February, 2006
25 posts under this date.
Just ‘cause, how the fuck does one translate this (wonderful) sentence to Spanish?
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
(This is just me loud thinking, it has nothing to do with On the language of this blog.)
March 2, 2006 – Update:
Si la tragedia es una experiencia en hiper-apego, la comedia es una experiencia en des-apego, en distancia.
Que tal?
SpielbergWP, IMDB’s MunichAM, IMDB, WP is a great film; there’s not a scene I would change in this 164-minute movie. On the other hand, the man’s starting to scare me, I mean, how can he be so talented? Every film of his I’ve seen is a masterpiece, to the point that it seems almost unfair that someone should hoard so much talent. He embodies that Gap Paul Graham talked about in much of Hackers and Painters:
When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There’s a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.
More to the point, Eric BanaWP, IMDB and Ayelet ZorerIMDB (sometimes called Ayelet Zu’rer or Ayelet Zurer) were the two Munich actors that impressed me most, and my favorite scene from the movie was the sex scene between their characters, Avner and Daphna. It is remarkable both for the long-during, extreme closeup on Daphna, and for the fact that she’s visibly pregnant all along. Closeups are one of the wonders of film, something unthinkable in theater, and this is one of the best ones I’ve seen: for over 30 seconds there’s only Daphna—beautiful and breathy and rhythmic and smelly and sweaty and lusty and doe-eyed and blushing and nubile. As for the visible pregnancy… well, I’m somewhat disturbed to find that very arousing, but I guess it’s all part of being a male homo sapiens at a reproductive age.
I couldn’t find any screenshots of this particular scene on the web—I seem to have very refined tastes—so I had to download the movie and take screenshots myself. Here they are:
This is fantastic: a cool website that specializes in selling royalty-free stock photos, iStockPhoto, has created a new way to search through their whole catalog: by arrangement. They call it ColorSpace, and is wonderfully simple, yet powerful. It consists of a 3×3 grid of squares. You change the color of each square to indicate what you want in that area: green, if you want it clear; red, if you want it occupied; grey, if it’s the same to you.
It works. If, for instance, you search for “flower” with this colorspace,  , you get:
Or if you search for “sky” with this colorspace,  , you get:
The star here is not only the algorithm but the clever, information-design interface.
Overall, it’s a very impressive site, its web developers really do care about it, and that’s always refreshing. The weirdest thing is that they’ve convinced me that selling royalty-free stock photos on the web makes perfect sense…
Sorry for the boosterism… blame that little techno-evangelist we all carry around inside.
Anyway, it’s interesting to put a face on those words I read so often. If you have a blog, leave a comment with a link to your pic and your blog’s address, and I’ll put it up here. Same for your favorite blog, leave a comment with a link to a pic of the author and the blog’s address, and I’ll put it up here.
In which I confess to be reading a blog in its entirety, reminisce about one of the first blogs I read, and use “Anyone lived in a pretty how town” as a tool to understand what’s so great about blogs.
I’m a fan of DHH (that’s David Heinemeier Hansson, but since no one, not me for sure, can type his name correctly, he’s usually called DHH). He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a very smart programmer, and an even smarter manager. How can you not like someone with this in his about page?
I believe in change, ignorance (my own), love, and the power of motivation.
Anyway, out of a childish infatuation with his persona I’ve taken upon myself to read his blog, Loud Thinking, back to front, all 4 years of it. I’ve just read the first 24 posts from July 2001, and it has been a lot of fun.
For one thing, I feel like a scholar, tracing all the antecedents that lead to someone’s achievements, savoring the obscure details, going straight to the source, nosing around on the archives. It’s fascinating to see his development.
It also feels like if I were talking to his ghost of days gone by. Blogs are truly a new state of being (see the next post for more of that techno-boosterism). What’s surprising is how similar that ghost is to myself. How he also struggled with procrastination, also likes the same music that I like, also learned VIM, also loves to argue, also fears growing old, also has sleep disorders, also likes to pontificate once in a while.
Of course, there are also lots of differences. But I knew that already. What is amazing is how much you can have in common with someone apparently so different. One of the first bloggers I read—back in the day when reading a blog was something weird and shameful (”You read people’s diaries? What for?”)—put e.e.cummings’ Anyone lived in a pretty how town in her about page, and interpreted it as a love story between “anyone” and “noone” (here’s an interpretation in that vein). What she found tragic was how oblivious the townsfolk were to their love and grief:
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
So what she treasured in blogs (this is all from memory, I’ve never been able to find her blog again) was their ability to let you see behind “anyone” and “noone”. They put you in contact with people you’d probably never even meet, let alone talk to, and show you that, in the end, they’re not so different from yourself—they also struggle, love, fear, and fail, just like you do.
My favorite from those 24 first posts? Refusing to let an identity mask run my life, hands down.
