Random tangent (blog)
Ameel Khan's personal blog. This is a blog about life, technology, the internet, science, skepticism, feminism, books, film, music, and whatever other random stuff I come across or happen to be interested in today.
I think my new favourite web radio station is Pinguin Radio.
They're an independent radio station that play:
a mix of pop, rock, hiphop, reggae, folk, metal, and singer-songwriters
Their music mix includes "golden oldies but especially new music" and they "specialize in broadcasting and developing new indie or alternative music."
Besides, how could you not like a radio station with the motto:
No bullshit, great music
:)
Give 'em a listen. They're well worth it.
Yay! We have a new website!
Every since Squarespace 6 launched in July 2012 I've been meaning to upgrade our old Squarespace 5 site to this newer CMS version. I wasn't in any rush to do so - Squarespace said they'd keep supporting the old CMS version indefinitely - but I finally reached the point at which the old site started to look boring and I was itching for something new.
This, by the way, is what the old site used to look like:
Insanity Works Version 3
And, for future reference, this is what the current one looks like:
Insanity Works Version 4
I've really enjoyed building this new site because Squarespace 6 is a really fun CMS platform to design on. I particularly love how it handles images - which you'll notice are now front and centre in this new site version.
I also love all the fonts you get access to via Typekit and Google Fonts and the fact that, thanks to developments in responsive web design, this site automatically has an excellent mobile version, too :)
So, what do you think? Do you like the new design?
Justin Timberlake's latest single, 'Mirrors', is seriously good.
Very few artists and their producers achieve this level of complex simplicity in their music. (In this album the producers were Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and J-Ro.) The musical layers are lovely and their spatial positioning (in the stereo sound field) is exceptional.
I particularly love the bit in the bridge (from 5:30 to 6:00) in which they layer the "You are / you are / the love / of my life" lyrics. That's at least three, though more likely five (or perhaps six) vocal layers of that lyric alone.
Dude.
Want a quick reference posted for logical fallacies? Of course you do.
You can order one from here or just download a PDF and print it yourself :)
You're welcome.
This is an awesome write-up by Douglas Bonneville in Smashing Magazine:
Best Practices of Combining Typefaces
Creating great typeface combinations is an art, not a science. Indeed, the beauty of typography has no borders. While there are no absolute rules to follow, it is crucial that you understand and apply some best practices when combining fonts in a design. When used with diligence and attention, these principles will always yield suitable results. Today we will take a close look at some the best practices for combining typefaces — as well as some blunders to avoid.
Yes, it's from three years ago but I recently needed to send it to someone and, while trying to look for it, realized that I hadn't actually blogged about it back then. So I'm talking about it now really just for completeness' sake :)
So, how did I spend my Friday night? I migrated my RSS feed reading life over from Google Reader to NewsBlur :)
The whole process took about five hours because I first culled my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader from 470 down to 302 – not an easy task! – and then I skimmed through all of my unread posts, saving the ones I wanted to read to Pocket.
Making the actual switch to NewsBlur was really easy: I signed up for a paid account, automatically imported all my Google Reader feeds, and then tweaked a few feed URLs that didn’t get copied over properly (a couple of them got truncated).
And now I’m a NewsBlur person – complete with NewsBlur Andorid apps on my phone and tablet plus my own BlurBlog (not that I’ve shared anything there yet).
Why did I choose NewsBlur over Feedly as my Google Reader replacement? A few reasons.
For starters, when reading RSS feeds I prefer efficiency in reading over a more magazine style reading flow and layout – the latter being Feedly’s key differentiator and, therefore, what they’ll probably be focussing more on in the future. I like to get through my feeds as quickly as possible (I do subscribe to 305 of them, after all) and NewsBlur works better for that.
I also like the NewsBlur’s approach to feed reading – everything from its layout options to its Intelligence Trainer that helps bubble up relevant stories from your subscriptions. In a way, I’m glad Google Reader is shutting down because it’s given me the opportunity to explore better and more effective ways of reading news feeds.
I like paying for good quality software and supporting the people who build this kind of software. So even when I use freeware that I really like – applications like Metapad, Notepad++, Freemake Video Converter, Paint.NET, Calibre, Launchy, and so on – I make it a point to donate to these people. By supporting smaller developers like this you help maintain a market for innovators and their innovations.
