Statistically Improbable Phrases

The last few months of my life have been taken up by Kete Ukulele: The Kiwi Ukulele Companion. This is coming out in July from AUT Media, 64pp, $NZ19.99, lots of illustrations and Kiwi songs (here’s a publicity handout); the book I wish I’d had when I was teaching myself the uke. My world-famous ukulele page, currently the 11th-most-popular ukulele page on the internet, Lord knows why, is going to morph into the book’s supporting site: it’ll have page-preview PDFs, and ordering information for those of you not in New Zealand.

This is my first book, and it’s impressed upon me the importance of having your own writing space, a good gung-ho editor, supportive friends who chivvy you along, and big dedicated blocks of time in a quiet house. You also have to love what you’re doing and believe that the book is truly worth writing, because you’re not going to get rich from it in New Zealand. So I’ve been cautiously exploring the world of royalties, copyright, proofs, publication schedules, and the all-important advance. The advance’s importance lies in the expectation that the author comes up with all the book’s content, including illustrations (more on the trials and tribulations of using freelance illustrators in a later post).

Back in May 2007, having just defended my PhD, would I have imagined that in a year I would be described as “Lyttelton musician Mike Dickison” by the local community newspaper? (The Bay Harbour News isn’t online but I scanned the article as a monstrous great JPEG.) Yes, I’m now living in the scenic seaside village of Lyttelton—pictured is the view from my patio. It has all the advantages of a very small town without being plagued by annoying open space and sunshine. I love it here.

I’ve also been working with the Museum Detective, whose website I redesigned in time for the New Zealand Radio Awards—she’s a finalist for Best Spoken Programme (Access) (Update May 3: she won!). We were simultaneously in Wellington a couple of months ago, so I introduced her to the visiting Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, a splendid bunch who contributed lots of tips to the book. She was so taken with them that a Museum Detective episode resulted, in which the UOGB and I perform “Anarchy in the UK”. That’s my ukulele you can hear, but I’m only playing the brushes and singing backup. And I fear that if any singing is out of tune, that could be me too.

The article I wrote on museum websites has finally appeared online in Te Ara, the New Zealand museums journal. Unfortunately there are more than a few typographical and web display problems, which make it look like I don’t follow my own advice, so I’ll post a better-designed version on the Adzebill site in the near future. I’ve also been working with Rowan Carroll at the North Otago Museum on their site, and am interested in trialling WordPress and the new museum content-management system Omeka with her. There’s lots that needs doing with museum websites; listen to Episode 14 of Digital Campus for an invigorating discussion.

Thanks to all my friends, here and overseas, who wondered where I had disappeared to. I’m back.

Wallowing in the seriously comprehensive art and design bookstores of Sydney J. G Ballard’s 1964 collection Terminal Beach, just for the story “The Drowned Giant” Buying DRM-free Amazon MP3s; part of the satisfaction is watching iTunes sweating John Crowley’s reading list of human cultures far weirder than fiction Clive James’s poetry, particularly “The Pilgrimage of Peregrine Prykke”, and “The Book of My Enemy has Been Remaindered” Re-reading Code of the Woosters and rediscovering its small and cheerful perfection The beautiful plating of the ratatouille in the movie of the same name, for which I gather we must thank Thomas Keller If you have so many fonts they’re effectively incomprehensible and unusable, and start using proper font management software like FontAgent Pro with auto-activation, the scales are lifted from your eyes and you feel ten feet tall Getting a Christmas kete from your bosses of yummy local and organic treats, including home-made hummus Buses that don’t just say SORRY, but alternate by flashing NOT ON SERVICE (Christchurch) or NOT IN SERVICE (Auckland)—Mike Bradstock drew my attention to this prepositional shift with latitude. John Scalzi’s photo-essay of his visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky

The Canon
Natalie Angier
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
ISBN: 0618242953

A whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science. The subtitle says it all. Natalie Angier provides a one-chapter crash course on each of the natural sciences, and the scientific method and probability to boot. Worthy stuff, and I’ve been looking for a single volume like this; something I can give to my friends and family, not too demanding, but enough science to excite them and help them see things a little bit from my nerdy point of view. It’s not a long book (although the designer cheats with very tight linespacing), and Angier is a New York Times reporter with a Pulitzer. So why did it irritate me so much that I reached the end only through sheer bloody-mindedness, audibly wincing every few pages?

