April, 2006
42 posts under this date.
I’d never heard of Jerome Kern. Much less of The Platters, apparently a pretty popular “doo wop” (!) group from the 60s. But in 1933, it turns out, Jerome Kern wrote a purdy, small song called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which The Platters in turn recorded and made famous in 1959.
And in 2006, today, serendipity brought me the song, played by Roxy Music (who are oh-so-very-cool), and it made me smile.
Yup, I am aware of it’s glaring cursileria, but it’s late at night and I’m strangely happy, so shut up and read the lyrics:
They asked me how I knew,
My true love was true,
Oo—oo—oh. I of course replied,
“Something here inside,
Can not be denied.”
They said, “Some day you’ll find,
All who love are blind,
Oo—oo—oh. When you heart’s on fire,
you must realize,
Smoke gets in your eyes.”
So I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed,
To think they would doubt our love,
And yet today, my love has gone away,
I am without my love.
Now laughing friends deride,
Tears I cannot hide,
So I smile and say, “When a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes”,
“Smoke gets in your eyes.”
What a wonderful surprise! Reading about Google’s Marissa Mayer —I have this obsession in which I obsess for days about certain people— I found out she got a BS in Symbolic Systems in Stanford. That’s right, there is such a thing! I’m shaking with excitement. I’m reading the career description online but my eyes just keep pushing ahead. It’s a weird mixture of “artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and symbolic logic.” Even “human-computer interaction” is thrown into the mix. I mean, a degree with symbol in its title! Could you possibly ask for more?
All the more reason to visit Stanford this May 13!
Goddamned Rails-Engines!
...
mmm… Ok, Ok… I take that back. They’re indeed very helpful but installing them locally was a true nightmare and now that I was finally ready to deploy to TextDrive they refuse to cooperate. I’ve no idea what’s going wrong. I was counting on having my (political) web-app online tonight but it seems it’ll have to wait until tomorrow, my eyes are too bleary.
And the worst thing is that it’s almost 5AM. Which means one more day I miss my yoga class. Oh well… :(
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
(I just found out there’s a pretty good song from The Beatles with the same title as this post. Heh. A nice surprise.)
I just noticed today that AT&T has a redesigned logo. I like the change —especially the sort of shadow inside the sphere— but of course there are those who disagree.
Will we (or rather, will our avatars) wear words when fully-immersive, massively multiplayer, 3d computer environments really start to take off?
Will it look like Matrix green code view? Will future fashionistas argue endlessly about the merits of serif vs. sans-serif? Bembo vs. Helvetica? Bodoni vs. Garamond? Will a future girl flaunting her sexuality wear a top bikini made of nothing but two rings out of the word “perky” barely concealing her nipples1? Will you wrap yourself in lyrics? In short stories? In emo text? Will I wear Borges’s while you wear Charlie Stross’s? While she wears Melville’s? Will you wear your favorite quotes as bracelets? As necklaces? As belts? Will HarperCollins be the new Gap?
Before you nonchalantly dismiss this idle rumination as the work of a feverishly formist mind, I ask you to pause for a moment and look around at today’s ubiquituous (and perpetually crammed) IM nick-names and personal messages, email and forum signatures, “witty” t-shirts, and the like.
Oh! I want to go to the Stanford Singularity Summit this May 13! I mean, Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Cory Doctorow, Eric Drexler, Max More, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be speaking! (Just imagine all the freaks1 that’ll be there…) It’s free for the public and I already RSVP-ed. Let’s see, if I stay in California with some friends, if I fly cheap, if I eat nothing but air, if…
1 Remember Tom Peters’s advise: Find a Fellow Freak Faraway.
Yay! I just got my invitation code to Google Analytics. What little I’ve been able to see is pretty amazing (mmm… make that very amazing), all the more so considering that it is free (it has always baffled me to no end that I’ve to pay more for stats than for hosting my website itself).
The best part was Google’s seemingly offhand notice (emphases mine):
If your site receives more than 5 million pageviews per month, you must have a linked AdWords account with at least one active campaign..
If your site receives more than 5 million pageviews per day, please contact us by replying to this message before signing up so that we can ensure proper capacity planning.
5 million pageviews? Per month? Per… day? That scale is one of the many things about Google that make geeks’s mouths (mine included) water. (I think it’s important to point out that StatCounter, my previous web stats provider, charged me $19 a month for 10,000 pageviews.)
I hope you are—just as I was—blissfully ignorant of the following quote and the game it portrays, for, if that’s the case, you’ll probably end up—just as I did1—with a day-long smile on your face. I mean, isn’t this something2?:
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
Wikipedia, as usual, is a great intro to the topic.
1 I’m riffing the structure of this paragraph from Matrix’s Morpheus memorable quote: “Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize, just as I did, that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Did you got that before I told you? Is there someone out there as linguistically disturbed as I am?
2 That beat comes from this other article, interestingly, on luck.
I’m sick (and oh-so-very-tired) of this clueless, absent-minded, bumbling persona of mine. I’m sick of knowing nothing about the rw (that’s the real word), of always getting lost, of always forgetting stuff, of never having my cell phone around, of people patronizing me, of stupid little mistakes like today’s. It’s time to start paying attention, to notice my surroundings, to stop forgetting in the shower whether I already shampooed my head or not. I’m becoming (to some degree at least) a worldly person as of this moment. This is my official skin shed of the silly-clumsy-absent-minded-professor-persona. So long.
“Attention,” the articulate oboe was calling. “Attention.”
“Attention to what?” he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening
answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.
“To attention,” said Dr. MacPhail.
Island, Aldous Huxley
Some more good quotes from the book here
Of course I’m fascinated with the Speech Accent Archive: a massive (521 samples) archive of English accents from all over the world! They put native and non-native English speakers to read the same sound-rich English paragraph, record them, and then painstakingly transcribe the reading to phonetic symbols and even point out error generalizations (it turns out Mexican poblanos speak with “final obstruent devoicing”, “interdental fricative to stop”, and so on…). It’s pure beauty —though it’s a shame that there’s only one Mexican accent in there, I’m thinking of sending my own recording (they do accept them and even have some precise instructions).
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