly, the bizarre frame form with multiple components whose colours may be mismatched as garishly as desired might be just what is needed to define the next classic. Peripheral visibility is not nearly as good as the old Stingers. The lens quality is great though and they hug the face to keep out dust and debris. Slots around the side of some lens models allow for a little ventilation in steamy conditions, hopefully to keep the fog at bay. Will these define the era?

If the 2010 road race world champ sports the Infrared Jawbones... will they help the rest of us ride faster? No. But we can all look just as silly ^h^h^h cool!

The Grid and The String in Music

[Image of the Tenorions from synthtopia.com]
Yamaha has a pretty looking device, Tenori-On for fans of MIDI-triggering LED grids. I have been a fan of portable LED grids since I discovered Maywa-denki's Bitman in Tokyo. Tenori-On is a 16x16 grid... four times more little LEDs than Bitman ;-) OK, seriously now... The Tenori-On's LEDs act as push buttons, much like the buttons on the old Novation Nova synths, another favourite of mine. Incidentally, Novation have their own LaunchPad controller which also plays on the pixel grid idea. This has been a common theme in this area over the last few years. In the Yamaha product, the grid is used to control a sequencer in various ways. In some modes the hardware acts like a step-sequencer, in others more unusual metaphors are employed to trigger music events, for instance a bouncing ball metaphor is employed to trigger an event when the ball (a lit LED that moves across the grid) hits an edge for instance. The user then controls the distance the ball moves between bounces to shorten or lengthen the delay between triggers... in discrete steps.

And this is the thing about "the grid": Whilst beat-based, typically 4/4 music is so seductive, popular, easy to make and therefore marketable to teenagers with home studios and greying electronic music buffs alike, it would be nice if these new tools enabled the subtlety of a string on a fretboard when it came to placing notes in time. For experts maybe a fretless fingerboard is better... no need for the guidelines, place the notes in time by feel. But no, even after all these years of computer-hardware and software based music production the "new" instruments by the big manufacturers return us to our neatly discretised rhythms (and pitches). They can't afford to venture into the territory that brings us an instrument like a violin or the shakuhachi because these are just too hard to master. Even a recorder which, despite its regular finger holes offers the player a chance to over-blow, stutter, tongue, tremolo and shriek their way through a piece, merging notes, individuating notes with staccato punctuation, placing notes wherever and whenever they darn well like, is more subtle.

A drum-machine? Well, I absolutely love the new rhythms that have been moving into electronic music since Kraftwerk, through 80s synth-pop, jungle, drum'n bass, techno... right through the 90s and 00s up to the stuff so popular even on mainstream radio today. It has really transformed the way I think about rhythm. Most of it I could never have hoped to play live on a drum kit (even when I practiced). But a lot of it is just sampled old drum loops. I know this is a little tired. We have heard all this before. But every new instrument that comes out is a chance to revitalise electronic music. Every new instrument based on the grid is a chance lost. All the complexity of which music is capable is being missed by a generation of music makers.

The Tenori-On looks like fun to play. And don't get me wrong, I love a range of electronica based around the grid. But really Yamaha's sequencer/instrument is just another toy with a pretty pixel grid. Funny then that there is a pop-group (well, it is surely OK nowadays to call a group of 3 sexy girls who make music and dance around a bit on stage a pop-group right?) called the Tenerions. From what I have heard of their music it sounds pretty much like the product demos on the Yamaha website. Not particularly exciting.

Although I haven't played with my poor dusty synths for years, sometimes I am tempted to look longingly into my cupboard, dust off their cool metal surfaces and twiddle the knobs... analogue knobs. Knobs that spin smoothly and continuously. And then I remember that I waved goodbye to my last truly analogue synth well over a decade ago. Even the boxes I have with knobs are analogue emulations. The knobs might spin, but the values they represent are discrete. And so it goes. In the name of suplesse (a cycling term... grace? suppleness? elegance... on a bike) I have given up many things. Music-making was an early casualty. Who am I to complain about grids? Maybe count me as a concerned music-citizen who would like to hear the newcomers make something different, sometimes. I guess the best of them do and I should just listen harder and more widely. No disrepespect to the Tenerions. The fact that I have even heard of you means you must be doing something right!

the laser pointer and the cursor

For some years now I have wanted to comment on the "cursor". Now is the time! Having just sat through a conference almost entirely dictated by powerpoint-style slides (my own talk included) it was interesting to note the role of the laser pointer and its digital analog, the cursor. Once I noticed it, the pointer seemed to sit upon the surface of the content, hovering over slides like an invisible elephant hovers over a dinner table.

