The Geometry of the Enterprise

Now I have a reason for why I like the TOS Enterprise better than the Next Generation. [Link]

The designer who created the starships for Gene Roddenberry was a guy named Matt Jeffries. His design of the Federation Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser (better known as the Starship Enterprise) is perhaps the most recognized science fiction ship in the history of the genre. Just as the Parthenon was built upon the firm foundations of the golden ratio, so too is Matt Jeffries’ Enterprise.

What is the golden ratio?

The first thing you need to understand is that the golden ratio is represented by two numbers (I suppose all ratios are like that). 1.618033988749895… and it’s inverse 0.618033988749895….If you add both numbers together, you’ll almost reach 2. I say almost because they are both irrational numbers. The decimals go spinning off in a seemingly random order into infinity, similar in the way Pi does. In the early 1900s, an American mathematician assigned these numbers an upper-case and a lower-case greek letter we know as Phi and phi so the golden ratio is also known as ‘The Phi Ratio’.

The Fibonacci sequence

In 1202, an Italian mathematician named Leonardo Fibonacci wrote a book that would revolutionize how we use numbers. Prior to its publication, everyone in the west was using the same I’s, V’s, C’s and X’s the Romans were using. However, Fibonacci thought the Arabs were doing it was much better and he must have been very convincing because soon afterwards everybody was using the now familiar 0 through 9 system we use today.

Fibonacci’s contribution to the golden ratio has to do with something he called “The Fibonacci Sequence”. Actually, Indian mathematicians knew about it for a long time but it goes something like this. Each number is the sum of the previous two numbers, starting with 0 and 1. This sequence begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the neat thing about it is if you divide one number by the previous, you get the golden ratio.

987/610 = 1.61803278688525

Well, not quite, but the higher you go, the more accurate it becomes! The idea that physical beauty is literally embedded within the mathematical equivalent of a ‘party trick’ really baked some peoples brains. Still does, in fact.

It's like they didn't want to get complaints

If they don't get complaints, they must be doing okay. and you can't complain because there IS a process. [Link]

How difficult is it to file a complaint against a rogue abortion doctor in Pennsylvania? It's a question I had after reading the grand jury report in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. I got even more curious after reading this item by my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta, who interviews a nurse practitioner at a different organization who tried to help two former Gosnell clients to file a complaint:

...she personally tried to work with two women to file complaints to the Pennsylvania Department of Health about him. In both cases, the women found the complaint process so onerous and the telling of their stories so personally difficult that they failed to complete the paperwork and abandoned the effort. The Health Department complaint process "was way too burdensome" for the women, she said, "not to mention the stigma, to have to tell your story aloud to state officials." So why didn't she complain on her own? "It really had to be a patient," she said. There was no clear channel for independent third-party complaints like hers. 

Of course, that was then. Say that a woman walked into a clinic like Gosnell's today for a consultation. If she saw cat feces, blood-spattered blankets, and medical waste all around, causing her to leave immediately, would there be an easy way to alert the appropriate public health officials? Say she had the inclination to complain, but would give up if it turned out to be excessively difficult. And imagine, though it's probably naive to do so, that she knew the Pennsylvania Department of Health was in charge.

Let's start at that website (interested readers can open a new tab and see how quickly you can find where to complain before reading on):

Stylish Hovercraft

Wow, that looks really cool. [Link]

Hovercrafts have the distinct advantage of being just as comfortable on water as they are on land, but usually at the cost of a pretty ugly and utilitarian design. So the engineers at Mercier-Jones decided to take a crack at designing a hovercraft that was as lustworthy as a sports car, and from the looks of it they more than succeeded.

The Mercier-Jones hovercraft appears to take design cues from modern Lamborghinis, the Bugatti Veyron, and even the Audi R8. But the Frankenstein approach to its design kind of works, resulting in an amphibious vehicle that you might actually want sitting in your driveway.

It's not all about looks either. Mercier-Jones claims to have designed a new directional control system that will make its hovercraft as easy to drive as a car. And with a hybrid drivetrain that uses a gas engine to power a series of electric fans, the two-seater might not actually be deafening to pilot. It's just too bad that Mercier-Jones doesn't have a definitive ETA on when the hovercraft will be available for sale, though the company's hopeful it can produce a base model with a price tag under $20,000.

Horizontal Killer Applications

Trello looks pretty cool, but I found this insight very interesting. [Link]

The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.

PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.

Some people saw Trello and said, “oh, it’s Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way.” Yeah, it’s that, but it’s also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people.

There are millions of things that need that kind of data structure, and there hasn’t been a great “list-of-list” app before Trello. (There have been outliners, but outlines are, IMHO, one of the great dead ends in UI design: so appealing to programmers, yet so useless to civilians).