This is, I think, a pretty good glimpse of one of the roles I want to play the next decade—don’t give up on me! :)
Something else is going on here. To a large extent, value on the Internet is not being created by businesses, as much as they want all kinds of credit and money for creating this wonderful value. Inventors, folks who are coming up with new tools, are creating it. Some of them are well harnessed by businesses, but it turns out that businesses don’t have to exist for them to harness themselves with the Net and get these things out there. For example, the person who created Eudora is a University of Illinois fellow who did it basically for himself and people he knew. In terms of quality, Eudora is visibly beyond any other email program. It makes you wonder what’s wrong with companies, what prevents them from doing the right thing when a random person puts his exquisite tool out on the Net for free. This happened with Eudora, and later with Mosaic, which led to a commercial version, Netscape Navigator.
The inventors of these tools are not crazed codgers in basements. They are, by-and-large, young people with a sense of social and cultural responsibility who want things to be better for everybody.They are as valuable as our snazziest scientists, but are not accorded the respect or rewards of the snazzy scientists. They are taken for granted more than they should be. Something is wrong if we think inventors are a lower order of being than theoretical scientists.
Ah, the ever-recurring techno-myth: a dirt-cheap educational contraption to revolutionize third world children’s education. I can’t even remember when I heard about it first. I was thrilled though, enthused. But then with the undelivering years went my excitement. For one thing, the deployment plan is based almost entirely on governments, which is a nonstarter. More importantly, there might be better options. Cellphones are already a phenomenal worldwide success, even in the poorest countries, and that’s because they’re tangibly, immediately useful. A recent Economist article, Splitting the Digital Divide, mentions other less obvious but intriguing options.
And yet, reading yesterday’s New York Times article, For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate(yup, there’s been some price adjustment), made me think again of the amazing possibilities that can unfold from a personal mobile computer in the hands of a child. Blame it on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond AgeAM with its amazing book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —every self-learner’s wet dream.
At any rate, it seems to me that (save actual existence and deployment) the crucial factor for success will be software and so, for what it’s worth, here’s a promise: If and when Negroponte’s brainchild ever sees daylight, I shall stop whatever I’m doing, for three months, to develop mindblowing educational software for it. There, I said it.
Hace unos dias ya que Ben me aviso que, justo despues de un roce con la muerte, Daniel DennettWP acababa de escribir una carta, Thank Goodness!, en la que respondia a sus amigos que le preguntaban si en algo se habia afectado su largamente publico ateismo.
La carta me impresiono muchisimo inmediatamente, porque atendia varias preguntas que me estaba haciendo en ese momento (recuerdo que ese mismo dia le decia a mi hermana Chepe en el cafe, medio en broma y medio no, que si realmente no queriamos morir por que no nos volviamos doctores (como Chemito!) y nos poniamos a investigar?) y porque me emociono tremendamente el estilo conciliador pero firme, tan brillantemente elegante, de Dennett. En cierta forma la carta es una buena y sosegada continuacion a la carta elegiacaELZR de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su fallecido hermano Yehuda—aquella carta que tanto me marco en su momento, que tanto ame por su cruda rabia y su descarnado optimismo, y que traduje al Español casi por reflejo (reflejo que fue muy gratamente reforzado cuando mi primo Paco me dijo que le llevo la traduccion a sus alumnos de prepa).
He traducido, tambien casi por reflejo, esta carta de Daniel Dennett y se encuentra disponible aqui, como una hoja aparte: Gracias al bien!. Fue una traduccion mucho mas dificil por aquellas oraciones increibles y barrocas de Dennett asi que por favor dejen un mensaje si se les ocurre cualquier forma de mejorar la traduccion. (Gracias, por cierto, a Chemito por asesoria medica en la traduccion.)
Ojala lo lean, ojala los haga pensar y ojala nos veamos en los proximos dias con sus opiniones. (Para ser escritas, las mias tendran que esperar todavia unos dias a que aterrice el desorden de ideas que traigo—esta carta de Dennet me condujo al movimiento de los brightsWP, a las ultimas ediciones de Wired, Time, y Newsweek, a los escritos de Dawkins, a Edge, a leer ciencia, a discusiones, coming-outs, y a muchos, muchos pequeños repensamientos propios).
Vaya, me tomo algo asi como 8 meses pero hoy por fin termine de transcribir1Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? de Jorge Wagensberg. Estan ya en linea los 531 pensamientos que tiene el libro y el texto introductorio. Solo faltan los textos al principio de cada capitulo, que no he transcrito y que probablemente ya no transcriba.
Lo mejor de transcribir todo el libro fue poder releer y pensar lentamente cada una de las frases. Hay muchas todavia que no entiendo y algunas que me parecen equivocadas, pero en cambio hay demasiadas otras que no agoto por mas que las repienso (y he puesto en negritas las mejores). He dicho ya que suelo juzgar una frase en medida de su «permanencia». Estas son de las mejores frases que conozco.
Firefox 2.0 is out. Frankly, not many things of direct consequence have changed and the best of those that have should have been included a long time ago (tab closing undo, session resuming, and tab arrows)... but there’s integrated spell check (!) and that and a painless installation (most all your extensions will follow you along painlessly) make this a must.
Update 28/Oct/2006:FF2’s find-as-you-type now searches inside textareas too! I used to copypaste back and forth between Vim and a textarea just to jump to particular text spot. Ahh… the joy!
KinKey is a tiny app that makes it easy to type with a US keyboard the special characters of
-Spanish
-French
-German
-Portuguese
-Italian
-Catalan.
It works in Windows XP/2000/Vista.
KinKey is now running in the background (and will run itself at every startup unless you uninstall it). At any2 text-editing place you want, you can now, say, press E and ^at the same time(in the same way you press Ctrl and C to copy) to get French’s e circumflex, ê. The order doesn’t matter, you could just as easily have pressed ^ and E to get ê.
Here’s a list of the characters you can type with KinKey:
Example:
Pressing A and / results in á.
Pressing Shift (or with CapsLock on), A and / results in Á.
To uninstall KinKey, close first the program by right-clicking its traybar3 icon, , and selecting Exit. Now just delete KinKey.exe itself and Kinkey’s gone. Similarly, if you want to move KinKey.exe close first the program.
Para desinstalar KinKey, cierra primero el programa haciendo click con el botón derecho en su icono a la derecha de la barra de tareas (al lado del reloj) y seleccionando Exit. Ahora simplemente borra Kinkey.exe y Kinkey ha sido desinstalado. Similarmente, cuando quieras mover el archivo KinKey.exe cierra primero el programa.
2006’s neologism is finally here:Googleseeding(also googletrapping or futuresearching or reversesearching), a beautiful idea by Jon Aquino: after an unsuccesful search, you post what you wanted to find and couldn’t in the hope of someone later finding the post and contacting you with the answer—or her simpathy.
And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15is the birth of a new art form.
How Gibsonian(or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.)Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).
Time is turning yet again: a beloved CIMAT teacher just send me one more of his one-every-24-months email, my 2nd out-of-school anniversary is around the corner (September 14), and today I found, via Joel1, that Rails just celebrated its second anniversary itself (yup, we were born to the web around the same date).
Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake. And have understanding for those conditioned by past disappointments to classify all that is new and ripe with passion to be uninteresting, to be all hype, no calories.
We’re past the point of infatuation, this is love, and love is inclusive. Happy birthday Rails, happy birthday Railers.
RSS
email
, and selecting Exit. Now just delete KinKey.exe itself and Kinkey’s gone. Similarly, if you want to move KinKey.exe close first the program.