For many of the talks speakers employed the supplied green laser pointer, whether they needed to or not. This green dot-making device was brandished with abandon, sometimes on the side walls of the auditorium as speakers forgot to release the switch, once or twice into the audience, but most often, in a jumpy-skippy fashion across regions of the projector screen. It is very hard to hold such a fine point steady from a distance, a phenomenon which is made more apparent in large auditoria since here the speaker stands far from the projection screen. By and large the pointer was not needed for indicating details on the slides. Instead it was used as a crutch, perhaps giving the speaker something to focus on apart from the audience.

The worst case I saw was of a speaker using the laser pointer to hop from word to word of his bullet points as he read the text from his slide... "follow the bouncing ball and sing along". Oh dear. The talk was otherwise very interesting, but it was hard not to giggle at the invisible elephant. Was I the only one who could see it?

Of course slide presentation software typically allows the speaker to use the mouse cursor. A few speakers did take advantage of this. This technique has the advantage of allowing the speaker to position the cursor, then leave it steadily in place. However laptop trackpads can be a fiddly means of positioning this cursor under pressure. One amusing episode ensued when a speaker attempted to operate the controls of a movie player on the trackpad, whilst looking behind him at the large projection screen on which the movie was being displayed. It took him awhile to negotiate the reverse mapping and trackpad sensitivity!

The mouse cursor's continued presence onscreen after its relevance has been removed is seldom a source of frustration for speakers... although it should be! Some software has the cursor vanish after a period of inactivity. This can be helpful, or it can be problematic depending on the speaker's needs for a specific slide.

It is interesting to note people's ability to see "through" a cursor. A number of presenters had beautiful images to show, and they left the cursor positioned right in the middle of them, unnoticed. I have seen Skype sessions, artists showing their imagery, movies being viewed... all with the cursor smack bang in the middle of the screen. It is amazing how readily we are able to see past this visual obstacle. This is akin to my experience of (for instance) Melbourne's suburban and city streets — I can often see past the tangle of power lines, tram wires, advertising signage and other visual pollution to admire a "beautiful" street (see Robin Boyd - The Australian Ugliness). This experience is also the norm when viewing Japanese temples and gardens. They are typically surrounded by old rubbish, blue tarpaulins, pipes, taps, wires, fences and signs but tourists come to admire their beauty and manage to turn a blind eye to all of this.

"So smarty pants. What did you do?", I can hear you ask. Well, I just added slides with arrow markers pre-placed to highlight the sections of slide I wanted to discuss. These appeared and vanished as I hit the space bar on the keyboard — something that is easy to do in an instant, without error. It mostly worked. Except I once forgot to use the arrow and pointed with my hand. Then when I tried to progress to the next slide I of course made the arrow appear at the point I had just discussed... a glitch. But not catastrophic I think and worth the improved pointing I achieved elsewhere in my talk.

...thank goodness for selective attention. Without it we have already polluted most of the world's potentially "beautiful" views. Anyway, feel free to leave the cursor on my nose when you Skype me. I know that you can't see this invisible elephant :-)

archaic icons

In a recent lecture it occurred to me how many of our current icons are actually unknown objects to many younger users. Here are a few that depict items that are no longer in everyday use.


The floppy disk hasn't seen regular action for many years but it is the universal save icon nevertheless.



When was the last time you saw a telephone with a rotary pulse dial? This is one of a couple of common symbols still used to indicate a telephone.




Funny that my mobile telephone call and hang up buttons show green and red icons that look like traditional phone handsets. The mobile phone itself (of course) looks nothing like an old handset.





A pencil for write... come on... we live in the world of the paperless office. How did you get more tip? With a pencil "sharpener"? What?! The clutch pencil is certainly an improvement! Does anybody actually write still?



