text:
How does a sample of de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater give birth to a mutant, six-fingered hand? This essay articulates the logic of Noon's 2001 experiment in constrained writing, which concretizes the play of signal and noise, pattern and randomness, in the flow of information. In the process, the critic suggests, Noon dramatizes how printed texts rupture and reassemble when they are transferred to electronic media.
I feed too much on inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. -George Eliot
Art destined to live has the aspect of a truth of nature, not of some coldly worked out experimental discovery. -Eugenio Montale
Let's get it on, sugar.
Let's get it on.- Marvin Gaye
In January 2001, Guardian Unlimited published Jeff Noon's manifesto, "Post Futurism," in which Noon laments the contemporary state of the English novel and offers the avant-garde writing process of metamorphiction as an aesthetic antidote. The "Post Futurism Manifesto" is posited in particular opposition to the collection of stories edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, All Hail the New Puritans (2001),In this volume of short stories initially inspired by the Dogme 95 filmmakers such as Harmony Korine and Lars von Trier, Blincoe and Thorne set out a ten-point manifesto calling for linear, simple, authentic, and transparent prose in favor of experimentation, nonlinearity, and lyrical prose styles in fiction. which Noon critiques as "dry, deft, slightly engaging tales...without any rules other than fixed tradition," accentuating "a fearsome denial of the imagination" (Noon "Post Futurism Manifesto"). James Wood, in his review of All Hail the New Puritans, also published on Guardian Unlimited, writes that
the short story has historically tended toward the simple. I have a favourite line from Joyce's "A Little Cloud": "He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad." Many stories by Chekhov, Verga, Joyce and the incomparably simple Pirandello follow Blincoe and Thorne's rules. But this is the simplicity of those who have known richness, and who are a little weary of congestion. Blincoe and Thorne, by contrast, are too poor too young; paddling in remnants, they are incuriously abandoning something they did not possess anyway. On the evidence of this book, we need a New Abundance. (Wood)
Indeed, the chaos and abundance of Noon's experimental writing method he terms metamorphiction is offered as a more faithful literary response to a readership Noon describes as being "adept at riding the multiple layers of information" of a "fluid society" (Noon, "Post Futurism"). It is also a rejection of Blincoe and Thorne's "manifesto for the New Philistinism" as Wood caustically words it. Certainly, Noon is not weary of congestion; rather, he celebrates it.
Perhaps best know for his rhapsodic debut novel, Vurt (1993), Noon's literary output has since traced an increasingly lyrical and experimental trajectory.Following Vurt, Noon has published six novels, Vurt (1993), Pollen (1995), Automated Alice (1996), Nymphomation (1997), Needle in the Groove (2000), and Falling Out of Cars (2002); one collection of short stories, Pixel Juice (1998); a collection of avant-garde fiction, Cobralingus (2001); a hypertext novel/writing game in partnership with Steve Beard, Mappalujo (2002); and is currently working on hypertext fiction in collaboration with Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, and William Shaw. Noon is also the author of numerous plays for both the stage and radio. His novels, with the exception of Falling out of Cars (2002), are all set in his native city of Manchester. Stylistically, Noon's writing is remarkable for its elegance, fluidity, and precision. While the content of his earlier work is more akin to the postmodern science fiction of J.G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, and William Gibson, his prose experiments bring to mind Nabokovian virtuosity and the lyricism of Elizabeth Smart. Music - particularly the compositional techniques of contemporary electronic music - plays an essential role in Noon's writing. The metrical eloquence of a Noonian sentence attests to the literary output of a melomaniac. That Noon's prose scintillates like a line of verse is telling: like a DJ's manipulations of recorded music, Noon "remixes" the writing of both himself and others in order to metamorphose archived texts into lines of remarkable beauty.See Noon's articles "Origins of a Dub Fiction" and "Post Futurism Manifesto." His writing is at once noisy and delicate. There is a recurring trope in Noon's work that is both amusing and seductive: that of words longing for one another; aroused and fecund, the unlikely linguistic lovers interbreed. Noon names this metaphor "nymphomation," sexy information; the process and the printed result are called "metamorphiction." The aim of this project is to achieve new modes of thinking and new kinds of writing by reconfiguring and mutating signs in a systemic environment of linguistic determinism. Exciting as these experiments are, for nearly two decades, Noon has expressed an increasing degree of impatience regarding the disinterest and dismissal of experimental literature by the contemporary British literary scene as he sees it.
Noon first describes the process of metamorphiction in his experimental book of fiction, Cobralingus (2001). Metaphors derived from information theory govern the whimsical construction of these works. This is not to say that chaos and information theory itself is governed by whimsical processes. Rather, the whimsical nature of Noon's metamorphiction is perhaps best understood as a celebration of the linguistic possibilities of dismantling and randomizing semantically stable samples of language and then reconstructing those excerpts into new units of meaning which are not necessarily related through any explicit etymological or semantic connotation. Indeed, Noon seems to take the "play" from literary play and the "game" from writing game and whorl the words into uniquely distilled forms. This strategy is not only compelled by the desire to experiment; that is, Noon asks in the "Post Futurism Manifesto," "can't we writers have some fun as well?"Ultimately, this process involves the rupture and reconstruction of metaphor resulting in a new metaphor of a different semantic order. The literary play of the associated writing game, "The Cobralingus Engine," treats the writing process using the technical terminology of the production of Dub reggae and its successor, experimental electronic music. The visual template of Cobralingus, wonderfully illustrated by Daniel Allington, is reminiscent of graphical electronic music programming environments such as Max/MSP, SuperCollider, and Reaktor. According to this writing game, "words become a liquid medium, a malleable substance capable of being transformed in surprising ways. Words can be stretched, broken, melted, drugged, mutated, forced into submission, set free" (Noon, "Post Futurism"). The process imagines a sampled piece of writing as an "inlet" which is "passed through various FILTER GATES, each of which has a specific effect upon the language. Each gate allows the writer to access different creative responses within his or her imagination" (Cobralingus 13). Consequently, the original writing sample undergoes a metamorphosis, from the semantic order of the inlet text, to the mercurial disorder of the intermediary stages, and finally to the reestablishment of a new order, the "outlet" text, which "can be seen as the ghost, or the unconscious desire, haunting the original text" (13).
Michael Bracewell notes in his introduction to Cobralingus that
much of Noon's best imagery - from Vurt to Pollen through to the more naturalistic styling of the stories in Pixel Juice - derives its power from the literalising of poetic language and the concretizing of images: the sudden opening up, within the landscape of the prose itself, of new routes to character and narrative, enabled by altering the meanings of words within the containers of their language. (6)
That is, Noon is engaging in language games within the determined constraints of an established system. Abstracted from the writing game, the process of metamorphiction has two stages: first, the concretization of an abstraction which is to be understood metaphorically - a piece of text as an electronic data signal - and second, a further hypostatization through which the original metaphor, now mutated, "materializes." The new metaphor no longer exclusively functions as a comparison between the vehicle and the tenor but rather literally becomes the subject-matter and, in the form of an outlet text, determines the structure of the unfolding work. Cobralingus is both a work about, and a demonstration of, transformation. Ultimately, Noon is confronting the ramifications of linguistic determinism in the age of information. Language is not subject to processes that ironically seek to display its logical assumptions, but instead is metamorphosed thus exposing the possibilities of permutation. The reader of Cobralingus may consider replacing his or her mortarboard with a hardhat since language here is not under erasure so much as it is under construction. Rather than a deconstruction of language, metamorphiction is an experimental mode in which linguistic relations reconfigure and mutate within certain systemic parameters; in short, it is a work of reconstruction.
The first piece in Cobralingus, "Organic Pleasure Engine," serves as a model for the process in its simplest manifestation and establishes the template for that the rest of the book. The work has Thomas Lodge's 1591 poem "Rosalynde's Madrigal" as the inlet text (Fig. 1):
Lodge's poem is then sent through the first "FILTER GATE," designated "OVERLOAD," disordering the original poem and chaotically encoding it into an apple-shaped concrete poem - indicating a semantically similar yet metamorphosed homage to Lodge's metaphorical "fruite" found in the first line of the inlet text (Fig. 2):
For example, the line "Plucke the fruite and tast the pleasure" (Noon, Cobralingus 21) in Lodge's original passed through the filter gate may become "uc k eth efruu ea nta thp le as u" or "p lpluckeetheffruiteeandttasttthepleasurerer," (22). In the next stage, Noon passes the overloaded text through two further filter gates: "CONTROL" and "SAMPLE." While the "CONTROL" filter gate "forces language to behave itself" (14), it is the "SAMPLE" filter gate, which introduces a new element to the signal (15). Here Noon samples the activities of which he partook on "Sunday 28 Feb, 1999" (Fig. 3):
This text is subsequently passed through two more filter gates, "PURIFY" and "MIX," thus establishing the outlet text, or the new order. The outlet text takes on a clearer concrete image of an apple and no longer contains any of the original language from Lodge's poem - it now contains only the listing of events from Sunday 28 Feb, 1999 - with the exception of scattered letters on the right side of what appears to be a bite out of the apple that, if reordered, would form, appropriate for any Epicurean, the word "pleasure" (Fig. 4):
The influence chaotics has on the form of this process from order to disorder to new order is evident. Moreover, the metamorphiction process itself becomes the subject-matter of Cobralingus; as Noon attests, "from inlet to outlet, the journey is the goal" (13). Accordingly, the process of metamorphiction is part of a "post futurist" project to assail what Noon understands to be the "lazy cynicism and nihilism" (Noon "Post Futurism Manifesto") that pervades much of the aesthetic of contemporary English writing. Its function is to enable the production of radically polysemous texts, while it offers a new approach to the aesthetics of fictive writing.
