It reminded me of the famous 1972 Massimo Vignelli map which hangs in my kitchen, but turns out it’s primarily influenced by the relatively obscure 1966 system map. That map is notable for the way its line curves match the street grid.

This reminded me of the KickMap by Kick Design, which takes a similar hybrid approach in its attempt to display the entire subway system and its relation to the city as cleanly as possible. The KickMap is stylized for clarity but its stations are location-accurate and a comprehensive street grid is used.

The KickMap is I think the most successful current map of the amazingly complex New York City subway system (the MTA thought otherwise), and you can put it on your iPhone.

Berman also uploaded this 1939 map of the never-built IND Second System, which would have put a subway stop within a half-mile of anyone’s home in New York City. They’re just getting around to construction of the Second Avenue line proposed then.

But much of Berman’s efforts lately seem to be focused on creating maps of entire city transit systems, particularly in areas served by different transit agencies who ignore one another. Here’s a map combining the regional commuter rail lines of Greater New York:

And here’s San Francisco’s complete rail system (BART, CalTrain and SF Muni united! Downloading this now because this always baffles me when I visit):

He’s also got some ideas on bicycle infrastructure for the suburbs.

In other words, everything that makes the Treasury unique is related to the fact that it’s a Flash application: its constraints, and its real-time feel. These things are inseparable from its origins in Flash. But at Etsy an entirely new infrastructure for collections (of items, shops and other entities) is being created. This infrastructure is fully scalable and powered by MongoDB.

So we launched Treasury East (beta) as a testing ground for a new unlimited Treasury world, where anyone would be able to create a curated list of items, and that human curation activity would be empowered, rewarded and harnessed—a critical ingredient I think for a vast marketplace of unique items made and carefully selected by humans.

And the birth of Treasury East has been nothing short of remarkable. It feels like the flowering of something new and great, as amazing items and fresh shops are surfaced by people with a talent for finding beautiful things.

Because as any collector knows, it’s fun and satisfying to find things, and can be an outlet for self-expression. Here’s a collection I made this morning while on a vintage mid-century modern housewares binge (it happens). The items were all discovered via Jared Tarbell’s Tag Fractal:

But I’ve been most interested to see what kind of new game mechanics might emerge in this brave new world. Over time we see the Treasury area becoming a hub for the most active collections site-wide. Collections will be abundant but only the most active and fastest-rising ones will be featured. Game mechanics will be baked in in new ways. Scarcity is actually already baked into Etsy itself due to the one-of-a-kind nature of the items available.

Yet already we’re seeing games emerge organically, some reminiscent of the Etsy Sneak Attack and PIF (Pay It Forward) phenomena, like Treasury East BnR (Buy and Replace), started by Grace of Homespun Handmaiden:

OK I’ve started a treasury east that’s a BnR (buy and replace). Basically you can buy any of the items in the treasury and post the transaction link in the comments. I then go to YOUR shop and replace the item you bought with one of your items! It’s a win-win for all involved. This is a great way to promote your shop and support fellow etsians at the same time!

Keeping an eye on the constant stream of Treasury East blog mentions and Twitter mentions for more.

• Tangentine: My Treasury East and thoughts on SEO, usability and opportunities
• Etsy’s Treasury East Rocks!
• “I tried out the new Treasury East feature on Etsy with this Malcolm McLaren-inspired collection from DIY crafters.“
• On Curating and Treasury East
• Treasury East… oh, the possibilities!
• “The whole world of Treasury East is cleaner, fancier, and just screams ‘buy me!’“
• “So, if the new treasuries never expire, why not explore this idea even further? Why not, in fact, create a treasury/inspiration board for each of my items?“
• East vs. West
• Etsy Treasury Tuesday
• “While fears of dilution are real, I don’t think persistence necessarily = creativity, and I’m confident Etsy will refine its Treasury East algorithm until the best of the best surface.”

1.
A few months ago I started acquiring various books on architecture, urban planning and social psychology and reading them with software design in mind. Christopher Alexander’s 1977 classic A Pattern Language towers above the others in sheer richness and hasn’t left my bedside. If you’re familiar with the use of design patterns in software development and the classic book on them, the format of A Pattern Language will be familiar: it was its inspiration. Jon Udell and Erin Malone have both written recently on the relevance of A Pattern Language to software design.

2.
Also been sifting through books, papers and presentations on neuroscience while thinking about software design. Neuro Web Design distills many of the key lessons from the field into one thin volume. It’s quite basic but not a waste of time. Topics include the power of social validation, building reciprocity and concession, invoking scarcity, using similarity, mass interpersonal persuasion (MIP!) and the power of storytelling.

