Red blood cells, Homo sapiens (Me) – The cells are the small red things (6–8 μm), the big thing containing them is not a cell, it's a drop of blood.

This is my dear antique microscope; metal body, made by the Soviet Russian company OПTA, model УМ-401П-1 No9206. I remember that my father had bought it at a flea market.

Toilet paper. Yes, it looks disgusting but it's only fair, considering its use. They may make it look nice to the human eye, with hearts and flowers on it but what you see here is much more honest. If there's one thing in the universe that has the right not to be beautiful on the inside, it's toilet paper. You just got to excuse it for that.

Saliva, Homo sapiens (Me again. I don't remember eating something like that though.) – You can see the transparent epithelial cells damaged by the toothpick I used to get them on the slide. Again, I seriously don't know what that thing in the middle is.

Needle tip

White grape skin, Vitis vinifera – Cell membranes and chloroplasts (green little things, 5 μm) are visible.

Foot, Musca domestica – I was on the lookout for houseflies once I found the microscope. I got lucky the day after. At least I thought so, until I saw this. Definitely not the prettiest foot I've seen. I mean, it has ugly feet even for a fly. I bet there are decent flies out there with much nicer feet than this. In fact I declare this to be my research agenda for the next three years.

Now that I’ve recollected that old joy of playing the biologist, I already started looking for a new professional (compound) microscope to buy – not for research, obviously, but to see/photograph things like these. I’ll be happy to listen if you have any suggestions.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?

I know we’re supposed to be terrified by this but I actually see the beauty of that. It is true that you cannot (and shouldn’t, politically speaking) impose a designed language on the public but the idea of a modernistic, minimalistic reduction towards a less redundant and more modular language is appealing to me at least as a theoretical exercise. Apparently Orwell was also ambivalent about it: in a series of broadcasts to India that he produced from 1942 to 1944, he chose to use Basic English, an English-based controlled language (a simplified subset of English) created by Charles Kay Ogden in 1930, which would later be his inspiration for Newspeak in 1984. [There are in fact many constructed languages, Volapük being the cutest in my opinion.] I can feel that when he wrote the above passage for the lexicographer Syme, some part of him was still strongly empathizing with the character and seeing “the beauty of that”.

I would argue that Orwell’s ambivalence manifests itself throughout the book: even though he depicts with Oceania an extreme and horrible form of modernity, he actually takes the side of rational modernist thinking versus what could be called postmodernism – interestingly, represented also by the Party – on important crossroads, through the protagonist Winston’s thoughts:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. (…) Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. (…) His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the Earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

If you’re not convinced that this passage relates to the modernism-postmodernism duality, here are O’Brien’s (a member of the Inner Party) words to Winston:

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. (…) You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature. (…) Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

The resemblance of these sentences to postmodernist-poststructuralist thinking is striking, especially because these schools of thought weren’t around when the book was written; O’Brien dubs it “collective solipsism” in his dialogue with Winston. (The word postmodern was in use at that time, albeit only within the context of art/architecture in a much narrower sense.) Of course these ideas have their ancestors in the history of philosophy, but it is Orwell’s genius that he presented a staggering discussion of them with a novel written in 1948 in such a way that it nearly encapsulates the intellectual climate of the second half of the century. What is more intriguing to me is that he has managed to describe in a convincing way an oppressive regime that is both modernist and postmodernist to the core at the same time.

When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the Earth goes round the Sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?

The concept of doublethink itself (the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct), by the way, is one of the key features of postmodernist literature, both as a characteristic of it and as a cherished quality in other things.

So, on one hand Orwell criticizes modernism through a caricature (a full-scale minimalization and modularization of language, strict standardization of the living spaces and of people, total disconnection from the past, etc.) while on the other he defends, through Winston, modernist thinking against the postmodernist ideas of the Party. Was he exercising doublethink himself when he wrote the book? Maybe he was just lucky enough to live in a period when thinking outside the modern-postmodern paradigm was still the natural thing to do. Or maybe he was deliberately rejecting modernism and postmodernism, hoping for a third alternative – or indeed having no hope for humanity whatsoever.

