IIBB: June 17, 2006
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Reading processors
Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,
I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.
, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,
and spacing (pdf),
What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?
5 Comments
El de los colores me mareó un poco al principio pero al cambiar a la versón normal ésta me pareció de lo más x. El spacing está MUY bueno. ¿O como sería?
El s p a c i n g está
MUY bueno.
Por cierto, que bueno que regresó el blog….
Gracias por el feedback y por el apoyo! A mi tambien me convence mas el spacing, y, en cualquier chance, pienso spacificar aquella carta a Yehuda para ver que tanto ayuda leer un texto mas considerable.
Update Jun 24, 2006: Yehuda letter spacified!Of course there has been since time immemorial a widely used example of spacing (visual-syntactic text formattingELZR): invitations!
Man this is genius! I’d been working on the same idea but from the angle of making a new font with characters that were more easily disquingishable than the latin ones (based on shorthand for ease of learning x%x double utility). Give me some time to get better at programming and I’ll be all over this! You come up with any new ideas you haven’t mentioned yet (p)(re the above examples: the coloured one was easier <small>(for me at least)</small> to use than the altered positioning, any idea which is more effective given time to learn it)%?
Sorry should probably have said “Hi” and introduced myself first. I’m British and bored and think computers are capable of being far more useful than they have been so far. I found your site via boingboing and have been wandering around the archives ever since.Welcome oliverd! I’m glad you liked this post and I hope you stick around. I definitely share your thoughts on computers’ promise. ;)
Heh. I love your latin-alphabet angle, it’s quite ambitious. A similar attempt of mine was to try to improve the arabic numerals, both the characters and the system (the canonic example of symbolic beauty).As for new ideas, I chanced recently on Dessum’s indent level highlighting. I installed it in my Vim and now I can’t live without it!
And I’ve had a couple of ideas on my own (reading processors are a topic that fascinates me to no end):a text isolator that would scan a webpage tags and keep only the one with most of the text (thus magically eliminating all clutter!).
a ”nomenclator” (a name rememberer) that would give you a person’s intro (its first mention in the article) when you hover one its last name’s instances. Useful for, say, long NYT articles.
a preposition highlighter, easy but possibly extremely useful. How many times don’t you use the next paragraph’s but to guess what the current one is about?
a number consigliere that would on hover over some..
date, give you days and years elapsed since
unit quantity, convert it to some predefined units
* quantity, give you order of magnitude anchors. Say for a quantity in inches it would compare scaled versions of your hand and a circle with the quantity for diameter.
a simple-worder that would turn some fancy words into simple compound words like myocardial
> heart-muscle, homeostasis> statekeeping, pediatrics -> children-medicine…What about you? Any further ideas for what a reading processor would mean?
(Oh and I have no idea of which of spacing and coloring is more effective.)