ideagraph

I'm probably not the first one to come up with something like this, but I did develop this without researching other things which may be similar, so it may need to be tweaked as I begin to test it out. I've done one test so far, mapping out a series of ideas and things to see where they fit. With a little fiddling, I was able to come up with results that seemed like a proof-of-concept this isn't exactly the scientific method at work here I'll probably post a version of that test run at some point but for now I wanted to post  the chart in the hope that it may be helpful to at least a fraction of the half-dozens of people that occasionally wander past this blog.

Clicky-click to bigenate. Use at will, according to rules below please*

The IdeaGraph was born on a short walk I took at work the other day. I walked past a bus/camper parked in front of the Artisan's Asylum. This vehicle is some kind of mobile eye exam venture. I know this because I searched for what it was after seeing what I did. As I approached, looking up from a vantage point that was probably too close for maximum effect, I saw a bus painted mostly pale-peach, with a large, black graphic made of curving black lines, overlapping in a random way, forming a large tapered arc. What? I'm too close, so I looked again assuming it was something normally smaller than 8 feet long. Ah, an eyebrow. Yep, there's another one, down the other end. A little hard to see from where I was approaching. There is a spot that juts out when parked, fancy camper style, making the front end brow harder to see. I'm almost past it now, searching for what would have two big eyebrows, clearly a face graphic, no, a photo. There's the name, opto-blah,  whatever, but where are the eyes? Just eyebrows? No...

The eyes are the wheels! oh, I get it

Round, black, shiny hubcaps. yeah, sure, but...

Wait, the eyes are... dirty, sort of separated from the rest of the face by the wheel wells, the dark hollows are like the eye sockets in a skull, the eyes are detached, dangling, lumpy, dry, filthy, and wait... they're actually touching the street! In the gutter! Ground right in there, smooshed into the asphalt and the grit, flattening out the irises... bleeahck

Yeah, its kind of gross. Dumb. Not a good design. Not a good idea. The antithesis of eye health.

It probably started out as an interesting idea. That's how design works.But how do we know whether or not something that looks good on paper or a computer screen will work in reality. what if we tear off the eyelids, and scrub the eyes in the dirt. forever. yeah, lets try that Some things need to be mocked-up, prototyped, tested. But before we go to the trouble, we just need to think about things a little more before foisting them onto humanity.

IdeaGraph won't help you determine if your idea is worth realizing by plugging in some numbers, or cranking it through some algorithm, but it may help you to see where your idea lies in relation to other ideas. This is the reason I'm not including my own test mapping. Everyone has their own value system and the mapping skews toward what works for you. Disclaimer: In order to be useful for idea realization, you will need to think about the norms of the society upon which you be doing your foisting while mapping on IdeaGraph. So what does it do? It may just help to organize your thoughts.

How does it work? IdeaGraph helps organize ideas (and real things) by fitting them into an overall framework of their relative weights, and seeing how they compare to one another, with some Venn diagram aspects to it. The map has no real scale, and if you blow it up you can fit more into it. The more ideas you enter, the more helpful it becomes. Thinking about things that are real, as ideas rather than physical things is helpful when mapping. George Washington was definitely a real guy, but the idea of George Washington, or taxes, or music (regardless of whether you consider these things as worth it) will help you map.

An oval representing ALL IDEAS sits at the center of the graph. This oval shape represents every idea we have or can have, and its expanding over time. The ALL IDEAS oval is overlaid, Venn diagram-style, with a parabola representing GOOD, which grows upward, and is potentially infinite. The mirror of that, EVIL, is a parabola which extends downward, and is also potentially infinite. Think positive and negative on the y axis with Venn aspects.

GOOD and EVIL overlap in the center, creating a zone where things and ideas are both good and evil, again, Venn diagram-style, but with scale. The further ideas are located from the center, vertically, the more good or evil they are. Where they overlap, ideas are more meh, but the scale is still important.

