Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

* is what a(n) * calls a(n) *

Posted by Roo - 15/07/08 at 10:07:43 pm

A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.

- Sir Humphrey Appleby, ‘Yes, Minister’

Searching the web for variations on the “* is what a * calls a *” snowclone turns up things like

• A cynic is what a romantic calls a realist
• A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist
• a cult is what a big religion calls a small religion
• A stable is what a pimp calls a group of women that prostitute for him
• a Squid is what a dumb Jarhead calls a sailor
• A Hottie is what a racing drivers calls a fast lap
• a hypothesis is what a scientist calls a theory
• a “deli water bottle” is what a New Yorker calls a bottle of water purchased in a deli
• a player is what a woman calls a guy who doesn’t want to go out with her
• a “flea” is what a surgeon calls a pediatrician-in-training
• a calorie is what a physicist calls a kilocalorie
• a pressure ulcer is what a doctor calls a pressure sore
• A bulkhead is what a sailor calls a wall on a ship
• a jarpie is what an Aussie calls a saffie

I love the way these open up more questions. A Jarhead is a marine, but what’s a saffie?

Of course the web also turns up some staggeringly stupid examples, including A pessimist is what a realist calls an optimist, if I recall the quote correctly. Wuh?

Given my investigation into * is the new * last year, I naturally wondered how I’d go about graphing these. A quick experiment with Graphviz gives me a couple of alternative approaches.

Even just wondering how to map these three-way relationships (in which all three parts might be re-used) gives some interesting choices. So far, I think B works better than A. You learn more from it. To tell me which two people call the realist a cynic using A, you’d have to read all the labeled edges. B is much easier. I’m sure I’m missing some obvious alternative approaches here though.

X is the new Y for 2007

Posted by Roo - 30/12/07 at 01:12:28 pm

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section today features an updated version of my “X is the new Y” diagram. [Update: it's actually the front page feature of the Ideas section. Thanks to Kelly for the picture...]

Originally inspired by the LeisureArts chart from 2005, I decided to bring the idea up to date in September. Essentially, it’s a few pages of results from a Google search for “* is the new *” (and “* are the new *”). For this latest version I also added “+2007″ to the search term, so it picks up things that happened (or were at least written about) in 2007. I then ran the results through some basic text processing. “x is the new y” became “x -> y”. This happens to be the required syntax for Graphviz, which then automatically drew the directed graphs for me.

(bigger version)

The search was a bit of a manual process, and I ended up doing additional searches in order to flesh out the diagram (oh.. pirates are the new ninjas.. I wonder what are the new pirates… I’ll search for “* are the new pirates”).

All of this is very similar to my first pass at this idea in September except this latest version, being 2007 specific, misses out more general links and includes culturally specific recent references such as the werewolves -> vampires -> zombies -> pirates -> ninjas chain (which I’m really happy about) as well as the iPhone and a few other recent highlights of this year.

Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe wrote a thoughtful piece about it.

If you want to know what happened in 2007, you could do worse than noting what it was that people decided was the new black, or the new oil, or the new golf.

…

Because it is so ubiquitous and so adaptable, because it so easily captures the human mind’s penchant for analogies, and because it is constantly rendering itself obsolete (what is the new iPhone? who is the new Amy Winehouse?), this off-the-shelf rhetorical device makes an ideal marker of a year’s conversational currents. The charts here are an unsystematic attempt, culled from Web searches, to trace the patterns that emerge.

…

Eventually, sapped by this sort of subversion, the phrase might have to give way to another equally handy one. What the new “new black” would be remains anyone’s guess.

The Boston Globe - ‘The new, new things of 2007′ - December 30, 2007

The team at the Globe took my ugly diagrams, which looked like this…

…and turned them into something beautiful, like this…

If you don’t happen to get the dead-tree version, you can read the article on the Boston Globe site.

ffffound

Posted by Roo - 11/12/07 at 06:12:41 pm

ffffound.com (closed beta. Sorry, no invites left) is really very lovely.

This: del.icio.us crossed with Clipmarks crossed with Flickr. It’s social bookmarking for images.

It’s also a lot simpler than del.icio.us. As nice as that simplicity is, there’s a big part of me that really wants it to support tagging.

I’ll try to share inspirational typographic/arty/design stuff there. I’ve added the feed and a link to my page to the feeds list in the sidebar.

x is the new y

Posted by Roo - 08/09/07 at 11:09:07 pm

Inspired by this lovely visualization (which I discovered recently via the always-interesting Information Aesthetics blog) of what was the new what in 2005, I decided to bring it up to date. Here’s what I ended up with after a couple of hours of hacking. Around 160 relationships in the form x is the new y.

Continue reading x is the new y…

Strategic Pursuer - LEGO image rendered using POV-Ray

Posted by Roo - 28/08/05 at 11:08:19 pm

Made the model in MLCad. (Find instructions for the set at peeron). Converted to POV-Ray using Lars C. Hassing’s L3P.

Rending time: 4 hours.

Arty stuff: Inkscape, Dia and Artrage

Posted by Roo - 03/06/04 at 12:06:45 am

Inkscape is a free SVG editor for Linux and Windows (an article about it was linked from Slashdot today) which spun off from Sodipodi. Dia is another related project; designed to be more of a diagramming tool (a bit like Visio). Dia (like Sodipodi) requires GTK.
ArtRage is more of a realistic painting simulator than an art package. It’s very intuitive and works splendidly with a graphics tablet. It’s free. Sadly it only works on Windows, but since that they were developing primarily with the TabletPC in mind I can just about forgive them that.