[Rezwan]

if there is any chance of the truth prevailing then, when we are presented with a piece of actual science, we must read what is there rather than what we want to see.

By all means.

Phil’s Dad wrote: if we reduce CO2 back to, say, 280ppm and temperatures continue to rise; one of them might at least pause for thought.

You see how speculative this is. “if we reduce…” Good luck with that. You’ll have to actually go along with the GW-ers, get that c02 down, and then wait a few years (or decades, or more, they’ll come up with something) for the lag time…who will even remember what the argument was about then?

I’ll try to keep a straight face, but I can’t imagine evidence based outcomes. This field is as fantastically uncorroborable for me as economics. And the emotions and passions both fields excites is fascinating. I shall leave it to more patient/impassioned people to discuss.

This reminds me of that book, “Chasing the Monsoon” – a travel writer follows the monsoon through India. Among other things, he talked about the impact of this seasonal weather event on Indian politics. Politicians rise and fall with the rain (late, early, too much, too little, favoring one district over another). Because people blame politicians for the weather. And now, here’s a chance for politicians to try and control the weather. So they try.

Or, this is like a somnambulist who awakens to find himself juggling chainsaws on a tightrope, 50 feet above the ground and no net. And then realizes he has no idea how to juggle chainsaws. Good luck with controling the weather….

[Rezwan]

Phil’s Dad wrote: As for which cop might change their mind – if we reduce CO2 back to, say, 280ppm and temperatures continue to rise; one of them might at least pause for thought. :cheese:

It’s sweet that you still have hopes of this being an evidence-based endeavour. Either side will be able to interpret this to their advantage. Humans are a clever lot.

[Rezwan]

Phil’s Dad wrote: By GW-er success I take it you mean reductions in world temperatures as a result of lower CO2 levels. Many a GWD would drop the D if there was any – any – sign of GW-er success.

Oh. No. Cynically, I just meant political success in passing the laws.

sale no mobārak

Thanks! A Happy Julian New Years to you as well!

Also, did you mean mo’alem as in Japanese “sensei?”

[Rezwan]

Rezwan wrote: Except…that brings up another issue: GW fears (right or wrong, who am I to judge) are very useful for the fusion community. It makes more strategic sense to leverage such fears to increase fusion funding, rather than dismiss them. Historically, fusion funding rises and falls with these sorts of panics. Weapons races, OPEC oil embargo, and now global warming.

It’s not about consensus, folks, it’s about coalition building (out of cantankerous people who tend to repel each other) for the purpose of directing the stream of pork to things you value.

Stay on mission, folks.

Not just GW fears, GWD fears are also useful.

We can leverage GW fears to increase fusion funding because GW-ers want emissions down. Likewise, we can leverage GWD-ers fears of GW-er success and cap and trade and other such regulatory horrors to increase fusion funding.

As long as people are going to run around being shrill and fearful, we may as well leverage them to our advantage. I mean that with all due respect since I don’t have the time to personally evaluate the data in any scientific manner and don’t know which fear is most warranted.

[Rezwan]

Aeronaut wrote: So what are these cops going to do when Detroit figures out how to build 20M FFs/year and carbon emissions become a quaint non-issue?

This isn’t going to resolve anything for both sets of cops. Arguments are about positions, rather than needs. The GW folks will be relieved because FF plants will reduce emissions and allay their fears. But they will not concede that they had been wrong about those fears.

The GWDs who have been saying there is no problem to begin with, won’t be able to show that there was no problem – since to show that, you’d have to just let the status quo continue well past when the dire consequences predicted by GW folk would take place. So they will continue to assert that there was never any problem.

A working fusion reactor won’t prove anything in that argument either way. As such, the argument itself is effectively irrelevant to fusion.

Except…that brings up another issue: GW fears (right or wrong, who am I to judge) are very useful for the fusion community. It makes more strategic sense to leverage such fears to increase fusion funding, rather than dismiss them. Historically, fusion funding rises and falls with these sorts of panics. Weapons races, OPEC oil embargo, and now global warming.

It’s not about consensus, folks, it’s about coalition building (out of cantankerous people who tend to repel each other) for the purpose of directing the stream of pork to things you value.

Stay on mission, folks.

[Rezwan]

Science is messy. Not instantaneous and certain. With GW, many of the issues go well beyond science, and it’s not about the science at all, but the politics, values, perceived threats.

Maybe, instead of thinking about consensus, we can look at this as a prisoner’s dilemma-type situation.

Start with the layman prisoner who has no intention of wading through all the data and come to a reasoned conclusion. So here’s the prisoner, trapped with some shrill, nasty guards (people who argue about GW: GW cop and GW denialist (GWD) cop).