Noon's choice of opening the book with "Organic Pleasure Engine" is strategic in this the piece clearly demonstrates the aim of the Cobralingus Engine game. However, the remaining nine pieces do not exhibit such relative simplicity; rather, though they vary, these pieces are characterized by wit, craft, and complexity. For example, the piece, "Blackley, Crumpsall, Harpurhey, Saturn," uses a sample from a Michael Bracewell's short story "Blackley, Crumpsall, Harpurhey," while the outlet text is a finely crafted English sonnet; "Exploding Horse Generator Unit" opens with a selection from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew while the outlet text is written in Dantean terza rima; the oulet text for "Boa Conscriptor Breeding System," which opens with Robert Herrick's couplet sonnet "The Argument of His Book," constrains the sonnet to the use of only eleven letters while retaining Herrick's original rhyme scheme. Of the more complex pieces that make up Cobralingus, "Bridal Suite Production" is of particular interest because it articulates a great deal about metamorphiction both as a process and in its relationship to a dialogue that may arise between print-based text and electronically mediated text. It also playfully engages with Noon's preoccupation with nymphomation and linguistic fecundity.
The inlet text for "Bridal Suite Production" is an excerpt from Noon's fellow Mancunian Thomas de Quincey's 1822 autobiographical work Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The de Quincey sample text is depicted in Fig. 5:
Here de Quincey describes an unpleasant effect of his opium addiction; that of experiencing involuntary visual hallucinations in darkness. As we shall see, the inlet text immediately draws the attention of the reader to its applicability to comment on the metamorphictive process that it will undergo. There are four major themes that run through de Quincey's text: first, the blurring of the threshold between two separate states - waking and dreaming - leading to the emergence of a new state, hallucination; second, the ability to immediately shape intangible images "into phantoms of the eye" - a power like Midas which once attained proves to be a great burden; third, the paradox that the "splendour" of the visions simultaneously frets the heart. The fourth theme, which governs all three previous themes, is that of irrepressible and disorderly transformation from one state to another.
Noon's sample of de Quincey's text demonstrates the wealth of approaches Noon may undertake in the subsequent stages of the metamorphictive process. The first filter gate through which Noon passes the de Quincey text is, perhaps unexpectedly, not one of rupture or disordering, but rather one named "PURIFY" which, Noon writes, manipulates the sample so that it "loses deadwood" and "[s]elects images or phrases from the text" (15) that contain the essential semantic signal that will form the basis of the variations in later stages of the piece. At this stage of the metamorphictive process, therefore, the original de Quincey sample is distilled and condensed into in a more succinct and "pure" form. Noon takes the liberty of straining the semantic possibilities of the signal, thereby permitting selected phrases from of the original sample to trickle through the filter. Fig. 6 represents the next stage of the metamorphiction:
At this stage the new text conforms to the "PURIFY" filter gate in that the major images and memorable phrases reappear, though suspended and decontextualized from the sampled inlet text. The new text has no deadwood. Consequently, the inlet text, appearing as de Quincey originally wrote, is literally "filtered" by passing through a filter gate that manipulates the original communicative signal and allows only a small amount of the inlet text pass through. However, it is in the final two lines of this particular stage, "a fretted heart / Thomas de Quincey" (38), where the filter gate becomes more obviously a tool that, as Noon suggests, "allows the writer to access different creative responses within his or her imagination" (13). The PURIFY filter gate is initially represented mechanically yet there simultaneously appears to be a non-mechanistic value judgment imposed upon the inlet text as well. While words, phrases, and images reappear in a purified form, the final two lines, "a fretted heart / Thomas de Quincey," prove to be a semantic abridgment of the inlet text as a whole. That is, the signature and date which accredit the inlet text to de Quincey, after moving through the "PURIFY" filter gate, serve to express the immediacy and severity of de Quincey's miseries. The romantic and autobiographical dimensions emerge from the disinterested tone characterizing de Quincey as an essayist. Consequently, a tense dialectic develops between imaginative authorial manipulation and the electronically mediated template of the Cobralingus Engine.
Readers may possibly misunderstand the nature of the tension between the mechanistic and aesthetic process in the Cobralingus Engine, as Noon notes in his article "Origins of a Dub Fiction":
A Cobralingus piece is not planned in any way. An opening Inlet text is chosen, followed by the first gate. How the text is transformed by the gate is entirely up to the individual. This is not a mechanical process. It's a way of allowing the imagination to explore areas it would not usually enter into. Once a text is transformed, another gate is chosen. The process continues in this way, allowing chance to play upon the text. Eventually, a phrase or an image will emerge from the process, something that makes the writer sit up and take notice. This always happens. This is the clue as to how the overall piece will end, and the process can now be pushed along in that direction. Again and again, producing these pieces, I was astonished as to how this moment arrived. I can only think that some hidden text has been brought to light, out of the original inlet. I have described this as the ghost, or unconscious desire, of the original text. Cobralingus, very like a Lee Scratch Perry dub mix, is a way of calling up these ghosts. (Noon)
This tension between the mechanistic technique of the Cobralingus Engine and Noon's aesthetically subjective response establishes the inherent paradox in metamorphiction: the process is simultaneously neutrally technologic and framed with authorial subjectivity.
It is the tension induced by this paradox that accounts for the unpredictable shifts that the signal may take. Indeed, the next stage of the process indicates a mechanistic move that nearly disrupts the semantic continuity of the signal altogether. In the subsequent stage, the signal is passed through the "DRUG" filter gate which, as Noon explains, "injects artificial stimulant into the language" (14). Throughout Cobralingus there are various different DRUG filter gates; Noon explains that each "type of drug will always be specified" (13). Some of Noon's humorously constructed drugs appearing in Cobralingus include "fecundamol," "simileum," and "etymol" each of which affect the text accordingly via reproduction, simile, and etymology. In this case the drug is, comically enough, "anagramethane" (39), indicating that the injection of this drug into the signal will yield anagrammatic metamorphosis. Essentially, by injecting this particular "artificial stimulant" into the language of the text, the letters which comprise the preceding signal are rearranged, resulting in interesting word play (Fig. 7):
In comparing these lines of the signal before and after the injection of anagramethane, we see that Noon's anagrammatic word play displays two distinguishing features of metamorphiction. First, there is a definite relationship between the original phrase and its anagram. The process suggests that all language can be randomized yet that there is also some meaning that survives the injection of chaos. Second, while there is a connection between the two stages of the metamophiction through the anagrams, the semantic progression associated with the inlet text and the "PURIFY" filter gate has been lost. Indeed, the actual meaning of the signal has been so remarkably altered that the original meaning may be nearly undecipherable at this stage. Indeed, Noon is concretizing the metaphorical process associated with information theory, a mathematical theory strongly linked to chaos theory.
Information theory was developed in the late 1940s at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by Claude Shannon; James Gleick describes information theory as "a piece of mathematics cum philosophy" (255).Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001) was an American mathematician and electronic engineer. The ramifications of his work went beyond the practicalities of the electronic engineering of communications systems and had a notable influence on the humanities.Warren Weaver in his "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1949), an addendum to Shannon's "The Mathematical Theory of Communication," noted that
the word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information. (8)
Information theory offers a means to understand the paradoxes inherent in the connection between order and randomness, sense and nonsense, and meaning and the absurd as they are expressed in Cobralingus. The signal's movement from the PURIFY filter gate to the DRUG (anagramethane) filter gate requires the reader to interpret a single signal as two antipodal possibilities as if it were exclusive, stable, and direct. Gleick explains, by means of Shannon's theory, that the best way to understand these patterns is to consider "a stream of data in ordinary language [as] less than random; each new bit is partly constrained by the bits before; thus each new bit carries somewhat less than a bit's worth of real information" (257). The paradox this situation presents is rather explicit: the more randomness that is featured in a data stream, the richer the information that each new bit will express (257). N. Katherine Hayles explains the significance of this paradox:
If information is pattern then noninformation should be the absence of pattern, that is, randomness. This commonsense explanation ran into unexpected complications when certain developments within information theory implied that information could be equated with randomness as well as with pattern. Identifying information with both pattern and randomness proved to be a powerful paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity. Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as complements or supplements to one another. (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 25)
Whereas in information theory proper, information is to be understood as semantically neutral, Noon's metamorphictive process allows the increasingly disordered signal/data stream to multiply the richness of information and hence the polysemous possibilities of the text. The DRUG stage of the signal, while being in one sense neutral word play, also includes new words which will govern the semantic direction the work will take during the remainder of the signal's pathway. Shannon writes in "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" that
the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design." (31)
By concretizing the abstract infusion of noise into the signal/inlet texts through representing the disordered intermediary stages of the metamorphiction, Noon attempts to display a similar process, albeit in terms of the development of a specific form of data stream: literature. From the original order of the inlet texts, Noon introduces various sources of noise at the PURIFY and DRUG filter gates, eventuating in a reorganized fragment of text expressed at a new level of complexity. Shannon explains that when "the signal is perturbed by noise during transmission or at one or the other of the terminals...the received signal is not necessarily the same as that sent out by the transmitter" (65). What Noon wishes from his outlet text will be enhanced semantically - an outlet text which proves to be a semantic ghost of the inlet signal, though very different from it.
