Happiness does not come from having or not having. It comes from appreciating what we do have, and we all have some things. A note posted on an email list to which I subscribe:

This is why I love my kid so much! It is things like this that make me realize just what a wonderfully amazing character he is.

I was just looking through his folder and mounds of paperwork and I came across an “I am thankful for” list. You know what topped that list?

1. My health

Can you believe a kid that has gone through so much medically, sometimes on a daily basis and in light of all of the “new” medical issues that have reared their ugly head, he is thankful in spite of all of this.

I love my baby boy.

Proud mama bear,

[name withheld]

Related reading: Stumbling on Happiness

Certainly a novel interface. It calls to mind the Nintendogs bubble-blowing function. The “twist” (sorry!) here of getting into the mindset of a blender is funny.

Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own. Materials are a 1950’s Osterizer blender altered with custom made hardware and software for sound analysis and motor control.

People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and power matches the person) and the person can growl blender-style at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant. The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated.

…but seriously, folks, what about areas in which it would be important to get into the mindset of an appliance? Have you never had the experience of trying to accomplish some task on a computer, and saying to yourself, “Now, where would they have put that function?”

If you speak the language of the computer (programming code), then you are a software programmer with the mindset of a blender anyway. Sorry. If you aren’t a software engineer, it’s a lot nicer to have the appliance go to the trouble of speaking your language rather than vice versa. Which is why the Macintosh OS is so much easier to use than DOS was.

Certainly when trying to understand other people and especially other cultures, we have to ask: Does speaking their language in fact help you to think their thoughts, feel their feelings? Yes, learning the language shows respect and facilitates communication, but does it run deeper than that?

Who couldn’t find a use for “neko-neko,” an Indonesian word for “one who has a creative idea which only makes things worse,” or “skeinkjari,” a term from the Faroe Islands for “the man who goes among wedding guests offering them alcohol”? Some words […] are surprisingly affecting, like the Inuit word “iktsuarpok,” which means “to go outside often to see if someone is coming.” And then there’s “tingo” itself, from the Pascuense language of Easter Island: “to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them.” (from Amazon.com’s description of The Meaning of Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod)

On a PRI Geo Quiz podcast, I heard the above author say there is a Norwegian word for dunking someone’s face in snow!

Having a word for an idea means you have the idea in your mind. Lack of words can result in lack of recognition of subtle distinctions and nuances. When one culture expresses these distinctions in its vocabulary and another doesn’t, important meaning gets lost in translation.

A very basic example that I’ve often noticed is in the Israeli and English words for “blue”. In English, we use blue as a general term for everything from pale sky to dark navy. In modern Hebrew, techelet is used for light blues, and kachol for darker blues. As a non-native Hebrew speaker, I have referred to an object as kachol only to get a blank look from the Israeli who can’t figure out what I’m pointing to; all he sees is something techelet. There is no mental equation of the terms; kachol and techelet are seen as distinct colors, just as blue and purple are to English speakers.

I’ve found that when someone behaves in a way that I’m having trouble interpreting, if I mimic the facial expression and tone of voice (no, not in front of them!), I can try and answer the question: “What feeling would I experience or thought would I think that would cause me to react this way?” Language is not always be expressed as words (hence the term “body language”).

Speaking the language -> understanding the mind.

The Book Page at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced the winner of the world’s worst book title:

“The winner was Cooking With Pooh, which is a real book from Disney. It barely beat out “Letting It Go: a History of American Incontinence,” “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” (which I think maybe some people did not realize is also a real book) and “Everything You’ll Need to Remember About Alzheimer’s.”

[via Igor]

Thanks to David Eisen for the tip.

“It was Disability Awareness day and the folks at Fenway did a lot of great things for kids with challenges. Here is one who sang and when he got nervous the Fenway Faithful helped him out.”

I guess some crowds have some wisdom, sometimes.

I love the idea of a graphical window into a hidden world. In this case, it’s a view into a computer, and elegantly done.

When we say, “the eyes are the window to the soul,” aren’t we poetically expressing something similar? The eyes, the nuances of facial expression, body language, speech content and tone of voice all serve as our interface between the minds and hearts of people. We take for granted that we can communicate thoughts from one person to another, from one locked cranium to another. Not everyone can.

When it comes to electronic device development, we speak loftily of pervasive computing and “interaction” but our communication with our devices is about as limited as that of an unborn fetus with the outside world. We hear some noises, we see some flashing lights.

On the cutting edge, I’ve seen experiments (and patent applications) incorporating smell into mobile phones. We’re seeing the first market-viable applications of haptic feedback and more subtle, almost peripheral, GUI alerts. It’s encouraging. It gets us to the point of, say, someone with Asperger’s-type autism. We study the messages (warnings, alerts, error, menus), we think about what they might indicate, and we attempt a response hoping to achieve the desired outcome. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Ultimately, we have a long, long way to go before we can say that we are really “communicating” with our computers.

[via information aesthetics]

You couldn’t miss Amazon.com’s new Kindle device if you visited their site today. It was the main attraction. Kindle, Amazon’s own e-book (a mobile computer specifically designed for reading digitized books) is being set up in direct competition to Sony’s e-book “Portable Reader System”. Both utilize the new e-ink display technology, which draws virtually no power when on, except when the screen refreshes.

Sony has been working on their product for years and years now. It’s only recently that the newest version (2.0) has gotten good enough to really garner the interest of the greater consumer electronics world. Even with the fabulous industrial design that Sony brings to their e-book, and even with years of testing the waters of the market, estimates on product sales are in the thousands of units.

Why hasn’t the market been more welcoming? Perhaps it’s a simple matter of solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Americans don’t read on the go much; if it’s digital, it’s on a PDA. Japanese read manga and novelettes on their cell phones. Why own another device to carry around (after all, you could just bring a book)?

Or maybe it’s the price. At close to USD$300, a Sony e-book is a substantial investment. You can buy a good stack of books for that money.

Or maybe it’s a straightforward case of user experience: reading is (mostly) pleasure and relaxation. Otherwise, you’d be online researching something. A computer just doesn’t have the feel of a book in the hand, just doesn’t feel the same to the eye, just doesn’t feel… like a book.

Why does Amazon think they can do better in this market-that-might-not-be-a-market?

Let’s be blunt: they’re not going to succeed on product design. Kindle is the most incredibly awful looking product I’ve seen in years. It looks like a cross between a Motorola Q and a pack of dental floss. It doesn’t hold a kindle candle to the Sony’s elegance.

Telecoms.com offers a reasonable answer: it’s about the business model. Whereas Sony makes their money on hardware (yes, I know that the hardware manufacturers are moving into online content sales), Amazon makes their money selling content. Take a look at the Telecoms.com link. It’s an interesting premise.

What should strike you most is the offer of free data. The cost of the cellular connection is included in the cost of the device. What a concept! Most countries are still struggling to bring flat-rate data to the masses; Amazon is upping the ante to no-rate data.

Might this be more than just another e-book? Might this herald the future of the always-on, always open network?

Update [Nov.  26, 2007]: In follow-up to the points made by Telecoms.com, it’s worth noting a comment left on Robert Scoble’s blog:

56. One thing about the Kindle introduction that sticks out to me-Bezos saying this isn’t a device, its a “Service”.

I’m guessing the 1.0 hardware is just something they had to do to get things started-but they must have a bigger strategy here. I’m wondering if Apple is going to release:

a) an update to the iPhone that can access the Kindle “Service”

b) a Tablet Mac that can access the Kindle “Service”

(Steven Levy even dropped a hint about something in his Newsweek column-”(I’ve been reading Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” on my iPhone, a device that is expected to be a major outlet for e-books in the coming months.)” )

Comment by Totoro — November 25, 2007 @ 8:13pm

Some words are just… sumptuous. They have character, pizzazz. They just work right.

I first became conscious of the power of a great word when I read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konisburg. I was in third or fourth grade then, and was fascinated by a conversation in which Claudia, the older sister, talks about thinking of “soft” words as she falls asleep (I remember “hush” being one of them). The idea that the sounds of the words themselves could have meaning above and beyond that of the word definition was mind-opening.

Since then, I’ve also learned to love the shape and appearance of certain words and letters. A word is a whole package of meaning, from its letters to its shape to its sound to its definition. (If you’re a synesthete — I’m not — then think of the word’s color, too.)

Today’s word: quesadilla.

In Hebrew, the meanings of the shapes, names and sounds of the letters of the alphabet are inherent to the teachings of the Torah. The combinations of letters that form words have meaning, too, as they combine the letter meanings to create the fundamental essence of the word’s definition. Thus, words with similar letters have subtle but significant connections in meaning, even when they do not stem from the same root word. You might call it a semantic web of the essence of the universe.

Do you have words you enjoy? I’d like to hear which.

If you stick around for any length of time, you’ll realize that I have a serious book addiction. I am always in the middle of reading three or four books at a time (one in the kitchen, one or two in the bed, one in the bathroom, one in the living room…), and I feel seriously insecure leaving the house without something to read stashed in my bag.

Some people eat when they’re unhappy. Some shop. I buy books. They’re taking over the house. There are two large (floor-to-ceiling) bookcases of children’s books in the boys’ room, and several walls full in the living room. The dining-room cupboards are double-stacked with books. It’s a serious space problem in a house as small as ours.

The books I’m listing in my “Books I’m Reading” roll represent whatever is open at the moment. One of these days I’ll post lists of all-time favorites, perhaps divided into categories (history, science and medicine, religion, biographies, children’s books). Definitely feel free to contact me via the comments if you want a recommendation, or are searching for appropriate books for a specific age group or interest.