Saturday, July 27, 2019
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
“Design is how it works” — Steve Jobs
News item from this afternoon —
The above phrase "mapping systems" suggests a review
of my own very different "map systems." From a search
for that phrase in this journal —
See also "A Four-Color Theorem: Function Decomposition
Over a Finite Field."
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Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Design Is How It Works: A Bedtime Story
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Monday, June 19, 2017
“Design Is How It Works”*
* See the title in this journal.
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Sunday, November 18, 2018
Space Music
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Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Think Different
The New York Times online this evening —
"Mr. Jobs, who died in 2011, loomed over Tuesday’s
nostalgic presentation. The Apple C.E.O., Tim Cook,
paid tribute, his voice cracking with emotion, Mr. Jobs’s
steeple-fingered image looming as big onstage as
Big Brother’s face in the classic Macintosh '1984' commercial."
Review —
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Thursday, September 1, 2011
How It Works
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See also 1984 Bricks in this journal.
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Saturday, September 9, 2017
How It Works
Del Toro and the History of Mathematics ,
Or: Applied Bullshit Continues
For del Toro —
For the history of mathematics —
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Thursday, September 1, 2011
How It Works
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Saturday, October 22, 2016
Magis
From "The Magis way: Notes on the publishing culture,"
by Giampiero Bosoni, at http://www.magisdesign.com/magis-world/ —
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"… perhaps it is interesting to reflect further on the relationship between a design object and a literary work, by reading (in whatever interpretative key you choose) the illuminating definition given by the great semiologist Roland Barthes of the act of writing and of the literary value of a text. 'Writing,' Barthes tells us, 'is historically an action that involves constant contradiction, based on dual expectations. One aspect of writing is essentially commercial, a means of control and segregation, steeped in the most materialistic aspect of society. The other is an act of pleasure, connected to the deepest urges of the body and to the subtlest and most successful products of art. This is how the written text is woven. All I have done is to arrange and reveal the threads. Now each can add his own warp to the weft.' [3] Magis’ long and highly advanced experience has given evidence, further confirmed by this latest publishing catalogue, of an ever-growing awareness of this necessary interweaving between warp and weft, between the culture of craftsmanship and that of industry, between design culture and business culture, between form and technique, between symbolic codes and practical functions, between poetry and everyday life." — Giampiero Bosoni [3] Barthes R., Variations sur l’écriture (1972), Editions du Seuil, Paris 1994, published in the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes 1966-1975 (freely translated from the Italian translation, Variazioni sulla scrittura seguite da Il piacere del testo , Ossola C. (editor) Einaudi, Turin 1999). |
See as well "Interweaving" in this journal.
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
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Sunday, December 27, 2015
Rigorous
Symbol —
Monday, November 7, 2011
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Thursday, December 3, 2015
Design Wars
"… if your requirement for success is to be like Steve Jobs,
good luck to you."
— "Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Marissa Mayer’s
Inability to Bet the Farm," New York Times online yesterday
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
Related material: Posts tagged Ambassadors.
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Sunday, February 15, 2015
Inside the White Square
Review:
Monday, November 7, 2011
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See also the phrase "a dance results" in the original
source and in yesterday's Valentine Dance.
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Thursday, December 26, 2013
How It Works
“Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”
— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer (Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746),
Section 16 (p. 716) of Handbook of Combinatorics, Vol. I ,
MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham, Martin Grötschel,
and László Lovász)
For some background on that Steiner system, see the footnote to
yesterday’s Christmas post.
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Saturday, March 3, 2012
Decomposition
A search tonight for material related to the four-color
decomposition theorem yielded the Wikipedia article
Functional decomposition.
The article, of more philosophical than mathematical
interest, is largely due to one David Fass at Rutgers.
(See the article's revision history for mid-August 2007.)
Fass's interest in function decomposition may or may not
be related to the above-mentioned theorem, which
originated in the investigation of functions into the
four-element Galois field from a 4×4 square domain.
Some related material involving Fass and 4×4 squares—
A 2003 paper he wrote with Jacob Feldman—
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
An assignment for Jobs in the afterlife—
Discuss the Fass-Feldman approach to "categorization under
complexity" in the context of the Wikipedia article's
philosophical remarks on "reductionist tradition."
The Fass-Feldman paper was assigned in an MIT course
for a class on Walpurgisnacht 2003.
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Monday, January 23, 2012
How Stuff Works
"Design is how it works." —Steve Jobs
Website logo—
Screenshot from How Stuff Works—
(Click image for details.)
From "A Device Worthy of a Gothic Novel,"
Chapter XVI of The Club Dumas,
by Arturo Perez-Reverte (1993),
Vintage International, April 1998….
the basis of the 1999 Roman Polanski film
The Ninth Gate —
Aren't you going to give me a document to sign?"
"A document?"
"Yes. It used to be called a pact. Now it would be a contract
with lots of small print, wouldn't it? 'In the event of litigation,
the parties are to submit to the jurisdiction of the courts of…'
That's a funny thing. I wonder which court covers this."
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Saturday, December 31, 2011
The Uploading
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
From a commercial test-prep firm in New York City—
From the date of the above uploading—
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From a New Year's Day, 2012, weblog post in New Zealand—
From Arthur C. Clarke, an early version of his 2001 monolith—
"So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered
throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the
promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been
patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.
Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set…."
The numerical (not crystal) pyramid above is related to a sort of
mathematical block design known as a Steiner system.