Noon's representation of metamorphiction as a technological process - it is, in fact, the reorganization of printed text - suggests that texts associated with the individual stages of the process have entered a unique dialectic between printed and electronically mediated texts. This dialectic may be may be viewed as series of shifts which occur in the semiotics between the textual formats in question. Hayles describes the differences in thinking about the semiotics of printed text and that of electronically mediated text. Beginning with the semiotic model as developed by Jacques Lacan, which denies a direct association between the signifier and the signified, Hayles explains that, through this disjunction in signification, Lacan asserts that "language is not a code" (30) and develops the concept of the "floating signifier." Hayles argues that Lacan's theory of semiotics and language is fundamentally influenced by print-based text and "not surprisingly focused on presence and absence as the dialectic of interest" (30). Drawing on de Saussure's observation that signifiers are not defined by their relation to corresponding signifieds but are rather identified according to their difference from other signifiers, Hayles explains that Lacan "complicated this picture by maintaining that signifieds do not exist in themselves, except insofar as they are produced by signifiers. [Lacan] imagined them as an ungraspable flow floating beneath a network of signifiers, a network that itself is constituted through continual slippages and displacements" (30). Consequently, not only are signifieds absent, the correspondence between their individual signifiers is also characterized by an absence. Cobralingus lends itself to a Lacanian semiotic insofar as it is like the traditional text format that influenced Lacan's formulation of the floating signifier. While it utilizes the technical language of electronically mediated hardware, Cobralingus is a distinct and unique printed document.Ismo Santala suggests that "Cobralingus is definitely a landmark work, not only because of its originality, but for the clarity and energy by which Noon animates his literary experiments. It must be mentioned that the book, by British small-press Codex, is a beautiful object in and of itself: the typographical design is fantastic, and the bluish-gray color is easy on the eye. Illustrations by Daniel Allington function as frontispieces, and seem to be telling stories of their own" (Santala, "Jeff Noon: Works").
Yet, Noon's conceptual and verbal borrowings from information technology and electronically mediated text in the Cobralingus Engine suggest a possible shift in the work's semiotic models. Noon, in an interview with Ismo Santala on The Modern World: Scriptorium website, mentions his tempered fascination with both printed and electronically mediated literature:
The structure and process of the work becomes much more obvious on paper, with the ability to flip through the pages. I'm a great believer in books, as being the perfect hardware for the software of a story. And they give you overview that's very difficult to achieve in the Web. But I am still interested in the Web as a medium. It's early days as yet. A lot of research needs to be done, research in the form of people creating stories just for that medium. (Santala, "Transmission > Reception: The Modern Word Interviews Jeff Noon")
In this light, one may no longer simply wish to consider the semiotics of Cobralingus, in general, and "Bridal Suite Production," in particular, in terms of printed texts and floating signifiers.
Hayles suggests that "the compounding of signal with materiality suggests that new technologies will instantiate new models of signification" (29) and that information technologies such as electronically mediated text must "fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier" (30). Hayles ultimately extends the Lacanian concept of the floating signifier model of semiotics into the realm of information technology to introduce the concept she terms "flickering signifiers" (30), which are characterized "by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions" (30). This shift from floating signifiers to flickering signifiers may suggest that a rethinking of the absence/presence dialectic is necessary. That is, while the Lacanian formulation asserts that language is not a code, Hayles reminds us that word processing is (30).
In the next stage of the metamorphiction, the text passes through the "INCREASE SENSE" filter gate. Noon explains the function of this filter gate: it "significantly enhances text" and "increases readability" (Noon, Cobralingus 14). Furthermore, Noon introduces "chemical symbols" and "rune names" into the signal (Fig. 8):
With the INCREASE SENSE filter gate, Noon seems to urge the signal to reassemble in a meaningful way as a means of compensating for the increasingly divergent pathways it has taken from the inlet text by de Quincey. In the left hand column, Noon writes an elegy to Freud. It opens with a chaotic image, that of casting the runes, perhaps as an homage to the chance and unpredictability that Noon employed to reach this elegiac stage. Runes are the letters of multiple Germanic languages used before the introduction of the Roman alphabet. A neo-pagan exercise involves tossing stones inscribed with runes which are then meditated upon - a geomantic practice similar to the traditional forms of divination associated with the classic Chinese I Ching. Indeed, the I Ching - or, The Book of Changes, in English - espouses certain ramifications loosely analogous to those of chaos theory; that is, concerns regarding the inevitability of change, flux and balance of opposing forces. The practice of geomancy, or the interpretation of objects tossed to the ground, is certainly in line with Noon's games of unpredictability. While Noon may be "tossing" runes in a more general sense - that is "tossing" text - the process is comparable: the unpredictable stages of metamorphiction must be interpreted in order to proceed to further meaningful changes. The phrase "cast the runes" may also be an homage to the ghost story by M.R. James, "Casting the Runes" (1904) - a story inspired by the British occultist Aleister Crowley. Finally, there is a remarkable intimacy between Noon's Cobralingus and the kabablistic practice called gematria. Colin Wilson, in his study The Occult (2003), writes that this particular branch of the Kabbalah is "a system by which Hebrew words are converted into numbers, and then into other words of the same number" (Wilson 268). The resemblance is remarkable: gematria is a practice in which words are transformed into numbers and then into new words, while Noon's metamorphiction has words converted, imaginatively, to information bits and then into new words. There is also a notable visual similarity between the two systems. First, the Cobralingus Engine has the appearance of an information circuit in which stages, text, filters, etc., are visually linked by connective lines marking it as a kind of snake diagram. The "basis of all cabalism," writes Wilson, "is a diagram known as the sacred tree, which consists of ten circles joined by twenty-two lines" (262). The link between metamorphiction and a vague assemblage of occult practices is made explicit in the piece "Pornostatic Processor." Here, Noon samples the famous word "honorificabilitudinitatibus" from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (1598); the outlet text is a series of tarot card readings that call to mind Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969). Each possibility is in conjunction with Noon's desire to divert the reader's attention from the mechanical aspects of the Cobralingus Engine; that is, to simultaneously express an exercise that is both admirably philosophical and entertainingly charlatanic.
Ultimately, Freud's death explicitly enters the signal only with the injection of anagramethane into the word "defrauded."Here, the claim "London, 1936: / Sigmund Freud died tonight," conflicts with Freud's actual date of death: 23 September 1939. The incorrect date of Freud's death marks the explicit entrance of an "error" into the signal, an unpredictable event which will further the metamorphosis of the signal. Midway through the elegy, however, the "increased sense" makes a startling shift, a "redraft chemistry of the rune spell." The chaos and randomness associated with the casting of runes pervades the elegy itself; the shift in the signal is now concerned with the "germination / of a deformed synthetic hand." The linguistic units that will produce this effect are to be found to the right of the elegy: chemical symbols and rune names randomly dispersed ready to combine in atypical ways to produce unexpected mutations. What is noteworthy, however, about the chemical symbols and rune names is their visual representation. Noon typographically represents the names as chaotically dispersed units suggesting concrete poetry in which semiotic models are the hypostatized visual subject. That is, the names - as signifiers - visually appear to be both floating and flickering. Consequently, Cobralingus aligns itself with two simultaneous parallel dialectics - language and word processing - which are, paradoxically, inextricably linked yet autonomous.
Noon then passes the signal through three further filter gates: "RANDOMISE" which results in the disordering of the text where parts "may be lost or changed" (Noon 15); and "PURIFY" and "CONTROL" where the language is forced to behave itself (14). What is left is a series of randomly dispersed letters and words - "data," "unusual," "computer," "sex," "anagram," "rhizome," "dna," are among examples. The sentence, "CHEMICAL WEDDING: / GERMINATION OF A DEFORMED SYNTHETIC DREAM HAND," suggests the upcoming zaniness the signal will take. There is a third sample in "Bridal Suite Production," this time from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: "I beheld the wretch - / the miserable monster / whom I had created" (41). Again, the metamorphiction takes an unpredictable direction: toward marriage and the conception of a synthetic dream hand. The Shelley quotation is appropriate insofar as it comments on the process of metamorphiction itself: that is, the reassembling and reordering of deconstructed subparts in order to produce a new creation. Furthermore, the language of the text, particularly in the concretized words metaphorically representing floating and flickering signification, is taking on connotations, not simply of technologies of reassemblage and production, but also of organic reproduction; or, the interbreeding of language itself.