3.
Douglas Rushkoff spoke recently at Etsy on the creation of value and how to exchange it directly with others. His book, Life Inc., has been very much on my mind since the fall, and helped kickstart a line of inquiry I’m still following regarding the nature of currency. Watch Life Inc. the Movie for an excellent introduction. Stacey Brook also wrote up a nice recap of the Etsy event.

4.
If you’re familiar with the Yahoo Design Pattern Library you’ll be familiar with much of this book: Christian Crumlish is the curator of both. I have it open quite a bit, though in some ways I prefer Joshua Porter’s older Designing for the Social Web. See 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences from co-author Erin Malone and the Social Patterns wiki for more.

5.
Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future is an Etsy Book Club selection. It’s a lucid book suggesting the need to explore new economic ideas and create more localized economies. The main idea is that localization is the only way to achieve economic resilience, and Bill articulates it convincingly.

6.
I’ve been reading up on games and game mechanics for a while (see Amy Jo Kim and my favorite category on Wikipedia), and teaching myself Go, but was unaware of how great Games magazine was (is?) until I came across some early issues circa 1977 and ‘78 at an antiques market. In between scholarly articles on ancient African games and the like there are pages of logic puzzles, unusual crossword variants and ads for ’70s classics like Mastermind and Othello—plus the magazine itself is a game, with hidden contests in every issue. New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz was an early contributor.

7.
This was a birthday gift from a few years ago, but there’s so much in it it’s still speaking. An extended abstract philosophical discussion amidst dense imaginary landscapes illustrated with obsessive detail, Kevin Hooyman’s The Language Change is one of the books that’s never left the active stack because I’m still getting my head around it. In “Chapter One: The Animals Speak Amongst Themselves,” a bird asks, “Are numbers real?” A bearded dog answers, “They are useful but they are not real.” And so on.

8.
My Piece of the Pie by Donald Brown. This is my grandfather’s autobiography, which I’ve been editing and designing. Family review copies have been circulating and I’m now trying to track down his patents to include them as an appendix. It will be available on Amazon eventually via Lulu.

9.
Beautiful Data is a collection of the stories behind elegant data solutions. Almost a book version of the kinds of things I was thinking about when I started working on Datamob, with many of the same players discussing different approaches to tackling the challenges of working with data. Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, whose 2009 Flea Market Mapping presentation still gets me excited, comes through with a detailed chapter on the process of freeing and beautifying urban data. There’s also a great chapter from Jeff Hammerbacher tracing the history of Facebook’s data team and the evolution of the tools used for information processing at that scale.

10.
I spotted a pile of back issues of Evergreen Review circa 1970 and ‘71 at the Beat Museum in San Francisco and found them irresistible. I had seen issues from the ’60s but in the ’70s things apparently got a lot sexier. Writing from counterculture greats, beautiful photography plus fascinating ads for underground book clubs and defunct concerns like Truth and Soul Fashions. So much style.

And a new stack is forming now with The Pragmatic Programmer, Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, Carl Jung’s Red Book, Coders at Work, and whatever I can manage to score from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World.

Biederman found test subjects preferred scenes like this,

Over scenes like this:

And more than that, preferred scenes were accompanied by high levels of neural activity in the association areas of the brain. Greater neural activity increases production of opioid neurotransmitters; the greater the rate of opioid release, the more pleasurable the experience. The association areas of the brain happen to have a high density of opioid receptors—neural activity there is pleasurable, and addictive.

The big pile of bricks above is what Biederman calls an “uninterpretable input.” It’s a random-appearing mass. “Novel inputs” like the garden scene above result in extensive interpretation and association and release a pleasurable flood of opioid hits. Repetition of novel inputs though result in rapidly diminishing opioid returns.

What makes a scene richly interpretable from an evolutionary perspective? A few key things according to Biederman: mystery (”How likely is it that something new might happen or that you would obtain different information from changes in your vantage point?”), vista (”How extensive is the view? Good reconnaissance?”), refuge (”Is there a position in the scene where you can achieve a good vantage point without being seen?”) and whether the scene is natural or urban (”Does it afford food or water?”).

To illustrate that pleasure is generated in that moment of novel interpretation, Biederman turns to Droodles. Droodles are doodle-riddles.

Have a look at this droodle, pre-caption:

Then have a look at it again with a caption:

Better, right? Biederman opted not to use lolcats in his study, to the internet’s dismay.

We’re forever seeking new and richly interpretable information. It’s how you got here, actually (and if you arrived via Twitter, you can consider yourself a junkie). Addictive websites and web apps happen to offer a constant stream of new information ripe for interpretation and association. Nowadays, with our basic needs for survival met, we spend much of our waking lives attempting to satisfy this drive. Some of us have learned that the internet is a great place to try and do this, over and over again.

In the evolutionary old days, new and richly interpretable information was relatively scarce. Now we’re swimming in it, and getting it on our phones to alleviate the opioid deprivation of waiting in line. But we still act like it’s scarce, and seek out that next hit, because we can’t help ourselves; it’s how we’re built. Scarcity is a powerful motivator. Biederman calls us infovores.

I had read about this study from secondhand sources but seeing actual presentation materials from Biederman is 100x more fun. You can download the slides from his Central European University lectures here. You can also download the images used in the Scene Preference Study there—flipping through them is sort of like a real-life version of The Parallax View montage.

A few weeks ago we had a “handmade code” hack day at Etsy, wherein many interesting features were born, large and small. One of the small hacks I crossed off on my to-do list that day because it didn’t exist yet was this Etsy search add-on for Firefox, for searching Etsy from within your web browser. Using the OpenSearch format, these things are wonderfully easy to bring to life. Here’s how.

The add-on was approved by Mozilla for public status and distribution today, just in time for a significant improvement to Etsy search: the ability to filter search results by category. Within a few hours of this update, I had hit a personal record in Etsy spending and paused to think about the larger economic implications to come when we really start unleashing discovery.

There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.

Find a shop you like? Check out their favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop’s favorites. Repeat until you realize five hours have gone by and you have 60 browser tabs open to Etsy pages.

I never stop at the shop level on Etsy. If I find an item of interest, I go past the shop to that shop’s favorites, and enter an endless loop. Below are some hearters I’ve been digging lately, and here’s a Yahoo Pipes-generated meta-feed consolidating all their hearting activity which you can subscribe to if they strike your fancy as well.

Tip: If you find yourself past page 10 of someone’s favorites, subscribe to their favorites feed.

corduroy’s items populate most of my favorite sellers’ favorites, so being pulled into her favorites was inevitable. She’s led me down some fruitful paths.

Etsy all-star hearter TeenAngster hipped me to the favorites of groundwork (among many others), who happens to be corduroy’s sister. Their mother, pogoshop, is also an active hearter. They share a great eye.

Just now after following a thread from groundwork’s favorites I was led to siiso (hearted this painting of hers). Her favorites led to half-dozen other eye-openers so she joins this list as well.

Icebear, aka Sofia Arnold, is in India right now but she left behind lots of quality favorites leads. I was taken with this free bird and French hermit crab.

Domestikate favors the witty. She likes “color, humor, good design, wood and skies of blue.” She also finds and sells parrot staplers.

yaelfran is one of Etsy’s heavy hearters, with a massive number of favorites. They’re a bottomless source of unusual illustrations and prints.

I’m a fan of Virginia Kraljevic’s intricate line drawings and her favorites have led me to some interesting places, like Hillarie Tasche’s graffiti train drawings and Betsy Walton’s world.

More found daily.

Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation. Parallax uses faceted navigation to make it easy to jump from one set of data to another related set of data and see the underlying connections.

David’s demo gets the idea across best:

I spent some time using Parallax to explore the influence node on Freebase, which attempts to capture the influences of notable people (and has led to some fun apps). Here are some of James Joyce’s biggest influences, mapped by place of birth:

Anyone who’s spent time puzzling over Finnegans Wake knows that Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher/historian/rhetorician/etymologist/jurist whom Joyce said made his imagination grow. But who influenced Vico? Here’s a timeline of those responsible:

There’s more to explore where that came from.

Excerpt from the text I created by clicking around Whitney Trettien’s combinatorial thesis on seventeenth-century digital poetry:

Harsdörffer used pieces of wood to make anagrams, designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations, and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem’s hidden values, earning him the title Der Spielende, or “the Player,” in the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Each of these games uses language not as an abstraction, the purely rational product of the mind, but as quite literally a material object to be manipulated and moved, cut-up and combined.

The Fünffacher Denckring der Teutschen Sprache, or the Five-fold Thought-ring of the German Language, is a database of the German language composed of five predicate variables: prefixes (forty-eight values), initial letters or diphthongs (fifty values), medial letters (twelve values), final letters of diphthongs (120 values) and suffixes (twenty-four values). Instead of using a table structure, however, each variable is inscribed along the edge of a disc and nested with each of the other discs, forming a simple combinatory mechanism that can generate any information stored in the database.

This “alphabet of human thoughts” remained an undercurrent in Leibniz’s philosophy throughout his life, manifesting itself in a number of different plans: his dream for a networked encyclopedia in which, through linking, every entry was a microcosm of the human macrocosm (see Selcer 29); his lingua characteristica, or notation system for concepts “whose signs or characters serve the same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers” (Leibniz 222); even his notion of “monads—discrete, irreducible primitives that nonetheless reflect the infinity of the spiritual cosmos. More specifically, Leibniz develops his “alphabet” through account of a mathesis universalis, a universal system for storing and generating knowledge.

“The verbal and visual tropes that surround the alphabet cloak the fact that the unit of textual meaning—the letter—lacks meaning itself.”