Finally, I really like having my own BlurBlog. I hated losing the public, RSS-subscribe-able list of shared items that used to be part of Google Reader (they turned that off because they wanted all of the sharing from Google Reader to go into Google+, instead). But with NewsBlur’s BlurBlogs my friends and I can go back to sharing our favourite posts with each other quickly and easily (assuming, of course, they all sign up to NewsBlur, too).
So, yay! And let the NewsBlur-powered fun times begin :)
Much as I dislike the introversion-extraversion false dichotomy (which is the popular understanding of this ‘personality trait’) I do acknowledge that, given a set of circumstances, people tend to be either outgoing or reserved. [1]
Given this disclaimer, I would classify myself as being usually introverted.
This was a bit of a challenge growing up because most of my family members are very extraverted and, at the time, I didn’t have the understanding or the language to express my discomfort with life in that outgoing and energetic household.
In fact I think the first time I read a good, easy-to-understand explanation of what it’s like to be an introvert was Jonathan Rauch’s famous ‘Caring for Your Introvert’ article in the Atlantic in 2003. (Sage Stossel’s 2006 interview with Rauch, ‘Introverts of the World, Unite!’, is a good, follow-up read, too.)
Since then the internet has been full of explanations from people about what their lives as introverts and extroverts is like. Most of these have been bad or, at best, misinformed and nauseatingly earnest (as people tend to be on Facebook).
So I was extremely pleased to read today on Reddit this excellent explanation about life as an introvert by bad_username (slightly copy-edited):
Imagine you're not hungry but every single person you meet during the day offers you a sandwich and it's rude to decline so you have to eat all of those sandwiches one by one. At the end of the day you are sick and tired of all the food. On the other hand you like good food and need it to survive. It's just you need less of it than most other people.
I really like that analogy and I think I’m going to use it from now on.
My other go-to explanation for introversion comes from Gavin Lister, one of my MBA career coaches at Melbourne Business School back in 2006, who said something along the lines of:
While I am perfectly happy to attend a networking event or stand in front of you like this to deliver a lecture I will need to go home and crawl under my rock to recover from all this socializing.
That is a perfect description of what I’m like: I’m happy to go out to meet people and do things but, afterwards, I will need time to recharge and recover (usually in my cave). That, for those who are interested, is why I very much prefer doing almost little on the weekends.
Fortunately life as an introvert isn’t too difficult for me now. Nadia who, as a huge extravert, gets recharged by meeting people (the horror!) really understands my need to be alone for extended periods of time (loosely correlated to how my day has been). More than that: she is happy to go out and meet her friends or even our friends on her own, leaving me at home to recharge. (Yes, she is awesome.)
I also have really good friends, many of whom are nerds like me and so understand very well the needs of other nerds.
So, overall, life right now is good. And today I have added another arrow to my introversion-explanation quiver.
--
[1] For the record my preferred personality classification tool is the Birkman Method.
I get a lot of ‘free’ stuff from the Internet – everything from news and entertainment to email and online storage.
By 'free', of course, I mean ad-supported (in most cases) so while I do technically pay for these services with my time, attention, and user profile data I don't directly pay for them in cash.
There are, however, a bunch of online services that I do explicitly pay for with my own money.
These include services you can't access without a subscription, such as:
I only recently signed up with MOG, by the way, and chose to pay them over their competitors for two main reasons: they stream high quality music (320kbps over WiFi and 4G) and, since they’re a Telstra partner, streaming music from them doesn’t count toward your mobile data bandwidth. Being both an audiophile who values high quality music and a Telstra mobile customer both of these are excellent reasons.
The other online services I pay for/contribute to are the kind that you can access for free but can also support financially if you so choose.
These include the news, information, and editorial services like:
With the exception of Wikipedia, to which I donate annually, the rest I support through automatic monthly micropayments.
The freemium services (products, really) that I pay for include:
Oh, and depending on how Fairfax rolls things out, I’ll probably subscribe to The Age Online, too, once they set up their paywall. And, speaking of news outlets, I also used to subscribe to the Economist but, much as I loved their content and editorial, I wasn’t getting enough of a return on my investment.
So that’s my list. What online services – content services or products – do you pay for?
So now you know.
In the November 2012 episode of the ‘First Tuesday Book Club’ Jennifer Byrne and her guests discussed the ‘The Chrysalids’ by John Wyndham.
Author Monica McInerney had this to say about it:
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham was what I call my bridge book. It was my first book to read that wasn't Enid Blyton, Trixie Belden, you know, like children's books. And it was the book that introduced me to a whole world of adult fiction. So it was the one that I walked across into a big, wider world of books. [Read the full transcript on the ABC website]
To a certain extent ‘The Chrysalids’ was my bridge book, too.
