So you may be wondering what’s going on here at Banapana since things have been up and down and changing and disappearing. There are two things going on. One, I’ve installed the new version of Wordpress (2.5)–more on that in a minute. The other thing is a general change in the way that this blog is structured. Banapana has always been about the relationship between media and cognitive psychology (though it has wandered from the subject from time to time). So, my aim, with this new Wordpress installation is to really shift things into a tighter focus. Read more…

If you delve into the news (especially science news) you’re just bound to run into some pretty frightening ideas, be they predictions or developments. In discussing the nature of open source software versus closed source, Jaron Lanier mentions an interesting metaphor with regard to genetics. Lanier cites a Freeman Dyson piece in which Dyson describes the early stages of evolution as “open source”—in the sense that genes moved freely between species as tradable bits of code. That alone was news to me, but after I thought about it, it wasn’t such a strange idea that our concept of Darwinian evolution—namely the natural selection of genes in organisms—doesn’t necessarily occur at the beginning stages of the development of life. Read more…

I found a fairly significant advancement in the development of CSS over at Blueprint CSS on Google Code. The major benefit here would be the standardization of this site’s XHTML and CSS, as well as the ability to “widgetize” the theme–something I’ve not been able to pull off before because of the CSS layout. It’s exciting and I’m happy to be doing it, but I’m also too lazy to do it somewhere in a development environment and then move it here. I’m just going to do it here. It shouldn’t take more than a few days anyway. In the meantime, some strangeness may happen, but that’s okay. Let’s just call it avant-garde design–kay?

Of all the oddities I’ve encountered on the web, the posthumous posting of Andrew Olmsted, who died fighting in Iraq, is one of the strangest encounters. Perhaps my word choice is poor and if I think of a better way to put it, I will—unlike Andrew, who has finished writing his own story. I use the word strange or odd because it is so rare that I read something on the web that hits me emotionally. This did—it does. Nothing on the web could bring you closer to the reality of soldiers dying in the field. I will reserve any political opinions on the matter in accordance with Andrew’s wishes:

I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don’t drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don’t cite my name as an example of someone’s life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I’m not around to expound on them I’d prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn’t support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I’d prefer that you did so.

Even copying and pasting text from this lost soldier upsets me. I know he will never hear me, but thank you for your service, Andrew. However you died, it was with honor. You will be missed.

They are clearly not the same thing—writing and word processing. One is an artform, the other a kind of wrestling, or clearly some derivation of manufacturing. I prefer to write as opposed to word process. And in fact, I still mostly (this blog being a glaring exception) write by hand. ((Definitely, all of my fiction is written long form.)) When it came to entering my scribblings into a digital format I long preferred simple text editors to the complexity of word processors. With word processors, I too often found myself distracted by instances of multiple paragraphs suddenly reformatting themselves, cursors leaping off the ends of lines, never being able to zoom in properly on the text, and on and on. For something as simple as a word processor very few companies have ever gotten it right. This is so much the case, that the one program I do use, I don’t refer to as a word processer. It’s just something other than a word processer clearly by design: Scrivener. It is the iTunes of writing. It is what Google was to the web—something to make the whole affair less confusing. The organization tools are awesome. And get this, you just write in text! You format later. And your documents are stored in text! Never worry about losing a document because you used some Mac OS 7 word processor. You can switch into a full screen mode so you can really focus. The best, most awesome interface innovation?—the entry point for the text stays in the vertical center of the screen. I know, it sounds like a mere triviality, but after you use it, you wonder what the hell these word processor programmers were thinking! Don’t take my word, listen to Steven Poole on his blog:

Pretty old-skool, huh? It’s perfect: far less temptation to switch to a browser window, much better concentration on the text in front of you. WriteRoom has a “typewriter-scrolling mode”, so that the line you are typing is always centred in the screen, not forever threatening to drop off the bottom, and what you have already written scrolls rapidly up off the top of the screen, dissuading you from idly rereading it. It’s a bit like the endless roll of typewriter paper on which Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road.

I could go on, but I will let Virginia Heffernan do it more lithely than I would.