In support and acknowledgment of cancer survivors in my own family and life, Syncretic Conundra is Pink for October, is support of breast cancer awareness. I actually like the pink better, so I might just leave it. ‘Cause it’s not like cancer confines itself to one month.

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I have a bunch of back-logged posts, I know, but I’m going to skip to something quick. Among the handful of blogs I follow on the topics of cognition, bodywork and brain stuff, Madam Fathom’s post on intelligence and knee injuries stood out as exceptional.

Reason being: I have a very clear memory from my college varsity volleyball days of my teammate Erin Ford move from the middle to a perfect right-side swing attack, hit past slow blockers for the kill down the line, then keep falling to the floor with a torn-up knee. In the middle of a perfectly executed fake-out attack, away from any other players or obstacles, Erin tore one of the major ligaments in her knee.

It has bothered me since. As we sat together on the bench, two* injured middle hitters watching the season go on without us, I kept replaying Erin’s attack in my head, looking for the tweak to her knee while she was in the air. It never made sense. So you can imagine my cheer to find Madam Fathom’s piece on cognitive activity and ACL tears. Women disproportionately suffer through ACL tears, and ACL tears are often due to unanticipated events rather than collisions or contact.

I remember Erin Ford was a fraction of a second behind the right-side attack, but made up for it with a line shot for a point. Being late on the attack could mean she didn’t expect KDA would set that attack out of the options available (it’s not a common attack), or just about anything else…say the 6 players hollering on the other side of the net, a yelling crowd and a fast-moving ball to jump and hit in a irregular sneak-attack play. There’s an endless list of possible causes of an “off guard” moment to push the body over its limits.

The twist added by Madam Fathom—or at least the way to get my attention and admiration—is that she cites an unusual source for academic-types: David Foster Wallace’s essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”, from the excellent book Consider the Lobster. DFW’s essay covers his bewilderment about why a brilliant athlete like Tracy Austin could write an awful memoir, one that describes none of the intense, instinctual cognitive immersion athletes develop for their chosen sports, nor even strategy observations during the game. To DFW, Ms. Austin’s memior might as well not have been about tennis, at least not playing it at an exceptional level. He argues that exceptional athletes might have a unique, pre-cognitive focus, that overrules what could be damaging second-guessing and doubt.

Ms. Fathom’s analysis of DFW’s point is worth a read, specifically. But her main conclusion is that “if the rest of us were under such circumstances [as intensive athletics], we would founder and crumple and fail precisely because we think too much”.

So there ya go, Erin Ford, 8 years after the fact. Cognition experts to DFW to you.

* I’d sprained both ankles (not simultaneously) just a few weeks before

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In an attempt to gain some clarity and separation of topics in which I’m interested, over the last month I’ve been preparing a new blog, which is now live. It’s called Lost Cog, and it focuses my research and interest in the relative maturity of tech companies (management, tactics, hiring, etc.) from the perspective of the average worker.

Go check out Lost Cog.

I’d like to note a few things about its development. More than a few intelligent, awesome people spoke with me about the underlying themes and questions. Without their help and encouragement, I would have kept my inner turmoil about the tech industry—well—inner. And there are far too many smart people keeping their observations about problems in the industry internal, to the detriment of us all, I believe. The tech industry is too new and raw to keep its maturity evolution strictly a top-down process. It employs some smart people, yet it undervalues or even ignores their analysis.

My interest in management theory comes out of personal discomfort with what I’ve experienced so far, in my career. I’m happy to admit my expectations were high, though. I was raised by one of the best managers in Seattle: my dad, Tim Fehr, who worked for Boeing his entire career. Tim Fehr (hereafter, Dad) started as an engineer within Boeing, eventually working up to being a senior VP, tasked with training many of Boeing’s top-brass in his management style. Dad underplays it, but my childhood was professionally managed by the best of the best. My analysis of management is strongly informed by a childhood absorbing Boeing’s management theory from my dad, and his take on management in a competitive, geeky industry not unlike the tech industry. So now I find myself reading management-theory books for fun, as an echo of management strategies played out on the kitchen table of my childhood, with salt and pepper shakers representing stakeholders, and the napkin holder representing the Board.

On the geek side, Lost Cog represents the beginning of my summer project of learning new skills: Ruby on Rails, domaining and improving my design and writing abilities. Lost Cog’s visual design tries hard to follow both grid-based design and a strong, mathematic attention to vertical rhythm, both hot topics in web design. It also runs on Garrett Murray’s writing-focused, RoR CMS SimpleLog, which gives me a working app for tinkering with RoR. Simplelog is a great project all the way around, and a good learning foundation for subsequent projects. (I’m a good ways into my first real Rails app, currently.)

With Lost Cog, I have a focused place to write about my ongoing argument about my career and industry, hopefully with an editorial overtone, rather than personal. I’ll cross-post summaries of big topics on Lost Cog here, of course, but I hope to keep Syncretic Conundra devoted to my own technical and design topics. More than a few posts are in “draft” status.

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I’m far from coining a style, but I want to add a note about my new navigation style you can see just up above this post if you’re not reading this via RSS. I call it “broadsheet”, as an echo of the old “wild west” broadsheet newspapers, which featured hand-built printing equipment and sometimes hand-lettering for the really low-budget papers. I can’t find good examples on the Web—books are better—but some of the hand-detailing is gorgeous and brassy at the same time. I blame “Deadwood” entirely for the increase in my aesthetic fixation with the Wild West. That being said, I’ve always liked it, so maybe it was just gasoline-to-fire.

Since this site is my own toybox, I use these pages to tinker with new CSS effects until I think they’re ready to go into my professional UX work. One effect I have in development is borders on page elements and links, and how they work throughout different interactive states. Browser support for advanced border effects isn’t stellar, but it does graceful degrade down to IE6 and alt stylesheets can cover beyond that in business settings. Based on the accessibility/usability notion that one shouldn’t rely on color alone to convey interactivity, I added border density changes and background-color changes to emphasize each interactive state distinctly.

One of the style goals of “broadsheet” is to mimic old wild-west typeface flourishes, best summed up in Larabee’s typeface “Vanilla Whale”. Top and bottom borders comes pretty close, in my mind. Eventually, I’d love to either get CSS to create the signature diagonal linking words like “&”, but I might also just sIFR select pieces in Larabee’s typeface itself, because I love his work. Lastly on the aesthetic side, I have a “low class” design idea brewing, in response to B-movies and Christopher Fahey’s “class” panel at SXSW. Think of “broadsheet” as the first salvo.

Another goal for “broadsheet” was to pack my navigation elements full of links to things I want referenced/linked/crawled. I didn’t want it to distract too much from the major pieces, so I tried to use size to indicate main components and supplemental information or sub-categories. I tried to visually mark links that open external sites, but also collect them into meaningful groups. The end result is really a “sentence” style, with B-movie, tabloid wording, to boot. Final steps: I need to complete work on my “digital self” page, which is supposed to be an “about me” page, but I’m having trouble writing anything satisfactory, so for now it’s all external links.

Coincidentally around the same time as I started my little project, Jeffrey Zeldman posted about the redesign of Happy Cog, which uses “sentence” navigation. And another friend, Garrett Murray, recently redesigned his blog Maniacal Rage with a similar “sentence”-based style and a killer hover effect. Garrett, in turn, credits Megnut for his design, which also uses ellipses and begins to wrap back to my “broadsheet” derivative.

One happy, segmented circle of people experimenting with navigation.

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