2006

Now, is this the most shockingly beautiful, original phrasing of Occam’s Razor you’ve ever read or what?

Damn! Damn! Damn! I just lost two hours trying to recover a photo in Flickr. It wasn’t that important but it just pains me everytime I lose something great for not saving it. Baka!

Even so, my vagrant vagaries brought me something mind-blowingly useful: Flickr leech Tired of paging? Search Flickr in 200-photo chunks.

And I’m happy I found grace (Parental advisory: beautiful nudity ahead)

I have got to read Nietzsche one of these days.

Es un deber basico de toda generacion introducir a la generacion siguiente a los logros mas destacados del pasado. Me molesto mucho pues que nadie—ni un primo, ni un tio—me haya dicho lo realmente genial que es Mecano. Habia oido, claro, clasicos que por alguna razon se cuelan en toda polvorienta coleccion de mp3s—Hijo de la Luna o Mujer contra Mujer, por ejemplo—y me gustaban pero hasta ahi. No me toco su periodo de fama y todo podria haber quedado en eso sino es que Martha me avisa un dia que tenia que escuchar la de Stereosexual. Me gusto muchisimo y, emocionado, baje toda su discografia. Que sorpresa oir canciones tan magnificas y originales como Cruz de Navajas, Aire o El Cine—entre lo mejor que he escuchado jamas. Tienen aparte muchisimas otras canciones destacables; bajenlas (su discografia de una vez), escuchenlas y lean sus letras—lo ameritan. Aqui va una muestra:

To publish before the heat death of the universe:

1. I Fell In Love With Yoga
2. Me, Myself, and Exercise
3. Why Reading Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies Got Me Out of a Math Degree (And How Paul Graham Held My Hand Later On)
4. How to Use Firefox as a Text-Reader.
5. How I Finally Got Criticism with Interface Culture & Understanding Comics
6. In Defense of Prejudices
7. Paean to Contraceptives
8. On Premarital Sex
9. How to Use Winamp with Flair
10. Prefiero Lo Fresa
11. The Perry Bible Fellowship: The weirdest comics you’ll ever, ever read
12. No amamos a nuestros amantes por su belleza
13. Secrets of Language Learning
14. A List of Fruits
15. A Wikipedia Feature Proposal
16. Analogies
17. Music Search and the Future of Google
18. How to Learn Esperanto
19. Azureus’ 3d View: a Beautiful, Dense, Self-Explanatory Example of Information Design
20. On Youth (and Foolish Ambition)
21. A Personal Theory of Love
22. Urban Sensibility. Media Enjoyment.
23. I Used to Fly
24. The Synaptic Mesh That Is My Mind Seems To Have Reached a Link Tipping Point. The Same Goes For The Web.
25. Reasons to Love Web Design
26. Mejor, la Verdad
27. Una Introduccion a Fernando Delgadillo
28. Como Todas las Mañanas
29. Sobre el Peje y Cosas Peores
30. Memetic Alert!
31. Those Pfizer Ads Are Pure eemadges!
32. I Want To Be Selfish
33. City Driving
34. Art Definition
35. Una Introduccion a Akwid
36. Doug Engelbart’s Stages of Mankind
37. Borges, The Information Fetishist
38. Ghosts, A Novel
39. A Summary of Summaries
40. Conceptual Blending
41. A Dictionary of Language Extensions
42. 18 Pages of True Math (Or Why Minus Times Minus Yields Positive)
43. Discographies and Sturgeon’s Law
44. Internet & Electricity
45. Ten Reasons to Drop Out
46. Systems (My Kind)

Things have been slow lately and, as is my nature, I’ve crafted a small weird plan to get things moving once again. This week I’ll…

• publish Erasmo’s novel on Wednesday;
• take Hatha Yoga classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday;
• get myself a medical certificate saying I can swim and enroll at Acalli;
• swim on Thursday;
• go every morning, 7AM to 1PM, 8AM to 2PM, to Starbucks Mariano Otero Providencia Minerva to read and write;
• read Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’s The Pragmatic Programmer, Erich Fromm’s El Arte de Amar and O. C. Ferrell, Geoffrey A. Hirt, and Linda Ferrell’s Business: (a fascinating textbook from my sister Paulina);
• reread Strunk and White’s Elements of Style;
• finally finish my Notes On WikiCriticism, the exploratory essay I’ve been painting for too long already.

There’s sadly too little programming in here, but I need to find out how good the WikiCriticism idea really is before I can start to move on. Wish me luck!

A few months ago my family got a new van, a Windstar. It’s a pretty good car and, being a luxe edition, has many interesting gizmos. My favorite one is a sensor that starts screeching when you get too close to something in the back.

It is not its human-augmentation side what fascinates me the most, but the possibilities that such a sensor suggests. Why not go crazy and make this a gizmo that truly represents space, in all its subtleties, through sound?

I envision a somewhat thick, solid, black band that you would close around your head, completely covering your eyes and your ears; somewhat like a headband worn too low.

