Megan West(erby)

The Keyframe Bias

jackcheng:

At the office we have adjustable height desks, the ones you can turn into a standing desk with the press of a spring-loaded lever. The guys have used sit/stand desks at previous jobs, and we’re all familiar with articles like this one in the Times touting the benefits of standing versus sitting.

An article like that can start a small-scale revolution, make you rise to your feet—literally—and cast off your Aeron chair to the purgatory for used office furniture known as craigslist. Viva la standing desk! And that’s when you find out standing all the time isn’t much better either, that the real benefit of sit/stand desks is being able to stand some of the time and sit some of the time. The remedy for a sedentary lifestyle is the delta; it’s the moving around.

This is a classic example of something I call the keyframe bias, after the animation term that refers to the frames marking the beginning and end of a smooth transition. Given one keyframe of a tiny plane in the distance and a second of the plane zooming past overhead, we can tell the program to fill in the rest and it would assume the plane’s motion is spread out across the intermediate frames. This kind of logic works great if you’re a movie-making piece of software. It works less great if you’re a decision-making human being.

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19 November 2011 ·