Better When I Move

Your eyes are constantly moving. If they stopped, your retinal cells would adapt to the incoming light levels and you would be effectively blind.

Sundance drops into a crouch, the gun flies from its holster, he snaps off a few quick shots from the hip, and the tin can dances.

The weblog exemplifies a Sundance Kid model of publishing: 1. The weblog is a constantly moving window on its author's thoughts; 2. Webloggers shoot from hip.

All of our most important decision making is unconscious.

If braking a car in an emergency required conscious intelligent decision making, you'd be dead by now.

In The Way of Zen, Alan Watts recounts the story of the caterpillar that was perfectly happy until a toad asked it which leg came after which. After this, the poor caterpillar "lay distracted in the ditch, considering how to run."

You can think faster than you can type, but you can type faster than you can think how to type.

We are not born knowing how to type. Or dance. Or fly jets. What are the limits to the kinds of behaviors that can be turned into reflexes?

Is a reduced attention span a positive adaptation to a world that is more and more a flickering magic-lantern show?

Saccadic motion: The constant movement of the eye as it jumps from detail to detail of a scene. Not the same as the low-level movement that prevents retinal adaptation.

Saccadic masking: Because vision is blurred during the saccadic movement, the visual system masks out this degraded data. In effect, the eye is blind while moving.

So we can't see if our eyes are not constantly moving, and we can't see while they are moving. Vision is a series of evanescent instants.

So, some would say, is life.

Saccadic search algorithm: A pattern-recognition algorithm for detecting facial features, face detection, and real-time head tracking. It draws upon understanding of the human saccadic system and the arrangement of photoreceptors on the retina.

The moving electronic ticker and the scrolling web-site banner add a third motion to the low-level twitching and the saccadic motion the eye insists upon. We seem to be adapting to this third motion very well.

A day is surely coming when we won't be able to read anything that sits still.

The logical next stage in weblogs: The one-character moving window. We only see each successive character as it is typed. Typing as performance art.

Businesses, like sharks, die if they stop moving.

There are many ways for a company to die.

Sometimes it's just the name that has to go.

International Business Machines is no more, but IBM is healthy. American Telephone and Telegraph had to go when the telegraph became an archaism. Dell Computer is a thing of the past, but Dell is going strong.

But Dr. Dobb's Journal is still Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Some things don't have to change.

The rate of expansion of the universe is increasing.

The pace of change in technology is increasing.

Surely there is a physical limit to these increases.

Isn't there?

The endpoint of the flashlight beam can move faster than the speed of light.

These have been just a few quick shots from the hip.

Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com