In any case, I do believe that Orwell was expressing his own thoughts when he wrote these lines for Winston:

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

For the first four reasons, don’t tell me that I have the option not to be doing these things (not checking emails continuously, etc.) while having the smartphone – I know, from observing my own internet behavior and people around me who have smartphones (i.e. people around me), that these habits will become second nature in just a few days. The only way of resistance is to avoid buying it in the first place.

Join the resistance, my friends! (Literally.) Because I don’t want to wait while you check Facebook under the table every five minutes.

The colors of the albums – a key feature of the whole visualization – are chosen according to the album cover artworks; Metallica fans can easily understand which color corresponds to which album without reading their names. As a convenient surprise, new albums (Load, Reload and St. Anger) that are stylistically different from the old ones are all tints of orange-yellow and this provides a natural visual grouping in the charts. (Try to see this grouping when you look at the charts.) Death Magnetic, which is their newest album but musically much closer to the old ones, has its brownish gray shade (again, taken from the real album cover), and that separates it visually from the Load – St. Anger period.

In the first chart, the number of concerts given each year is plotted. In the second chart, the bar heights represent the absolute numbers of songs played from each album. The album release dates are marked on the grid columns with the corresponding colors.

The years 1982–91 are a very intense period for Metallica; they write a vast majority of the songs that are played live even today, and are involved in extensive touring. We can see that in the eves of the first four albums, Metallica continues to play gigs. With the self-titled fifth album, the band starts to quit touring and takes more time for songwriting before releasing albums. Maybe this is one of the sources of the famous “problem” (according to the oldschool first-four-albums metalheads) with the new albums; maybe Metallica shouldn’t be left alone before albums. This idea is consistent with the case of Death Magnetic which is not written in absolute isolation according to the chart, and has largely won the hearts of oldschool fans.

The year 1992 sees the climax of touring in Metallica’s carrier where each album reaches their all-time maximum play counts (except Justice), all dominated by the “Black Album”s overwhelming numbers.

Looking at 1996–97 we observe that Load-Reload songs seem to go well with the Ride the Lightning songs in a way that the remaining of the first-four-albums don’t. Interestingly, Reload never reaches the explosive levels of playing of Load after its release but it enjoys a more stable carrier afterwards (thanks to Fuel and The Memory Remains) compared to Load, ultimately not falling too far behind it in total play count (1115, 696).

St. Anger comes after the longest break in Metallica’s touring history (for obvious reasons) and lives the short and brutal life of a monster. (It is seen as their worst album by the oldschool fans.) It’s clear that Metallica aren’t happy with playing St. Anger songs live. It seems like Death Magnetic songs arrive to put St. Anger out of its misery; this is the only case in Metallica’s history where a new album entirely cuts the play count of the previous one. It can also be seen that Death Magnetic songs enjoy the company of the older songs instead of Load-Reload.

In the second part of our examination is a map of the places where Metallica has played live. The opacity of the red outer circles correlates with the number of concerts given in that city. The details about the northern- and the southern-most gig venues where Metallica has played are given in trivia boxes.

In the third part we see the total play counts by albums and songs. As expected, the most played songs are from the old albums, and the least played are from the new ones. But what if there was a way to compare the real “performances” of the songs in concert setlists, independent from their release date? To address this question, in the next part, we introduce the concept of Power.

Song Power is calculated by dividing the total play count of the song by the number of concerts after its first playing date. Album Power is the total play count of the songs from the album divided by the number of all songs played in all concerts after the date when a song from that album was first played (which may be before the release of that album) and then divided by the number of songs on it. This is a normalization to eliminate the advantage that the old songs have (they had more time to be played) in order to create more neutral rankings. You can also say that a song with the Power value 0.945 has a 95% chance of being played in the next concert. The Album Powers are additionally normalized with respect to the numbers of songs on the albums. (The Album Power values on the chart are multiplied by 10 for presentation efficiency.)

