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The Dunbar Number is the upper limit on the number of other people with whom one can have interpersonal relationships. This restriction is purely cognitive, a result of evolutionary pressures, and it tops out at about 150 people. Robin Dunbar gave a great presentation on his work, and Cracked magazine has a brilliant exposition on it, calling it The Monkeysphere. Dunbar’s number is all about relationships: the number we can maintain in our heads. It’s about the same size as a human tribe before the invention of civilizations with uniform laws; it’s also the maximum size of most family’s Christmas card lists.
150 people seems to be the maximum number we can treat as people rather than as abstract human beings that need categorizing and simplification in order to manage. Laws treat human beings simply, as categories rather than as people. So do companies bigger than 150 people. We need these abstractions to marshall large numbers of people to accomplish things that require so many, but down inside our brains we’re still dealing with the same simple small number of real people.
One the things that occurred to me this morning is that writers might have their monkeysphere slots filled with their own characters. This might be one of the reasons we’re all so famously isolationist and loner: our slots of friendship capability are limited to those not currently occupied by the characters that haunt our stories. And I say this because I’ve recently felt as if Ken Shardik, Aaden, and P’nyssa haven’t been as much of my monkeysphere as the rest of the world. Part of that is because they’ve been pushed out by circumstance: they don’t have twitter feeds and Facebook accounts, they’re not part of the rest of my family’s world. I didn’t have to keep them away from Omaha, but the kids don’t need to know about them, so dealing with them is a bit like having an affair these days. I have to go to cafe’s and long train rides to have long conversations with them, catch up on their lives, and push the stories forward.
There are, of course, exceptions: Jay Lake seems to have pretty solid characters and yet maintains a huge monkeysphere of friends. A skilled politician often has a prodigious memorys and can glad-hand thousands of people, making each feel as if she is a member of his tribe at least long enough to vote for him. I seem to have a less-than-well-endowed monkeysphere, myself. It kinda bothers me, but I’m dealing.
So, if you’re a writer: do you believe that your characters take up treasured positions in your Dunbar number of friends?
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.Tags: ego, writing
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While visiting with friends and family this weekend, I ran into a long-missed flame who said she was frustrated because she’d gone back to school to renew her web design business, last heard from about a decade ago, but the school seemed insistent about teaching her programming instead. Her head was full of PHP and Javascript, when what she really wanted to do was “draw pretty pictures” and hand them off to the developers.
Curious, and because I’m always looking out for good designers, I asked her what her design aesthestic was. Did she like grunge or clean? Organic textures or vectors? Dark or light? What did she think of grids? How about Minimalism? Typography?
I’m afraid in my high-speed way I hit her with all of those questions in one long stream and she stared back at me like a deer in the headlights. She’d never heard of any of these terms being used in conjunction with her current studies or practices. Now, admittedly, these were terms from poster and illustration work back in 1999 that had only just begun the leap into web design practices. When she jumped out I was working with flat, vector advertisement people who thought the height of design sensibility was the Taco Salad typeface (Ugh, totally hate that one now, even though it’s immortalized in a design I did in 1997 that will live forever and that I can’t take back).
I’m still much more of a developer than a designer, but I keep a daily zeitgeist feed of what’s hot in the design world, and I collect and keep tickler files, so when I’m in need of a new design, I can collect a few and when I hire a designer I can say, “I want a feminine design, slightly three-d (drop shadows are adequate, some pseudo-perspective boxes would rock), with a wine-purple background to suggest sensuality and mystery. The objective has some infographic weight, so a stable grid would be a good idea. Let’s talk information architecture and session flow. I want something that’s a mash-up, not a compromise, between a website that sells porn and one that sells high-end cosmetics. The background has to be IUI compatible.” Or, “I need an info-rich magazine layout for the adult story set, something way sexier than what’s currently out there, but with enough whitespace that each article can successfully compete with its neighbors for eyeballs based on content about the length of a double-tweet. I need a bumper-sticker-sized banner, with a solid typographic cascade, for the story of the hour. And I need some Section-508 compliance in the site, so high contrast is a must.” Or, “I need a web 2.0 throwback site for a low-end web app. A simple thing. Let’s do green and white, subtle gradients and high-contrast borders, unless you’ve got something burning that I can buy into.”
Being able to talk this way with designers is a plus for me, but it also lets me experiment on my own. I know what I want. I know what other developers are doing with it, and I can whip out the Wacom (or, better yet, colored pencil and paper) and just let myself explore the possibilities. I’ve been hanging out with a bunch of web “creatives” recently, and this is the language they use. The posters of their office space run the gamut from photorealism to grunge to flat OEM (original English manga) style, with same 60’s psychedelic for a wine-and-Shakespeare festival on the far wall.
