Hull Form
Fairing the hull of a wooden sailboat. Design is a Melonseed, a 19th century duck hunting skiff. Plans from the Smithsonian Museum.

#WoodenBoat
#woodenboats
#handmade
#oldschool
#formandfunction

#dinosaurs #paleodiet #triassic #earlyjurassic #biomechanics #morphometry #dentition #formandfunction

Folklore against fascism. A post about the international, multicultural, inter-cultural, and ever-changing nature of folklore

https://dowsingfordivinity.com/2020/04/24/folklore-against-fascism/

#FolkloreAgainstFascism #FolkloreThursday #FormAndFunction

@johnwehrle Media and message tend to adapt to one another.

A book was roughly the length of a scroll, yes, but scrolls were chosen in part as they were suitable to a reasonable-length work.

Other examples which come to mind:

• Broadcast media is strongly tied to the hour, or reasonably even divisions or multiples of it, modulo advertising and/or sponsorship slots. Stream/playback media not locked rigidly into such constraints expand and contract far more flexibly: film and podcasts particularly come to mind, though there's some clustering around a few typical lengths: 60-second snips, 5--10 minute shorts, 20--30 minute brief lectures, 60 and 120 minutes for longer exposition. I find that broadcast-intended works tend to suffer on this basis (though there are many podcasts which might benefit from a time budget and editing as well). Listening to a couple of episodes of Rachel Maddow's new podcast, I'm struck by how often she repeats points, which seems more common and suited to broadcast, but which grates in podcast format.

• Music was long tied to recording medium capacities, growing from wax cylinders and acetate 78s (a few minutes each), to LPs and singles (about 24 minutes and 3 minutes per side, respectively. The capacity of the compact disk was selected to be able to hold all of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minutes/.

• DVDs and Blu-Ray define not only the length of video media, but the resolution and screen size (though that's also driven by display devices. Smartphone proliferation is changing the orientation of video from landscape to portrait.

• Still and motion video cameras similarly define, drive, and occasionally adapt to specific formats and resolutions: 16mm, 35mm, 70mm, iMax, etc. Digital CCDs probably have similar effects. Early tape-based video has capacity, resolution, and artifacting (e.g., ghosting and streaking especially of bright lights) which were characteristic, sometimes intrusive, sometimes exploited. Film grain has spawned religions and holy wars.

• Publishing strongly prefers books of a set size, typically about 125,000 words, or about 250 pages. Shorter works (in English, and/or specifically for American markets) tend to get padded. (This was a notorious problem for many poorer-quality, grossly overstuffed technical books in the 1990s / early 2000s.) And longer books are either tremendously cut or split into multiple volumes, as bindings for works > 250 pages or so tend to get iffy.

• Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is actually comprised of eight books, "lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle#cite_note-2

And as I've mentioned a few times, what I'm realising having a 13.3" e-ink tablet, the great failing of online long-form document formats is far less the formats, including the much begrudged, even by #YoungerMe, PDF, than displays. At roughly an A4 / US-Letter size, *print formats are strongly preferable to "online native" such as HTML and even ePub. (Though some documents, including Bill's UpLib article which I've found and am busily deconstructing, use fonts small enough to be painful and/or tedious. Another related work I've found by a German author uses a font *weight that is all but illegible on the device, which is frustrating.)

A large-screen Retina-display iMac is similarly a huge step forward in document viewing as compared with 96 dpi screens. The landscape display will show two-up (and occasionally even more simultaneous pages) of documents in very high clarity, and its colour capabilities are better adapted to some historical documents in scanned format.

@billjanssen

#Documents #Media #FormAndFunction #Formats #Standards #eBooks #Film #Music