We see that the rankings change when we eliminate the time factor. Enter Sandman takes the lead as the most Powerful song and Death Magnetic, their latest album, beats all the old albums in Power; this means that Death Magnetic had a greater share of setlists after its release than the other albums did in their own lifetimes in average. Two songs from Death Magnetic are already in the Top 10 Most Powerful Songs list, prevailing over classics like For Whom the Bell Tolls and Seek & Destroy. Another way of thinking about Power is this: given enough time, Death Magnetic may well be in the top ranks of the Total Count by Albums list whereas Load, Reload and St. Anger do not seem to be moving from where they are. (Note that if we did the same analysis in 1997 we would have been saying a similar thing about Load; time will tell whether Death Magnetic’s Power will subsist.) S&M with its two songs presents an interesting case as it moves on top of the “Orange Albums” thanks to the song number normalization.

This part also contains the complete list of Metallica songs never played live in their entirety; among them are songs that are played in part (for instance, until the second verse part) or have been featured as riffs in a jam. Here Reload sticks out as the album with the most songs that are never played live. Kill ‘Em All and Master of Puppets are albums that had all their songs played live at least once.

In the fifth part we plot the Song Power on the y-axis with song durations on the x-axis. Here the first thing that strikes us is a pattern of orange-yellow squares tiling the lower part of a diagonal line between the upper left and the lower right corners. This tells us that songs from the Orange Albums tend to lose their Power as they get longer in duration; there isn’t one song from Load, Reload or St. Anger among the 19 songs located above that diagonal. This plot also gives insight about the natures of the individual albums thanks to the color-coding; for instance, it is easy to see that the black squares are grouped in the left half of the plot, meaning that the album Metallica consists of shorter songs in average.

Finally we make a comparison between the personal listening statistics taken from Last.fm and the concert setlists (after 2002 when Last.fm was founded). On the left are songs that have a greater share within Last.fm than within setlists in total, and the songs with greater share within setlists are on the right of the axis. This chart suggests that the band may further please the audience by playing songs from the left end (The Unforgiven, The Unforgiven II, etc.) more in concerts. The fact that there are fewer songs on the right side and their bars are much higher than the ones on the left side tells us that the setlist and Last.fm statistics have different distributions: there are songs that Metallica plays on almost every show and there are songs that they have never played live whereas Last.fm listening statistics are much more homogeneous.

[Personal addendum: In addition to all the objective analysis above, I would like to state as a fan that I love the Orange Albums as much as I love the old ones, and I am thrilled to see them played live.]

—

Praise on Social Media

• andypotter (Andrew Potter) Lustig and also insane :)
• jmlacroix (Jean-Michel Lacroix) L’infographique le plus intéressant de 2011.
• nag_acharya (Nagaraj Acharya) Whoa! This is for those of you who are doing a PhD on Metallica.
• tmbrntt (Tom Barnett) not exactly a metallica fan but this is an all-time favourite infographic.
• bquarant (Brian Quaranto) The infographic bar has been raised again.
• clipperhouse (Matt ☼ Sherman) OK, this is actually an infographic. (Most “inforgraphics” are just lists done in Illustrator.)
• DannyJWillis (Danny Willis) My new favorite data visualization ever.
• dkastner (Derek Kastner) Here’s an infographic that’s actually informative, novel, and presents data effectively.
• Fitoria (Adolfo Fitoria) La mejor infografía de todos los tiempos.
• Brian Fitzhugh An infographic that is actually interesting.
• Leah Root Wow! This guy put more research and effort into this than most people do for research papers or companies do for financial statements. He needs to be a CEO of something. A real ‘Master of Puppets’ ;)

A typical conversation between the judges and a contestant is like this:

— The color of your shoes is very wrong, considering your dress. Why did you choose that color?
— Because I like that color…
— You could’ve picked a bright green instead.

or

— That dress is a very wrong choice considering your body type. Why did you buy it?
— I don’t know… Because I liked it…
— Look at how it makes your hips look larger. That’s not a good choice.