They’re each offering some kind of deal.

So, you can take GW’s deal, and GW is right. Or take GW’s deal, but GWD was right.
Or go with GWD but he’s wrong, or go with GWD and he’s right.

What’s really at stake in each of these scenarios?

I doubt it’s possible to come to a consensus about that, either, or to even envision the scenarios. There are so many variables. Laws may be passed, substitutions made. Or not. And also, both cops may be “wrong” in many other unforseen ways, or eclipsed by other concerns, like an internet meltdown. And for all the fear of GW laws crippling the economy – how does that compare to the impact of the housing bubble and other wall street fiascos? I think we can cripple ourselves just fine in so many other ways.

Put another way, say you’re a born-again Christian. But then you find out, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jesus was just a guy, not the son of God, and so your entire faith is unfounded. (This is, of course, not true. Jesus lives, folks! Or not – this is not the forum to argue the matter)

The question here has nothing to do with whether or not church doctrine (or any specific offshoot) is correct.

The question is only – how would you live your life differently if you believed x instead of y.

If you ask most people this, they wouldn’t live much differently, because their values are still the same and they chose that doctrine because it resonated with their values.

The arguments about specific doctrines are mostly smoke. But for some reason easier to talk about than values.

[Rezwan]

Phil’s Dad wrote: Happy: Christmas/Posadas Navidenas/Yule/Litha/Ashura/Zarathosht Diso 🙂

Happy solstice! Here comes the sun, and all the fusion energy that implies.

[Rezwan]

Congratulations on your excellent gift of 2 neices! Too bad for them they’ll never get as many birthday gifts as the other kids!

amcnea wrote:
And finally, I was wondering if it would be possible to set up a second EE site on the Focus Fusion server. Something that is completely independent of the current site. Something that can server as a sand box or test bed. A central place where we (and any developers who come on board) can both have admin access to the EE site and upload/store our code to and make changes without effective the main site. Also a place where others can look at the new site and make suggestions.

Then after everything looks nice and is good to go, you can just simply move everything from the sandbox to the main site.

If this can’t be done on the focus fusion server, I might be able to talk someone into letting us do this on their server. Anyways, let me know.

No problem. You read my mind. I downloaded “MSM” a couple of weeks ago to be able to set up multiple sites. Starts out with 3, which is perfect for now. Focusfusion.org is one, and we’ll set up the new focusfusion.org/sandbox for developers. And of course, the very important dpf network which we also need to design from scratch. That’s for dpf scientists. Per this post, and particularly the quote here;

“…there had actually been two earlier efforts to set up international organizations of DPF researchers. In each case, the effort had essentially been reduced to a method of raising money for a single group.”

we don’t want the plasma network to be a subcategory of the focus fusion site, but to be it’s own entity.

Of course, with MSM we can share a lot of info, which is nice.

Anyway, off to more holiday goodness for now. Will set up the sandbox this upcoming week.

Joy, peace, love to all!

[Rezwan]

But what I can’t do is take pieces and ignore the site, because I don’t know what that means.

I didn’t mean to ignore the site. Rather, as you conceive of a site, make sure that the pieces are to some extent independent and can fit together with some tolerance. Don’t go for designs that are too interlocking and high maintenance to avoid this:

Precision is merely a consequence of understanding the code and understand how browser differentiate the displaying of that code. For example, under certain conditions it is common for IE to render with a 1px offset difference from how Firefox and Webkit renders. Now, if you are trying to make a straight line, this offset can kill the page design. 1px can be the difference between a page looking beautiful and a page looking like crap.

Yeah, so design some handsome pieces that all match/coordinate, but don’t rely on having to be exactly touching each other in certain ways. Let them all be on the site, do their job, look stunning together, but not have to be so dependent on each other. A loose, friendly affiliation, kind of like the members of this organization. Sloshing room.

But yes, it definitely has to pull together as a site. I just want the whole site to be deconstructible into pieces.

Then again, if it’s just up in the header, I suppose we could accommodate some tricky graphics that have to line up and lock in. What we do below shouldn’t affect that.

[Rezwan]

My Dear AMcnea, I hold you in the highest esteem! It pains me that I have abused you with uncalled for remarks. Sincerely.

This exchange has filled me with a sense of promise, and the feeling that a beautiful site is close at hand. It pains me that I have expressed myself defensively or grumpily. You, on the other hand, have given me nothing but joy by, first of all being available and willing to do some serious design, and secondly by coming up with a design that I’ve already started to incorporate. On top of that joy, you have now given me relief with the admission that you’ve given up on Joomla with me.