This gadget, the soundscape (scape for short), will simply translate space into sound. Let’s imagine the simplest case. A soundscaper standing in the center of a medium-sized, empty, white, circular room. What would that sound like? Well, as the soundscaper turns, it’d probably be a soft hum in all directions; medium-volumed to represent a medium distance; high-pitched to represent the whiteness of the walls; equal in all directions to parallel the physical reality.

If we increase the diameter of this circular room, the walls move farther away, and thus the (sound) volume will decrease; if we decrease the diameter, the walls come closer and the volume increases. If this room now had a door and it were open, the soundscaper would notice it as it turns around to “hear” the room: it would be a sudden sharp decrease in the volume.

If we now put a black square somewhere in the room close to the soundscaper, it’d sound like a squared speaker the size of the black square, emitting a somewhat loud, low-pitched noise.

Can you imagine it? Yeah, who knows if it would have a practical use (assist the blind?) and it’d probably never be advanced enough to allow you to, say, “read” a book through pure sound, but it sure’d be interesting to use it.

Of course, there’s no reason to stop at sound, maybe space can be represented through smell too (and maybe, just maybe, through taste). We always think of space as something fundamentally visual but that’s only because we’re all so visually biased. There are other possibilities.

And yet, sight is probably the best way to represent space. It’s by far the sense with the biggest bandwith. So much, in fact, that I think at least two other senses (hearing and smelling) can be merged into it. Thanks to sci-fi movies we’re all familiar now with some sort of thermal vision—in which red represents hotness, blue coldness. Hearing and smelling could be added in a similar fashion. Sound could be represented as an overlay of 3d waves expanding rapidly through space. The sound of birds chirping outside would look like a pond under a light rain, only in 3d. And smell could be represented as an overlay of little colored dots. A nubile girl passing by would leave a rainbow cloud of dots behind her.

But the soundscape still sounds the most daring, maybe because the possibility of replacing sight is as frightening as it is exciting. Just imagine, sound as light!

Update August 24, 2006: ABC News’ Humans With Amazing Senses: Blind People Who Interact With the World Like Dolphins and Bats

Update April 24, 2007: Wired’s Mixed Feelings: See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). I blogged about it here.

I’m fascinated and disgusted in equal measure with a recent Village Voice cover article: “Do you wanna kiss me?” (How New York’s women are wising up to The Game’s pickup tips). Fascinated because what it describes is such an interesting, natural, and inevitable step for men to take in relationships; disgusted because it seems to betray the all-important honesty upon which conversation relies. The rightly famous cluetrain manifesto is about the need for companies to speak with an honest, human voice; I guess we’ll soon need one for people too (but then again, what could be more positively human than artifice?). Magda, from William Gibson’s delightful Pattern Recognition, comes to mind:

And now, after reading the Voice article—let alone reading The Game, for whatever purpose—, how can you not act differently? How can you help from negging, from creating a yes-ladder or a false time constraint? (Or from recognizing them?) I now know that the style of conversation I’ve evolved over the years, mostly unconsciously, is quite neggish; doesn’t being aware of what one’s doing changes the very nature of the act? “Being natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

Perhaps Dolly is right. These techniques may be nothing but conversation cosmethics (or rather, prosthetics) and I can surely appreciate their playful side, the way they’re “the grown-up version of hair-pulling on the playground.” But I’m still wary—it’s conversation we’re talking about here and there are few things I value more.

Oh, and I’m well aware that at least some parts of the article have been fabricated, as rumored first in Gawker, and then acknowledged by the Voice and the author himself. This is a shame (not least because of the wimpy apology by the author) but the article is still interesting and worth reading; that’s why I made a verbatim copy of it in my website.

Haciendo mandados, me toco platicar hoy con una señora que dirige un cibercafe mientras los dos haciamos fila. Le pregunte sobre su negocio y dos cosas me llamaron mucho la atencion. La primera es que un cibercafe gasta mas, mucho mas, en luz que en el internet mismo. Mientras que esta señora pagaba 650 pesos por internet al mes, la luz le salia de 2,600 a 3,000 pesos—casi 5 veces mas. Asi que lo que uno paga es mas bien la electricidad, no el internet. En vez de cibercafes deberian pues llamarlos electrocafes.

La otra cosa que me intereso fue que los cibercafes locales se aliaron para fijar el precio minimo por una hora de internet (12 pesos, si mal no recuerdo). Que, segun eso, a menos no les sale. Lo que no alcanzo a entender es porque necesitan imponer un precio minimo. Si alguien lo da a ese precio y no le sale, pues alla su problema si quiere regalar su dinero, no? Me recuerda una platica con un taxista que me decia que si no estuvieran restringidas las licencias para taxis, habria tanta competencia que ya para nadie saldria. Sera?

Bueno, hubo una cosa mas, una meta-cosa, que tambien me llamo la atencion en la platica: cuanto puede enseñarte una conversacion casual sobre esferas tan distantes a las tuyas.

If you’ve decided to browse with Firefox,^[1] why not learn to do it gracefully? It’ll make you happier and more efficient.

Before we begin, be sure to have the latest Firefox. As of 28/Feb/2006, the current version is 1.5.0.1 and what follows will assume you have that version or a higher one. You get Firefox from GetFirefox.com.

With that you’re ready. Here is my guide (for non-techies) to using Firefox with flair: