Not A Thing: Temporal Spatialization

All right, this breaks with the blog structure/content because it isn't a thing that needs to exist, but it's just too cool to ignore.  

From Labspaces (emphasis mine):

In their time study with the Yupno, now in press at the journal Cognition, Nunez and colleagues find that the Yupno don't use their bodies as reference points for time – but rather their valley's slope and terrain. Analysis of their gestures suggests they co-locate the present with themselves, as do all previously studied groups. (Picture for a moment how you probably point down at the ground when you talk about "now.") But, regardless of which way they are facing at the moment, the Yupno point uphill when talking about the future and downhill when talking about the past. 

Interestingly and also very unusually, Nunez said, the Yupno seem to think of past and future not as being arranged on a line, such as the familiar "time line" we have in many Western cultures, but as having a three-dimensional bent shape that reflects the valley's terrain.

This is phenomenally cool--a natural extension of the better-known Polynesian spatial reference system with geographically-based reference systems, like the Hawaiian "mauka" (towards the mountain) and "makai" (towards the sea).  If that's your spatial reference system, of course the way you conceptualize time spatially will fit into that.  I wonder how universal spatialization of time is--do all groups do it?  Obviously they don't all do it the same. . . 

Thing 18: Merging File & Task Management

Most of the tasks I do involve a number of different files. Designing an experiment means I've got to have open the papers I'm building on or referring to, plus notes on the design, plus IRB forms proposing or approving the new experiment. Creating the stimuli for an experiment means I've got to have the stimulus-creation program (Excel, Presentation, a compiler, whatever) open, plus my notes about what the stimulus should be. Analysing data means I've got to have my lab notebook open, plus the analysis files I'm creating, plus any old analysis files I'm using as models. This means that a big part of the cognitive load of resuming a task is remembering what files I need to complete it, and where they all are.

I've found a couple of half-solutions of various kinds. After an awful lot of digging around on the web, I did find a sadly now-defunct tool called Multifire; it allowed the creation of a txt file that referred to different documents or folders or websites, which opened them all by a double-click. It's a little limited, since it can only open any given file type in its default program and doesn't allow for any specification there--and anyway it's since vanished from the web completely. My favorite task-management tool, Remember the Milk, supports adding a URL to a task, but not any other type of file reference.

I would love to see a utility that has all the wonderful task-management features of RTM, but also allows a wide variety of files to be grouped with tasks. So, a task like "check readiness for new experiment" would include a link to the stimuli to be tested, to the consent & questionnaire files for review, and to the recruitment text for posting.

Man, I really want this to be easier than it is.

Thing 17: A Better Podcast Function for Sonos

I love my Sonos: almost immediately after you get it, it starts to feel like a natural feature that all living spaces should have. But it handles podcasts so, so badly--unnecessarily badly. It pretends that we're all listening to radio shows, so the only portal to the podcast world is RadioTime. RadioTime has a middling-to-OK catalog but no better, and the Sonos/RadioTime interface does an incredibly poor job of using the functionality of podcasts.

Thing seventeen-A: I want an RSS-like list of new episodes, across all feeds. Right now, the easiest way to do that is to look at the BeyondPod episode listings on my phone, then search for those shows and add them to the playlist. This is unutterably stupid.

Thing seventeen-B: I want to be able to subscribe to audio feeds using their URL.

Thing seventeen-C: I want to be able to see the episode notes, or at least the full title! The truncated titles means that quite often, all you can see of an episode is "A Podcast Named George: Ver" where the full title is "A Podcast Named George: Versimilitude in Geology". Some podcasts have longer titles than others, so for some, you can't even see the full title and get nothing at all of the topic. Since many podcasts don't put dates in their titles, it's not easy to figure out the date, either.

Thing seventeen-D: I want to be able to import and export my list of subscribed podcasts. Lots of podcatchers are using OPML to allow for this, so it's not a hard problem--it just needs an intake mechanism.

There are probably other features that I want, but a podcast area of the Sonos with these four would go a long way. Adding Stitcher (which is supposed to make a continuous "radio station" out of your podcast subscriptions) could have gone a long way, if it weren't for Stitcher's terrible implementation and problematic advertising & distribution policies, which keep some shows I like from signing up.

I know there are behind-the-scenes plumbing and approach problems with some of these requests, but I can't imagine they're really all that hard to solve. Podcasts are a major component of the audio I listen to, and the lack of an intelligently-designed podcast arena in Sonos is a serious drawback for me.