Coral Castle is now a classic Florida roadside attraction visited by tourists on Miami vacations. [main site] [wiki]

“The Incredible Mystery Of Coral Castle” by Christopher Dunn, illustrated.

Friendly roadside America article

Leedskalnin said that he “discovered the secret of the pyramids.” No one saw how this little man moved these giant coral blocks, but the science of bulding pyramids is not entirely hidden and unknown.

However, due to the impressivene, unusual nature of this feat, there were claims of secret energies found there and a new hidden math (the Coral Castle “code”).

See also “Secret Energy Haunts Coral Castle,” Wired 2003.
and a skeptical look which offers a much more rational explanation.

Metropolis Magazine feature, “The Man Behind the Cubicle” (Nov 1998)

“Cubicles: The great mistake,” Fortune Mar 2006

Herman Miller case studies for business

Web site: Laetus in Praesens (“joy in the present”)

Chronological Index of Documents by A. Judge

Documents as sorted by 35 themes

Quotation: “What we need to understand may only be expressible in a language that we do not know.”

Currently retired fro UIA and now the “instigator” of the Union of Imaginative Associations

Judge’s “Selected websites on dialogue”

Harley Earl-designed hi-tech GM bus, used in the Parade of Progress in the early 40s and early 50s. [more] [images] [wikipedia]

Restoration project

“The World of Tomorrow”

Summary with pictures and links

A Virtual World re-creation of the Fair has many photos and photo-based products (like coffee mugs) available for sale.

Sites with good and notable web design, great HTML examples, good coding, etc.

Personal sites

John M. Lynch’s Web Site is an excellent example of a professional home page done well.

More graceful simplicity: Don Klipstein’s Web Site.

Ian Jackson’s lynx-friendly pages.

How minimalist can it get? Ask John Cowan.

Databases, Magazines and Web Resources

Michael E. Grost’s A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection is one of the best examples of good plain design for an online guide or resource site.

Cardigan Industries have out-McSweeneyed McSweeney’s. Seriously, it’s fantastic design. No wonder, they’re using Textism.

Grunnen Rocks is a web db from the Netherlands of indie rock, 90s to now. They’ve “updated” but the ancient old site design from way back when was simply righteous. [have a peek]

arxiv.org

The gopher-directory style of the etext.org archive (defunct) [archive]

the old wikiwikiweb had and has a simple, straightforward design

Online books

TeX Font Guide is simple and readable and elegant.

WordPress Elegance

Cynthia Harrison’s A Writer’s Diary.

For further reference

A good, well-designed online guide, Building Accessible Websites.

The Easy-2-Read Standard: Five smart rules for on-screen text design (“Don’t tell us scrolling is bad!”)

The Webless Initiative is against CSS, style sheets, “interactivity” and so on. It might not have much of an effect but the ideas are interesting and very often the “webless” design turns out great.

(Browsers should be able to control and present an infinite array of local styles; styles should be controllable not only by the publisher but by the reader.)

OCLC’s memorial article (illustrated) is worth reading. [PDF]

[quotes] [google] [wikipedia] [NY Times obit] [OCLC announcement]

Books and articles

His writing on library automation and book publishing had a great influence on my own outlook and ideas.

Most important is his book, The Evolution of the Book (Oxford University Press 1998). Fantastic history of the book with ideas for the future.

The Collected Papers of Frederick G. Kilgour, great reading, once online in scanned GIF files (!), are apparently now offline. [archive] [buy]

“Interlibrary Lending Online,” Dr. Kilgour’s entry to the Pioneers of Information Science Scrapbook (Oct 1998) by Dr. Bob Williams. [more]

“White text on a blue background” (like WordPerfect) (good for low-brightness environments)

Results of a text and background color test

“Readability Of Websites With Various Foreground / Background Color Combinations, Font Types And Word Styles“ (1997)

“Computer- & screen-based interfaces: Universal design filter”

“Interface Design and Optimization of Reading of Continuous Text”

Why this page is black

or, how to read lots of text on display screens without getting
retina burn.

[First published 27 Jan 2000. Most recent update on $Date: 2002/11/22 15:10:52 $.]

Back in the 1990s, they used to say that black backgrounds were for Web sites that wanted to be “cool.” But that’s not why I did it (and I haven’t been cool since at least 1994); these pages are black because I’ve found that it’s easier to read light text on dark screens than it is to read dark text on light screens!

When it comes to paper ephemera, the opposite tends to be true — black text printed on a white piece of paper is easier to read than white text on black-printed paper. It’s also cheaper — with the old paper publishing, black = ink = money.

But the display screens we use with computers today are different from printed paper in this and many other ways. On printed paper, it’s easier to read a typeface that has serifs, which are the gilded edges of the main strokes of the characters. (Times Roman is the classic serifed font.) This is why newsprint is always in a serifed font — newspapers must be designed for readability. It so happens that with the CRT display screens used with computers (and televisions and teletypes), a sans serif font — such as “Helvetica” or “Ariel” — tends to be easier to read.

That some studies found this to be true does not mean that these should be the standard preferences for all etext; nor it does it mean that Web publishers (myself included) should force their personal font and color preferences on their readers — unlike books and other printed matter, there is no price penalty for choice of color or font, or for changing them post-publication.

