In this post I try to explain abstract art - those kind of paintings that are just some shapes and squiggles that don't represent anything, and they look like a kid drew them or that they can be done by anyone in Paint.
My approach is to explain one of Piet Mondrian's paintings, but first I explain what abstraction is. I do that by taking a short text (any Monkey Island fans out there?), that is full of descriptions, and abstract it over and over again, until there is barely anything left of the original. Then I explain how that same process works for graphical arts, and what it all means.
I recently read "How Emotions are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett and I wanted to write in my own words the mechanisms she described, so I can understand them better.
Since today is World Mental Health Day, I thought I'd share some things I've learned over the past few years from dealing with anxiety issues. Perhaps it will be helpful to others.
I've found this site something like 10 years ago and changed how I tie my shoes. I do a double loop thing and I never have to stop to tie them back because they came loose. Whenever I see a soccer player stop to tie his laces I laugh and say that that should be the first thing the coaches teach and this site would be a great resource for that.
Your explanation has just made the movie more interesting to me. Until now I thought it was quite idiotic, but your revelations do make sense.
Though I still think that the ending scene is badly handled. If the point is that Cobb doesn't care any more about the outcome of the spinning top, then Nolan should have just slided from the image of the top to Cobb and his children.
By zooming in on the top and cutting the shot right before it should falls, it just adds this unneeded baggage of questioning whether all that happened is real or not. Like some sort of magic trick. "Do you doubt what you've just seen?" And I just didn't find that that was the point of the movie.
I think that's a really good comparison, because it really is a magic trick, isn't it? I think most good heist films are in the sense that the pleasure is in the misdirection: what makes them satisfying to watch is being "in on the game" -- seeing all of the clues arranged in plain sight and watching how the director pulls it off.
So Inception might not be for everyone since it's heavy on narrative and light on character development (we don't see why Cobb changes, he just does), but there's all of this wonderfully meta sleight-of-hand just below the surface as Nolan tells us how he is making the film. Even beyond the symbolism, the very rules he outlines for how to create dreams apply equally well to the film itself (make the plot a paradoxical maze, get the audience lost in it while you plant ideas in their heads, and make the message stick by forming it around a core message of positive emotional catharsis). And yet we are still surprised, or I was at least!
Anyway, hopefully if you see it again you'll like it better next time. I personally think it's hands-down one of the best films in the last decade, and it's a real pity it got shunted off at the Oscars when it should have swept the field.
The Nook STP runs Android, and it's pretty trivial to get Android-native PDF readers up-and-running on it. None are yet optimized for the e-ink screen, of course, but some have an option to turn off animation which helps somewhat.
Something like mupdf (which has already been ported) combined with some button/touch bindings and perhaps a touch-friendly zoom feature seems to me like it would do the job perfectly... and be an easy weekend hack for much of this site's target audience?*
I think you'd have to look long and hard for an e-ink reader with truly decent out-of-box PDF support and no serious failings in other areas — my search so far has been unfruitful, but please do tell if you've come across anything which fits the bill.
*edit: If someone actually does/has done this/something similar, please post about it here!
Yes, I did see videos of rooted nook, and you could use android apps to view PDFs, but the problem with that is, of course, rooting the device.
I think Kindle 3 is better for PDFs than the Nook Touch, because you can zoom in. It is clunky, but at least you can do it. On the Nook you can only change font sizes, and that reflows the PDF and messes everything up.
The solution, as I see it, since they have a touch screen is to implement something similar to ezPDF, which is my favourite PDF reader for Android. Just a double tap on a section, and it'll zoom exactly on the section of text you want to read. You don't have to fiddle with fixed zoom settings and clunky movement to try and fit the viewport to include the portion you want to see.
Of course, they probably aren't interested in doing this at all, since they'd be very happy if you only read books bought at their store.
PS. The Kindle DX is probably the best for PDFs, but its price and size are big downpoints.
Actually the ectaco jetbook, a cheap ebook reader I got over a year ago as superb PDF support. It automatically zooms in past margins, loads all graphics and text, turns pages quickly, even on monster sized textbook PDF files. This cheap piece of hardware handles PDFs better than my (albeit cheap) android tablet. If only they had a version with a decent screen size, it would be the killer device for textbook reading.
Thanks for the tip, but the jetBook seems to use a TFT screen: "jetBook uses a huge, state-of-the-art 5-inch VGA reflective monochrome TFT screen" (http://www.jetbook.net/specifications). No word about resolution but I'm skeptical that it could compare in any way to e-ink, especially the new Pearl panels.
Oh definitely not. But its not bad in its own right. It's not backlit, it uses ambient light to display the picture. So battery life is quite good. Personally I found it easy on the eyes, but then again I don't particularly have trouble with backlight LCD's for extended periods of time either.
The resolution of my 5'' is 640x480. The size definitely kills it for anything other than standard novels. If they came out with an 8inch version I would be all over it.
It seems to me that PDF is not a format suitable for much more than printing on paper.
A very important feature of Kindle is to allow choosing font size. It make it an ideal tool for elders. But PDF documents have a fixed layout that won't allow resizing font conveniently, or you have to break it in pieces.
You are right. But, I have an extensive library of PDF files that I'd like to read. I expect many people do too. Most are technical documents with equations, graphs and other images. I would love to have an e-ink based reader that will render such documents correctly.
But, Amazon are probably more interested in selling their content, so I understand the lack of PDF support.
I have an older Kindle DX which can do technical PDFs. Aside from the cost (nowadays triple the smaller Kindle), it's still not entirely satisfactory for three reasons:
- It's cumbersome to do anything other than reading sequentially.
- The screen is still not big enough for letter/A4 pages - it does perform decent scaling, but you know how scrunched many technical papers are. Can go landscape and read half a page, which is a pain in two column layouts ...
- It's a tad heavy, almost like a hardcover textbook that needs to be held in both hands.
I understand PDFs aren't a great format for books, but there are some cases in which it'd be fantastic to have them on an e-reader.
For graphical content, such as technical drawings/illustrations, wireframes or just B&W document proofs, the resolution and fidelity of an E-Ink Pearl screen combined with the true WYSIWYG nature of the PDF format across digital/print would be a dream come true for me...
I'm not too hot on the touchscreen. I don't need it. I like the physical page turning buttons on my wife's Kindle 3... they have a satisfying weight to them and they sit nicely where your fingers already are. I don't want to tap tap tap my e-ink screen all day.
My approach is to explain one of Piet Mondrian's paintings, but first I explain what abstraction is. I do that by taking a short text (any Monkey Island fans out there?), that is full of descriptions, and abstract it over and over again, until there is barely anything left of the original. Then I explain how that same process works for graphical arts, and what it all means.