Chief spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jody Williams used the fax machine to help build organizational capacity:
Imagine trying to get hundreds of organizations – each one independent and working on many, many issues – to feel that each is a critical element of the development of a new movement. I wanted each to feel that what they had to say about campaign planning, thinking, programs, actions was important. So, instead of sending letters, I’d send everyone faxes. People got in the habit of faxing back. This served two purposes – people would really have to think about what they were committing to doing before writing it down, and we have a permanent, written record of almost everything in the development of the campaign from day one.
The quotation comes from the FAQ section of the ICBL website.
There are four example formats for blurts that I want to consider here, although there are many others floating about that I could have discussed. They are: 1) facebook status updates, 2) twitter’s tweets, 3) moves in signtific’s forecasting games, and 4) comments in Tim Gowers’ mathematical blog. Each has a different character but each shows how the properties of length, rapidity, and openness can play into a successful conversation.
The author equates blurts to a form of brainstorming in which the participants—and not a moderator—shape the structure of the conversation.
Magic Paper
[via rodcorp]
“. . . because this is honestly the most exciting thing in the world.”
Thelonious Monk’s advice to saxophonist Steve Lacy (1960)
[via TomC]
My favorite line: “What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play” (italics substituted for underlines). For some reason, everybody keeps lopping off play at the end of the sentence; but it’s right there in Monk’s handwriting, just below the last syllable of important.
If you’d like to swim upstream on this link: Swiss Miss got it from Eric Alba who got it from Neven Mrgan who doesn’t tell us where he found it.
It’s been floating around the web for a while, though. Do The Math did a little legwork on this and discovered that the original document is mentioned or used in Steve Lacy’s introduction to Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music.
Comics grammar and tradition
[via TomC]
A style guide for comics letterers. I’m intrigued by all the traditions—”[a balloon] tail should terminate at roughly 50-60% of the distance between the balloon and the character’s head”—and recent trends:
Thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years in preference for narrative captions. Text in a thought balloon can be italicized. The tail on a thought balloon is made up of smaller bubbles and should point towards a character’s head (not mouth, as in a standard balloon tails). Generally you should have at least three little bubbles of decreasing size that reach toward the character. Two seems insufficient and more than four or five seems excessive.
Kansas rethinks its prison policies
[via bfunk]
Among other initiatives, there’s been a major push to soften the traditional, cop-like approach used by parole officers when dealing with parolees.
The new strategy seems to be working: five years ago around 203 parolees returned to Kansas prisons each month but by 2007, the number reduced by 100 per month and the number of new crimes—felony convictions that people pick up while they are on parole supervision—also nearly halved.
[via nautical2k]
In the wake of the US Airways crash-landing on the Hudson, author Bruce Barcott offers one explanation for the increasing rate of airplane–bird strikes:
“We traded the meadowlark for more houses and big-box stores. The gaining species are terrifically adapted to the human landscape. Turkey vultures dine on roadkill. Gulls and pigeons eat our garbage. To a Canada goose, every golf course is a grassy smorgasbord.”
[via cityofsound]
“Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984.”
[via bfunk]
“When one talks about ‘failed states’ one often means ‘failed cities’, such as Gaza, Sadr City or the slums of Port-au-Prince.” — Mike Davis
[via rodcorp]
A forward-thinking and well-designed public service website promoting increased transparency and more direct communication between elected officials and their constituents.