We’ve been thinking aloud on key issues and we’re making great progress. I feel we’re converging to functional harmony.

EXCELLENT point about the divs and the base css. I am in agreement.

The divs have not all been defined, and many of them are improperly named.

Like, to my embarassment, I have a div class “bluecontent” which was my temporary box to hold side content. We’ve all cringed at it.

First of all, the name shouldn’t relate to the color. It should relate to the function. Second, we will want to later differentiate say, the paypal box from the recent posts box, so it’s terrible to put everything in a bluecontent box. The boxes may all start out looking alike, but here nomenclature and div differentiation is important.

Anyway, more on divs, but too much to write. I’ll call you. Let me know a good time.

For the base css – I like your taste so far. You want specific action:

1) Come up with a color palette.
2) Choose fonts, sizes and colors for the basic elements, e.g., h1, h2, h3, h4; p, quotes, bullets, and variations of those in sub categories.
3) Bullet variations – I am hopeless with bullet points. Lists come up a lot on this site. Would love some nice bullets.
4) Some box designs for those bits (specific divs!) on the side. Like the donate box, or the member log in box. (actually, I want to keep a line for member action on the top of the site next to the search box. Any reason why you left that off the top of your design? A usability issue? Want to put that on the side somewhere?)

5) Mast head, logo area
6) navigation – But we’re still figuring out the navigation of the site. That’s an info arch issue, right? Anyway, I do like that treehugger.com approach with info/interact/act.
7) Animation/storyboard space: I like the blue bar with animation you have – but then again, don’t want anything moving on the screen unless acted upon. Perhaps, under the menu, you could do a big blue rectangle taking up 2/3 of the page, and have visible the options, and then as a person clicks on things, the picture and info come up, until you click through all for that thing. So the pieces unfold like a story, at your command.

This might satisfy JShell’s interest in mystery, because you have to take some action to let the pictures unfold.

Structure – I’m fine with your basic header, nav band, some columns (2-4, depending) and a footer. Or, a folded page, with more segments as you go down. Do you have any structural, div related suggestions?

Photos/gallery/video divs – another conversation.

Usability. Yes, zeldman was about the back end. The book on usability that I like is Janice Redish’s letting go of the words. Something I have a really hard time doing – but one day. So much I have to pare down and streamline on the site.

According to the Redish book, we have to start with creating “persona”s – what is the typical person looking for on our site. That will be another topic thread!

Thanks again for all your hard work and constructive conversation. I truly appreciate it.

[Rezwan]

Well, I cleaned up ffs css a bit. It’s more legible now. Also, inspired by your more useful footer design, I just implemented that on the site. Of course, the footer is within the “container” div for now, so it looks odd.

We’ll have to place it outside to run across the whole bottom. But with the current blue plasmoid background, that will look odd as well.

I get the feeling that the blue background is on its way out. It is a relic of the past, it’s been with the site since the beginning. But it always looked a bit rough. Still, it’s a piece of the history of the site.

Anyway, I couldn’t figure out how Joomla codes that cool grey groove in the footer. I used the “hr”, but no go.

Speaking of blue background, color palette and font palette are a key design issue.

Of course, these can easily be changed. When you’re in expression engine templates sector, you do a search for, say the color turquoise (#069) because you want to replace it. The templates that contain #069 all show up and you can go through and see where you want to change the color. Very useful for fickle design.

[Rezwan]

Have you read Jeff Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards? I’ve adopted that philosophy.

I don’t think we have to compromise on style, but it may be your approach to design is over-complicating things.

amcnea wrote: Now, to give an example from the demo. Things like the font, link color, background, etc would be the base. Then the top black area would be one sub-section, followed by the blue sub-section, then there is the article sub-section below and to the left, a module sub-section below and to the right, and finally a footer sub-section at the bottom. Then in the module section there is a Paypal, login, and Photo sub-sub-sections.

If you start by designing the sub-sub-sections and work your way out to the broadest sections, then as you alter the code in the base area, this will change the appearance of EVERY sub-sub-section. Text starts to wrap, things get pushed off of where there supposed to be, etc. Then you have to go through and modify the CSS for each sub-sub-section to be compliant with the new base CSS.

That’s what I’m talking about. You broke it down beautifully. Yes, in the css sheets, you start with the base css. Then, having decided on the different divs of your site, you add code necessary to differentiate them. It’s like cell differentiation.

If you’re very concerned about straightjacketing the site and making sure things fit precisely into eachother, you’ll run into design problems. If you relax that standard, you have much more freedom.