There is also a scale from left to right. The further things are to the right on IdeaGraph, the more helpful they are, the further left, the less helpful (or more detrimental, depending on your viewpoint.) The line between MORE HELPFUL and LESS HELPFUL is not vertical. The higher ideas get on the vertical scale, the more the line (shown in red) slides to the left. The more evil things get, the more the line slides right. At the upper and lower limits, really good is always helpful, and really bad is never helpful. Even though the arrows are shown graphically, they are not overlays in the Venn diagram sense, its just a relative scale. Think positive and negative on the x axis.

Running vertically through GOOD and EVIL is a vague strip of weirdness. This band is a little murky and expands at the upper and lower limits, where it also becomes more vague. Unlike the line between more and less helpful, the weird band is an overlay of the GOOD and EVIL zones (Venn again) but its character changes; it doesn't have a fixed value. Its has some labels along the band to help you decide where things fall. For example, weird ideas on the low end of the GOOD scale are just ODD. The higher you go, the more lofty, and lower things get darker. Fee free to add your own intermediate labels to fine tune the scale.

Within ALL IDEAS is a smaller oval shape representing ACHIEVABLE IDEAS. These are the ideas that can be spun up into tangible things: buildings, books, movies, art, governments, nuclear bombs, etc. That means the oval ring of ALL IDEAS that sits outside ACHIEVABLE IDEAS contains the rest of our collective intangible ideas: greed, charity, despotism, faith, dragons, magic, Satan, etc.

Both the ALL and ACHIEVABLE ideas ovals extend left and right beyond the bounds of GOOD and EVIL. Some ideas and things are neither good nor evil, but we still need to decide if they are helpful or not. For example, I would argue that optimism exists outside the limits of good and evil, and as an intangible idea, it sits in the oval ring. Maybe it does; if so, does it fit on the left or the right?

The green circular area floating high at the center is labeled "Ideas worth considering." I put it here, on the good side of the scale, but overlapping the bad a little, spanning equally left and right, but a closer look at the red line shows that this zone is more helpful than not. This is where my value system indicates I should be looking. Yours may differ slightly. This zone has no hard limit; its more Vennish than Venn. This zone also extends outside what is achievable, with the hope that we can expand that oval.

Lastly is a red colored parabola, that makes up a very small portion of what is actually achievable. This is the "Ideas worth realizing" zone. This is where you want to be. It sits on the good side, but not too high, and extends to infinity on the right, toward helpful. The smallest bit of the parabola extends to the left, and the bottom just touches on bad, assuming that some ideas worth realizing may not always be extremely helpful, or without a darker side, but only at the very lowest scales. The red zone is also overlapped by the weirdness zone; some things worth doing may also be a little weird. This is where some art, comedy, and Shakespeare live. A blow-up of this zone, mapped with only real things may be helpful for graphing your ideas when they are close to fruition, to see if they fall in the red zone, or if they are just outside it (like scraping your eyeballs on the pavement) or way outside it (like Fat Man and Little Boy.)

Download it, print it out, fool around with it, and let me know if it works for you. And tell me where IdeaGraph and this blog post fit on IdeaGraph. I'm guessing a shorter post would probably move up and to the right, but I'm not sure if it makes it to the red zone! Based on my experience, mapping ideas can get pretty funny, pretty quickly.


* You are free to use the IdeaGraph for whatever you would like as long as you maintain the copyright information, the title, and the text referring to this blog. Also give credit to me, and link back here. If you decide to derive from the ideas and/or intellectual property manifest within IdeaGraph for profit, whether or not you've modified the graphics and text, then be a grownup and send me a fat check.**

** If you're unsure if this is the right course of action, plot it on the IdeaGraph without lying to yourself.*** And then send me the check.

