“favorites”

I loved this thought experiment because it’s the first instatiation I see of what a truly different kind of math would be like. Just imagine, a math without integers! As Jameson Graber elaborates here, we started with integers and only through calculus first started to truly grasp the continuous. What if there were other paths?

Having thought about this question a good deal, I believe that math is a human construct in that the Math that is possible is far Vaster than we imagine, and from that gnarly Vastness we choose only one thread. That’s what Atiyah’s quote illustrates to me.

Without beings to think it Math exists only in a combinatorial, potential form, just like all that we’ll ever write already exists in a latent form in the alphabet.

As to its universal truth, validity, applicability…, perhaps all that can be said is that empathic nonhumans might be able to get and accept some of it, just as exotic stories start to make sense to us only after we understand the exotic sensibilities that gave rise to it.

Math is not a special, magical kind of thought but simply the ever more sophisticated, ever more rigorous thought that we have. That it is, as it is famously said, “unreasonably effective”, is just an endorsement of thought itself.

Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow (and MetaFilter now!).

The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.

Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site: Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow.




It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.

I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.

Something changed,...

..I’m starting to feel like…

..I’m getting the hang of how to live!

Intermittently through the past 6 months, more and more often, and all over the past week, I’ve been glimpsing a day to day life that fulfills me, that I look at and say, yes, this day, this is the life I want to live.

I’m talking about the little things not the Grand Scheme of Life, the micro not the macro, the structure and weave of daily life—what to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to work on, what to buy, how to relate to other people, how to love, how to exercise, how to rest, how to organize your time, how to fail, how to recover, how to improve, how to find peace and keep it, how to make a routine, how to be stable, how to find flow, how to live.

Of course I’m only starting, and know next to nothing, and have been far too blessed all along, but for the first time I’ve set it all up and all systems seem to be running smoothly. Exhilarating. Like being able to control your non-training-wheels bike for the first time, the wind rushing by.

An experiment in improving the reading interface of the world’s best news magazine. Very early days. Check it out at elzr.com/reader.

Right now it’s just a glorified table of contents but even that I think helpful. It includes the abstract of every article or it’s first line —in my experience The Economist’s pithy, playful titles can be under-descriptive. And there are also backbars behind every title, giving you an ambient, non-verbal hint to the article’s size. Both features are there to fix something that got lost in the transition from print to web.

I’ve read The Economist for many years now, almost since the beginning from the web (I subscribed for a year when it was behind a paywall, the only time I’ve paid for content). And almost as long, I’ve been struggling with it’s interface. I guess it’s not that bad for casual readers, but for longtime junkies it can be much improved. Which is what I’ll try to do in the coming days.

Changelog:
.3 version, 16 June 2009: BIG changes. See http://elzr.com/posts/03-release-of-the-economist-reader for full details. Read the whole magazine in a single page, columns, much better design (sections separators!), and… flags!


.12 version, 14 June 2009: Fixed
.11 version, 13 June 2009: Prettier version.


.1 version, 8 June 2009: Kicking it off.

Wikipedia Backbars is a GreaseMonkey script to add histogram backgrounds to Wikipedia tables. It’s a great way to make tables more graphic, to visualize the patterns in the excellent, but usually very dry tables in Wikipedia.

It’s early days yet but it’s already usable enough to give it a spin.

To install it just download it from its UserScripts page. You need to have GreaseMonkey (version 0.8 or more), a Firefox extension, installed first.

Obsesionado como estoy con la cuestion de lugar, me he topado en mis busquedas con estas 4 oportunidades internacionales para Mexicanos. Me gustaria fueran mas conocidas y aprovechadas, por lo que las comparto aqui desapasionadamente pues si creo en el consejo es cuando es descriptivo, no prescriptivo, cuando te abre caminos, no cuando te empuja.

From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.

I hunger for nonfiction because I love learning and because I long to expand my life, my experiences, my thought—all of them so sadly limited. One particular obsession of mine lately is to find truly great nonfiction in languages other than English. It’s not that there’s a lack of it in English (quite the opposite) but rather a nagging suspicion of Western (American-European) parochialism, of missing out on great works and different perspectives I can’t even imagine.

The surprising thing, though, is how hard it is to found it. I have no trouble finding truly great, truly unique fiction in many languages but my trawlings for worthwhile nonfiction turn out almost always empty.

Perhaps it’s a matter of nonfiction not being as readily exportable and thus translated to other languages. Perhaps there’s just not a English market for translated nonfiction. Perhaps English just sucks into it most modern nonfiction writers, whatever their native language. Perhaps whoever wants to be widely read these days chooses to write only in English. Perhaps nonfiction in other languages is ”remade” rather than “subtitled” into English. Perhaps I need to be introduced to it by a native speaker. Perhaps nonfiction as we now conceive it is a very modern meta-genre. Perhaps nonfiction is a Western thing. Perhaps nonfiction needs a massive community of hundreds of millions of wealthy, educated speakers to foster the few who will read it, let alone write it. Perhaps I’m so drenched in the Anglosphere that I only get it’s version of who’s relevant. Perhaps just as Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arab, or French had their golden nonfiction age, this is English’s. Perhaps.

Lacking an answer, my guess these days is that English nonfiction is, personally, by far the only worthwhile modern nonfiction in the world.

But I’m still looking. And so, dear Interwebs, please help me out, what examples do you know of truly great nonfiction in languages other than English?

