Students don’t have much trouble with the drooling dogs and bombardiering birds. Nor do they have much difficulty mastering the concepts of positive reinforcement, in which you are given something desirable (food, money, etc) to reinforce a target behavior, and punishment, in which you experience something unpleasant whenever you perform an undesired behavior. Confusion doesn’t set in until negative reinforcement is brought up. Negative reinforcement, just like positive reinforcement, increases the likelihood that a target behavior will occur (in contrast, punishment decreases the likelihood of a behavior occurring, and isn’t very good at creating long-term behavior change). The difference is that while positive reinforcement introduces something pleasant to reinforce behavior, negative reinforcement works by removing something unpleasant. It’s a tricky concept to teach because it’s difficult to think of examples in which you’re removing something unpleasant without also introducing something pleasant. As it happens, I’m living just such an example right now.

I am not a morning person. I never have been, and I probably never will be. I am not one for whom the dawn is its own reward. It takes a supreme effort and an elaborate system of alarms to wrench myself out of bed every morning. During holidays my circadian rhythms inevitably slide toward the nocturnal. I eventually find myself falling asleep at 4:00AM and waking up at the crack of noon. Nevertheless, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve overslept for an early appointment. If I absolutely have to be somewhere at 7:00AM, I’ll be there. It’s just how I was raised.

For the past two weeks I’ve been arriving at the lab by 7:30AM. Initially I did this because I had to; a subject in an experiment I’m running could only come in at 8:00AM. But the subject in question finished up last week, and now I’m coming in early by choice. You may be wondering how I’ve managed to sustain such a miraculous change in my behavior, and believe me, “miraculous” is definitely the word here.

It has everything to do with the B Line. Anyone who lives in Boston knows what I’m talking about. The B Line is by far the slowest, most crowded, and least reliable subway line in the city. That it serves the most densely residential sections of the city but runs the fewest trains is a topic for another day. The end result is that rush hour on the B Line is a nightmare. Moreover, the B Line remains crowded for huge swathes of the day, even as the ridership on other branches of the Green Line thins to almost nothing. The thought of having to stuff myself into a B Line car for what is, all things considered, a short commute fills me with dread.

It turns out that if I can get myself onto the train by, say, 7:00AM, all of these problems go away. The trains haven’t had the chance to get backed up, seating is plentiful, and the ride is quantifiably faster. The whole experience is far less aversive, so much so that I’m actually willing to push against twenty-seven years of night owl habits to change my behavior. Negative reinforcement in action, ladies and gentlemen.

There are positive reinforcers as well, of course. There are more hours in my day and I’m more productive (the only other time in my life where I managed to maintain this schedule also happens to be the time I wrote daily). Since I’m in so early, I don’t feel bad about dodging the evening rush hour by leaving at 4:00. The positive reinforcers are obvious, but it’s the negative reinforcement of avoiding a horrible commute that gets me up in the morning. Skinner tends to get a bad rap these days, but there’s no denying that the man was on to something.

Psychophysical experiments typically require a small, simple set of responses from participants. Yes/No, First/Second, Left/Right, Brighter/Darker, Pigeon Pecking/Pigeon Not Pecking, that kind of thing. So I’ve always thought it a bit strange that we (meaning my lab) record responses from a full Apple keyboard. If the subject only needs three keys to participate in the experiment, why present him with 109?

About a year ago, I volunteered to participate in an experiment at a lab where they specialize in eye tracking research. I could detail the hellish setup they employed to stabilize participants’ heads—which involved an eye patch, plastic rods, and dental impressions—but I won’t. I think it’s more fun to let you imagine how those three items fit together. Anyway, there I am, feeling like a pirate about to be fitted for braces, when into my hands is thrust a Playstation 2 controller. “What a brilliant idea,” I thought, trying not to drool into my lap.

