New Balance Mid-Century Modern Collection

I'm a big fan of New Balance sneakers, they fit my particular foot shape—really wide forefoot, narrow heel, collapsed arch—comfortably in a way that brands like Nike and Adidas just don't. Their new Mid-Century Modern Collection is really striking in that somewhat muted New Balance way. No fluorescent colors, New Balance shoes typically use the darker shades of any color it employs, with everything else from shape to material somewhat restrained.

The 998 Distinct Mid-Century Modern, one of four shoe models and five colorways available in the collection.

Sante Fe Institute Operating Principles

Linked to from my earlier piece on how greatness cannot be planned, the Sante Fe Institute Operating Principles (PDF) by Cormac McCarthy are short and great. Even if you don't like PDFs, this is just one page, and it's fun to see the inline corrections and to read the note in its typewriter-like typeface.

I like the ending line.

Occasionally we find that an invited guest is insane. This generally cheers us all up. We know we're on the right track.

Why greatness cannot be planned

After months of dissecting research papers, interviewing experts, stumbling down “dabbit holes” (as we call them here at FiveThirtyEight1) and not writing a single draft, my editor gave me a non-negotiable deadline, and I spiraled into a well of despair. I had a desk cluttered with scientific papers, a hard drive stuffed with gigabytes of research and three chalkboards covered in illegible notes, yet still no tangible form for my obsession. Only in the final hours, with the deadline closing in, did something resembling a story emerge. The first draft that I puked out was no masterpiece, but it was finally something. All those scribbles and stacks of paper were necessary steps, but only in retrospect can I see where they were pointing me.
 
When I told this story to University of Central Florida computer scientist Kenneth Stanley, he nodded in recognition. I met Stanley, a mild-mannered artificial intelligence researcher, without intending to. We were at the Santa Fe Institute, where he was spending a sabbatical and I was in residence as a journalism fellow. Stanley had stumbled upon an algorithmic principle that pointed the way to creativity in science, art, culture and life, a principle he outlines in a new book, “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective.” He told me that a computer algorithm he’d created suggested that my chaotic, unstructured writing process was the ideal way to produce creative work.
 

Interesting. I need to pick up that book. Stanley built an algorithm that allowed users to evolve photos from simple blobs like this...

...to more recognizable images like these:

What's interesting is thinking about whether this idea applies to other forms of creative work and research.

The same sort of blind process happened in another series of experimentswhere Stanley and Joel Lehman instructed robots to work toward defined objectives. In one experiment a bipedal robot programmed to walk farther and farther actually ended up walking less far than one that simply was programmed to do something novel again and again, Stanley writes. Falling on the ground and flailing your legs doesn’t look much like walking, but it’s a good way to learn to oscillate, and oscillation is the most effective motion for walking. If you lock your objectives strictly on walking, you won’t hit that oscillation stepping stone. Stanley calls this the “objective paradox” — as soon as you create an objective, you ruin your ability to reach it.
 

And does this thinking apply to teams as well? If you are a company that needs a creative breakthrough, might that require a mental shift from a world of deterministic results, in which deliberate practice is the best process, to one that is more probabilistic, open, exploratory?

I suspect the answer is some mix of patience, novelty-seeking, and persistence. You have to be okay with a high failure rate, and a lot of iteration, but that by its very nature requires a lot of repeated, sustained effort. Thus, much like being an entrepreneur.

This week in NBA Twitter

That should be a television show. It's too bad Twitter wasn't around when Michael Jordan was at the height of his basketball powers because his homicidal competitive streak would have had him up all night looking for any perceived slight on Twitter and then responding in some terrifyingly inappropriate manner.

Having MJ-wannabe Kobe actively tweeting is a solid consolation prize, though.

Vertical video

The shift also shows off the way that opinions of tech elites can be rendered moot by mainstream preferences. So, whether you are shooting a home video or something for work, you can safely ignore the puppets. To shoot vertically isn’t to be exposed as a tech ignoramus or a lazy philistine who cares little for the creative process. Rather it is to be on the vanguard of a novel and potentially far-reaching artistic trend.
 
The arguments against vertical video all seek to find something inviolable about images that play out horizontally before our eyes. “We live in a horizontal world, and most action happens from left to right,” said Mr. Bova, one of the men behind the puppet P.S.A. He added that “vertical videos feel claustrophobic,” because often they feature one or two people occupying the full frame, and not much of the landscape to show what lies beyond. Finally, Mr. Bova said, “our eyes are horizontal,” by which he meant the human field of vision is wider than it is tall, so it is only natural that our videos match that shape.
 
There is a simple rejoinder to his argument: Our eyes may be horizontal, but our hands are best suited to holding objects vertically, which is why phones, tablets and, in the predigital age, our books and other documents were usually oriented in portrait mode. Watching horizontal video on a phone’s vertical screen is a minor annoyance. With a horizontal video, you have to awkwardly flip your phone sideways so the entire image fills the screen, or you can keep your phone vertical and tolerate the huge black bars displayed above and below the picture.
 

So writes Farhad Manjoo in the NYTimes. Let's throw this in the category of contrarian pieces that are actually just wrong.

Just like professional photographers will turn their camera vertically from time to time, the lens orientation should match the subject. I would not want to watch a mumblecore movie in a Panavision 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio, but for Lawrence of Arabia, the Super Panavision 2.20 to 1 widescreen aspect ratio was crucial to the feeling of the feeling of people against the open expanse of the desert (and it amplifies Lawrence as a great man to see him wield his force of personality against such a broad canvas).

Sure, sometimes shooting vertically on your phone allows you to get closer to your subject, like the baby's first steps mentioned in the piece. However, for most subjects, horizontal is better. Human field of vision is horizontal, and it feels claustrophobic to watch vertical video for long period of time, it's like looking through the vertical slats in a fence.

For a Snap or a Vine, sure, I don't really care that much, neither do most people. Most of those are shot spontaneously, without much regard for the background, and it actually feels more unnatural or artificial if the video is horizontal since you know people usually hold their phones vertically. The vertical orientation suits the casual, disposable nature of those videos and subjects. The rise in vertical video reflects the rise of those networks and the rise of the mobile phone, but it doesn't signal some fundamental change in the difference between the suitability of horizontal versus vertical video.

Yesterday I watched this remarkable eyewitness video of the explosion in Tianjin China. It's stunning, but I couldn't help thinking two things watching it. One: stop filming and get to safety! Two: I wish it was shot horizontally.