*** If you are an evil person, IdeaGraph won't work for you, because everything you plot will be skewed down and left. Lying to yourself is as indivisible from evil as responsibility is indivisible from privilege.

last mile

Like the last book I read, I also borrowed this one from my wife. I've read a couple of Baldacci's books, and I don't like him as much as some of the other prolific action writers out there, but this one wasn't bad. I guess I have a little trouble with the dimension of his characters. I don't really understand how the main character's head works. Maybe that's the point about Amos Decker, but I'm not sure if its that, or if that's just the writing, because I don't really understand any of the minor character's either. There are a bunch of people that are included in Amos Decker's newly formed team, and even the most prominent of them seems like a stand-in. A borrowed stereotype that is completely 2-dimensional and we're relied upon, almost exclusively, to fill in the blanks of these characters. They just seem to wander into scenes and say lines the main character can react to and then disappear.

When one of the new team members goes missing, I'm like, who? I don't even know this person, I have no idea why they are on the team, and I'm not sure the team does either. And then it seems like a day or two will go by and then someone seems very concerned about finding the missing teammate and I realize that I'd forgotten they were gone. Because it seemed like everyone in the story had forgotten they were gone too.

That said, the Amos Decker character is interesting. His personality and the way he thinks is the engine behind the plot. The story has some twists to it, that only Decker can see, and then they are revealed to us in short order. I'm not wild about the tactics sometimes; like Decker scribbling a note on a slip of paper at the end of a planning meeting and saying something like, then this is what we'll do. No one would do that. They've just been talking in a room for 20 minutes, why would he suddenly stop and write something down instead of just saying it, if only to keep it from us for a chapter or two. I don't feel like the author should be huddling with his characters and whispering so I can't hear. hey Dave, I'm right here. I can see you hiding stuff with your hand 

So if you're like me and you need something to read, this is definitely something to read. There's pages and everything.

no middle name

I just borrowed No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Short Stories from my wife, who hadn't read it yet. She picked it up recently in paperback and I was looking for something to read. I've read a bunch of the Reacher Stories, but not in order, and I certainly haven't read all of them. I didn't know what this one was about--I don't usually read book jackets and back covers--so I was on my third story before realizing that this wasn't a novel and I was reading a series of unrelated short stories. I remember thinking, we're really jumping around in time, and I'm not sure how these things are even related

The way I've noted the title with its sub-title above, its a little easier to see. The sub-title on the book cover is a little small, as you can see in the image to the left. If the size of the text on the cover is any indicator, and I assume it is, Lee Child is what is selling the book, Jack Reacher is next in line, and the book's title is third, almost an afterthought down there at the bottom. And the sub-title? Well, you're going to need to dig for that, its not even as important as the best seller list crap. Its even written in that too-narrow-to-read, Surgeon General's Warning font. warning, the information contained here is not really meant to be read

The stories range from novella size to a few pages that read more like a slice-of-life; just Reacher being a good guy. Some of the stories fill in some of his early life, and other slot in between his larger adventures, and I'm not sure the timing, or where they fit in is even important. I get the feeling that Lee Child may have an idea, and if he can't spin it up into a novel, he doesn't just give up on it, he writes it through to see where it goes. Sometimes its 500 pages, and other times its 50. or 10.

So, as I said to my wife when she asked me about it, it wasn't what I was expecting. Is the publisher really trying to hide the fact that this is a collection of short stories and not the next Reacher novel? I'm not sure, but I can tell you that my wife is the one who bought this, and after reading a few of the stories, she wasn't sure when they were going to get tied up into the same story either. score two for the publisher But this book is better than the last one.

My recommendation is clear, you should read this if you're a Jack Reacher fan.

essential ingredients

The School of Essential Ingredients is the first novel by Erica Bauermeister, which I picked up in paperback at my library's on-going book sale. Lillian owns a small restaurant in a quiet neighborhood, tucked into a old house with a front porch and small gardens in the yard, where she mixes flowers with herbs she uses in the kitchen. Once a week, Lillian hosts a cooking class, on Mondays when the restaurant is closed. The story opens with Lillian, and why she got into cooking, what she thinks it did for her, and how she thinks that it may help others to connect or re-connect with people, feelings, memories, and their own sense.