Just as the catastrophe of Lacan's presence/absence dialectic is castration, Hayles identifies mutation as the analogous outcome for the pattern/randomness dialectic. Hayles argues that
randomness is the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such. The crisis named by mutation is as wide-ranging and pervasive in its import within the patter/randomness dialectic as castration is within the tradition of presence/absence, for it is the visible mark that testifies to the continuing interplay of the dialectic between pattern and randomness, replication and variation, expectation and surprise. (33)
Castration marks the catastrophe in psycholinguistic development in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as it is "the moment when the (male) subject symbolically confronts the realization that subjectivity, like language, is founded on absence" (31). Mutation, however, marks a disruption of pattern so explicit that "the expectation of continuous replication can no longer be sustained" (33). Both Hayles and Noon use the genetic code as a means of demonstrating via analogy the effects mutation can have on the dialectic. Hayles suggests that the effects of mutation take place when an already existing pattern is disrupted by a random event, such as "a burst of radiation or a coding error" (32). In Cobralingus, the date of Freud's death as it is introduced in "Bridal Suite Production" functions as a type of coding "error;" at this point, something new emerges in place of the previous code. In "Bridal Suite Production," however, mutation occurs from neither a blast of energy nor a coding error, but rather from a deliberate language game: the random sampling of DNA codes (Noon 42) into the already disrupted de Quincey sample. In this stage the signal is passed through the "PLAY GAME" filter, which Noon describes as a "mischief maker" which "encourages craziness;" consequently, the "results may surprise the user" (15). The random disruption of the system or code establishes the direction in which the piece may now take. Noon's mischief metamorphoses the "CHEMICAL WEDDING: / GERMINATION OF A DEFORMED SYNTHETIC DREAM HAND" (41) into a mock wedding invitation in the next interim text (Fig. 9):
The wedding invitation is framed by DNA code which, through its distinctive detachment from the invitation itself, gestures back to the two paradoxical dialectics. That is, the disconnected DNA codes are visual representations of signifiers which may be floating, flickering, or both. Hayles argues that "mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information" (Hayles 33). Indeed, Noon's game of sampling DNA codes into the signal is among the list of antagonistic moves he makes against the order of de Quincey's original inlet text. However, for metamorphictive purposes, the move that begins the mutation is key in developing unpredictable and surprising literary results. It may appear that there is very little in the original de Quincey text which would, only five pages later, generate a wacky wedding invitation heralding the union of "Mr Wretched Data" and "Miss Deformed Synthetic." Yet, there is certainly a common element to the signal that Noon has specified and exploited: that of unusual combinations that gesture towards unique and unusual forms of change. Nevertheless, despite the unpredictability of the direction the signal takes, the result has artistic merit in its innovative humor, in its technical expertise, and its formal eloquence.
In the following text, Noon again drugs the signal, this time with "fecundamol," furthering the chaotic hilarity of the signal by suggesting a strange wedding night. Here the signal becomes excessive; there is no spacing between the DNA codes which open and close the text and the chain of words which were employed earlier in the signal. The next stage, (Fig. 10), is as follows:
Here Noon displays the signal as white noise in that this stage includes the presence of nearly everything which has disrupted the signal thus far. The white noise itself, however, is not devoid of meaning (and humor). At the climax of the wedding night, the repeated "DNAH" (derived from DNA), is suggestive of the sighs of orgasm. Of course, it is also the word "hand" spelled backwards.
In the final stage, Noon passes the signal through a DRUG filter gate, the drug now being "metaphorazine." "Metaphorazine" is also the name of an amusing short story which Noon includes in his dizzyingly diverse and masterful collection of short stoires, Pixel Juice (1998). The story consists of a variety of portmanteaux consisting of combinations of tropes and drugs which dictate the way the language is executed in the corresponding section of the story. This short story is an early example of Noon's experiments in drugging language with chaos.This marks the outlet text of the metamorphiction, indicating the terminus of the signal's pathway and the final manifestation of "Bridal Suite Production." The outlet text is a concrete poem: a mutated human hand of six fingers comprised entirely of repetitions of the word "hand" (Fig. 11):
The final two lines of the concrete poem appear to form a wrist band or some sort of barrier made up, again of the four bases of DNA: ACTGAATCGGTAGCGATAG / GCTTAGTCCAGAAGCTGA (Noon 44). Furthermore, between and around the polydactylous hand are individual bases - "G," "C," "A," and "T" - that could be floating or flickering signifiers indicating that the outlet itself is subject to further possible mutation. While this outlet text in the form of a concrete poem may seem a disappointment, particularly in comparison with some of the more beautiful pieces that appear in Cobralingus, it is a poignant reminder of the inlet text. That is, the signal that began as a sample of de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, though radically disrupted and altered, has now ended as a concrete poem representing a deformed human hand, a mutation resulting from the interbreeding of language. The outlet text ultimately asks readers to recapitulate their memory of the inlet text - de Quincey's miserable musing on his opium addiction - as a disorderly and disobedient shift from one state to another. The massive ruptures from one manifestation of order via unpredictable reassemblage to another form of order suggests that order, in some variety of self-similar variation, is inherent in disorder. The deformed six fingered hand is, after all, an artifice - one brought into being by human agency rather than the natural reproductive process that regularly produces five fingers - indicating that the DNA is meant to be explicitly taken metaphorically as subject to synthetic mutation.
Ultimately, the concrete poem representing a polydactyl human hand, the "same" (though metamorphosed) signal as the de Quincey text, metaphorically represents the intermediary stages that fiction must take from printed text to electronically mediated manifestation. The Complete Review's review of Cobralingus, while comparing the book with constrained writing techniques of Oulipo and Raymond Roussel, attests that
Noon writes of the specific effectof each FILTER GATE, as though it were a precise algorithm and the text transformed according to very precise rules. In fact, the Cobralingus Engine is no such thing. The rules, beyond their most basic operation, are entirely of Noon's own choosing...Cobralingus is artifice, an excuse for literary play (though it does, admittedly, impose some restrictions on the texts). (The Complete Review)
Ultimately, the synthetic hand of the concrete poem, as a synthetic formation of the Cobralingus Engine, indicates one of the most poignant dimensions not only of "Bridal Suite Production" but also of the epistemic literary function of metamorphiction. Noon wishes to explore the implications of the shift literature is invariably taking into provisional electronically mediated forms whereby Cobralingus and all its associated pieces and processes may be considered metaphors for the interim stages of the representational shift from printed text to electronically mediated text that fiction is presently undergoing and how this shift will transform the way the subject interacts with language. The polydactylous hand metaphorically represents metamorphiction itself, as an intermediary stage in the semiotic mutation that texts, and the ways we are seduced by them, are presently undergoing.
Works Cited
Complete Review's Review: Cobralingus. The Complete Review. 7 February 2008. http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/noonj/clingus.htm. Web.
de Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987. Print.
Hayles, Katherine N. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Print.
Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Print.
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.
Milligan, Barry. "Introduction." Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2003. xiii-xxxviii. Print.
Noon, Jeff. Cobralingus. Illus. Daniel Allington. Hove: Codex, 2001. Print.
"Origins of a Dub Fiction." Language is a Virus. 20 June 2008. http://languageisavirus.com/articles/articles.php?subaction=showcomments&id=1099110671&archive=&start_from=&ucat=&. Web.
"Metaphorazine." Pixel Juice. London: Black Swan, 2000. 47-49. Print.
"Post Futurism." The Guardian. 10 January 2001. Guardian Unlimited. 7 January 2008. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,420328,00.html. Web.
Santala, Ismo. "Transmission > Reception: The Modern Word interviews Jeff Noon." The Scriptorium. 8 October 2003. The Modern World. 7 January 2008. http://www.themodernword.com/SCRIPTorium/noon_interview.html. Web.
"Jeff Noon: Works: Cobralingus." The Scriptorium. 8 October 2003. The Modern World. 7 January 2008. http://www.themodernword.com/SCRIPTorium/noon_works.html. Web.
Shannon, Claude Elwood. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Print.
Smith, Leonard. Chaos: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Weaver, Warren. "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication." The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Print.
Wilson, Colin. The Occult. London: Watkins Pub, 2006. Print.
Wood, James. "Celluloid Junkies."16 September 2000. Guardian Unlimited. 12 May 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4064046,00.html. Web.


text: The Florida Solar Energy Center at the University of Central Florida will open its doors to the public Oct. 5 and 6 for tours as part of the National Solar Tour. The guided walking tours of the center and its laboratories will give residents and businesses a chance to learn more about solar energy, energy efficiency and alternative transportation systems and how to implement those strategies in their lives. Read more

subset: commoncrawl


text:
ABUS crane systems at NedTrain Componentenin the Netherlands
Thinking of means of transport in the Netherlands the bicycle comes to mind straight away. This country is marked by cycle paths all over. However, the railways too can boast an impressive 2,800 kilometres in length: The Dutch company, Nederlandse Spoorwegen N.V., the equivalent of the former British Rail, runs about 4,800 train journeys a day carrying up to 1.2 million passengers. This huge amount of traffic requires trains to be very reliable if they are to be on time. Regular maintenance is required to guarantee the failure rate of trains is as small as possible.
NedTrain – the partner for the maintenance of trains
The company NedTrain has specialised in maintaining trains. For more than 165 years NedTrain has made sure that trains run properly and safely. NedTrain is a private company and belongs 100% to the Dutch Rail. NedTrain is present at 30 strategic sites on the rail net ensuring maintenance, service, cleaning, and overhaul of the trains.