I’d put the whole experience out of mind until the Mimeo thing got me thinking about video games and controllers. Should I purchase a USB gamepad for use in my experiment rooms? Something like this or this, perhaps? The ergonomic advantages are pretty clear. When you’re trying to confine yourself to a chin rest it’d be a lot easier to hold something in your hand, rather than peck awkwardly at the bottom of the numeric keypad. The reduced set of buttons might even reduce subject errors. Such advantages are well worth considering.

In my search for a good, simple USB controller, it became clear that they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are even made to mimic the peripherals of our youth, and the nostalgia is almost powerful enough to overcome the litany of reviews detailing these products’ shoddy workmanship, unreliable responses, and generally short lifespans (still, this slightly more expensive model looks more promising, and more faithful to the original hardware). The mere sight of those four purple buttons—the exact shape, size, and color of Smarties, I have always believed—is enough to set my brain on edge and fill me with vivid memories of Mortal Kombat and Super Mario Kart. Hours upon hours of them. I can almost feel my fingers reaching out to hit the SNES’s spring-loaded reset button before my Arwing explodes for the millionth time.

As my search for gamepads inevitably branched into unrelated areas (oh, internet), I was surprised to learn that you can actually get a workable NES or SNES on eBay for far less money than you might think. Then again, I think these things are priceless, and it’s downright shocking to see my childhood on sale for $65.82. You’d think that these venerable gaming systems, particularly something as old as the NES, would have begun to appreciate in value. Or at least I would think that. Perhaps normal people do not. In any case, even if I ponied up the piddling amount of cash necessary to buy a SNES, where would I put it? Is it really worth having the thing around? I’m still undecided. Am I genuinely interested in buying such a system, or just eager to distract myself from work? It’s hard for me to disambiguate the signal from the noise on this one.

Maybe I should collect some more data. With a gamepad.

I’d like to take a moment to formally define something I’m going to call Year Twelve. This is the year of your life when everything seemed exciting and wonderful, a time full of seemingly endless enjoyments with little to no interference from the hassles and complications of the adult world. This is almost always the year when you, personally, were twelve. Pixels were the language of my childhood. They take me back to a time when everything was simpler, newer, and more fun. In other words, Year Twelve. As such, the sight of 8-bit or 16-bit graphics can provoke one of two powerful reactions in me: absolute joy or utter disdain.

It all comes down to how the pixel aesthetic is being used. Is this game being retro for retro’s sake? If so, I have a problem with it. If pixelated graphics are being used solely to maximize cuteness, that’s a waste. If they’re being used to hide the game designer’s lack of artistic skill, that’s dishonest. In both cases the underlying problem is laziness. Can’t be bothered to come up with some decent art direction? Here, let me take a cheap shot at your childhood and hope it hits home.

What many people forget when they see a retro game is that those pixelated graphics were products of their time. Memory and screen resolution were limited. Look at The Legend of Zelda. An enormous section of the screen is given over to graphical elements that don’t move, cleverly (and necessarily) reducing the game’s demands on the NES’s limited hardware. This sort of context is essential to understanding why the sprite-based games of the 80s and early 90s look and, more importantly, behave as they do.

Why did I like Mega Man 9 so much? It wasn’t just the cutesy, blocky graphics harkening back to Year Twelve. The game’s designers had gone out of their way to flawlessly replicate the unforgiving precision required to play the game. That’s what so many people miss about sprite-based games; the best ones were marked by precision in all things, from the meticulously crafted graphics to the demands made of the player. In Mega Man 9, you play this section exactly right or you die (although why you’d forego use of the Jewel Shield here is beyond me). Along the same lines, players always have a certain amount of control over Mario’s jump when in the air. Games that did not allow for a similar level of precise control feel loose and frustrating in comparison.

In his introduction to the Mimeo project, Inman writes:

A single pixel out of place, one too few or too many, ruins the illusion. There’s an unmuddied, economy of expression, the thankless result of the limitations of cartridge-based consoles.