However I took my first steps into the world of adult fiction with the help of a number of authors, including (in no particular order):
My proper love of adult fantasy fiction didn’t kick in till later. Not till I’d read things like the ‘Duncton Wood’ series by William Horwood and, of course, the J.R.R. Tolkien canon.
Of all those books, I think the ones that really opened my mind were Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Chrysalids’. I suspect that’s because they were among the first adult-level first person narratives I’d read. And, as someone who has a younger sister, David and Petra’s relationship in ‘The Chrysalids’ was something I related very strongly to.
The stories that inspired me the most were probably the Clarke and Asimov short stories. I both wanted to be and had a huge crush on Susan Calvin and was generally looking forward a world in which Multivac existed.
Finally, the books that got me thinking the most about people, society, and politics were the ones by McCaffrey, Christie, and MacLean. Also, I think the first few books I ever read in which people simply lived and worked in space – as opposed to went exploring in space – were McCaffrey’s.
In more recent years (the last fifteen or so) the latest literary “bridge” I’ve crossed has been into Young Adult (YA) fiction. And the authors that have led the charge in that crossing have (so far) been J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Philip Pullman.
What were your bridge books and who were your bridge authors?
Here's a really good writing-tip series by Rachel McAlpine on Contented.com that talks about using a system when editing documents:
It’s simple, straightforward, and incredibly useful.
Enjoy :)
Lifehacker recently published a skepticism-for-beginners type article called 'How To Determine If A Controversial Statement Is Scientifically True':
Every day, we’re confronted with claims that others present as fact. Some are easily debunked, some are clearly true, but some are particularly difficult to get to the bottom of. So how do you determine if a controversial statement is scientifically true? It can be tricky, but it’s not too difficult to get to the truth.
The article features advice from Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy) and David McRaney (You Are Not So Smart) and, even though it's a little long, it makes for a good read.
tl;dr for Lifehacker article: Search the web (Google, Snopes, Wikipedia, Science Daily, Phys.org), search scientific journals (Google, Google Scholar), and ask science advocates. Also, beware of confirmation bias and don't forget to think critically.
In case you haven’t already noticed, we’ve upgraded our website.
We’ve moved from a basic, static HTML site that was built in 2008 to one that’s hosted on the fantastic Squarespace platform – which, by the way, I highly recommend.
We upgraded the site because the old one was…well, old. Also, it was too manual and time consuming to maintain. This new site, on the other hand, is leaner, faster, and, overall, a more effective online presence for both me and Nadia.
The web has also changed a lot in four years. For example, your own website no longer needs to host your entire online life. You can do things like outsource your media storage and sharing to services like Flickr, YouTube, and Picasa Web Albums. And, on the social media side, you can outsource a lot of your micro-content and general web content sharing to services like Twitter and Google+.
But you know what the best part is? Using a professionally hosted web content management because that really makes website management both easy and a lot of fun.
What do you think of the new site? Love it? Hate it? Don’t care?
Exciting news! I've bought myself another watch :)
This news is exciting because I love watches – not as pieces of jewellery, but as gadgets that tell the time. I always need/want to know what time it is and, as a result, have been wearing a wrist watch almost every day since the early 80s.
Why buy a second watch when I already have a perfectly good watch that I love and wear all the time?
Two reasons:
First, the watch I have right now is too thick to fit comfortably under the cuff of my work shirts. As you can see in the picture below, the watch on the left, which is my current watch, is much thicker (16mm) than the watch on the right (8.6mm), which is my new one.
Now, because my current watch is so thick, for the last year and a half, I have actually not been wearing it to work every day. I know! Crazy, right? Fortunately, I carry two smartphones with me all the time so, even though I’ve been without a watch at work, I have always been able to keep track of the time.
Second, well…let me put it this way: Where is the one place you can't use a smartphone to tell the time? In an airplane, of course – specifically during take-off and landing. And what company do I work for now? Oh, yes, an airline.
So what happened to me last month? I flew to Sydney for work and, for two extended periods of time (well, at least they felt like extended periods of time), I was chronologically disadvantaged because I'd had to turn my phones off and had forgotten to wear my bulky-but-still-functional watch to work that day.
Scarred by that experience, I decided to look for a nice, cheap, simple, and, importantly, thin watch that I could wear to work. Obviously, I was only going to look at Casio watches.