Like I said, the subtitle says it all. We know what a whirlwind tour is, but what the heck is a whirligig tour? Poetically, one that’s hectic and constantly changing; literally, it’s a pinwheel, a brightly-coloured child’s toy that’s amusing and pointless. An unfortunate metaphor, and the first of many. Angier loves slapdash metaphors. Also flowery turns of phrase, obscure and only somewhat-appropriate words, zany non-sequiturs, and alliteration (e.g., the beautiful basics in the subtitle). Here’s a typical paragraph.

Scientific notation works just as well for the furtive as for the discursive, although in this case you’re talking about powers of one-tenth rather than powers of ten. One-tenth of one-tenth is one-hundredth, written as 10^-2; one-tenth of one-hundredth is one-thousandth, or 10^-3. Keep biting the right-handed bit of Alice’s toadstool. Down you go, you’re a fractionated Italianate family. You’re milli — a thousandth, 10^-3; or micro — a millionth, 10^-6; or nano — a billionth, 10^-9; or pico — a trillionth, 10^-12; or femto — a millionth of a billionth, 10^-15.

Some people might like this sort of wordplay, but it gives me hives—and it’s not even good wordplay. Furtive for small is nice, but since when did discursive mean big? Meandering and full of digressions, like Angier’s metaphors, yes, perhaps expansive, but only incidentally large. And what’s up with Italianate? Does she mean Latinate (although the prefixes are actually Greek)? Or do Nano and Pico sound like comical Italian names? (Pico Iyer’s the only Pico I know of, and his name’s Indian.) Lastly, the Lewis Carroll reference is just a bit too sloppy: it’s a mushroom, not a toadstool (an important distinction, if you’re eating it). And it makes you grow taller and shorter, not bigger and smaller—in the original, Alice elongates and contracts like a caterpillar.

Every page is like this. Angier plunders the dictionary for shiny words: proptosically, vinculum, slub, and surl. As she flails for synonyms, the soup of particles in stellar formation becomes a cosmic chowder or a plasmic bisque, until the star and the metaphor collapse in a ball of baklava, whatever that’s supposed to look like. Every page has its pun, mostly lame. Pop culture allusions abound but are random and baffling rather than illuminating. And lists of three or more things always, without exception, conclude with something wacky.

…one might find organisms that take in nutrients, excrete waste, replicate, and actually use the fondue set they got as a wedding present.…

As for Pluto and Sedna and others of their subcompact class, whether you consider them planets, dwarf planets, planetismals, planet parodies, or Planters party mix…

Dave Barry it’s not. Which is a shame, because if you can get past the florid language she does a pretty good job of explaining one or two core concepts from each of chemistry, physics, astronomy and so on. There are some factual blunders, as you’d expect in a book covering all of science—I only picked up the biological ones. She says the platypus comes from New Zealand, and the carpal is just a single bone. Those hackneyed tetrapod forelimbs get trotted out again (she’s got me doing it now), and they’re poetically called homonyms—words that sound the same but have different meanings—but her metaphor is almost exactly backwards: bat and cat forelimbs are superficially different but share a deep, homologous, structure. Most importantly, she constantly confuses the fact of evolution (using examples from the fossil record) and Darwin’s theory; the fossils she cites support descent with modification but not natural selection.

It’s a shame. Angier is an great science journalist, but The Canon’s enthusiasm has a whiff of anxiety, as if she was so worried about getting through to the science-averse that her entire rhetorical bag of tricks was upended on the table. If you’re happy to sort though the pile for the good stuff, you’ll enjoy this book more than I did. But I’d still rather recommend Bill Bryson.

(I quickly stopped using New Zealand vocabulary and learned to speak American. Because folks laugh at you when you say…)

• Get off the grass
• Turned to custard
• Skiting
• Ute
• Lollies
• Gummies
• Sweet as
• Jandals
• The too-hard basket
• My oath
• Spat the dummy
• Sook
• Fizzy drink
• Packed a sad
• Too right
• Choice!