Each of the following chapters is focused on one of her students in this particular class, what their history is, what they bring to the class and its explorations of flavor, memory, confidence, and connectedness. Lillian sees food as more than sustenance, she sees it as one of the essential ingredients in life. The point seems to be, that there are a number of things that we as human do throughout our lives, maybe even most of our lives (such as work) which are really essential to human life. What we need is food, water, air, and in some or most cases shelter, clothes, and to procreate. That's it. Of that short list, only food gives us the opportunity to dazzle all of our senses, or perhaps just comfort them.

The cooking class is not really about food--although the descriptions of the food and the cooking are well done, and help form the backbone on which this sweet story is about. This story is about the people in it, and how slowing down and allowing their senses to indulge can help unlock other feelings they may not have been allowing themselves to have.

It was an interesting, and sensual look at what simple pleasures can do for us, and how they may not be so simple after all. This is a great first book, and I bet was popular with the book club folks, and cooking clutch folks as well.

prisoner of heaven

I picked this book up at the library book sale because I recognized the author's name, and was pretty sure I'd read one of his books. Carlos Ruiz Zafon may be a prolific writer, but perhaps not all of his books are translated and brought to the US, what do I know. The title credits in the frontmatter of the hardcover I just read only list a few books.

I think the book I read was The Shadow of the Wind,* which is part of Ruiz's Cemetery of Lost Books series, as is this one: The Prisoner of Heaven. The way the series is described on the book jacket, these stories are related, but they don't need to be read in order. Which is probably good, as I don't think I've read any of the intervening books.

This was good. A fast read, pulled me right in. I read a lot more of this one at each siting than I did the last one. see below The story was dark, a little Gothic, romantic, sweet, sad, with a little intrigue, and glimpses at larger unseen things in the background.

The translation was done by Lucia Graves, and it appears to be British rather than North American English. After a quick look, Graves is indeed English, and a writer herself. She's also translated a lot of her father's works (Robert Graves.) I liked the translation. Sometimes translations are obvious, they seem to be a separate thing, that kind of floats over the author's work, and obscures as much it reveals. I like how Graves translates the feeling, or the meaning, rather than just the words. She finds idioms and phrases that may not match word-for-word what Ruiz has written, but they do match what he means, or needs to convey in the story. Brava Lucia Graves.




Unrelated: So, where have I been for over a month? Reading has been difficult with my house under construction; its hard to find books that are either packed away or hidden behind piles of stuff. After a couple of false starts (reading a few pages of things that I could find, but wasn't really interested in reading) I went to the library and picked out a book--Jerusalem by Alan Moore, of graphic novel fame--and its got, like 2000 pages or something. Its new so its in the 14 day book group, which means that you can only take it for 2 weeks, and then you have to renew it, which I did (once) then gave up. Its not often that I do, give up on a book that is. I felt like this one had something to say it just took... so... long... to... say it. I just couldn't get that book rolling. I've had slow starts in books before. You know, it takes 50 or a hundred pages for the author to lay out the premise and get you up to speed sometimes.

200+ pages in, in a month! and I'm still reading completely disjointed tales from the POV of a bunch of, as of yet, unrelated characters from Northampton or "The Boroughs" (Moore's hometown) and I'm not getting it. I've had this book twice as long as I'm supposed to have had it and I don't even know what its about. Might have been good, I think it could have been. A little purple however. Moore seems to suffer from trying to paint as colorful a backdrop as he can in a graphic novel with words. If each frame in a graphic novel is indeed worth a thousand words, then it appears that is about where he was headed.

This ends up being a partial review of Jerusalem as well, I guess.


* None of Ruiz's books show up here, so if I read some of his stuff, it was before 2009, when I started writing this stuff down. And that's why I started thing, so I could keep track of what I've read, and not buy the same book 3 times.

lion for easter

So for those of you who don't know, I typically try to predict whether or not March will actually go out like a lamb, and I usually make the call around the 15th ides of march, right?