At its core, play, and by extension video games, is learning. Call it discovery or mastery but a good game introduces new ideas (teaches), leverages existing ones (reviews) and layers them to create unique challenges (tests). Teaching, at its core, is communicating. Verbosity is an academic sleeping pill. A game’s graphics are the player’s teacher and a good teacher is consistent, clear, and concise. Like good pixel art.

Clearly, Inman gets it. I’m on the edge of my seat for Mimeo and the Kleptopus King. My only regret is that since Mimeo is being developed for the iPhone, I won’t have a plastic controller in my hands when I play it.

I’ve watched the episode in question, and I’m left wondering what made Sarah Palin’s gut feel so cruelly kicked. That a person with Down Syndrome is portrayed as worthy of teenage affection and desire? That Ellen is capable of living a life as normal as any other teen? How does that constitute a kick to the gut, exactly? The Palins (Bristol Palin has also made some public comments about the episode) seem dead set on interpreting the entire episode as an attack not just on persons with Down Syndrome, but on Trig Palin, specifically. Frankly I think it’s a stretch to see the episode as offensive to the disabled community (the jokes are remarkably tame by Family Guy’s notorious standards), and outright ludicrous to conclude that the show’s writers set out to mock a specific infant.

But this is America, by gum, and just as Seth MacFarlane has the right to express his nonsense in public, so do the Palin family. In her comments on the episode Bristol said, “People with special needs face challenges that many of us will never confront, and yet they are some of the kindest and most loving people you’ll ever meet,” which is one of the most ignorant things someone could possibly say about persons with disabilities. Disability is not a virtue in itself. Having a disability does not automatically make someone a better person. Bristol’s comment is particularly ironic since the entire purpose of the Chris/Ellen story was to make exactly this point. Chris ends up dumping Ellen after their first date because she is a demanding, overbearing, terrible person, disability or not.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that in her capacity as a Fox News pundit Palin asked, “When are we going to be willing to say, you know, some things just aren’t really funny?” Probably around the time that Glenn Beck gets pulled off your network for calling the sitting President a racist, which is to say, never. Of course, the Family Guy joke in question wasn’t really about Trig, it was more of a small jab at his mother. This isn’t really about Palin’s motherly outrage so much as it is about her penchant for victimhood and her inability to accept any comment that even mildly conflicts with her personal narrative of Conservative Sainthood, Unsmartened Wisdom, and American Greatness.

I’ll leave the rest to Andrea Fay Friedman, the actress who voiced Ellen and who herself has Down Syndrome. In response to Palin’s comments she wrote, “I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line ‘I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska’ was very funny. I think the word is ’sarcasm’. In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.”

“Keep Calm” was the final poster in a series of three commissioned by the Ministry of Information. It was intended to be used only if Britain was invaded by the Germans. I mean, really, how stiff upper lip can you get? There you are knee-deep in Nazis and the King’s message to you is simply, “Keep calm and carry on.” Of course, Britain was never invaded and this third poster never saw the light of day (though one supposes that this might have been an ideal message during the Blitz). The poster was forgotten by history until 2000, when an errant copy turned up at Barter Books of Northumberland.

The bold color, stark typography, minimalistic Crown symbol, and wonderfully succinct slogan combined to create something that was both emblematic of the era and perfectly British, all in little more than five words. Suddenly I remembered that the Southerner’s birthday had just passed (don’t look at me like that, he’s not big on presents) and that he has an affection for all things Royal. It became clear that I had no choice but to buy him a copy for his own especial privilege and certain knowledge.¹

Here’s where things get tricky. Crown Copyright on “Keep Calm and Carry On” expired more than twenty years ago. Combined with the poster’s simple design and immense popularity,² this means that there are a lot of knock-offs floating around the internet. All of them feature the Crown, but only some of them use an accurate font. Since the poster is almost all text, the accuracy of the typeface is critical. Barter Books claims to have the original poster. I have no reason to disbelieve them, but some of their merchandise uses a font that is obviously different from the original’s (note the way the letter “C” terminates, as well as differences in the “M”). The match is close, but not close enough, which is deeply confusing. KeepCalmAndCarryOn.com (even more rhyming than the original!) seems to employ the same near-miss typeface, except on the book (weird, right?). Don’t even get me started on the cheap and highly inaccurate reproductions available on Amazon, which appear to use Adobe’s Myriad Pro. While Myriad has the benefit of being free, it looks nothing like the original 1939 typography (particularly noticeable on the letters “K”, “C”, and “M”).