Anything goes, as long as it’s general, nonlocal, non-culturally-specific (say, no books on Kohdo, the Japanese art of smelling incense, or on the cuisine in the Mexican state of Oaxaca) but to give you a more specific idea of what I’m looking for, here are some subjects dear to my heart and some outstanding representatives within them (with the few items in languages other than English bolded):

• Economics —think Daniel Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, PJ O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich;
• History —think Peter Watson’s Modern Mind and Ideas, Mitchel Waldrop’s The Dream Machine;
• Philosophy —think Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves;
• Reference —think Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Diccionario Maria Moliner;
• Biology —think Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, cognitive science (think Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs);
• Neuroscience —think Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence;
• The Singularity —think Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, Hans Moravec’s Mind Children;
• Computer science —think David Hillis’s Pattern in the Stone, Charles Petzold’s Code, Peter Norville’s Ambient Findability, Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect;
• Philosophy/language/cognitive & computer science —think Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher and Bach;
• Aphorisms —think Jorge Wagensberg’s Si la naturaleza es la respuesta…;
• Essays —think Alfred N. Whitehead’s Aims of Education, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Fernando Savater’s A Decir Verdad;
• Information Design —think, of course, of Edward Tufte’s masterful works;
• Comics —think Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics,  The 9/11 Report: a graphic adaptation, Rius’s works;
• Artificial Intelligence —think Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind;
• Interface design —think Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things;
• Design —think Cristopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form;
• Journalism —think John Battelle’s The Search;
• Business —think anything by Peter Drucker;
• Medicine —think Atul Gawande;
• Language —think Claude Piron’s La Bona Lingvo, George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by, Giles Fauconnier’s The Way We Think;
• Selfhelp —think Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion Emocional, Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, Harry Browne’s _How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World;
• Finance —think The Essays of Warren Buffet;
• Sociology —think Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Guillermo Oliveto’s El Futuro Ya Llegó;
• Psychology —think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog, Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self;
• Biography —think Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Sam Walton’s Made in America;
• Mathematics —think Michael Spivak’s Calculus, Tobias Dantzig’s Number;
• Education —John Holt’s How Children Fail, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry’s La Tragedia Educativa, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine;
• Programming —think The Pragmatic Programmer, The Little Schemer;
• Technology —think Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control;
• Periodicals —think The Economist, The New York Times;
• Video —think TedTalks, Helvetica, David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth;
• Animation —think The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Trusted Computing, The Machine;
• And other wonderful, unclassifiable stuff —think James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, El Retorno del Cangrejo Parte IV, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Evolving Self.

Extra points (not-at-all-necessary but cool parameters):

• the book is less than 200 years old. One extra point if also less than a 100 years old. A further extra point if also less than 50 :).
• from a non-Western language (like Japanese!),
• third culture-ish,
• NOT yet translated into English.

I’m fascinated by meaningful compound words, the more elegant the better.

Esperanto is full of them, based on them really. Chinese writing is like that too, at times—I’m particularly impressed by things like 大小, literally “big”-”small”, used occasionally to mean “size”.

One problem that comes up is is that no matter how small the root words, compounds eventually get unwieldy, even to express simple ideas. In Esperanto, for instance, supr- is the root for “up” and you attach the -en directional root to make supren = “upwards”. Using the inverting root, mal, you get malsupren = “downwards”. So you end up having to say the clunky malsupreniri to express the simple “to go down” verb (iri = “go”).

One very elegant solution mentioned in Claude Piron’s wonderful La Bona Lingvo (“The Good Language”) is to take a different, simpler track altogether. The same idea of “going down” can be more elegantly expressed as desupri, literally “to from-top” (and the corresponding alsupri, literally “to to-top”). This, to me, is the stuff of beauty.

I recently learned 2 new Japanese words, fascinating to me because they used an entirely different conceptual track to the one I knew. You see, the Yamanote line is Tokyo’s most important train line and, remarkably, a loop. Japanese refer to trains travelling the loop clockwise as 外回り, literally "out"-"go around", and counter-clockwise as 内回り, literally "in"-"go-around". In Japan, trains, like all traffic, travels on the left and so these words make wonderfully creative, precise descriptions. (This is done, though rarely, in Western countries too, I later learned.)

The problem with these words is that they’re specific to Japan’s traffic regulations—they would confusingly mean the opposite in much of the right-driving rest of the world.

So, inspired by the Japanese track, I decided to create more universal words for clockwise and counter-clockwise, words which always confused me as a child and which aren’t particularly wieldy (in Spanish, the equivalents truly weigh you down: clockwise = “en el sentido de las manecillas del reloj, counter-clockwise = “en el sentido opuesto de las manecillas del reloj”). Fun historical note: clock hands move the way they do because that’s the way clocks’ predecessor, sundials, advance—sunwise that is (in the Northern hemisphere).

Thus I present to you rightcenter, meaning clockwise, as in “clock hands move rightcenter”, with the center to the right, in a right center way. As well as leftcenter, meaning counterclockwise, as in “screws are usually loosened leftcenter”, circling with the center to the left, in a left center way. Their derivation, I hope, is made even more obvious by the following diagram:
In Spanish, they can be translated into the much wieldier alternatives to the local counterparts: “con el centro a la derecha” and “con el centro a la izquierda”, respectively.

Now, I make no illusions that these terms are immediately or intuitively graspable—spatial direction is hard, most of us still have to consciously think about telling right from left. These words are just an alternative, fun way to label (and thus think) about the concepts of circular direction—and to think about language itself.

Apropos of the many pundits awoken by the finance crisis:

Foretelling MUST be part of any worthwhile understanding.
(We can all come up on demand with plausible histories after the fact
and “description—often bad description—hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.”)

Speculation’s to finance, what experimentation’s to science: THE TEST.
No one salubriously rich can claim to understand finance.
Whoever REALLY understands it is welcome to big bucks any day.

Heard that Douglas Adams’s creation story?
Same thing may happen with finance:

This all but an instance of a bigger theory that claims:
The future, society, others, and even you, among such things.