2006
371 posts under this date.
Today is World Book Day and to celebrate it there was a public reading of
The Aleph, a wonderful book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges (“the information fetishist”), in my city. Let’s not miss the opportunity, here’s a great short-story of his to read today: Funes, the Memorious (in English and in Spanish).
“He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky.”
The story is slow, filled with all sorts of mundane, meticulous details (apocryphal, of course) and full of seemingly irrelevant roundabouts—Borges hallmarks. How else can you talk about such profoundly magical things?
...but I’m not. Let’s walk the biosphere while we still have it. I hear they’re gonna read Borges out loud tomorrow in the park. Yey!
Unlike most people these days, I happened to chance upon Rails through Ruby, not the other way round. But wait, today’s reading is a tad geeky but I’m putting it up here for non-geeks to read it —particularly those, you know who you are, that don’t yet speak any computer language— so here’s some context: Rails is a tool (a web framework they call it) to make web-apps (that’s right, a meta-tool: a tool to make tools) and Ruby is the computer language in which Rails is written.
Anyway, I can’t remember how I found Ruby but I can tell you when I was certain it was something truly special: when I found Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide and, shortly thereafter, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. The first one is a most delightful, witty, unique manual of the language made out of of an acute bout of ruby-rapture and given away for free by its freakishly talented authors; the second is the exact same thing.
So, after much ado, here’s today’s reading: the first chapter of Why The Lucky Stiff’s poignant guide, Kon’nichi wa, Ruby . Technophobists worry not, this chapter doesn’t contain a line of computer code nor does it force you to install a thing, it’s just good ole prose. It is my Trojan horse to try to get you to learn Ruby (you gotta learn a computer language someday). In fact, I’m so confident in my wooden stallion that let’s do this: you only need to read the very first section (1. Opening This Book) of the chapter. If it doesn’t mesmerize you, if you don’t have the weirdest crooked grin on your face by it’s end, feel under no obligation to read any further.
A friend of mine recently put “Dios mio, paralo! Paralo!” as his IM personal message. Automatically, I did the first thing I usually do these days whenever I find something weird, I googled the phrase. The results were pretty incoherent but I did found this beautiful poem by Gabriela Mistral (which ultimately had absolutely nothing to do with why he put that phrase ^_^):
Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.
I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:
My belief is that the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use.
He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)
But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.
...it can only give you answers.
He died quite a few years before Google (or the Internet, for that matter) started, but I’m sure Picasso would have said that. And I think there would have been some truth in it.
Yesterday I spent most of my day just trying to find out why my local web-apps had crashed horribly ever since I upgraded to Rails 1.1. It was all a complex dance between Google, my web-apps, and all sort of forums. I painstakingly build my web-apps one-step at a time, several times, just trying to find out exactly what step was causing the problem.
And finally the question emerged: ¿Is there a known problem between RMagick, a ruby image-manipulation library that I use, and Rails 1.1? The answer from Google was nigh immediate: Rails 1.1 requires Ruby 1.84, which in turn kills RMagick. I’ll simply have to do without it until a fix is posted.
It is not the results that drive us, but the query.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of a search engine is not that it provides with immediate answers, but that this immediacy allows us to pose far more questions.
This preponderance of questions over answers is what makes me believe there might be some future in clustering techniques (Marissa Mayer to the contrary): when it works best, clustering works by hinting at good questions.
A question machine
Do we need a question-machine? What is a question-machine? Is that the question to ask? Is the name of god a question? Where can I buy the Whole Earth Review? Is the universe recursive? What is this “fly on the wall” syndrome? When did I first hear the song There Was An Old Woman? What might Sergio Rivas be doing this very moment? Where is that story we wrote together? Was it any good? What is a question? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis true? How is Ray Kurzweil like? Is it true that “the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use?” Is the universe discrete or continuous? Will they come when you do call for them? Will we ever achieve post-symbolic communication? Is symbolic systems a career for me? What does a “reality conversation” look like? Will there be a singularity? Are we becoming a Gaia? Is there an I? Is everything a prosthesis? Is everything an interface? Will interface design be the art form of the twenty first century? Will I be any good as a web-app craftsman? Will sex ever be free? What are the classic walks of the world? What is meaning? Will I ever find out? Is copyright fair? Are there better solutions? Is it wrong for me to download music illegally? When will this post be lost forever? Why are there so few women in scientific careers? How can Orson Scott Card be so smart and yet so frighteningly conservative? Is abortion the cause for a drop in U.S. crime rates? Was the pill the cause of the sudden increase in U.S. crime rates? Is technology the answer? Will they really build a robotic team that can compete and defeat the world soccer champions by 2050? Is it too late for Esperanto? Will an A.I. ever read these very words? Will anyone? How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? Will I die? Will I really be rich by 30? How was Borges like? Did AMLO know about Bejarano and Ponce? Which is the best candidate in this presidential elections? Will Caja Negra work? Will I work at Google? Should I’ve taken that Etsy offer? Would I be happier in New York? Am I scared? Am I too easy on myself? Is it wrong that I don’t finish what I start? Is this good or bad procrastination? Will I ever meet annzah? Am I foolish to believe, deep down inside me, that in my life “everything happens for the best”? How should I love her? What’s char doing right now? Is she happy? Did she find out the title of the song of that ad? What is the equivalent of a word-processor for reading? How can you improve reading? How can you automate understanding? As in, say, how can you automate or speed up the process of understanding a legal document? With diagrams? Is Doug Engelbart’s idea of a parts-of-speech highlighter any good? Is speed-reading real? If it is, why is it so marginal? Will Jef Raskin’s Archy ever pan out?
Today, in what I’m sure is an increasingly common occurrence to everyone, I was uncertain on a subtle language question and I googled it. The interesting thing was that I didn’t do that to get somewhere, to find any particular webpage, I only cared about the result numbers.
You see, I wasn’t sure whether you wrote “that’s a clever move of their part” or “that’s a clever move on their part.” Prepositions are one of the nastiest, most irrational things in every language. In Spanish you would use the equivalent of “of” in the equivalent expression and I’m guessing that’s what led me astray.
The worst thing is that dictionaries are no help at all in this regard, they just throw at you an impossibly long chain of usage cases. Enter Google. All it took to answer my question was a quick google for ”on their part” and one for ”of their part” (quotes included!). The first query had 2,820,000 results, the second 146,000. The winner was clear, my question was settled.
But it was unnerving. The web has swallowed our language with all its subtleties—it ought to make for one heck of a primeval soup. Don’t you get this feeling every so often that Google is this close to being able to do true translation? This close to understanding? This close to speaking? Do you think it’s not hearing us right now?
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
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