So, Mr. Amateur Typographer, you might be thinking, what’s the correct typeface, then? The answer, I think, is that it doesn’t exist. Given the way that posters were produced in 1939 and the limited set of letters that “Keep Calm” employs, it’s more likely that the text was drawn by hand specifically for the job. This means that the only accurate type sample is on the original poster itself. I found one vender on eBay who had gorgeous, accurate prints for sale, but because I live in a disreputable neighborhood the print went missing somewhere between the confirmed delivery and my arriving home. Luckily enough, Wikipedia’s version of the poster appears to be a direct copy of the original, and even better, it’s in SVG format. This means that provided you have a suitable vector graphics application and a decent print shop, you can make your own crisp, typographically accurate copy in any color or size you like. As it happens, I have both, so today I’ll be able to present the Southerner with his long-overdue birthday gift. 24×36 inches big, violently red, and defiantly British.

1. For why that sentence is funny, please see Paragraph VI of the Charter of Maryland, 1632. ∧
2. Some people believe that “Keep Calm and Carry On” is too popular, as this thread on Apartment Therapy indicates. One commenter goes so far as to write, “I couldn’t stand to have my Keep Calm print at home anymore, it seems like such a cliche.” This is, of course, idiotic. Great design lasts forever (or nearly so), and remains great despite its ubiquity. Trashing your print of “Keep Calm” just because it’s popular is like buying a Zune just to spite the iPod. ∧

“Read the letters above the green line, please.”

“X-O-Q-T,” I say. This is followed by a slightly too-long pause.

“And the rest of the line, sir?”

“Oh,” I say, quickly recognizing the problem. I need to turn on my right eye. I squint my left eye shut to give my right eye a jumpstart, and the rest of the line pops into existence. “R-P-V-M.”

Without another word she moves on to the rest of the paperwork. I didn’t get my license renewed that day, but that’s an entirely different story. The point of my telling you this is to let you know that like many people born with cerebral palsy, I have a lazy eye. Or rather, I had a lazy eye, surgically corrected when I was about two years old. As with language, where there’s a sensitive period during which the brain can soak up a native language with ease, there’s a similar period for the wiring of depth-sensitive neurons. This period occurs at a very early time in development, so my depth-sensitive neurons didn’t develop in an ideal manner.

I’ve spent most of my life with this crippling visual disability. Unable to play catch or aim a frisbee. Terrible at estimating how far away I am from anything. And most damningly, utterly unable to shake hands or open doors without accidentally punching someone in the mouth or mashing my fingers against the wall. My hands, they ache from being bitten and bludgeoned so.

Not!

This is why articles like “How 3D Works (And Why It’s Back!)“, by Erez Ben-Ari, never fail to tick me off. They inevitably equate depth perception with stereopsis (literally “solid sight”), a phenomenon experienced when the two slightly different images hitting your eyes merge to produce a sensation of depth (this process is also called binocular fusion¹). In reality, stereopsis is a minor contributor to depth perception, most useful within a range of five feet and essentially useless beyond twenty. The lion’s share of depth perception arises from monocular (one-eyed) cues. We tend to take these for granted since they seem so basic: the way solid objects overlap each other, the way things get smaller as they get farther away, changes in texture and other visible details, to say nothing of a little thing called motion, which always seems to get neglected in discussions of depth perception, academic or otherwise.