The company NedTrain Componenten
NedTrain Componenten overhauls the individual components of the trains. This includes huge and complex units such as compressors and current collectors as well as small parts such as spare parts for brakes. The company features highly specialised production lines such as pneumatics, electronics and mechanics in order to master these tasks. These different departments are responsible for the overhaul of the parts which, after revision, are considered to be functionally new parts. High quality and short delivery times are given priority.
NedTrain's new plant at Berkel Enschot
In 2007 NedTrain started to design a new plant for the components' section of its business. One key point of this design was the aim to make this new plant a state-of-the-art one within Europe, another point was to make the new building a role model of quality, safety, order, and cleanliness for similar companies. The final design saw a production hall (194.4 metres long) being built with two storage buildings behind it. This layout allows a high degree of standardisation as well as flexibility while focusing on the production flow. The two storage buildings have a size of 3,400 square metres each while the production amounts to 6,500 square metres. There are also some adjoining rooms, offices, and a canteen.
ABUS products in use
NedTrain choose Kraansystemen BV (www.abus-kraansystemen.nl), the Dutch daughter company of ABUS Kransysteme GmbH, to find a solution for the internal transport tasks. ABUS supplied a total of 45 single girder cranes with load capacities ranging from 500 kg to 3,200 kg, and 13 suspended rail systems (double girder cranes for load capacities between 350 and 400 kg), and 3 jib cranes (100 kg SWL), as well as one double girder overhead travelling crane. NedTrain also relies on ABUS cranes for future extensions of its workplaces.
ABUS – strong also in the service
ABUS Kraansystemen did not only supply and install the crane systems but is also responsible for the maintenance and the annual service inspection of the hoists in use. This minimises expensive down-times and reduces the risk of accidents. ABUS Kraansystemen's staff is fully trained to meet the special requirements of its customer NedTrain: service engineers are available 24/7 in order to guarantee the optimal availability of the hoists. Thus ABUS does its bit too to make sure that cranes and trains are kept running smoothly and that 1.2 million passengers are reaching their destination safely.


text:
A design brief is an important document that outlines your design project so that you and your client understand exactly what to expect in terms of deliverables and project workflow. It's a key project management tool that also helps you manage client expectations, so it's important to learn how to write one to keep your web design projects on track.
Whether you've used design briefs in the past or not, you should consider adding them to every project workflow. Here's everything you need to know about how to write a design brief to keep your web design projects on track, feel more organized, and delight your clients.
What is a design brief?
A design brief, also known as a creative brief, is a project management document that allows you to identify the scope, scale, and core details of your upcoming design project. It is similar to a proposal or statement of work with the key difference being that in a design brief, your client has already decided that they want to work with you—you've already closed the deal, now it's time to lay out the details.
When you include the right information, the design brief has the potential to be one of your most powerful project management tools. It can be used to inform design decisions and guide the overall workflow of your project; from conception to completion. A well-written creative brief helps you to identify and avoid roadblocks early on, and it can even streamline and accelerate your prototyping, design, and development process.
"The design brief has the potential to be one of your most powerful project management tools."
While every designer and agency tackles creative briefs in their own way, you'll get the most out of it by collaborating with your client at the onset of a project. This way, your design brief allows you to clarify goals and objectives, get input from important stakeholders, and, ultimately, hold both parties accountable for the final product.
If you and your clients both understand each other's responsibilities and have a clear vision for what the final deliverables will be before any work begins, you'll likely avoid many unnecessary revisions or, "We didn't ask for that" moments during and after the project.
Kicking off a new project with a design brief provides so many other benefits for your project workflow. Here are just a few more benefits that it will give you—and your client. A design brief:
- Provides designers with the necessary insight, background, and foundation to create the visual design
- Offers your team a more detailed vision of the client's expectations, giving you everything you need to delight them
- Helps keep individual contributors aligned and on track, while keeping the project on time and on budget
- Gives the client a sense of involvement in the process, and comfort that their goals and vision are understood
- Provides you with all design specs upfront
- Helps you understand your client's taste and identify their "must-not-haves"
Your design brief is valuable even after you've completed and submitted your project. If you've taken the time to draft a comprehensive design brief, you'll be able to use it as the basis for a case study to use in future pitches. If you're unfamiliar with how to do this, check out our detailed walkthrough on how to write a web design case study that lands new clients. If your client projects are similar, with repeatable elements, there's also no need to write your creative brief from scratch every time you start a new project. Using a creative brief template can save you time and energy.
Free Design Brief Template: Check out the design brief template to get started.
The anatomy of a design brief
Design briefs can come in a variety of formats, and can include different information depending on the type of project you're working on and the client you're working with. To give you a sense of what to include and how to structure the document itself, here is a breakdown of the core sections of an effective design brief.
1. Company profile
Your design brief should include an overview of your client's business so that all members of your team are familiar with your client, their brand, and any internal factors that can influence the direction or success of the project.
Here are the key elements to include in this section:
- Company details, including client name, industry, product lines, etc.
- Brand differentiator and/or unique selling proposition
- Brand mission, vision, values, and messaging
- Key stakeholders, contributors, and points of contact within the business
- List of direct and indirect competitors
Including these important details about your client's brand, decision makers, and the context for why they want and need the project can help you get to know your client as they see themselves from a brand perspective. It helps to know exactly which stakeholders are responsible for certain deliverables, and who you should be contacting if an issue arises.
"It helps to know exactly which stakeholders are responsible for certain deliverables, and who you should be contacting if an issue arises."
You may have already researched your client and pitched them your services, leading to them working with you. If that's the case, feel free to use the information collected during your research. Just be sure that your client reviews the information to confirm its accuracy and to add any relevant information you might have missed.
If your client proactively reached out to you to work on a certain project, they should be responsible for sharing this information with you, upfront. However, they may not know that it's their responsibility to share this information.
It can help to create or use a design brief template, form or questionnaire for your client to fill out with all the details you need to know before you start the project. If you want to be strategic about the types of clients you work with, consider posting the form on your "Contact Us" page on your website, to effectively screen clients. Those who put in the work upfront are more likely to be organized, responsible, and clear about their objectives.
When working with larger clients—especially when projects involve multiple stakeholders—you should also formally acknowledge who within their organization has the final approval for the project. This transparency not only helps keep everyone accountable, it also strengthens client relationships.
Take the time to get to know your client and/or their team in a kickoff call, and be sure to ask any clarifying questions. This is a good time to clearly state if you foresee any potential challenges or misunderstandings. Add any relevant details to your creative brief as needed.
You might also like: 4 Crucial Steps to Building Strong Client Relationships.
2. Project overview
Provide a detailed description of the project, including as much context and background as possible in the project overview section of your design brief. You can get the answers you need for this section in the design brief by asking your client in your kickoff meeting or when they fill out your questionnaire.
Your overview should define the scope and scale of the project and its deliverables. Here are some example questions you can include in your design brief template to ensure that you're consistently asking the right questions:
- Are you building something new?
- Are you redesigning something that exists?
- What other assets do you expect at the completion of the project?
- How much involvement do client stakeholders want (or need) to have?
- What are some potential challenges or obstacles you foresee?
- What is not included in the scope of the project?
Now that you have a clear idea of what they want, it's time to investigate why your client wants to work on this project. You should try to answer this question by identifying the web design problems your client faces that compelled them to hire you for this project.
Sometimes, by digging a little deeper into the why, you can discover alternative solutions that strategically meet the needs of your clients.
You might also like: Get to the Heart of Your Clients' Ecommerce Dilemmas With the 5 Whys.
3. Goals and objectives
Designing websites may be a core offering that is central to your business, but to a client (especially those in ecommerce), a website is their business. Using numbers or plain language, share measurable results for what this project is trying to achieve.
Goals reflect the main purpose of your project, while objectives represent the smaller, measurable milestones that, together, add up to achieve the goal. Some sample examples of goals and their corresponding objectives for a website build or redesign could be:
Goal: The client wants more traffic to their website
- Increase the amount of weekly sessions by 20 percent by X date
- Grow proportion of new monthly traffic to 40 percent of total by X date
- Set the year-over-year traffic goal to be 20 percent higher than the last year
Goal: The client is looking to drive more revenue from their website
- Increase daily revenue by 50 percent by X date
- Grow the total average order amount by 25 percent by X date
- Reduce cart abandonment by 15 percent by X date
Goal: The client wants to increase engagement with their online content
- Reduce average bounce rates by 10 percent by X date
- Increase the average number of pages viewed per session by 25 percent by X date
- Increase average time on page per user by 15 percent by X date
Once you've established the goals and objectives and have recorded them in your design brief, you can "work backwards" and identify the technical steps you need to take to achieve them.
By establishing goals and objectives upfront, you're not only suited to make more informed decisions around your design, you'll also be able to prove your business value to the client beyond their website aesthetics. This sets you up to become a trusted partner, leading to a better quality relationship with your client over the long term.
You might also like: Leading Successful Discovery Sessions: Set the Stage for Client Projects.
4. Target audience
Make sure to develop a solid understanding of the users who will be interacting with your client's website. Understanding your client's target audience will inform your design decisions.