Incandescent bulbs are on their way out of light sockets around the world. It will be awhile before they are gone from the collective memory as representative of ideas though.




Until recently a popular digital photo application still used an icon (and text label) for a film roll when importing pictures from a digital camera. Slide shows in that same application are still represented with an icon that depicts couple of old 35mm slides.

...I am sure there are plenty of other traditional icons for modern concepts. Keep me posted if you find any more...

the butterfly and the bicycle

How many butterflies died in the making of this Hirst-Armstrong-Trek bicycle? I prefer Damien Hirst's shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). The shark shows some understanding of the essence of life (and death) and fear and decay and nature and the sublime... lots of things really.

The Trek is something a little girl might do with her first bicycle and a sheet full of butterfly wing stickers from the supermarket. It is unimaginative and completely ignores the form of the machine. It is considerably less than I would expect from an artist of Hirst's reputation. It is of course big news (it even makes it onto this blog for instance) because it is a Hirst, and an Armstrong, and for "a good cause". But not because it is good. Disappointing.

This Marc Newson TT bike really works I think. For the most part the bike has been left alone, but its disc is rounder than round. At first I thought the design a little gimmicky but it is growing on me. It doesn't interfere with the bike's lines (which I have to say, coming from Trek are not in and of themselves anything to write home about – Trek should look at Pinarello or Ridley or even Specialized dare I say it, to see how to make a lovely and fast TT machine) but it adds a kind of rolling oomph to the machine, like it is being propelled from the rear towards warp speed. Whilst quite geometric, the design is simultaneously very organic. A good crossover point between the human and his machine. I love this one!

solar light

It is true. Despite the countless un-PC jokes told in primary schools across Australia concerning solar-powered torches, there is one available now. The Cateye solar-powered bicycle headlight charges an internal NiMH cell during the day, so that you can spare it from using standard AA cells at night. Alternatively, buy rechargeable AA cells for your usual headlight and switch to solar powered home energy. This lamp is a bit gimmicky... and ugly. Did I mention it is ugly? :-( It ain't going near the handlebars of my bike but perhaps I could use it to light the driveway if I attached it to the front fence.

art dec-adence

The (now closed) Art Deco blockbuster at the NGV was a gallery-sponsor's dream. Plenty of photo-opportunities, advertising quality (and advertising) imagery, spectacularly sleek cars, elegant dresses, striking accessories, exotic furniture and household goods. Everything was designed to within an inch of its life utilising the best in brushed or polished steel, gloss black enamel and the finest shagreen. The NGV was the house of style. Had it been a shopping centre for homewares I may have been tempted to buy one or two of everything. A wander certainly topped even a trip to the local Ikea megastore, social-democratic, utilitarian designed, pine extravaganza. Thankfully visitors were spared the Swedish names (Does anybody outside of Scandinavia want to sit on a couch called Ektorp Jennylund?) and I suspect none of the goods was flat-packed (apart maybe from the glass and chrome Strand Palace Hotel foyer).

Its great to see the attention lavished at the time on linking materials and form, especially for mass-produced household goods. Bold colours, material contrasts and strong geometry are a welcome change to the current soft, fuzzy friendliness of much of today's design. Of course these were times when no heed was paid to environmental impact. Decadence was the style of the day (for those who could afford it and for some who couldn't). I hope we don't rebel against the current green trend and head this way again, but I still enjoy looking back at the glory that was. The greenest thing in the show was the jade AWA radio.

complexity increase in evolutionary software

Daniel W. McShea, Perspective: Metazoan Complexity and Evolution: Is There a Trend?, Evolution, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 477-492.

[Image credit: Fig 1. Increasing complexity in evolution? McShea, 1996]

It would appear at a glance that evolution has driven increases in complexity from replicating molecules up to conscious humans. Is this justified? Or are humans simply so self-centered that we line everything up behind us, even in this modern day and age? A-Life has held the production of open-ended evolution in-silico as one of its aims for some time. Early models such as Ray's Tierra or Yaeger's PolyWorld are two of my favourite approaches to the problem. Each of these software ecosystems has spawned a complete lineage of programs addressing similar concerns. McShea's paper looks at data on real organisms and attempts to discern any trends in their evolution that would justify the belief that organisms evolve towards greater complexity. Consequently, it addresses an issue of real importance to A-Life that harks back to the formative years of Tierra and PolyWorld.