Mr. Ben-Ari’s article makes a mistake pretty early on when he claims that ”3D imagery has been around for ages, mostly as a gimmick, but things have changed in the past few years.”

Well, sort of. Stereoscopy, or the process of creating a sensation of depth from a pair of 2D images, has been around since 1840. Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the first stereoscope (among a few dozen other things). In fact, Wheatstone’s stereoscope is still used in vision research today, as the apparatus is both cheap and easily adjustable for each observer. You can make one yourself, either with mirrors and cardboard or, if you’re feeling particularly American, with iPods. Even setting the research applications of stereoscopy aside, Ben-Ari’s claim that it’s mostly a “gimmick” is debatable. Any doctor who’s ever gazed into a professional-grade microscope will tell you how useful that extra depth cue can be. Of course, research into stereopsis eventually led Béla Julesz to the random dot stereogram, which in turn gave us the Magic Eye. That’s not just a gimmick, that’s torture. There is no Easter Bunny.

Ben-Ari can also be faulted for failing to do some basic research into the history of 3D movies. Discussing the various methods of projecting 3D movies he says, “…the most popular way, initially, was to use the notorious red-blue glasses…A few years ago, a new delivery method came about, based on polarizer glasses.”

Ben-Ari gives the impression that this polarization technique is all newfangled, arriving on the scene “a few years ago.” I suppose that’s true, if by “a few years,” you mean seventy-four. Polarized 3D movies were patented and marketed by the brilliant Edwin H. Land in 1936. In fact, he started a little Mom and Pop business called Polaroid, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Most of the 3D films shown during the “golden era” of 3D in the 1950s were projected using the polarized method, with the more well-remembered red-blue lens system being used for comic books and later TV adaptations.

All this is window dressing that hides Ben-Ari’s real whopper. After a discussion of the basics of binocular depth perception and before his inaccurate recounting of the history of 3D film, he casually says, “For this reason, people with a damaged eye cannot judge distances correctly.”

Oh, I beg to differ. So would cinematographers, surveyors, and snipers (and anyone who spends a lot of timing estimating distances with one eye shut, really), as well as Bryan Berad, the one-eyed professional hockey player. While we’re on the subject of sports, I found at least three Major League pitchers who are blind in one eye: Thomas Sunkel, who pitched for the Cardinals, the wonderfully named Whammy Douglas, who pitched for the Pirates, and Abe Alvarez, who pitched a few games for the Boston Red Sox during—get ready for it—the 2004 season.  People with damaged eyes should be concerned more with their diminished field of view than anything else. Judging distances is not a problem.

Let it also be known that not all “damaged eyes” are equal. If you’re like me and you have some form of amblyopia then not all is lost. Evidence suggests that special visual exercises can restore an amblyope’s visual function to normal levels. At a large vision conference last year, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Sue Barry, who showed me that I can even restore my stereopsis, provided I’m looking at the right things. My recent experiences at 3D movies like Up and Coraline have shown me that I am indeed capable of perceiving stereoscopic effects, which suggests that with training I might be able to fully restore my 3D vision.²

So let’s review. Erez Ben-Ari wrote an article on the resurgence of 3D movies in which he botches the science, rewrites history, and fundamentally misunderstands why this resurgence is taking place. It’s not really about improved stereoscopic technology (although it’s certainly easier today than it was in 1936, when two reels of film had to be meticulously synchronized to prevent the audience from dying of eye strain). It’s more about 3D as an attraction. You still can’t get good 3D in your home, which means that the theater is the place to be. For this reason, I doubt we’ll ever see a usable home solution for full-color 3D. If the movie industry hasn’t already gummed up the works on that project, they really should. It’s where the money is. Just look at Avatar.

