Entries from February 2009
Recalibration
As you may or may not have noticed, I recently redesigned my site, only about six months after my last redesign. I did this for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which was how outdated and restrictive my old design was starting to feel. The new design brings more flexibility and represents a slight change in the focus of my site. It’s perhaps one of the more complete designs I’ve ever done, which is surprising, since I had it done in only about 4 days.
A Little More Personal
Having “web design + development” in my header restricted my post topics.
One issue that always plagued me with my previous design was that I felt compelled to stick to one topic: web development. I remember showing Colin Devroe the design for the first time, and he mentioned that I should take out the “web design + development” from my header. At the time, I brushed the comment aside, thinking it was not much of an issue. As time went on, however, it became more constraining, and, now, with the new design, I’m hoping to make this into more of a personal site. Sure, I’m still going to be posting mostly about the web, since that’s one of my primary interests, but I also hope to have more posts about other things as well. I also imported all of my Flickr photos into a brand new section on the site, which I’m really excited about.
Easier to Navigate
My old archives were painful to browse.
With my old site, it was almost infuriating how difficult it was to discover old posts. The main archive page (pictured above) was just about useless, and it was hard to find related posts once you started browsing. With the new design, I’ve significantly cleaned up my notebook section to make it a whole lot easier to browse. I’ve even found myself browsing my old Flickr photos this way, because it’s so enjoyable. My absolute favorite part is the “filter bar” that appears on each archive page (e.g. the 2008 archives), which allows you to quickly filter out what type of post (entries, links, or photos) you want to see, no matter whether you’re browsing by tag or date. I’ve also improved the related entries algorithm, and it now is more accurate and efficient. (I posted my old algorithm a little while back.)
My New Favorite Font: Calibri
The new archive filter really help to drill down what you’re looking for, and it looks great in Calibri.
When I first started mocking up the new design in Photoshop, I used Calibri, one of the new fonts in Microsoft Office, for the text, expecting to change it later. As I kept working, I eventually fell in love with the font and realized I couldn’t have the site set in anything else. However, this posed a problem, as most people do not have Calibri installed, and, because it’s sized slightly smaller than other fonts, having a fallback of Helvetica or Arial didn’t look very good. To combat that, I put together a simple jQuery plugin to detect if Calibri is installed, which allows me to serve two different versions of the site really easily. If you don’t have Calbri, however, I’d really, really recommend getting it, because it truly is a beautiful font. Check out my about page for info on where you might find it.
Separate Admin Area FTW
Back when I was working on rewriting my site, I toyed with the idea of having all of the site administration inline–that is, instead of having a separate admin area, I would be able to edit a post from the same page everyone else views it, with a sort of WYSIWYG interface. After thinking it over, I ended up keeping the two parts separate, and I’m really glad I did. When I went to put the new design into my Rails project, I didn’t have to worry about making sure my administration functions still worked, because I didn’t even touch that code–I coul d go ahead and change the design completely without breaking the core of the site. I also didn’t have to have the extra hassle of designing to accommodate an administration area as well.
Feedback
Of course, I’m constantly tweaking the site. Right now, I’ve got a list of about 15 things I still need to do, and I’m sure that will keep growing. If you have any thoughts on the new design, please let me know either by commenting on this post or by sending me an email. If you’re reading this through a feed reader, please come and check out my site and see what you’re missing!
The Black Hole War
I recently finished reading The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind and really enjoyed it. Billed as “the riveting inside account of the battle between Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind, and Gerard ‘t Hooft over the true nature of black holes,” I ended up learning a lot from the book about black holes, quantum mechanics, and gravity.
Information Loss
The central issue at stake in the book is the idea, proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1981, that information is lost when an object is devoured by a black hole. That is to say, if you or I happened to get sucked into a black hole, when that black hole evaporated (as all eventually do), there would be no sign that we ever existed. This may seem to make sense, but it violates a central law of physics that information cannot be destroyed. Even if you think of burning a book, you may not be able to read the pages any more, but, if you were able to catch all the light given off from the fire and collect any remaining physical pieces, you could reconstruct the book as it was, so the information contained within it still exists.
Susskind, upon hearing this pronouncement, spent the next 20 years trying to disprove Hawking. Though Susskind initially was in the minority, he eventually was able to convince physicists that information is indeed conserved when an object enters a black hole. While it’s a book about some very complicated physical interactions, Susskind presents it in a way which is very accessible to the average person.
Physics as Thought Experiments and Analogies
One of my favorite aspects of Susskind’s book was how he was able to boil down even the most complex problems to simple thought experiments or analogies. For instance, to explain how gravity can bend light’s path, he used the example of a very fast elevator, and to describe what someone would look like as he or she fell into a black hole, he used an analogy of fish in a pond getting sucked down a hole in the middle. This is one of my favorite parts about studying physics–most complicated problems can be explained through simple thought experiments, which is exactly how Albert Einstein first came up with the special theory of relativity.
As Susskind got into more advanced quantum mechanical topics, I could tell he was having trouble explaining the concepts without mathematics (there were perhaps only 2 equations in the entire book). This is not his fault, as the interactions on a quantum scale are so bizarre that there really are no analogs in the real world. Humans were not made to be able to understand these things, so it requires a lot of “rewiring,” as Susskind puts it, to really understand what is going on, more so than can be done in a 450-page book. That being said, Susskind does an admirable job of giving enough insight into what is going on without having to go into the specifics.
Definitely Recommended
If you have any interest in black holes at all, I’d definitely recommend reading The Black Hole War, as it is definitely a book created so that everyone can have at least some understanding of the complexities of black holes. For me, I wish it had been a bit more on the technical side, but I can definitely understand why Susskind wrote it the way he did. If nothing else, it excited me to learn more about what are some of the strangest objects in our universe, and I’m really looking forward to go more in depth about their properties in my classes at school.