I’m sure you can run a good sized web business without this knowledge base. But you’ll look like these guys. I’ve sent these guys my resume’ because, you know, that’s what I’m required to do under the circumstances. But let’s face it, these guys need help: four separate flash items on the home page, bad 2003 swirly headers, no alt tags on the title images, table based layout, and no grid sensibility at all.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: chat, design, web development
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This morning, I woke to the horrifying news that four police officers in a suburb a few miles south of my own were shot dead while sitting in a café, syncing up their laptops and getting on with the day. This evening, I learned that one side story to the whole thing might well end the career of Mike Huckabee. The alleged shooter, Maurice Clemmons, was in jail in Arkansas when Mike Huckabee, feeling magnanimous and merciful, let him go after 11 years of a 100+ years sentence, citing that the young man was only 17 when he committed the crimes. Prosecutors recommended against the release, saying Clemmons had repeatedly demonstrated a lack of psychological stability. I kinda wish we'd had a better way of getting rid of Mike Huckabee. Even the Free Republic is saying he's toast. But, all the better for my cause: Tags: shrill
Current Mood: disgusted
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I spent most of today either at the library, or hacking on the print edition of Aimee, which will be the next book from Pendorwright Press. It'll be 168 pages long, and will incorporate the first two novels in the Aimee series (okay, the only two books so far). I used the stock Palatino font set for my typeset of Sterlings, but for Aimee, which is more of a fantasy novel, I switched to the elegant Centaur typeface, which I absolutely fell in love with after reading Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places, and I think I got it absolutely right. For the page design, I switched away from the Science Fiction Manuscript and went with the straight Novel style. This took quite a bit of relearning, but I think I've got it down just fine. At the very least, I'm not getting any errors. One thing I'm bad about in book design, though, is covers. Any one got any suggestions? Recommendations for a good graphic designer? Tags: geek
Current Mood:  geeky
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Karl Hansen's books War Games and Dream Games remain influential, at least to me, because they were so rich and forward-looking in terms of technology, personal ennui, and cultural malaise. The main character opens the book as a teenager subject to vicious abuse by his infinitely wealthy parents and siblings, all the while observing long orgies in which said older relatives attempt to alleviate the tedium of their long, jaded lives with ever-increasing doses of drugs, perversion, sadomasochism, and the degredation of lesser peers. The protagonist doesn't necessarily view this lifestyle as a bad one; he just wants to be on top, a victor rather than a victim. The book blurb on the cover of the first printing, 1981, from Playboy Paperbacks, reads: More real than life, more painful, and in the end, more beautiful. Hansen really goes for the jugular! Exclamation points are de rigueur for book blurbs, especially in the 1980s. The blurb was provided by Orson Scott Card. Yeah, the "gays are a domestic enemy destroying the fabric of our society, and Obama's giving aid and comfort to that enemy!" Orson Scott Card. The cognitive dissonance is... dissonant. Tags: reading
Current Mood: aging
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Well, it's 1:00am and I can't sleep. It's all Yamaraashi-chan's fault for having me read Little Brother to her. Chapter 13 has a hell of a confrontation, and I was so buzzed after reading it I knew I would have trouble sleeping, despite all the tryptophan. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, or as PZ Myers put it today, "Happy Wary Vigilance, everyone: remember, the universe is out to get you and even the Earth is hostile to our kind of life." But I'm thankful to a lot of human beings: Omaha and my children, for being so wonderful, Lisakit for proving to be a great friend and roommate, Fallenpegasus for continuing to lob fascinating ideas at me, and others who I don't see enough now that even my travel plans are rationed and restricted by financial considerations. Anyway, I'm still alive, still making job contacts (hint, hint), still plugging away at life, the universe, everything. Tags: life
Current Mood:  thankful
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One of the duties of a parent toward the end of any school quarter is the dreaded parent-student conference. The district has recently turned toward something else, though: the student-led conference. This amounts to going to Yamaraashi-chan's school to learn what we already know, since, according to the paperwork we received, we will be led to each of her classrooms where the student will discuss with us what she is doing and show us samples of her work. In big, bold letters on the right hand side of the sheet, we are told in no uncertain terms that we will not have an opportunity to have an in-depth conversation with the teacher about Yamaraashi-chan's progress or failings. Well, screw that. That's exactly what Omaha and I did, with a number of the teachers-- the science teacher, the math teacher, and the writing teacher, specifically. The health and exercise teacher even seemed eager and completely blew the time limit, mostly because even he recognizes Yamaraashi-chan's tendency to let her friends take advantage of her. We talked briefly about the things we have talked about, and I realized that while I've talked to Yamaraashi-chan about most of the dangers of teenagerhood, I haven't mentioned smoking much mostly because nobody I hang out with smokes much. As it is, her grades are fabulous, except in math, but she's jumped two grades since last year so she's struggling. She has trouble turning her work in on time, and she rarely speaks up in any class. I find all that disappointing, but I've promised to work with her on the mathematics, hopefully bypassing all the feel-good bullshit that my states (yes, sadly) has chosen to adopt. I actually asked one of the teachers what the whole point was. She said that since it's a required event, for a depressingly large number of parents it's the first time they've ever asked their kid, "Why don't you do your homework?" Tags: kids
Current Mood:  annoyed
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