1. By the way, binocular fusion’s evil twin is binocular rivalry, which occurs when the two images hitting your eyes are too dissimilar to be merged together. Rather than fusing them into a depth percept, your brain has a big argument over which picture you should be seeing, with your dominant eye (yes, just like you have a dominant hand, you have a dominant eye) usually winning out by default. This is why red-blue 3D glasses almost never work for me, and it’s also why I had that problem at the RMV. ∧
2. It really seems to depend on how much form information my brain has to work with. I’m hopeless on a random dot stereogram, where a perception of depth arises purely from binocular fusion, but as the object is more clearly defined (more realistic) and/or takes up more of my visual field, it gets easier to induce stereopsis. ∧

In case you weren’t aware, Proposition 8 is in court. Perry v. Schwarzenegger, as the case is officially known, is exactly what you think it is. The plaintiffs are seeking to overturn the ballot measure that modified California’s constitution to define marriage as an institution between one man and one woman, which denies gay couples the right to marry (a right they had briefly enjoyed thanks to an earlier decision by the California Supreme Court). If you want a thorough overview of the case, the New Yorker has you covered. The plaintiffs are being represented by David Boies and Ted Olson, a notable pairing because Olson and Boies were on opposing sides of Bush v. Gore. Olson, a conservative who represented Bush in that famous case, has written eloquently about why he believes that gays have the right to marry.

Also worth noting, Olson and Boies are not affiliated with America’s defacto gay rights lobby, the Human Rights Campaign. This case is going to reach the Supreme Court of the United States, and the HRC wants no part of it. In fact, the HRC has usually done everything in its power to avoid exactly this situation. See, the HRC’s lawyers have long believed that a majority of the Justices on the Supreme Court would vote to defeat any measure that tries to grant gays the right to marry. Fearing that such a decision would greatly damage the gay rights movement, the HRC has decided that it would be more prudent to wait until SCOTUS liberals up a bit.

So, you know, bear with us, we’ll get you gay marriage some time in the next ten to thirty years. However long it takes Scalia and/or Alito to die and be replaced by moderates. If you’d like to help the HRC you can donate money, pray for a spontaneous embolism in the brain of your least favorite Justice, use your last wish from that genie to create a paradigm shift in the makeup of the Senate, or genetically engineer gay unicorns that fart Social Security benefits.

If the above paragraph was a little too heavy on colorful imagery for you, let me clearly state that I am not happy with the HRC. The HRC is the Comfortable Rich Gay, as a friend of mine put it. The HRC has tons of money, a couple of ounces of political capital, and it likes it that way. The HRC is happy to shepherd along incremental advances in gay rights and clap like a seal when a mainstream politician pays it five minutes of attention. Boat rocking is out. When the opponents of gay marriage spout Biblical vitriol and outright lies to defeat gay rights initiatives, the HRC simply turns up its nose and sniffs indignantly. The HRC says that gay marriage is a fundamental right, but treats even the most minuscule advance in gay rights as a watershed moment in history, rather than the frustrating, insufficient advances they really are. This position is nonsensical.

In its advertisements, the HRC prefers to let straight celebrities from gay-ish TV shows and parents with theoretically gay children do the talking for them, rather than show actual living, breathing, loving gay people. Meanwhile, Yes on 8 showed the world how terribly, terribly confusing gay marriage would be for the Nation’s children, as well as the educational dystopia that threatens to ooze forth from that land without God, Massachusetts. Mind-explodingly stupid, yes, but it worked. You know what else is mind-explodingly stupid? The HRC’s failure to release an unambiguous statement of support from Barack Obama. I know his popularity has taken a hit lately, but back in ‘08 he was unstoppable. Probably wouldn’t have hurt to mention his name a few times.

Simply put, the HRC are a bunch of cowards, tiptoeing around anything even remotely controversial, terrified of entering into any battle that isn’t already a sure thing. Is this how the fight for civil rights works? Wait around until everybody feels comfortable treating you like a real person? Only fight when your victory is a foregone conclusion? Run around Washington in your neatly pressed business suit begging for a tip of the hat?