But selecting color and font is really a client-side, front-end function. (In other words, it’s a job for the Web browser.) Which is good, because these properties ought to be controllable by the reader, one of the major improvements of etext over paper output. (Need a large-print version? Want it in your favorite font or colors? Should it be just 6 points larger? You’ve got it.)

And it’s a terrible shame that, with more than a half-decade of Netscape Navigator behind us (and that’s in real, not Internet years), there are only a handful of workable, actively developed Web browsers to choose from and none of them are really optimized for reading text. I think that’s why they still call them Web “browsers” — nobody’s ever made a Web reader.

A publisher ought to be able to specify his “envisioned” or “suggested” colors for a document, but this should be something that the Web reader/browser can easily override. Web reading tools should be able to set a “palette override” so that the user can set his own text colors for background, foreground and the various link colors, and then view the entire WWW in that chosen color palette! And it should work so that a simple keystroke toggles the publisher’s envisioned colors with the reader’s colors, and perhaps an algorithm to determine something “in between” according to some heuristic rule, so the reader could meet the author/publisher halfway, in a sense…

My current favorite all-around combination is what I’m using on this site, which is bluish-white text (#CCCCFF) on a black background (#000000). There are plenty of other combinations that work. White text on blue is good — so good that the designers of WordPerfect and of the Apple IIgs both picked it as their default.

I also like black text on a bluish-white background, which I used in my music-review zine Review Addict. I tend to cycle the colors I use on my personal start-page; right now, it’s black text on an aqua/turquoise background (#CCEEEE). I used to like to read text-only Citadel BBSes with either red or Navy blue text on a white background, and I still favor the Navy blue-on-white — this is the scheme I used for linart, a resource for artists who use Linux.

The standby of black text on white background is used by a lot of top etext designers — most notably by Philip Greenspun — and a lot of people still prefer it. Until recently, my emacs text editor was still (un)configured so that most buffers used those colors. However, I want to get away from this default and the “HTML files are pages, like pieces of paper” kind of thinking — and its limiting of the possibilities — that it tends to encourage. Because reading text with the computer is unbounded — the possibilities are wide open, waiting for you to think them up. Or as Paul Muter wrote: “At present [1996], we do not know how to optimize reading via electronic equipment.” That we still call variable-length files displayed on these screens “pages” shows that we still have a long way to go in making these distinctions.

If I change the colors on this site (and I undoubtedly will, someday), it will probably be to no color — perhaps a stylesheet with my most-recently-preferred-colors, but an empty <body> tag. That way, the readers will always have total control of the text, which is how it probably ought to be. (In fact, I decided to publish the ebook edition of The Linux Cookbook without specifying color.)

Dr. Lauren Scharff is one of the relatively few people actively researching the readability of graphical user interfaces. Her conclusion so far (in the Netscape/IE world of late-1990s “browsers”) is that there’s no easy answer for Web site readability. But I think that we’ll see the preferences soon turning toward the reader, and letting the reader choose the fonts and colors dynamically and on-the-fly, and easily, so that this “page” may be black — or white, or red, or green — depending on how you, the reader, feel it should be.

Related links

• Table of screen colors with UNIX names, hex color codes and sample text.
• Dan Lyke’s rant on black-on-white screen text (on a black-on-white page itself!), is worth reading.
• Are you a designer of a computer screen-based interface? Ellen Francik wrote a design guide for you, “Computer- & screen-based interfaces: Universal design filter.”

British economist and author, futurist and global planner. Chief interests included sustainable environments, ending poverty, global economies and the development of Third World nations. Pioneer of sustainable planning. Was a Catholic and after being cured of cancer in the 1940s she said it was due to the involvements of Padre Pio. Influenced by RBF. [wikipedia] [google]

The Barbara Ward Papers at Georgetown include various correspondences, including more than 700 letters written to her mother. [quotes]

Books and writings

• Spaceship Earth (1966)

  Mix of sustainability and Catholicism.

  In the world at large, the millions will be born. The settlements will grow — in squalor and violence, or in work and hope. The whole world — linked by its communications, its airlines, its hijackers and its terrorists — has really only one choice: to become a place worth living in or face ‘the way to dusty death.’ And where else do people live save in their settlements? So where else is the salvation to begin?

• Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet

  Co-authored with Rene Dubos. Global sustainability and economics.

• Nationalism & Ideology (W. W. Norton 1966)

• The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (W. W. Norton 1984)

• The Angry Seventies: The Second Development Decade: A Call to the Church (Pontifical Commission: Justice and Peace 1970)

• Five Ideas that Change the World (W. W. Norton 1959)

• Are today’s basic problems religious?, Moral order in an uncertain world
  (University Press 1953). The Mott Foundation Lectures.

• It can be done: An approach to the problem of world poverty (G. Chapman 1965)

• Britain’s interest in Atlantic Union (Friends of Atlantic Union 1954)

• Democracy, east & west (Bureau of Current Affairs 1947) (Background handbook)

Articles and references

“The Third World Urban Forum: ‘Spaceship Earth’ spiralling irreversibly into the urban era.“ (2006)

“Following the vision of Barbara Ward” [photo]

For further reading