McShea's approach is firstly to clarify the kinds of complexity that can possibly be measured in real organisms. This has long been a sticking point... the real world is not always so easy to divvy up as information theoreticians might like. Useful, information-theoretic measures of organism complexity are difficult to specify. McShea simplifies matters a little by trying to count organism parts and internal processes that are specific to some groups of Metazoan. I won't go into detail here. His conclusions is interesting: we still don't know enough to say either way. He proposes an "emphatic agnosticism". This is a far cry from the usual assumption we make about complexity increase. There is room here for debate. Anyway, leaving that aside also since it still isn't the main point I want to raise in this post...

If, for some obscure reason, biological evolution turns out to be closed, could we modify the scenario in simulation to generate virtual ever-increasing complexity regardless? A-Life has always assumed that the real world offers an example of open-ended evolution and that somehow our simulations are missing some secret herbs and spices that will allow this to occur. It is pretty clear that our software evolutionary systems fall far short of biological evolution as complexity generators. We have probably missed an element or two. But could it be that we will correctly simulate real evolution and still not get open-ended evolution? Maybe the simulation will clarify our perspective on real evolution by showing us why it must be closed. What then? Could software evolutionary systems exceed nature's ability to evolve complexity?

I think that is an amazing possibility. For now I will just keep on playing "catch up" with nature.

creative bike parking II

Earlier I put out a challenge for designing a better bike rack (David Byrne gets a D- for his poor clichés). Nobody listened to my blog post but all the same, I have now found a lovely solution, the bike tree by Abhinav Dapke!
Bikes are kept out of reach of thieves. The owner is recognised by finger print. That's a great idea... as long as you don't need to loan the key to somebody! The version installed in Geneva apparently has a smart card which is probably, ummmm, smarter. In addition it has an umbrella to keep the bikes from getting rained on. (What bit of a bike can't get rained on? I am not sure about the need for this although: (i) it keeps sheep-skin seat covers from getting soggy; (ii) it stops dirty rain marking flash paintwork; (iii) you can stand under it to eat your lunch and gaze up at the lovely bikes. The bikes are winched up using solar power too. I am truly impressed!

P.S. I hope that Noisy Mynas or Pigeons don't take up residence. Maybe some graffiti for birds is in order.

a nest of camellias

This morning whilst I was eating my Weet-Bix a Grey Butcherbird was attempting to build a nest from pink Camellias outside our kitchen window. It would tear a flower from the tree, hop across and attempt to wedge it into a crook between two branches. Inevitably the Camellia would tumble to the ground. Unperturbed, the Butcherbird would grab another and try again. Sadly for us, and for it, the nest-construction was eventually aborted. A nest of Camellias would have been quite special! Imagine if we could all live in such a home: soft, pink, biodegradable and it requires only sunlight, water and nutrients to produce the building materials. I suspect the design might be flawed. After a few days the pinkness would be replaced with a rotten browness.

The bird could be heard singing nearby for a short time. Now it seems to have left. Oh well. Maybe an Australian native will work better. Wattle perhaps?

environmentally unfriendly LCDs

Computers involve environmentally toxic manufacturing processes. These machines and their trim are nasty! The lifetime of a computer (for somebody who works in computer science) is limited to a few years at most. One can try to stretch this out, perhaps to five years, by carefully selecting new models and soldiering through operating system and software upgrades stoically. So far this Powerbook G4 has served me well for 4 years (OK, I needed to replace a dud hard drive).

My recent street rambles have occurred during our suburb's hard rubbish collection. The number of CRT monitors and TVs piled on people's nature strips is astonishing. The LCD revolution is here with its promise of clearer pictures, less energy consumption and flat, elegant displays. But, is there a cost? LCD monitors consume less power during their use and so the naive assumption people make is that CRTs should be replaced with this new technology to "green up an office".