No. Gay marriage is a right. Anyone who believes otherwise is a bigot, pure and simple. I have said this before and I will say it again. There is no rational argument for the denial of gay rights, as Olson lays out in the aforelinked Newsweek article. He is currently making this same argument in a court of law, and if these pathetic depositions on behalf of the pro-Prop 8 side are any indication, Olson and Boies have a strong shot at making gay marriage a reality for the entire United States. I am optimistic.

Even if this case doesn’t turn out the way they would like, isn’t it worth trying? Don’t conservatives pull this kind of stunt all the time? A Constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman? No one thought it would pass, and it didn’t, but that wasn’t the point. It got people talking. The marriage amendment has become a litmus test for a politician’s conservative bona fides. Most importantly, it set the terms of the debate; instead of talking in terms of gay rights, the argument was suddenly framed in terms of protecting straight marriage. Note to Democrats: make some noise, already. Throw some insane, doomed legislation into the pot and stir things up. Get people talking on your terms.

But I digress. I once again return to my original question. At what point does cynicism become nothing but a euphemism for cowardice? When does pragmatism give way to paralysis? When does caution become fear? I don’t think the HRC knows the difference anymore. I’m rooting for Olson and Boies.

No, really. The Nook sucks.

The Tall One received a Nook as a Christmas present this year, and it was delivered to him before the end of January, because he is lucky. The excitement was palpable, but within two hours it had given way to frustration and disappointment. The Tall One had read that the Nook can display any PDF you load onto it. As an avowed Warhammer addict with several dozen codices in his possession, the space-saving potential of such a device was almost intoxicating to him. Alas, the Nook always displays a full page at a time, with no options for zooming in, which makes reading a codex impossible.

Warhammer nerds are crazy anyway, you might say, and the Nook was meant for normal people. Fine. Then tell me why the device is so monstrously slow. A delay between page loads long enough for me to start counting my Mississippis? Absolutely unacceptable. The problem with the Nook (and to a lesser extent, the Kindle) is that e-Ink technology just isn’t ready for prime time. I’ll grant you that it’s easier on the eyes than the unrelenting glow of an LCD screen, but that doesn’t make up for the slow refresh rates, compounded by the Nook’s myriad other missteps: the confusing navigation scheme, dodgy touch panel, curiously slow startup and load times, and propensity for crashing. I seriously doubt that we’ll look back at the Nook as something that defined modern computing.

But back to the Tall One’s Warhammer problem. If he wants a slim device capable of reading and zooming PDFs, he need look no further than the iPhone or iPod Touch. Aside from Apple’s built-in PDF support, there are apps for that. Several of them. The only real problem would be the tiny screen.

Which brings us, at last, to the iPad. This is clearly Apple’s answer to netbooks and e-readers, and that answer is, “They both suck.” E-readers suck because they are an immature, narrowly focused technology, and netbooks suck because they are nothing more than shrunken, anemic laptops. As Steve Jobs said at the start of his presentation, “They aren’t better at anything.” Instead of being built for ease of use or enjoyment, they are built for disposability. Does this sound like a product category with a future?

Instead, Apple has created a device that is built to be enjoyable. For the vast majority of computer users, the iPad does everything they will ever need it to do: email, web, photos, music, video. Most users do not want to bother with file systems. Most users do not want to bother with installing and configuring. This, I believe, is the device that Apple has been building towards since the day it introduced the world to the mouse. A device you hold in your hand, touch with your fingers, and just use. Calling this a “computer” is wrong. Computers started as things that compute, and ever since have had layer after layer of human-friendly interfaces grafted onto them. The iPad feels different, almost as if the interface came first, and the functions came later.

There’s a saying in computational neuroscience: “The hardware is the algorithm.” In other words, the brain does not distinguish between hardware and software. That’s what the iPad feels like to me. Naturalistic, intuitive hardware that engenders naturalistic, intuitive software. That’s the big innovation. That’s why the iPad is going to be much, much bigger than the skeptics think. It’s not a shrunken Macbook or an engorged iPhone. It’s an entirely new era in the way we interact with machines.