Given that I can cheat my way through by waiting until the middle of the month, I'm typically pretty good at guessing, but this year, because Wednesday is no longer Prince Spaghetti Day in the Boston area, its Nor'easter Day, I blew it.

The bet I made this year is: If I'm right we'll have lamb for Easter. no brainer But if I'm wrong we'll have lion. Little did I know how difficult it would be to make good on this bet. Its really difficult to find lion meat, as it is (of course) illegal, but I did find a source on line you have to dig pretty deep and took a ride to Vermont yesterday to meet a guy who brought it over the border from Canada. Don't think its legal in Canada either, but I didn't ask a lot of questions. I won't say any more, as I'm sure that the guy I met with isn't looking for publicity.

So, one squishy package into a cooler in the trunk, and some last-minute advice to try juniper berries to help with the gaminess from my guy really, where the hell am I going to find those? and I'm off home to try and cook this stuff up. I've had it in a brine all night, with salt, peppercorns, vinegar, bayleaf, and rosemary (which I read on line is a pretty good substitute for juniper berries.)

It just went into the oven to slow roast for dinner, I'm going to deglaze the pan with gin, which is flavored with juniper berries! I hope it comes out good! In any case, I'm glad its April.

Happy Easter everyone!

barbershop libraries

From their InstaGram (without permission)

Today I heard a story about Barbershop Books on public radio. Barbershop Books is the brainchild of Alvin Irby, a ex-kindergarten teacher, and stand-up comedian, who decided to do something about encouraging--inspiring, even--black boys to read. In an interview, Irvy made a point about the reading that is assigned in schools, that has always bothered me, the negative storylines in books assigned to young people to read. My kids understood the formula, and made jokes about it, before they finished elementary school, which runs through grade 6 in my town. Here's how they described the books they read, year after year: victim of Nazis, victim of racism, or victim of Nazis AND racism.

Irvy summed it up this way (I'm paraphrasing) What are the role models black boys read about in school? Old, dead, black men who's stories don't touch their lives, and that they can't relate to. Irvy has curated a select list of 15 books that he installs on a shelf somewhere in a participating barbershop. Books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and The Snowy Day.

These are books want to read, can relate to and are fun. The idea is to encourage reading, by making books available in a safe space. Irvy has chosen barbershops because they typically are home to men. Men interacting with one another in a comfortable, friendly, normal way. Young and old. Many of them father figures. Ingenious.

This is library.

Here's the mission, in their own words (used without permission):

"In an increasingly global and knowledge-based economy, poor reading skills among young black boys today will produce black men who are unprepared to compete in the workforce of tomorrow. Four key factors contribute to low reading proficiency among black boys: (1) limited access to engaging and age appropriate reading material; (2) lack of black men in black boys’ early reading experiences; (3) few culturally competent educators; and (4) schools that are unresponsive to black boys’ individual learning styles."

Visit Barbershop Books, and see for yourself. Kudos to Alvin Irby and Barbershop Books.

in like a lion

Lion and Lamb Eyes

I'm a little late getting my March calendar up this year, but figured I had to get with it with a big storm coming to the Northeast. Might be rain, might be a foot of snow, might be nothing. We won't know until tomorrow. Today was a bull, and tomorrow is a moose. Either one could be trouble, so we'll have to wait and see what happens.

Last year, March was so bad, I ended up changing the whole month to lion. I hope that's not the case this year. Enjoy!

Here's how it stacks up this year. yes, its the same every year, that's why we call it a tradition.

