Greg EganJan 1, 2023

When electronics importer Cara Leon goes missing, private investigator Sam Mujrif is hired by her sister to investigate. Cara is 8 times taller than Sam, but evidence soon points to players much smaller than either of them.

As Sam and his cross-scale colleagues pursue the case, it becomes apparent that Cara’s disappearance is linked to technology with the potential to reshape their whole society, and radically alter the balance of power between the scales.

https://www.gregegan.net/SCALE/SCALE.html

Show threadHenry Segerman
@gregeganSF The cover image here is the only other example I think I’ve seen where you read a word “radially”, rather than left to right, or in some other translational way. Does anyone know of any other examples? (The attached image is from http://www.segerman.org/autologlyphs.html)
Autologlyphs

Jan 2, 2023 at 4:04pmWeb
Show threadCraig S. KaplanJan 2, 2023
@henryseg @gregeganSF This 2012 paper comes to mind: https://innovis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/innovis/uploads/Publications/Publications/FatFonts.pdf. They render numbers using nested digits (and play other tricks to relate darkness to magnitude).
Show threadCraig S. KaplanJan 2, 2023
@henryseg @gregeganSF The overall word packing on the cover reminds of this recent technique from JMA: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17513472.2020.1855570
Immediate gestalt: shapes, typography and (quite irregular) shape packing

Instantaneously understanding the gestalt of thousands of words is achieved through the programmatic placement of the words and control of their presentation characteristics, such as size, repetiti...

Taylor & Francis
Show threadMark CrockerJan 2, 2023

@henryseg @gregeganSF this book cover reminds me very much of the #Sozi presentation tool, http://sozi.guide/en/first-presentation.html , where the presentation is done as a huge #SVG diagram, and some JavaScript code moves through the presentation by combining zooming, translation and rotation of the view to go from one "slide" to the next. Hmmm... #Sozi seems a lot like Scalzi ... 🤔

Edit: typo Solzi -> Sozi

First presentation: show off your Big Ideas

Show threadMark CrockerJan 2, 2023

@henryseg @gregeganSF

One of Alan Kay's assertions with #Squeak was that PowerPoint is unnecessary. It should be trivial to assemble a slide deck of graphical and text objects without needing some heavy weight, proprietary application to do it.

#Sozi is the same idea. Use whatever SVG tools you like to generate a diagram, then use #Sozi to track on a little bit of JavaScript to orchestrate navigation through the presentation that works in any browser. Simple.

Edit: typo Solzi -> Sozi