So what’s the problem here? I see two. The first problem is with the contestant’s almost tautological answer, but it’s natural, given that these are regular people with no design education or high intelligence. The second, and the bigger problem, is with the way judges respond to that. They tend to offer specific and temporary fixes, and ignore the main issue; if only somebody told these women that style (or fashion, or indeed design) decisions are not just about what you personally “like”!

As far as I understand from the show, personal styling is very much like design in general: you start with a problem, and look for solutions. What problem? What is the design brief, indicating the problems to be solved, giving the context against which the solutions are judged, in the case of this show? What is the content at hand? Well, as the judges frequently hint, the “given” content and problems include your height, your weight, your body type, your skin tone, the beauty level of certain parts of your body (face, shoulders, knees, etc.), and where you plan to go in that dress/make-up. Once you have these constraints, the rest is optimization (with multiple solutions, of course). For instance, if you are short, you should avoid flat shoes. If you have a beautiful face, you should make it visible by tying your hair up. Simple as that. Just keep track of the “if”s. [The "if"s multiply in number as soon as you start to make decisions: if you have nice toes, you may pick open-tip shoes. Then this becomes a new "if" in your system: if you wear open-tip shoes, don't ever wear pantyhose. So now you don't have the right to say "I wore pantyhose because I like it."]

It appears that the parallels between styling and other design disciplines go further than this. Consider this dialogue from the show:

— Why did you choose that color for your purse?
— I wanted it to match the color of my shoes.
— But they don’t exactly match.
— They’re close…
— Close isn’t good enough.

This is the famous ambiguity problem in design. Things (colors, distances, typefaces, etc.) should be either exactly the same or distinguishably different from each other; in-between isn’t good since it puts a cognitive load on the viewer – an unconscious monologue like “Are these the same? No, they’re different… Or are they?” Another example:

— You have a huge gold bracelet on your arm, and then you have the huge gold necklace on your neck… One huge gold thing should be enough.

This is the hierarchy problem. “There should be only one boss”, or ”Elements shouldn’t be competing”, as we say in editorial/layout design. So not only styling resembles design in its overall nature, it also shares the basic principles common to other design fields.

As in every design discipline, clothing design (and styling in general) has its long-tried and well-known solutions to common types of problems, though you can always go creative and invent your own solutions. The judges in “Bugün Ne Giysem?” applaud those rare creative contestants, and spell out those well-known solutions for the unsuccessful ones, but they never reveal the true nature of the process: they never explicitly tell that this is a problem-solving process that has very little to do with what you “like”. This may seem like a theoretical issue, but it makes a huge difference in the intended style education of Turkish women. Avoiding it strengthens the mystical belief that picking the right clothes, looking good, being stylish (and getting good critique) all have to do with the so-called “taste”. And this rather metaphysical “taste” thing, you either got it or not. But tastes may also differ. (Yes, it’s not a coherent belief system.) If your look is ugly to me, then you obviously have no taste. If you don’t like my look, then your taste is different from mine. If the judges don’t approve my look, they sure have different tastes, and there’s nothing objectively wrong about my look – now you see how that “theoretical” issue in styling (or design) education ruins everything that the educator tries to accomplish.

[The taste issue is just as problematic in visual communication design: the taste of the CEO of the company – ideally – should have nothing to do with the corporate identity design of that company. He may hate the color blue, but blue may be the objectively right choice given the design brief at hand.]

On “Bugün Ne Giysem?” we too often see this taste defense on the part of the contestants, to which the judges apologetically reply by babbling something like “Well, we’re judges in this show, we’re supposed to give you critique…” Instead, they should be asserting “Forget about your taste, think of problem-solving!” They should, just as design educators do, make it perfectly clear that they won’t take “Because I like it” for an answer.

I am not claiming that taste, or talent, has absolutely no role in styling/design, but rather an immensely overrated one. My point is that making good styling/design is an ability that can be learned within a rational discourse, in a way that the taste metaphysics discourages us from. I propose that the judges in “Bugün Ne Giysem?” should stress in every opportunity that personal taste or “liking” has little to do with the success of styling, that styling is a problem-solving and system-constructing process with predetermined constraints and objective reasons for action, and that one can have rational discussions about those reasons and their results beyond “This is what I like and fuck you if you don’t”. They should do this in order to make a permanent impact on their target group, providing them with the paradigm shift that will illuminate all of their styling decisions in the future. In short, they need to teach design-thinking instead of just giving tips.