I’m here on the top of Mt John, in the Tekapo Valley. The observatory here has scientist accommodation if you’re connected with Canterbury University; the décor is a bit Research Station Cinderblock (a Star Wars poster and a collection of interesting pine cones) but, hey, there’s wireless.

Mount John is rather grandly named; it’s more of a a solitary hill rising out of the Mackenzie Basin. You’re ringed by the Southern Alps, and look down on the amazing turquoise waters of Lake Tekapo. The lake and valley are both products of twenty or so glaciations, which scoured out the basin and left Mt John sitting like an increasingly battle-scarred veteran each time they retreated. The surrounding mountains do keep the clouds at bay, and make a good spot for an observatory (which, the Museum Detective reveals to my disappointment, consists mostly of people looking at monitors; computers are doing all the stargazing).

But walking round Mt John by day, when the astronomers are asleep, is an experience. Skylarks (Alauda arvenis) are all around, trilling as they ascend from sullen earth to sing hymns at Heaven’s gate, or at least they try when the wind is not howling too forcefully. It’s a bit blowy today, and I watched a surprised lark fly backwards. Supposedly there are chukor (Alectoris chukor) in the tussock, but I had to descend to the larch forest on the southern slope to see any other birds; various finches and grey warblers (Gerygone igata).

The vegetation has been sadly rather munted by rabbits and sheep, though pockets of subalpine native plants persist. In the rockfalls are various spiky and twiggy divaricating shrubs, the occasional nibbled-on native broom (Carmichaelia), and golden spaniard (Aciphylla)—even ferns (Blechnum penna-marina), perhaps the last things you’d expect to see on a wind-blasted, sunbaked mountain. I do love spaniard, with its ferocious spines and crazy yellow thatched flower spikes, just daring you to touch it. The spines don’t seem to work too well against mammals, but they almost certainly evolved as a defense against moa browsing, a poke in the eye for Megalapteryx.

This landscape used to be full of totara forest, but now the blasted emptiness of the tussock-clad basin is sublime. You could paint it with a very minimal watercolour kit; the tricky part would be getting the opaque blue of the lake. It’s almost like the blue of the sky at the horizon, perhaps because the fragments of quartz in the water scatter the light the way dust does in the atmosphere.

And you’ll see the mirror image of this if you ever have a chance to visit Mt John overnight: the lights of the lakeside town twinkle for the same reason stars do. As above, so below.

At the Small Museums meeting in Akaroa on October 26th, I gave a talk on museum websites, and walked the group through a randomly chosen (Australian!) museum website, pointing out the problems as I went. Now, it’s a bit too easy to just rip into other people’s sites (in fact, the original title of this post may have employed the word “suck”), so I won’t do that here; the handout for that presentation is on Adzebill for those that have to know which unlucky institution it was. Some problems, though, were surprisingly common on first-generation museum sites, so I’ve made a checklist. If you work at a museum, let me know how your site measures up.