If you're lucky, your client will already be equipped with relevant research about their target audience and be willing to share it with you. However, not all business owners will have this information. If you find yourself in this situation, you have two options. You can try to use this opportunity to offer user research services as a value-add to the project. If your client isn't interested, try asking them who their ideal customer is, and work together to build an audience persona through discussion.
Your audience persona should include demographics such as age, gender, and location, as well as psychographics like media consumption habits, values, and related interests. This information can reveal important details about what resonates most with your client's customers online.
For example, are your client's customers more likely to use mobile more than desktop? Do certain colors resonate more with their lifestyle? What UX or UI considerations are missing? What additional universal design principles can you apply to improve site accessibility?
If your client already has an active website, advanced segments in Google Analytics reports can provide both demographics and psychographics insights. It's a great starting point if your client is unsure about who they're attracting to their online store and why. Your client may find that their target audience isn't the type of user visiting their website.
By defining the target audience in your design brief, you'll be prepared to make informed decisions during the design process.
You might also like: 5 Questions You Should Ask Your Clients Before Every Web Design Project.
5. Design requirements
When it comes to the design requirements section in your design brief, be sure to include the relevant details so that you're not making several rounds of revisions or chasing your client for files that are the correct size.
By including specific design requirements in your design brief, you can ensure that you and your team have everything needed to work efficiently and meet client expectations. Including these details upfront also reduces the risk of revisions or complete redesigns.
While requirements may vary for each project, you can include any of the following details about your deliverables:
- Asset dimensions/resolutions
- File formats
- Required color palette
- Image assets to be included
- Associated copy documents
It is also worthwhile to include any reference materials in this section. These could include brand guidelines, mockups, mood boards (check out these intuitive mood board apps), and anything else you feel could assist with the completion of the project.
You may be collaborating more closely with your client on this aspect of the project, especially if they—or other members of your team—will be working on creating certain assets or design elements (such as logos, graphics, videos, photos, etc.) while you're designing and building the website. Communication here is key. Get as much information recorded in your design brief as you can.
The more thorough your supporting documentation, the less chance you'll experience challenges or delays while working through the design itself.
6. Budget and schedule
If you work in an agency, budgets and schedules can be seen as an afterthought and left for the client services team to deal with. However, these project components are just as vital for creatives as they are for your account services counterparts, and are imperative for the freelancers to address early on in the design process.
The budget
Getting a clear understanding of your client's project budget allows you to effectively manage their expectations about project deliverables, while also managing how your team uses their time.
When initially meeting with your client to scope out their project, make sure you allocate budget across all disciplines: research, design, copywriting, development, coordination, testing, and review. That way, you're much more likely to avoid scope creep or feature creep.
Without a clear budget, it can be easy for you or your team to dive deep into a job and lose track of how many billable hours you've logged. To help manage time spent on billable tasks, use one of the best time tracking apps to stay on track and within the budgetary limits of the project.
The schedule
Projects need to stay on track and be delivered to your client on time to stay profitable—that's why you need to include some form of a schedule in your design brief. Your schedule should be realistic and account for potential changes or unexpected challenges.
It can be tempting to commit to completing a project on a compressed timeline, but that often does more harm than good. Give yourself some breathing room in your workback plan so that if you do need more time, or if your client takes longer than expected to provide feedback before your next project milestone, it doesn't mean you and your team will be working 12-hour days just to get back on track.
An effective schedule should not only highlight the final deadline, but also identify any milestones between the beginning and end of the project. It is crucial that your team can mutually anticipate completion dates for concepts, final designs, development work, and review periods.
While schedules are vital for keeping your team on track, they can also give your client some insight into the design process. Some clients simply won't know how long it takes to research, design, and build a website. It's important to set the expectation of what's realistic when creating your design brief. This, just like the entire design brief, ensures your team and client are on the same page from the beginning.
You might also like: A Web Designer's Guide to Project Schedules.
Start using the design brief in your project workflow
Done well, your design brief has the potential to be one of your most valuable project management tools. It's worth the time to learn how to write a design brief to keep your web design projects on track. Try to incorporate these tips into your design or development workflow so your projects begin with a strategic start.
We've put together a sample design brief template that you can use as your starting point for each project you work on. Feel free to make changes and update it as you see fit. Download your design brief template below and let us know what you think!
Free Template: Check out the design brief template to get started.


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Referral Line: 484-628-HELP
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Health Library
Many nose and throat illnesses are common in children and require clinical care by a physician or other health care professional. Listed in the directory below are some of these conditions, for which we have provided a brief overview.
Allergic Rhinitis
Deviated Septum
Endoscopic Sinus Surgery
Foreign Bodies in the Ear, Nose, and Airway
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Pharyngitis and Tonsillitis
Congenital Laryngeal Stridor / Laryngomalacia
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text:
The week before Christmas I hunkered down and took on a nagging issue in Geary I'm almost embarrassed to discuss. The long and short of it is, prior to this commit, Geary never deleted emails from its internal SQLite database, even if they were deleted on the server. It was a classic problem of garbage collection and reference counting. (If you're interested in the problem and why Geary didn't simply delete an email when it was not visible in a mail folder, the original ticket is a good place to start.)
When I first ran the new garbage collector on my four year-old 2.7GB SQLite database, it detected a tremendous number of emails to remove—almost 50,000 messages. (Yeah, fixing this bug was long overdue.) After it deleted them I quickly checked the size of the file to see what kind of disk savings I'd just earned for myself. As you might imagine, I was surprised to see the file size had not changed—but only for a moment.
As is true so often in programming, closing one door tends to open two or more new doors. In this case, by deleting a significant amount of data from the database I now confronted a question all applications using SQLite face at some point: to VACUUM or not to VACUUM?
What is VACUUM?
Why would you want to VACUUM an SQLite database? To conserve disk space and improve performance. (There's a third, more esoteric reason: certain configuration changes require a VACUUM. More on that later.)
Conserving disk space and improving performance are really tantilizing things. If you look around the Internet, you'll find lots of people asking how to achieve one or both with SQLite. VACUUM sounds like a magic pill, this one-shot solution that will solve all your problems. But the solution comes at a price, and a pretty steep one.
To step back, what exactly does VACUUM do? According to SQLite's documentation, VACUUM "rebuilds the entire database." Okay…so what does that do?
Here's my guess as to the simplified steps SQLite actually performs when instructed to VACUUM a database:
- SQLite creates an empty database file in the same directory as the original database file.
- It reads the original database's entire schema and applies it to the new one. This creates the tables, indices, and so forth. Certain PRAGMA settings are also copied.
- For each table in the original, SQLite reads each row sequentially and writes it to the new database. (Note that rowids are not preserved unless they were marked as INTEGER PRIMARY KEY.)
- SQLite deletes the original database file.
- Finally, it renames the new database to the original's file name.
There's more to the process than this, but I suspect conceptually that's the bulk of the operation. Note that SQLite is doing this in a transaction-safe way, that is, if the power fails at any step, you're not hosed.
Why VACUUM?
What does this buy you? It helps to think of the SQLite database as a kind of dynamically resizable filesystem-in-miniature. Like a filesystem, it has free pages and pages in-use. Writing a new row to a table is like writing a new file: free pages are removed from a free list, the data is written to those pages, and then they're linked to an internal index (which marks them as in-use). The difference is, most filesystems have a static number of pages to work with (i.e. a fixed partition size). With SQLite, if it runs out of free pages, it expands the file to create new ones. When you delete a file the filesystem merely marks those pages as free. Same with SQLite; when you delete a row, its pages are added to the free list and can be re-used later.
Imagine if you insert 1,000 rows to an empty SQLite database. SQLite will expand the file to generate the space needed to store all that information. Now delete 999 rows. In its default configuration, SQLite does not magically move that last row to the beginning of file and truncate (thereby returning the free space to the operating system). Instead, the last row remains in place and the pages for the 999 deleted rows are marked as free. If your 1,000 row database takes 1MB on disk and you delete 999 rows, the file remains 1MB in size.
Judging from the SQLite forums and Stack Overflow questions I've read, this simple detail has caused considerable anguish. But from an implementation point of view, the approach has a certain logic. If you needed 1,000 rows at one point, you'll probably need most or all of that space again later.
Now take that 1MB one-row database and run it through steps 1–5 above. You'll quickly understand why VACUUM can conserve disk space. Because SQLite is lazy about allocating pages, the new database file will only be large enough for that one row. 1MB becomes 1K (or so).
What about improved performance? Vacuuming a database sequentially re-serializes each row's data in the new file. If the row requires multiple pages, those pages may be spread all over the original file. Vacuuming stores them side-by-side in the new file. That means VACUUM can create cache locality effects. Related data will be located closer together, so traditional performance gains (fewer disk seeks, filesystem cache hits, L2 cache hits, and so forth) come into play. Not only will your data be closer together, but SQLite's internal lookup tables will be compacted as well, improving access times. Remember disk defragmenters? VACUUM defragments your database. That's the performance improvement.
A few catches
So VACUUM sounds like a pretty sweet deal: less disk space, speedier performance, what's not to like? There are, of course, trade-offs and warnings to be aware of.