For its relationship to the graphic block design shown above,
see the webpages Block Designs and The Diamond Theorem
as well as The Galois Tesseract and R. T. Curtis's classic paper
"A New Combinatorial Approach to M24," which contains the following
version of the above numerical pyramid—
For graphic block designs, I prefer the blocks (and the parents)
of Grand Rapids to those of New York City.
For the barbed tail of Clarke's "Angel" story, see the New Zealand post
of New Year's Day mentioned above.
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Monday, December 12, 2011
X o’ Jesus
Religion for stoners,♦ in memory of Horselover Fat
Amazon.com gives the publication date of a condensed
version* of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis as Nov. 7, 2011.
The publisher gives the publication date as Nov. 8, 2011.
Here, in memory of the author, Philip K. Dick (who sometimes
called himself, in a two-part pun, "Horselover Fat"), is related
material from the above two dates in this journal—
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011 m759 @ 12:00 PM …. Update of 9:15 PM Nov. 8, 2011— From a search for the word "Stoned" in this journal—
See also Monday's post "The X Box" with its illustration
Monday, November 7, 2011
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs, quoted in
For some background on this enigmatic equation,
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Merry Xmas.
♦ See also last night's post and the last words of Steve Jobs.
* Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher, has, deliberately or not, sown confusion
about whether this is only the first of two volumes.
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Sunday, December 11, 2011
Nine is a Vine
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
Blockheads
(Continued from earlier posts.)
See the online New York Times on November 27—
With Blocks, Educators Go Back to Basics
— and related letters, online today—
The Building Blocks of Education
Another back-to-basics illustration—
"Design is how it works."
— Steve Jobs
See also the designer of the above Big apple—
“I’m fascinated with how past designers
had to come up with ideas
and solve problems using limited resources.”
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Monday, November 7, 2011
The X Box
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs, quoted in
The New York Times Magazine on St. Andrew's Day, 2003
.
For some background on this enigmatic equation,
see Geometry of the I Ching.
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Sunday, November 6, 2011
Design Sermon
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,''
says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer—
that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!'
That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like.
Design is how it works.''
— "The Guts of a New Machine," by Rob Walker,
New York Times Magazine , Sunday, Nov. 30, 2003
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See also, from the day of the above Anything Box review—
St. Peter's Day, 2011— two Log24 posts—
The Shattered Mind and Rome After Dark.
Related boxes… Cosmic Cube and Design Cube.
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Sunday, October 9, 2011
Beautiful Failure
"Design is how it works." — Steven Jobs
A comment on the life of Jobs —
Paola Antonelli
Photo Credit: Andrea Ciotti
Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—
“NeXT was a risk and a beautiful failure."
Related material—
and 2008 posts of
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Thursday, September 1, 2011
How It Works
“Design is how it works.” — Steven Jobs (See Symmetry and Design.)
“By far the most important structure in design theory is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”
— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
The name Carmichael is not to be found in Booher’s thesis. A book he does cite for the history of S(5,8,24) gives the date of Carmichael’s construction of this design as 1937. It should be dated 1931, as the following quotation shows—
From Log24 on Feb. 20, 2010—
“The linear fractional group modulo 23 of order 24•23•11 is often represented as a doubly transitive group of degree 24 on the symbols ∞, 0, 1, 2,…, 22. This transitive group contains a subgroup of order 8 each element of which transforms into itself the set ∞, 0, 1, 3, 12, 15, 21, 22 of eight elements, while the whole group transforms this set into 3•23•11 sets of eight each. This configuration of octuples has the remarkable property that any given set of five of the 24 symbols occurs in one and just one of these octuples. The largest permutation group Γ on the 24 symbols, each element of which leaves this configuration invariant, is a five-fold transitive group of degree 24 and order 24•23•22•21•20•48. This is the Mathieu group of degree 24.”
– R. D. Carmichael, “Tactical Configurations of Rank Two,” in American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan., 1931), pp. 217-240
Epigraph from Ch. 4 of Design Theory , Vol. I:
“Es is eine alte Geschichte,
doch bleibt sie immer neu ”
—Heine (Lyrisches Intermezzo XXXIX)
See also “Do you like apples?“
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Thursday, August 25, 2011
Design
"Design is how it works." — Steven Jobs (See yesterday's Symmetry.)
Today's American Mathematical Society home page—
Some related material—
The above Rowley paragraph in context (click to enlarge)—
"We employ Curtis's MOG …
both as our main descriptive device and
also as an essential tool in our calculations."
— Peter Rowley in the 2009 paper above, p. 122
And the MOG incorporates the
Geometry of the 4×4 Square.
For this geometry's relation to "design"
in the graphic-arts sense, see
Block Designs in Art and Mathematics.
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Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Symmetry
An article from cnet.com tonight —
For Jobs, design is about more than aesthetics
By: Jay Greene
… The look of the iPhone, defined by its seamless pane of glass, its chrome border, its perfect symmetry, sparked an avalanche of copycat devices that tried to mimic its aesthetic.
Virtually all of them failed. And the reason is that Jobs understood that design wasn't merely about what a product looks like. In a 2003 interview with the New York Times' Rob Walker detailing the genesis of the iPod, Jobs laid out his vision for product design.
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' Jobs told Walker. "People think it's this veneer— that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''
Related material: Open, Sesame Street (Aug. 19) continues… Brought to you by the number 24—
"By far the most important structure in design theory is the Steiner system
— "Block Designs," by Andries E. Brouwer (Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics , Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham, Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))
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