• Splash screen. Very 1998. Why ask your visitors to click through a picture or (worse) an animation just to visit your site?
• JPEGs with grubby compression artifacts or illegible text.
• Sponsor or tourism links on the Welcome page, all sending visitors somewhere else if clicked: how welcoming is that, exactly?
• Giving the (not very skilled) web designer a free advertising link, right there on your home page. Let them get their own website.
• Telling visitors to go get a bigger screen, or that they need Quicktime, Flash, and a different browser before they may experience the wonders that lie within.
• Fancy animations. Usually representing time and money that could have been better spent on some basic site testing with actual visitors. Bonus points for animations that repeat incessantly, or for more than one per page.
• Any error messages, like “Sorry, your browser doesn’t support Java” (bonus point if your browser actually does). Let the site degrade gracefully, and only show the fancy stuff if the visitor can see it.
• Typos, helpfully informing us the site hasn’t been proofed since it was erected. Bonus point for each year it’s been up.
• “Welcome to the [Generic Museum] site.” I think we can assume they’re welcome.
• A page that links to itself: usually found in a sidebar of links that always look the same, no matter what page you’re on.
• Links that don’t change color to remind you that you’ve visited the page. Perhaps you’re supposed to be taking notes.
• No “breadcrumbs” showing you where you are in the site. People will not view the pages in the order you want, and they’ll come from Google (you hope!) So they have to know where everything is and where they are at all times.
• Bad typography: “typewriter” quotes, missing apostrophes, hyphens instead of dashes, and no line length controls (making text stretch all the way across the screen).
• Happy-happy “marketing” talk; needless verbiage that could be cut by half.
• Any incomplete visitor information: not stating exactly what hours and public holidays you’re open, or what your admission charges/suggested donations are, or if you don’t take credit cards, or don’t have disabled access.
• No single page a visitor can print out to prepare for a visit, containing all the information they need but fitting on a single piece of paper. Why not a higher-resolution, printer-friendly version? In A4 and US Letter sizes?
• A cruddy map, that doesn’t use MapQuest or anything similar, so visitors can’t get driving directions or zoom out to place the museum in context.
• No clues as to when the page was written. Visitors are reassured by knowing the site is still alive—you don’t need “last updated” tags, just some recent news.
• “Last updated [two years ago].”
• A clickable email link on your Contact page, unless you like getting spam. Try sending visitors to an online form; even better, help them structure their enquiry, direct their questions to real people, and provide a FAQ.
• Who are those real people, anyway? Are their names, mugshots, areas of expertise, and phone numbers on the Contact page?
• Links for the sake of linking, particularly to the generic home page of a site visitors could easily find on their own. Rather than a “Links” page, use smart, directed links as annotations or footnotes to your own content.
• “Back to [another page]” links. Either give a proper link in an always-visible sidebar, or let them use the back button. They know how.
• Education pages without downloadable lesson plans, so teachers can’t prepare, or even decide if they want to visit the museum or not.
• No PDF masters for photocopying/printing. Why are museums still mailing out educational materials? “Because otherwise people might steal our precious activity sheets!” There’s often a tension between hanging onto your proprietary intellectual property, and giving everything away free. Learn to let go.
• “Under construction.” Any empty or “coming soon” pages. Bonus points if they’re “News and Events” pages.
• Virtual tour, or anything that’s just little pictures of the exhibits, implying that visitors should drive to the museum for the “real” experience (and tough luck if you don’t live in that country, mate…)
• When the above problems are pointed out, saying “we know, our website’s terrible, but we’re getting it redesigned professionally next month/year/decade”. OK, but why not at least fix everything listed above. Say, tomorrow?

(A version of this list appeared in Te Ara, the New Zealand Museums Journal.)

In the liner notes to Stop Making Sense, David Byrne got it right: “American money is the ugliest money in the world.” (Byrne also claimed that the best way to keep your money from sticking together was to crumple it into little balls. See what you miss when you buy all your music as MP3s?)

Anyway, someone at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing felt that the five dollar bill unfortunately wasn’t quite ugly enough, so they stuck a big Barney-purple 5 on it (note the carefully-clashing sans-serif typeface—wouldn’t it be great if it turned out to be Arial?). Yes, this seems to be for real. Isn’t that the most jaw-droppingly hideous thing you’ve ever seen?

“We wanted this redesigned bill to scream, ‘I am a five. I am a five,”’ Larry Felix, director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We wanted to eliminate any similarity or confusion on the part of the public between the $5 bill and the $100 bill.”

Well, Larry, I don’t like to tell a man his job, but have you ever considered not making all the bills the same color and size? That seems to work pretty well for, oh, every other country in the world. Actually, I know what Larry would say—every American says the same thing when you point this out to them. “Monopoly money!” Yes, it’s true. Even a child’s board game has better-designed money than the USA.

The original Monopoly design has an appealing simplicity, with slabby serifs and ball terminals in a classic transitional typeface, rather than that ludicrously bloated font on the greenback. The numbers are big and clear. There’s an anti-counterfeiting pattern, and a rather sweet repeated train and house motif—in the real world, those could be little transparent windows in a polymer bill. Heck, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing should just adopt this design as is—after all, Monopoly was invented in the Depression so ordinary people could live the American dream of being property-owning capitalists. And its inventor seems to have stolen the idea. What could be more appropriate? It’s the USA writ small.