The first one is the deal-breaker for most people: the database is completely locked during a VACUUM, which can take minutes (or tens of minutes) to complete, depending on its size. No database access is possible during a VACUUM. And VACUUM is not an asynchronous or non-blocking operation; if you want to update the user interface while it's working (a progress bar or busy spinner, for example), you'll need to VACUUM in a background thread or a separate process. Oh yeah—you'll want to read SQLite's warnings about threads before going down that path.
The technical note in step #3 (above) about INTEGER PRIMARY KEY should not be ignored. If you forgot to include explicit primary key declarations in your schema and your relational structure cannot handle every single row being assigned a new rowid, then VACUUM is not for you.
VACUUM creates a new file. It never happens in-place. That means your disk requirements could as much as double while vacuuming.
The amount of time VACUUM takes is dependent on the number of used pages in your database. Vacuuming a database you've just vacuumed will not complete instantly. It will take just as much time the second iteration as the first, only to produce a byte-for-byte copy.
I know of no way to cancel a VACUUM. I'd be happy to hear about a safe, sane way of doing so.
When to VACUUM
When I was researching the issue I closely studied this 2011 blog post on how the Liferea RSS reader attacked the question of vacuuming. (It appears the Liferea developers have been worried about VACUUM since 2008. I know VACUUM has been a recurring issue for Firefox too, which uses SQLite for maintaining bookmarks, history, places, and more.) The Liferea post details many different questions and discoveries about vacuuming and it's well worth a read.
At one point Liferea was running vacuum every time the application started, and later once a day, causing the blog writer to state:
…running vacuum everyday provides no significant benefit (it only provides a benefit when there's a significant amount of stuff to vacuum). If you're vacuuming on every startup, you're using a nuclear weapon to dig a hole in a small garden.
I wholeheartedly agree. VACUUM sounds like a magic solution, but it's more like a magic drastic solution. VACUUM is not a fine-tuned solver of problems, it's a big red RESET button on your database's on-disk layout. It really is the nuclear option.
One page on the Firefox wiki ("Avoid SQLite In Your Next Firefox Feature"—overkill, but it makes some good points) lays down this dictum:
You should have a vacuum plan from the get-go. This is a requirement for all new code.
I have to agree: any application using SQLite should devise a VACUUM policy early on. It's almost as important as planning your table schemas.
My advice? Anyone considering VACUUM should first ask themselves if it's necessary at all.
When not to VACUUM
Your database may never need to be vacuumed, ever.
One bit of lore spread around is that an SQLite database will grow without bounds if you don't VACUUM. That's not true; free pages will be reused. Without vacuuming, an SQLite database will expand to its largest size and remain that size. That's a little different than growing without bounds.
If you're worried about disk space, ask yourself at what threshold the savings are worth it. If VACUUM saves anything less than 50MB for a modern desktop application, I would say it's not worth it. (Some might even go as high as 500MB, or higher.) You should also consider auto_vacuum, which I explain below.
As far as page fragmentation, that's a harder metric to come up with, but at least understand that if your application is slow, VACUUM is not a magic bullet to make it faster. Projects wanting to speed up SQLite should look closer at their SQL, schemas, and parallelization before turning to VACUUM.
Trigger mechanisms, heuristics
If vacuuming is necessary, I recommend coding a trigger mechanism, one or more heuristics that decides when vacuuming is due. Don't just blindly fire off VACUUMs at regular intervals hoping they will solve your performance woes.
Heuristic #1: Disk space
If you're interested in conserving disk space, the database has to have free pages to release back to the filesystem; it's as simple as that. One heuristic is to examine the free versus in-use page counts and trigger a vacuum when a certain threshold is reached (say, 25% of the total pages are free). That information is available via SQLite's page_count and freelist_count PRAGMAs.
Another possibility is to multiply the free pages by the page_size PRAGMA and trigger when an absolute size is reached. This is smarter than vacuuming at a certain ratio, since 25% of 1MB on a modern desktop machine does not represent significant savings in an era of terabyte hard drives.
Heuristic #2: Elapsed time
I also suggest subsequent vacuums only occur after a period of time has elapsed.
Consider a user who opens an application, waits for a vacuum to complete, deletes a lot of data, closes the app, then re-runs it—and has to endure another vacuum. It makes more sense to wait a period of time (a day, a week, a month, or more) before allowing a second vacuum, regardless of the free page count. Not only is this good for the user's sanity, it acknowledges that those freed pages stand to be re-used in the near future.
A more advanced heuristic might only trigger when a certain amount of free pages exists for a duration of time, suggesting the user won't be needing them soon, if ever.
Heuristic #3: Fragmentation
I've yet to find a straightforward way to retrieve or calculate page fragmentation. One could imagine a number of black-box schemes to determine when performance is suboptimal—timing transactions, for example—but that risks running a VACUUM for bogus reasons, such as another application hammering on the disk.
If the rows in your tables are, on average, of similar size, or if your database is not hit particularly hard with UPDATEs, INSERTs, and/or DELETEs, then it may make sense to never VACUUM it for fragmentation reasons. (For example, a web browser's bookmark file.) If your tables are populated with data blobs of widely varied sizes and is actively updated (such as a web browser's cache), then periodic vacuuming might make sense even if the free page ratio is low, just to defragment it.
It might sound like over-engineering, but you could track the number of UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE transactions made on the database (in, say, a special table) and code your heuristic to vacuum when a threshold is reached. It's no guarantee of significant fragmentation, though, just an indicator of the activity that can lead to it.
Other reasons to VACUUM: page_size, auto_vacuum
There is another reason your application may need to vacuum the database. If you adjust the database's page_size or auto_vacuum PRAGMAs after you've created any tables, those changes won't go into effect until a VACUUM is performed. This is a big motivator to get those values right the first time.
I discuss auto_vacuum later so I won't go into that yet. As for page_size, I'll pass on an anecdote.
During Geary's development, we discovered a major problem with startup time after adding a Full-Text Search (FTS) table to the database. When the FTS table was first touched by our code, SQLite would block for an excruciatingly long amount of time—database locked—with no indication why. It didn't matter what kind of transaction was performed, simple or complex, read or write, the first transaction against the FTS table always set off a storm of disk thrashing.
Without going into the whole story, how we solved that problem was fairly simple: we increased the page_size from its default (1024 bytes on most Linux systems) to 4096 bytes and vacuumed the database. That was it. VACUUM didn't solve the problem, page_size did.
For any non-trivial application using SQLite on a modern desktop operating system, I strongly recommend a 4096 page size minimum. (Read the discussion about page_size in SQLite's documentation before deciding on the value right for your project.) Larger page sizes might make sense for your needs, but I doubt anything less than 4KB is right for any desktop application. (Mobile and embedded devices are a different story.) New applications should also investigate write-ahead logging.
If you're using journaling or specialized locking modes, it's also worth reading the documentation on the journal_size_limit PRAGMA and how VACUUM affects the rollback file.
How to VACUUM
First, a few tips about running VACUUM.
As mentioned earlier, executing the VACUUM command will block the current thread, so it makes sense to run it in a background thread if your application needs to remain responsive to the user.
VACUUM cannot run from within a transaction. This will fail:
It also cannot be executed when transactions are open on other connections; it will fail immediately. It's upon you, the application writer, to ensure VACUUM is invoked when no other work is being performed on the database.
The Firefox wiki has some interesting numbers on improving VACUUM's speed. Adjusting the journal_mode and synchronous PRAGMAs can improve the time it takes to complete a VACUUM at the cost of database integrity. Turning off synchronous risks data loss if VACUUM is interrupted at the wrong time. Changing journal_mode to MEMORY or OFF risks losing rollback and atomicity, but it's unclear to me how important those are for VACUUM. The original database is not altered until it's deleted and replaced with the new file, which is where synchronous, not journal_mode, is important. (And would you ever want to roll back a VACUUM?) But don't take my word for it.
If you change synchronous or journal_mode to speed up VACUUM, remember to reset them to their original values when it completes.
With that out of the way, how can your application work around VACUUM's limitations? What follows is a compilation of approaches I've discovered while searching around the web. All assume you're using a trigger mechanism with a heuristic and not simply vacuuming the database every time.
1. Delayed startup
At start time, throw up a busy indicator for the user and run VACUUM in a background thread.
This is the most common approach and the one developers and users dread. For some people, this is simply unacceptable.
2. Delayed shutdown
When the application's exiting, close or hide the UI but keep the process running as it vacuums the database.
Some users will hate you for seeing a busy indicator on their drive light even though nothing appears to be running. Since your application is technically executing and the database is locked, what do you do if the user turns around and re-runs your program?
Leaving the UI on the screen is a possibility (with a busy indicator), but users will hate you for that too. You'll need to account for the variety of ways an application can be stopped, too. You can count on users starting your program, but you can't count on it being cleanly shut down every time.
3. Ask the user
When a vacuum is required, ask the user if they want to do so. (This is discussed in the Liferea blog post.) Or, have a menu option or a button that launches VACUUM. Instead of starting immediately, either approach could store some state that indicates VACUUM should run the next time the application starts (i.e. delayed startup).
It seems fairly antiquated in 2015 to be asking the end-user a technical question about databases. Although the delayed startup approach is generally hated, users do understand when an application says "Please wait while updating…" (This often happens after a software upgrade, for example.) Asking a user "Do you want to compact your database?" wasn't even acceptable in the 1990s. There may be an elegant way to do this, but I'm at a loss.
