week 55

– I wrote a bunch about nightclub layout back in January. Last week, I went back to Zuzu, in Boston…and found that things had changed. Specifically, they had opened a door in the back left of the room that allowed people to go and relax in a non-sweaty, well-lit room.

This is a terrible idea.  You’re giving people  a road back to reality, where they can calm down, clean up, realize that the person that they wanted to sleep with is actually ugly, etc.  You’re allowing people to break the spell of the dancefloor.

And the party was less good for it.  I have not been in Boston for two years, so maybe the party just got lame…but I have a deep suspicion that a simple, open door is not helping.

– We Think Alone, by Miranda July, is an amazing thing.

– I’ve  been thinking about how I write code, which is badly, and the legends of people like Knuth and Dijkstra, who could, apparently, write things that worked first time, because they were amazing coders / mathematicians, people, etc.  Specifically, I was thinking of the impact of interpreted languages like Python, etc, vs. writing nasty stuff on punch cards, and how that, in a McLuhanish sort of way, that affects your brain.  This also ties into Bret Victor’s work around displaying how systems work in an explicit fashion, and Donald Norman’s work around the design of every day things, and making their changes obvious to the user.  Do these things matter?  Or are they the same as bemoaning the lack of oral culture?  Or did that matter too?