I had a fantabulous Friday up at Yahoo! doing the jbum dog & pony show for one of their regular developer talks. I showed a bunch of fun little projects from the past two years including various Flickr Hacks and the crowd favorite, the Whitney Music Box – always nice to see the “most hypnotic website evarrr” on a big screen! Plus I got to introduce a bunch of Kircher-virgins to my main man. A crowd of Kircher-virgins is better than a new jar of peanut butter.

The highlight of the day for me was breaking naan with a goodly number of folks on the Flickr team: Stewart, George, Heather, Cal & Kakul. What a down-to-earth and cool bunch of people! This group has single-handedly increased Yahoo!’s hip-quotient by a factor of 11.

All in all, a most excellent day in what is turning out to be a most excellent year!

* * *

At the lecture, I paraphrased a quote I stumbled across about a year ago, from a 17th century writer (+- 2 centuries). The quote, as I remember it, was “The eye likes surprise, the ear likes comfort.” To my mind, the quote is a great encapsulation of the greater ability of our optical circuitry to handle new information. It also helps explain why the visuals in the Whitney Music Box make the music more enjoyable.

The problem is, I can’t find the quote anymore! I’m clearly misquoting it, because according to both Google and Yahoo, I’m the only one who ever said it. Oy! Various permutations of the quote aren’t working for me either. If you can help me find the original quote, and author, I’ll give you a dollar.

I did originate this quote, however:

Bumgardner’s Law: Any sufficiently large collection of photos must contain at least a few Buddhist monks.

UPDATE: Pamela Fox dug this up – Thanks Pamela!

“The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.”
W. H. Auden

This is indeed the quote I was paraphrasing. It comes up on the first page when you search for “body quotes,” which is how I originally found it. My version:”The eye likes surprise, the ear likes comfort,” is a bit pithier, no?

* * *

The Yahoo dev talk was well received, I think. Here are reactions from George and Schill.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 4:54 am and is filed under Jim's Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.