March 1 - Lion: Of course. Its in like a lion, right?
March 2 - Tiger: Up to 11-feet, and nearly 700 pounds!
March 3 - Bear: Oh my! Definitely polar bear this year.
March 4 - Shark: Everyone knows that shark week is not really a thing, right?
March 5 - Wolf: The Timber variety. They're coming back, baby!
March 6 - Bull: One word: Pamplona.
March 7 - Moose: Brake for moose, it could save your life.
March 8 - Eagle: Don't leave your pets outside... or your chickens.
March 9 - Scorpion: Step on it before it steps on you.
March 10 - Dingo: No, its not a stray dog.
March 11 - Hawk: Not hawkish. That's for scared people, pretending to be strong.
March 12 - Lynx: No honey, that's not a tom cat, don't feed it.
March 13 - Bat: Wanna put on your Batman suit, party on!
March 14 - Monkey: They're cute but can also throw poop! HBD Coleen!
March 15 - Snake: The Ides of March. Snakes are known for wisdom, and treachery.
March 16 - Ox: Hard working in a plodding kind of way.
March 17 - Elephant: Wise, big, powerful... gray.
March 18 - Raven: Nevermore.
March 19 - Stag: Power and compassion. Might make a good patronus.
March 20 - Crab: This one can sneak up on you. First day of spring!
March 21 - Goat: Stubborn and tough going.
March 22 - Horse: Strong and reliable. Sometimes crappy on the back end.
March 23 - Pig: Smart but messy; wear your boots today.
March 24 - Dog: Friendly and good-natured; take a walk.
March 25 - Dolphin: Fun and wet; bring an umbrella.
March 26 - Rooster: Get up early and wake the neighbors.
March 27 - Turtle: Muddy, but adorable; boots again.
March 28 - Toad: Similar to turtle, but a little squishier.
March 29 - Robin: I guess you could wear your Robin costume today. You cosplay nut!
March 30 - Rabbit: Roasted with rosemary and potatoes! HBD Kelton!
March 31 - Lamb: Mmm... arrosticini. Smells like spring!

According to one source I read "This phrase has its origins with the constellations Leo, the Lion, and Aries, the ram or lamb. It has to do with the relative positions of these constellations in the sky at the beginning and end of the month." Sounds like a stretch to me. My guess is it comes from someone making up a story to tell children around a fire, or something equally as mundane.

In any case, March is the month that brings us Spring, so it can't be all bad. But the weather might be.

Sheep eyes are weird. That's all I'm saying.

UPDATE: Happy Easter everyone! We made it, tho I was tempted to change this year to lion (or some other vicious beast) everyday. This March was one to remember. Wednesday was Nor'easter Day this month. Seems like we got one once a week all month, but it WAS sunny and warm yesterday, so lamb-like it was.

piano shop

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank was apparently pretty popular when it came out in 2001. Its not a long book, 300 pages or so, and it traces the author's rediscovery of the piano. The sub-title: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier gives you a little more info on where Thad Carhart is coming from.

Carhart is an American living in Paris, with his family. Carhart spent years in Paris as a child with his own family, where he took piano lessons, and enjoyed playing the piano for himself, but was never interested in pursuing piano as a musician, and certainly not as a career. It was his childhood impression that once his teacher's learned that, they weren't as interested in teaching him. That may or may not be true, but he eventually left Paris and returned to the US, leaving his piano lessons behind.

As an adult, who has moved back to Paris with his wife and two school age children, Carhart steps into a piano shop in a quiet neighborhood on the Left Bank, and his love for the piano is reignited. What follows is Carhart's re-immersion into the world of pianos, their history, construction, maintenance, tuning, restoration, and differences. Carhart's decision to write about it, inspires his delving into the finer points of fine pianos, what makes a piano fine vs. what makes an inexpensive piano crummy (in most cases) and even leads to a visit to Fazioli Pianoforti.

I would imagine this book will strike a chord with pianists especially, which I am not, but I did enjoy Carhart's matter-of-fact style, and how he is able to share his love for these old, mysterious pieces of furniture. It was also nice to look inside the neighborhood life of Paris and some of its people. The descriptions of the people he meets and the friends he makes along the way are just as fun to read.