Then the analogy becomes the website as a person. You have a body. You are naked. You want to go out in public. So…you put on a hat. That’s the header. It goes on your head. You get some matching shoes. Footer. You put a necklace on – the menu. A shirt, a vest, a jacket, some pants or skirt. Your skin tone is your skin tone, determined by your body. But say you all of a sudden want blue legs – you only change the div “tights” to blue. And so on.

But you have to start out with that approach in mind, otherwise you may code in some messy entangled code. And then you’re dependent on Joomla’s interface to fix things and out of touch with the complex code beneath it.

The page you designed was actually simple enough. You had a header, a menu bar, and that blue animation thing. The body, a left column, a right column, the bits. A footer. With a website, if you have it clearly defined and with the expression engine approach, you could just as easily place the header at the bottom and the footer on top, or the animation on the bottom.

Oh, again, my philosophy to let things float. Not try to constrict them so much. Another body analogy. It’s the holidays. And you go to people’s houses, and you eat a lot of food. You want to let your belt out. Websites now and then go to different browsers and they have to let their belts out. Best to put spandex in the clothes and give them some breathing room. If you design with that in mind, you’ll be far more flexible, and still look cool. Just let go of the interlocking control aspect and go for a general fit.

Furthermore all this is complicated by multi-browser support.

All the more reason to keep it simple and think mostly of accessibility and the future.

[re: image]Anyways, what all this means is that the image should be good for use.

Good to know.

I don’t know, I am not really a fan of insulting or luring people. Can’t you just say that your a non-profit and what your looking for?

I did, in the text. I’m just wondering about which option to click in the drop down box that straightjacketed me into choosing an amount offered. The lowest it had was $50K.

[Rezwan]

My guess is that you will run into this same hesitation about site-layout for any EE designer. Especially for the price you offered. Because a single redo of the site could basically eat up the entire budget.

Dude! I probably just instulted all those folks on the ee forum, as well! About the pay offered, there just wasn’t a “volunteer” button on the drop down menu. But really, we want the service free, but at the same time, we want the full quote of how much it costs so that we can put it into the grant proposal. Ultimately, I’d like an in-house CTO, Chief Technical Officer who would oversee all the technical aspects of the site. Looking at the “dosomething.com” website team list, they have a lot of people working on different aspects of their site.

Unfortunately, we have no budget right now, so it’s volunteer labor. But I do appreciate how much work it is, and I do, as soon as possible, want to get to a position where we can pay someone market rates to do it.

As to whole site redesign idea – that’s my point. Don’t think of the whole site, just of parts. This site will change over and over, a bit comes off, another one goes in its place. It’s dynamic, and you’re right about people’s fickle tastes. A kalashnikov is the weapon of choice around the world because it’s so easy to dismantle, drop in mud, what have you. We don’t need an upholstered tank here. We really want a simple site, with perhaps a stunning header, stylish but simple navigation and nice boxes.

No need to redesign a whole site, just pieces. A la carte.

A la carte: for example, your great choice of matching images with well written blurbs – upbeat and to the point. I incorporated your text in the “how green is it” section. I didn’t take the graphic ’cause I don’t know if it’s creative commons or we’d need a license. Anyway, since I’m still in the structure mode of choosing those bits & writing copy (essentially setting new category headings) I’d love to hear/see more suggestions. The DPF and How green is it sections are now up, for example. Especially if you can start with the “how hard is it” icon. Sisyphus is bad karma. We need another image that conveys heroic efforts required to do something, but not the guy pushing a rock up a hill. Which, by the way, I got off some blog, and I think it’s not legal, so I must axe it.

I suppose at some point, since you have 1.6.8 I can do that “dump” thing and you could play around with our code. I bet once you do a few quick fixes on things (like embed bits mast – replacing the header with something decent) you’ll see how quick it is.

Yeah, get a bit more guerilla for now as we sort through the structure. Luxe design can come later.

Now, should I go back to the ee site and put down a higher pay offer with the disclaimer that actually we’re paying nothing? Or would they feel lured under false pretenses? Which is worse, to be insulted, or to be lured? Ah.

[Rezwan]

The other site I really like, in terms of functionality as well as style, is http://dosomething.org

I think a campaign like that for Focus Fusion would be great. Of course, looking at their staff page, they have a lot of dedicated people making it happen.

So, given that no one knows expression engine around here, I just posted a job on the ee sites. http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/139233/ No nibbles yet. Could be the pay.

[Rezwan]

OK, back to the header/top navigation. I like what treehugger does. They have quite a lot going on up there, and divide it into “get informed”, “interact”, and “action”.

This is an efficient way to organize a site that has a lot of information/interaction/action items. It’s got everything laid out in the top. All business.

I’m looking at function more than design here, as usual.

Screen grab attached.

Attached files

[Author]

Posts