Unfortunately, there are no Casio outlets in Melbourne so I was stuck with the limited selection on display at Angus & Coote and Thomas Jewellers on Bourke Street in the CBD. Neither of them had what I wanted so I went to trusty old Amazon.com to see what I could find.
That was when I discovered that online retailers sell most Casio watches at about a third of the price that local brick-and-mortar retailers sell them at. Wow. I am never buying a watch from a local brick-and-mortar retailer again.
Anyway, here is my original short list from Amazon (my current watch is in the top left hand corner):
Yes, I get a little obsessive when it comes to buying gadgets. Especially those I’ll be using frequently for a number of years. Heck, I wouldn’t even be writing this blog post if I wasn’t that obsessed with this stuff!
Finally, after getting Nadia's preferences, I made my decision and placed my order. As it happens, Amazon ended up being just the front-end for this purchase because my actual order was placed with the appropriately named MrWatch.
A few days later, through the mysterious powers of FedEx, I had my new watch :)
The watch I bought is a Casio MTP-1309L-8BV. (Yes, that’s quite a mouthful.)
It’s simple, good looking, and, fits very comfortably under the cuff of all my work shirts.
Of course, this is the first analogue watch I’ve had in years so using it to tell the time is taking a little getting used to. I can’t just take a quick peek at one part of it, for example. I have to look at the entire watch face before I can tell what time it is. Not that this difficult to do, of course. I’m just not used to doing it.
I am liking its leather strap, though. And I am enjoying the sight of the second hand as it spins around the clock face.
So, “yaay!” for my new watch and my ability to comfortably keep track of time while wearing a business shirt during take-off and landing. (Hmmm…my reason for getting this watch sounds a lot less impressive when you put it that way.)
Over on my ACME blog, I’ve written about using charts and infographics to explain complex or hard to visualize ideas, concepts, and relationships.
Instead of cross-posting that here, I thought I’d just provide a link and a teaser chart:
I discovered only today that, late last year, Alexander Davidson released a new version of my all time favourite text editor, Metapad!
Metapad is one of the most lightweight, simple, and yet powerful text editors out there. I love it for its tiny footprint, portability, multiple font support, block editing functionality, and transparent window capability. It also looks really nice :)
Before I upgraded this afternoon, I’d been using its previous version for at least ten years (via a recommendation from Chris Pirillo).
The latest version has a higher quality icon (which is really cool) and integrates fully with Windows 7 so it’s now my default text editor. Yes, you have to do a little OS-level tweaking and hacking to make that work…but it’s so worth it.
Yaay!
My three favourite Internet radio stations (the first two thanks to Winamp and SHOUTcast Radio) are:
ABC Classic FM is also nice, though I don’t listen to it all that often. Also, it’s only 64kbps.
That is all.
The first teaser trailer of the upcoming US version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was released a few weeks ago. It was, by far, the best trailer I’d seen all year.
That got me thinking about which other trailers were, in my opinion, equally awesome? I could only think of two recent examples: Inception and Watchmen.
Here are all three for your viewing (and listening) pleasure:
Earlier this month, in a post about the upgrade of the Melbourne tram network map, I mentioned that I really loved the London Underground Tube map and the MTA New York Subway map.
A lot has been written about these maps so I don’t have much to add but here some information are bunch of links about them that you might find interesting.
Let’s start with the Wikipedia entry for this map which summarises its origins:
The first diagrammatic map of the Underground was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. Beck was an Underground employee who realised that because the railway ran mostly underground, the physical locations of the stations were irrelevant to the traveller wanting to know how to get to one station from another - only the topology of the railway mattered.
...
To this end, he devised a simplified map, consisting of stations, straight line segments connecting them, and the River Thames; lines ran only vertically, horizontally, or on 45 degree diagonals. To make the map clearer and to emphasise connections, Beck differentiated between ordinary stations (marked with tick marks) and interchanges (marked with diamonds). The Underground was initially sceptical of his proposal - it was an uncommissioned spare-time project, and it was tentatively introduced to the public in a small pamphlet in 1933. It immediately became popular, and the Underground has used topological maps to illustrate the network ever since.
This is the map that started it all: It was a proper transport system infographic and not a route overlay (underlay?) drawn on top of a geographically accurate aboveground map.
Here’s what the map looks like today:
You can read more about the Underground map on the BBC’s h2g2 website and can see images of it through its history on the Guardian’s website. There’s also more detail about it’s history (till 2002) here.
For something more awesome, check out:
Oh, and if you’re interested, you can get the actual, current map from here.
