Informational Geometry

I was only a little surprised to read yesterday during my commute about fake news. About a month ago I saw an advertisement online titled " Bigger Than Snowden " someone actually paid money towards an online ad campaign to purport that electromagnetic weapons are being used by the government to covertly target, monitor, and torture victims. Seriously. The link above goes to  google search results and you can see how this nonsense has been smeared around the internet as if it's true. Which it's not. Did fake news catapult It (I'm not saying It's name) into the White House? NYTimes seems to think so . And you know what, I think so too. As a User Experience designer I know how to pull the same exact tricks that creators of fake news pulled. Any of us web professionals could easily fool a lot of people with fake stories. Then I was a little surprised to read today about a group of college students who already solved the fake news problem in a hackathon. It t...

Suddenly I remembered the one and only reason for not registering to vote when I received my latest jury summons for the San Francisco court. I hate jury duty. It's not that I'm an anarchist or that I dont like looking at men in uniform. I simply cannot afford to do it, one doesn't get paid for their service to the court*. The night before I tried to find creative ways to try to get myself out of jury duty. Like printing a huge penis on a t-shirt to wear to the court. I suspected this might not work the way I wanted, so instead I picked out my "I'm a woman and I vote" t-shirt, and wore that instead. Hey, an opinionated woman is a scary thing to a lot of people, even... especially in San Francisco. 10:30 am: There I was at 10:30am reporting for duty in room 307 of the Hall of Justice. They took names. I felt like a child. Damn why couldn't my last name start with the letter A? 10:45 am: And now for the video. How delightful, California sponsored bullshit...

I figure I spent several weeks worth of time this past year trying to interview for various jobs at Google. Recently, on a 3rd attempt I thought things were looking pretty good. Despite all the positive feedback from my interviews, I was shot down in the 11th hour because some VP (who I never actually met) decided that I am not "the right kind of designer". I really really want to know how having 13 years of experience, and a proven track record in silicon valley makes me "not the right kind of designer" but ... whatever. I get it now. After all that work (over 120 hours of unbillable time total in 2007) I'm glad I tried. I really liked all the people who interviewed me and I am really disapointed that I wont be able to get to know them.