Or maybe they need not. This is just a stupid TV show in the end.

[In case you want to watch it, you can do so online here at 15:00 or 02:00 EET.]

I had low expectations for this book because of its (typographically) cheesy cover design and clumsy typesetting. In the end it made me want to read his other books.

The author uses the debate between Dawkins and Gould to walk through many important topics in evolutionary biology, mentioning lots of other scientists and philosophers on the way, and successfully switching between detailed examples and the big picture. He definitely knows what he’s talking about, and his writing is so clear and concise that it somehow resonates with the in-your-face 12-point Baskerville it’s set with. Even so, I would recommend it to those who have read Dawkins/Gould and are somewhat familiar with their ideas. The book ends with an amazing Suggested Reading section where Sterelny makes useful comments on every book he suggests.

In any case, Kim, if you’re reading this: change your publisher. Your book deserves better design.

And this is something I did (based on the original) reflecting where I stand on the debate:

Searle is always good at summarizing things, and the introduction entitled “Philosophy and the Basic Facts” offers a nice big-picture, including my favorite part of the book: a list of recent (last century) – and fortunate, in my opinion – changes in philosophy:

1. Epistemology is no longer at the center of philosophy.
2. Philosophy of language is no longer at the center of philosophy.
3. Systematic large-scale philosophy is possible again.
4. There is now no sharp distinction between philosophy and other disciplines.

The chapter on free will, however, comes along very dry as we witness the classic Searle reasoning through nothing but plain common sense and dismissing fruitful (and possibly accurate) ideas/theories on the basis that they are “intellectually very unsatisfying” (p. 62), or “literally incredible” (p. 77).

The most obvious and even fun case is on pages 45–46 where he literally uses his nemesis Dennett’s heterophenomenology approach (“Granted that we have the experience of freedom, is that experience valid or is it illusory?”), only to discard the illusion answer as it is “absolutely astounding”. One wonders how many more counter-intuitive facts we have to discover in order for him to abandon his intuitions; apparently the Copernican, Darwinian and Einsteinian revolutions weren’t enough.

In the end Searle declares that there are two viable answers to the question of free will: epiphenomenalism (i.e. free will in its ordinary sense is an illusion) and quantum indeterminism. For the latter, he bypasses the common criticism (“randomness isn’t freedom”) by proposing that randomness at the micro level may not necessarily imply randomness at the macro level. Yes, enter the almighty emergence…

For a book with a such promising title, it is hugely disappointing to find out that the two chapters “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology” and “Social Ontology and Political Power” were written separately and only relate to each other as parts of a “much larger philosophical enterprise”. Nevertheless, the second chapter has proved useful to me with the concept of “desire-independent reasons for action”, getting close to answering a question pending in my mind for years: What motivates a rational person to vote in elections while she knows that her single vote isn’t going to change anything?

I must confess that, despite all its disappointments, I realize that I still like the book. I fear it may be because it has a marvelous cover.

Registration desk at the Sabancı Center, Levent

Exhibition poster at Kadıköy-Karaköy Pier

The banner at Taksim Square for the Uncontainable exhibition

The banner at Taksim Square for the Uncontainable exhibition

The main exhibition Uncontainable is at the Taksim Square Cumhuriyet Art Gallery (right next to the red banner above), be sure to drop by. You can get detailed information about all the exhibitions, events, performances, paper sessions, panels and workshops at the website. You can follow the tweets about ISEA2011 here, and this is the Facebook group of the event.

I’d really appreciate if you send me any photos you took showing ISEA2011 visuals/objects in some way, from around İstanbul. This is especially a call to any friends of mine reading this.

* Edit: You can see most of the documentation here:  http://www.denizcemonduygu.com/work/isea2011/