Again, let’s start with the New York Subway’s Wikipedia entry which has this to say about its map:
The current official transit maps of the New York City Subway are based on a 1979 design by Michael Hertz Associates. The maps are not geographically accurate due to the complexity of the system (i.e. Manhattan being the smallest borough, but having the most lines), but are known to help tourists navigate the city, as major city streets are shown alongside the subway stations serving them. The newest edition of the subway map, which took effect on June 27, 2010, reflects the latest service changes and also makes Manhattan bigger and Staten Island smaller.
Part of the reason for the current incarnation is that earlier diagrams of the subway (the first being produced in 1958), while being more aesthetically pleasing, had the perception of being more geographically inaccurate than the diagrams today. The design of the subway map by Massimo Vignelli, published by the MTA between 1974 and 1979, has since become recognized in design circles as a modern classic; however, the MTA deemed the map was flawed due to its placement of geographical elements.
So New York is one of the few large cities whose subway map is more closely tied to its aboveground geography. In his 2006 New York Times article, ‘Win, Lose, Draw: The Great Subway Map Wars’, Alex Mindlin had this to say about why Vignelli’s simpler but geographically inaccurate map didn’t work:
Although designers love to discuss why Mr. Vignelli’s schematic map didn’t fly, no single theory has emerged. The graphic designer Michael Bierut, however, suggests that New York’s street grid was to blame.
“Londoners are actually unclear about how close one stop is to the next,” he said. “But a lot of Manhattanites could tell you authoritatively how long it would take to walk from Fifth and 28th to Seventh and 44th. So the geographic discrepancies in the Vignelli map, which are no more than those you find in lots of subway maps around the world — they’re just glaring.”
Bierut actually explained the problem with Vignelli’s map more thoroughly in his own article on this topic in 2004 (the 100th anniversary of the New York Subway system):
[Vignelli’s map] was a design solution of extraordinary beauty. Yet it quickly ran into problems. To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. What about, for instance, the fact that the Vignelli map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide? If you're underground, of course, it doesn't matter: there simply aren't as many stops along Central Park as there are in midtown, so it requires less map space. But what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get out at 59th Street and take a walk on a crisp fall evening? Imagine your surprise when you found yourself hiking for hours on a route that looked like it would take minutes on Vignelli's map.
Here’s what the map looks like today:
For more about the map’s history (as well as that of the the subway system itself), check these out:
Another good website on the New York City subway is, of course, nycsubway.org.
For something more awesome, though, check out:
Of course, if you’re interested in the actual, official, current subway map, you can get that from here.
For more about Melbourne’s transport maps (both tram and train), check out these links:
If you’ve reached the end are are still reading, here are some more good links to check out:
So today we took part in SlutWalk Melbourne (which I wrote about earlier).
The only half decent report on the Melbourne walk is here but I’m sure there will be others over the next few days. The really good accounts (i.e. the nuanced and non-snarky ones) will, inevitably, be published in blogs.
We started outside the State Library of Victoria on Swanston Street with a few speeches:
The one by Cody Smith was particularly inspirational though others made really good points as well, such as:
"It shouldn't be the responsibility of survivors to educate people about rape."
"It is not the responsibility of women to educate people on sexism"
"If you come from a position of privilege it should be your responsibility to educate yourself and your friends."
Lots of people were carrying awesome protest signs, like this one from James:
And this one from someone standing behind us:
After the speeches we walked down Swanston and Collins Streets to Parliament Gardens. Here are Scott, Nadia, James, and Andrew:
And here are me and Nadia once we got to the gardens:
If you’re curious about the “Hornet’s nest of revolutionary feminism” t-shirt I’m wearing, you can find out more about that on the Tiger Beatdown blog.
(Also, you can see a few more photos from this walk on my Flickr profile.)
Sadly, while the walk made an important statement, raised a lot of awareness, and was lots of fun to participate in, my cold didn’t react very well to two hour out in the cold so I got home a little worse for wear. I’ll definitely be sleeping in tomorrow!
A big thanks to the walk’s organizers and volunteers for making this happen; Samurai AV for the sound system; Victoria Police for coordinating our movement through the CBD; and everyone who turned up today (both in person and in spirit).
Here’s hoping this walk – and, indeed, this whole movement – has a genuine, long-term impact that reduces incidents of victim blaming and slut shaming. If nothing else, the walk has got us all talking about theses issues and that, in itself, is a good thing.
This is personal website of Nadia Niaz and Ameel Zia Khan. Here we document our lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