4. At idle
Wait until the application (or system?) is idle, indicating the user is away from the machine, and launch VACUUM. Another variation is to use a cron/at job that executes in the middle of the night.
The user isn't inconvenienced, but note that not all applications access their database solely due to user events, so "idle" may mean different things. (For example, an email client, where mail may arrive at any time.) You also need to deal with the situation where the user returns in the middle of a VACUUM. As mentioned, I have yet to find a way to sanely cancel the command.
As for cron or at jobs, most SQLite applications don't deal well with separate processes modifying the database. (If your program stores even a single rowid in memory between transactions, it's one such application.) The background job would probably need to abort if it detects the application is already running. For applications people leave open all the time (again, an email client), that might be a problem. And nightly jobs are not reliably launched on devices that are often sleeping, such as notebooks.
5. VACUUM a copy in the background
Copy the database file and vacuum the duplicate in a background thread. Since the application remains open and usable, track all subsequent database changes and apply them to the vacuumed database when it's ready.
This one was suggested in the comments section of the Liferea blog post and on Stack Overflow (I've lost the link to it, though). This approach sounds like the best of all possible worlds: the operation happens in the background, the user is not notified or queried, and the application is not locked. It's also the hardest one to get right.
First, remember that VACUUM already generates a copy of the database. Even if the vacuumed file is one-half the size of the original, with this approach you have three copies on disk: the working database, the copy being vacuumed, and the final vacuumed version. For my 2.7GB Geary file, that's 2.7GB + 2.7GB + 1.4GB = 6.8GB, all for a process whose ultimate goal is to conserve disk space. (The worst case? 8.1 gigabytes.)
Second, copying an SQLite file is not without its cost. It takes time to copy large files, and to do it right, you'll need to block all writes to the source file while duplicating those bits.
Third, there's the rather large question of how to apply subsequent changes to the vacuumed database. One approach is to walk every row in every table in both databases and apply detected changes. That's not a trivial algorithm to write (and don't forget that rowids can be reassigned without INTEGER PRIMARY KEY). Like copying the file, writes to the original database will need to be blocked while this is occurring.
Another approach would be to journal all changes, but that opens up another can of worms: where to save this journal? If it's in memory, you risk losing the journal if the app crashes. If on disk, is that in a new database, a special table in the original database, or neither?
For both approaches, unless it's completely generic, any change to the database's schema or relations must be reflected in the synchronization/journaling code.
This strategy seems rife with possibilities of data loss and maintenance headaches. Writing a database synchronizer or an ad hoc journaling system for the occasional VACUUM seems a big pill to swallow. I can't advocate this approach for any project unless they can bring considerable resources to bear.
SQLite offers auto_vacuum. You might wonder why I didn't mention this first. After all, if SQLite will automatically vacuum the database, doesn't that solve all the problems already discussed? Not really.
auto_vacuum has three modes: NONE (the default), FULL, and INCREMENTAL. Like page_size, enabling or disabling auto_vacuum after creating tables requires rebuilding the entire database with VACUUM. Thus, it's worth pondering page_size and auto_vacuum (and write-ahead logging) before you start building your database. (Note that you can switch between INCREMENTAL and FULL once auto_vacuum is in place.)
When auto_vacuum=FULL is enabled, after each transaction SQLite moves freed pages to the end of the file and truncates them. This is the magic "re-mapping" of rows I alluded to earlier.
Unfortunately, FULL does not compact used pages, so re-mapping could actually worsen fragmentation. If pages can be re-mapped after a transaction, they are, meaning you have no control over how often it occurs or how much time it takes. That results in longer write and EXCLUSIVE lock times, especially important if your application relies on simultaneous transactions.
The way I read SQLite's documentation, if every transaction on a database is performed with FULL auto-vacuuming, at the end of each transaction there will be no free pages in a database file. This could lead to a kind of thrashing, where successive transactions free pages, then allocate pages, then free pages, then allocate pages, and so on.
INCREMENTAL is a potential solution to FULL's shortcomings. It only re-maps pages when you invoke PRAGMA incremental_vacuum. The PRAGMA accepts a page count as an argument, meaning you can control how many pages are re-mapped at any one time. This at least offers some degree of control over the vacuum process without locking the database for an indeterminate amount of time. The fragmentation problem remains, however. As I've never used INCREMENTAL, I can't vouch for how much time it takes for SQLite to locate and move those free pages. (Remember, pages aren't really "moved," they're copied from one file offset to another file offset.)
There's a lot of confusion out there about auto_vacuum. I suspect its name is the problem, which makes it sound like a full-blown alternative to VACUUM. auto_compact or auto_release_pages would have been more appropriate.
auto-vacuum strategies
One auto_vacuum strategy would be to use auto_vacuum=FULL, eat the incurred write costs, and enjoy the disk savings while accepting potential performance degradation.
Another would be to use auto_vacuum=INCREMENTAL and run incremental_vacuum when the free page ratio hits a certain cut-off point. The maximum number of vacuumed pages could be capped to prevent long lock times.
Another is to use INCREMENTAL and blindly run incremental_vacuum at each startup with a small page count to limit the amount of time it takes. If the database file has a lot of free pages, this will chip away at them slowly over time without inconveniencing the user. You could do something similar in a background idle thread.
At the end of the day, I've yet to see a major application relying on SQLite that wasn't worried about its performance. If you go the auto_vacuum route and your application hits the database hard, updating it with a variety of blobs big and small, you probably need to VACUUM occasionally, if only to defragment the pages. It doesn't seem there's any way around it.


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The worst criminals on earth are not the poor who sit behind bars in jails and prisons. The biggest thieves are found among the rich. The 1% can buy legislation, politicians and the media to carry out and hide their dirty work. If they can't change the laws to benefit themselves in their homelands they simply send their money elsewhere through shell holding companies. This transfer of wealth, much of it diverted from what ought to be tax payments, is an open secret. Panama, the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg and Switzerland are known for securing the money and secrets of the rich and the well connected.
The leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panama based Mossack Fonseca law firm brings into the light of day what was long known but passively accepted. Now the facts are in the open but the way in which the revelations are reported is questionable and taints an important story.
The documents now known as the Panama Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) who then shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). ICIJ is a non-profit but with its own problematic origins. It is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Kellogg Foundation and the Rockefeller Family Fund. ICIJ then worked with journalists around the world including from the Guardian and the McClatchy newspaper chain. They in turn will decide what will be kept secret and what will be shared with the public. The goal of revealing secrets instead turns into a plan to keep more secrets and to tarnish certain reputations based on bias and mysterious criteria.
The Panama Papers show that the heads of state of Ukraine, Iceland, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all held shell holding company accounts in different tax haven locations. Vladimir Putin's name appears nowhere but the corporate media used his image repeatedly to drum up interest in what is an otherwise newsworthy story. There are Russians who have used Mossack Fonseca services and three of them have close ties to Putin. Guilt by association and innuendo follow instead of disinterested reporting of pertinent facts.
While the corporate media happily do the work of imperialism, Russia is making good on its promise to kick ISIS out of Syria. The liberation of the ancient Syrian city Palmyra should have garnered Putin as much press attention as the Panama story. But the United States and NATO have still not abandoned their goal of regime change in Syria. They were ready to let ISIS fight Assad and do the job for them. While they pretend to drive ISIS out of Syria the Russians are actually getting the job done. If the corporate media want to cover Putin, that development provides an excellent opportunity for them to do so.
While news outlets ranging from the Guardian to the New York Times do their best to connect Putin to the Mossack Fonseca scandal without evidence, the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the president of Ukraine are directly involved. David Cameron's late father is among those mentioned in the Mossack Fonseca trove. Simply put, he established an offshore account to hide the family fortune. The goal of the scheme was as simple as it is devious: keep Cameron family money and the prime minister's inheritance from being taxed.
The president of Ukraine is yet another thief. When Petro Poroshenko came to office after the 2014 anti-Russian coup he promised to cease playing any role in the operations of his confection company. That business made him a wealthy man with an estimated $800 million personal fortune. Instead he opened an offshore account in the British Virgin Islands to avoid paying taxes.
The media already knew that Poroshenko is richer than many of the Russian oligarchs they obsessively cover and they know that Ukraine is a failed state. They know that Ukraine owes Russia $3 billion and they know that the IMF violated its own rules in not making them pay up.
It is a good thing that the corruption of the world's elites has been revealed. But as Wikileaks points out, all the documents must be released so that there is transparency available to all and an adherence to journalistic standards.
Hopefully, the proof of worldwide corruption will spur protest and opposition to a system which gives the masses nothing except more inequality. The people of Iceland didn't wait to be told what to do. Thousands took to the streets and forced their prime minister to resign within three days of the story being published.
It is interesting but not at all mysterious that there are no Americans named in the Mossack Fonseca documents. The reason is simple. U.S. law so clearly favors the rich that they have no need to go offshore to form shell corporations. They can do so legally in Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada. Rich people everywhere know it too. No need to go to Panama or Switzerland. The U.S. is now the best tax haven on the planet. Hopefully the corporate media will decide to cover that story too.
Link to original article from Common Dreams