Unfortunately, such replacement is not necessarily a good thing. The paper, Life-cycle environmental impacts of CRT and LCD desktop monitors (by Socolof, M.L.; Overly, J.G.; Kincaid, L.E.; Dhingra, R.; Singh, D.; Hart, K.M. in Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment, 2001, pp. 119 - 127) compared LCD and CRT environmental impacts. It assumed in its survey that the monitors were replaced after the same period and for technological upgrade, rather than because the device had failed. The analysis, taking into account potential sources of error in the data, investigated 16 components of the impact of the production, use and decommissioning of these monitors: non-renewable resource use; renewable resource use; energy use; global warming; ozone depletion; air acidification; photochemical smog; air particulate matter; aesthetics (odor); water eutrophication; water quality: biological oxygen demand; water quality: total suspended solids; hazardous waste: landfill space use; solid waste: landfill space use; radioactive waste: landfill space use; radioactivity.

Energy cost and global warming contribution were given special attention in the paper. The CRT requires a lot of manufacturing energy, in particular for glass. This is the most significant factor, and exceeds by far the amount of energy that these monitors consume in use. CRTs consume more energy in production and during their life cycle than LCDs. LCDs do not consume as much energy in production, nor do they consume as much electricity during use. (Although interestingly enough, they are nastier in production than CRTs in almost all other ways - a point for another day!)

Global warming contributions of the monitors is however the reverse of what one might expect from considering energy consumption. The main global warming contribution of CRTs comes from electricity consumption during their use. During their manufacture, various forms of energy production are employed and these do not all uniformly contribute to global warming. LCDs, as noted above, consume less energy to manufacture and use than CRTs, but in the manufacturing process sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is employed and this swings the pendulum against the LCD when considering global warming contributions:

"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that it has evaluated, with a global warming potential of 22,200 times that of CO2 over a 100 year period" (Science Daily)

Oh dear, we are not saving the planet by throwing out energy hungry CRTs. Instead we are worsening the situation by increasing the manufacture of LCDs and tossing out CRTs that may have had a good few years left in them, their manufacture being the dominant component of their energy cost, even if not their contribution to global warming.

So what should we do? My suggestion is to keep CRTs until they are worn out and use 100% renewable, green energy to avoid the CRTs making any further contribution to global warming. Simple!

Of course since LCD monitors certainly consume less energy in use than the CRTs and energy consumption is measurable by business on an energy supplier's bill, changing to LCD is an easy way to make documented claims about "being green". I suspect this naive approach will be more likely to occur. Anyway, LCDs are much slicker technology and take up less desk space so that we can reduce office sizes and save on rent, heating and air-conditioning bills :-)

Face it. Computers and electronics are environmentally toxic. Use them for as long as you can and on green power. Resist the urge to upgrade.

ecological design

Notes on the 10th Anniversary Edition of Ecological Design, by Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan. This is a terrific book that collects ideas from numerous sources into a coherent statement of how we might best rectify the mess we have gotten ourselves into. In some places it waffles a little but it is always thought-provoking and helpful.

"In many ways, the environmental crisis is a design crisis. It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used. Design manifests culture, and culture rests firmly on the foundation of what we believe to be true about the world. Our present forms of agriculture, architecture, engineering, and industry are derived from design epistemologies incompatible with nature's own. It is clear we have not given design a rich enough context. We have used design cleverly in the service of narrowly defined human interests but have neglected its relationship with our fellow creatures. Such myopic design cannot fail to degrade the living world, and, by extension, our own health." (p. 24-25)

This quote sums up the authors' approach neatly. The text proposes that human designers should not "take from nature" but that our designs should actually become a part of it by playing the same roles as organisms and ecosystems. We must ensure that the processes we employ for construction, and the structures they generate, mesh directly with nature's own processes. Everything we do must sit comfortably inside biology. So far our actions primarily degrade it.

My response to this book is therefore, "Design all things within the parameters laid down by organisms and ecosystems." That's a tough call, especially for someone whose career is based on the use of equipment that is so ecologically destructive. Green Computing? Yikes, that is a far cry from the kind of environmentalism the authors of this book champion.