Since Javascript 1.2 and later there has been a cool and very powerful literal syntax for functions:
var sum = function(x, y) {return x+y}
A couple of weeks ago I found an interesting use of this syntax. Missing Ruby’s wonderful each function, I decided to implement something similar in JS, and, after some experimentation, ended up with this:
function each(a, f) { for(var i=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) };
The function syntax comes in handy when you use this each:
each([1, 2, 3, 4, 5], function(e) { alert(e) });
It may not be as satisfying as Ruby’s each, but it’s quite useful.
In which a philosophical quote provides the sparkle for some more talking on philosophical things like the self and civilization.
It is a time when, even if nets were to guide all consciousness that had been converted to photons and electrons towards coalescing, standalone individuals have not yet been converted into data to the extent that they can form unique components of a larger complex.
That’s the chilling intro to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Honestly, when I first read it I thought it was mere Engrish, but now that I’ve come to terms with its form (I’m even starting to like it), I can’t get its content out of my head. It’s just so powerful.
It makes you think of civilization as one long gradient towards ever larger complexes. A very interesting lens with which to revisit many important events and inventions: family, clans, money, speaking, writing, printing, law, contracts, corporations, science, the net, IP, blogs, wiki, mailing lists, email, IM, whatnot.
And it reminds me a lot of a favorite essay of mine—one I stumbled across a few years ago in wonderful serendipity: Erosion of the Essential Self. In it, it is argued that our sense of self is being made increasingly obsolete by technology, and that this may not necessarily be a bad thing. One of the interesting points it makes is that our sense of self itself is probably a byproduct of written culture: “In ongoing, face-to-face conversation, we are little concerned with the mind behind the words; meaning is shaped before us in the course of the interchange. However, with the emergence of printed text, important questions were created about the ‘author’s meaning.’” It’s one of those essays that simply becomes a part of you afterwards, something like this:
I was amazed and impressed by the brilliance of GEB when I first read it, but it didn’t change my life. However over the years I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level. Now I find them my own thoughts, and I realize I now see the world through a similar lens.
In which in response to a question it is explained, in Spanish, why this blog is written (mostly) in English (and not in Spanish).
Entiendo y supongo que comparto esa como admiración por lo divertido que puede ser escribir en inglés, pero acaso no es posible hacer lo mismo con el español?
Claro que es posible, pero, al menos para mi, es mas dificil. Tu afirmas tacitamente que lo que importa es el talento, no el idioma, y eso es muy cierto. Estoy seguro de que toda la jerga gringa que nos invade—jerga tecnologica, cientifica, social, y artistica—podria haberse desarrollado perfectamente en Español, en Japones, en Hebreo, o, quizas, en toki pona. Pero se desarrollo en Ingles! Y es precisamente por que el idioma no es lo que importa, sino sus hablantes y la suma de sus talentos y creatividad linguistica1, que el Ingles es actualmente la lengua. A principios de nuestro siglo no hay esfera mas importante, mas efervescente, ni mas creativa que la angloesferaWP (que para mi abarca todos los hablantes del Ingles, sin importar si lo aprendieron, quizas a regañadientes, como segunda lengua). No es malinchismo, es la verdad.
Precisamente, un buen ejemplo en Español de a que me refiero con jerga es “malinchismo”. Es una palabra curiosa, llena de significado y matices para cualquier mexicano (quizas tambien para cualquier latinoamericano), pero es muy dificil de traducir a otros idiomas por ser un fenomeno cultural (tristemente) muy nuestro. La tecnologia, la ciencia, y el arte son hoy en dia, en enorme medida, fenomenos de la angloesfera (como lo fueron en su tiempo del Aleman, del Frances, del Latin, del Griego, del Sumerio, del…).
O aqui va otro ejemplo, mas alentador: como dices “trova” en ingles? No puedes. Te ves forzado a escribir trova entre comillas y explicar atropelladamente que es la trova dentro de la hispanoesfera (o simplemente confiar que tu escucha este familiarizado con ella).
Por supuesto, este tipo de palabras y conceptos no son propiedad exclusiva de la esfera que las creo. Eventualmente, otras esferas las asimilan y llegan a su vez a derivar nuevas palabras y conceptos—rocanrol es ya una palabra hispana, y mas aun rocanrolero (como dices “rocanrolero yo soy” en ingles?). La pega aqui es ese “eventualmente”. ( In the long run we’re all dead, remember?)
Es por eso que me faltan palabras en Español para hablar sobre lo que yo quiero hablar—mi idioma no las sabe todavia. Me faltan palabras y me faltan interlocutores—la gente con la que quiero hablar, abrumaduramente habla ingles (muchas veces como segundo idioma, claro, pero aun asi). Le he dado pues varias vueltas al asunto y, en este momento, la conversacion que me interesa, en la que quiero participar directamente, es la de la angloesfera2. Que cada quien elija, libremente, la suya.
Please! Refrain from speaking or any sort of communication that could ease the time. Limit yourself to look stupidly astray and ignore the fact that you are sharing space and time with other fellow human beings.
Time to say goodbye to my incipient vegetarianism. Who am I kidding? I’m a man of the flesh.
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