“criticism”

Zipping back and forth along Kottke’s Twitter some minutes ago I finally got Twitter. And I smiled. Like I smiled when I finally got Wikipedia (or blogs or Flickr or Facebook or Google or GMail)—a smile of wonderment at the great and totally unexpected.

His observations on it are spot on—no wonder he’s the web pundit par excellence.

Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la Maitena^{WP, IY}) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.

No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatía, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

Remember that wacky koan^ELZR about reading processors (“what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) and how it led to the idea of a text spacer (illustrated at length in this example)?

Well, I just found out about Live Ink by Walker Reading Technologies (via KurzweilAI.net’s newsletter, though it was slashdotted earlier) and realized people have been toying with the idea for over a decade now. Live Ink is clumsy marketese for what they also elegantly and precisely describe as visual-syntactic text formatting and these guys have not only coded it and are now marketing it, but they have already done some interesting homework, carrying on a year-long experiment where it allegedly improved reading proficiency. They offer a 30-day trial program implementing the technology called ClipRead (screencast) and though the interface is positively abysmal (why, god, why, must bad interfaces happen to good people?), it’s still very much worth downloading to play with.

Here below is a (fitting) paragraph from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando for comparison.

I like how they limited the spacing to linebreaks and indents; it’s a good starting constraint—it simplifies the task enormously and the results are still quite good. Highlighting the verb is also a clever touch—the nuance with the biggest syntactic payoff. Overall, while the simple flaws do stand out (because we’re such effortlessly gifted syntactic parsers), what surprises me is how decently it works, how the formatted text feels more accessible than the monolithic paragraph. At several points—interestingly, at some of the most usefully formatted parts—the algorithm at work seems oddly straightforward: nestedly indent and linebreak prepositions. Ahh… I’m itching to write some regex hack… Probably will write one in a couple of days, together with some handcrafted spacing of the above paragraph, just to see what we’re aiming at.

According to VentureBeat, meanwhile, the company is poised to taking the world any minute now. I doubt it. But they have given spacing (visual-syntactic text formatting) a broad hearing and there’s now a flurry of attention on it and, probably, on the broader idea of reading processors. There are bound to be some intriguing reinterpretations and extrapolations in the coming months.

Always have loved them. Always have obsessed about them. I treasure my favorites and revisit them again and again—I could barely think without them. I have a tag for them in this blog (here) and I almost started “a collection of beautiful definitions” to go with my eemadges website (“a collection of beautiful descriptions”).  A good definition more than justifies a whole book. A good book always has many good definitions in it. Good people always carry several good definitions with them—you just have to know how to tease them out.

And yet I seem to get into all kinds of tiresome, silly discussions when I try to share them with friends. Besides my not to be belittled incompetence as an explainer and my fabled monomanias, I believe a basic misunderstanding regarding their nature is at the heart of the matter.

You see, most people seem to never have moved over the idea of a definition as distilled truth—the one true essence which both captures everything that should be captured and leaves nothing that shouldn’t be left out. Definitions as platonic ideals—the perfect divine forms of which we only see shadows. The one golden fiber that runs trough all the thread.

The problem with this view, of course, is that it is crippling in its obsession with perfection. It intimidates and nurtures ridiculous expectations. If we had had to delay mathematics until we had a “perfect” definition of number we would still be waiting.

In their supposed perfection, definitions only become cages. And we easily get to the point when not only it isn’t believed that things like “love”, “mind”, “conscience”, or “happiness” could ever be defined (again, as if there was one true definition to rule them all), but the very possibility is viewed with dread. Dread that what once was magic and alive is cramped and crippled into a cage.

A much more interesting view of definitions, in my opinion, is to regard them as tools for thought, and as such, to value them on their usefulness and pick the one appropriate for the task at hand—platonic truth is only one of the many, many things we can ask of them. Most importantly, we ought to recognize that we need them—a brain unaided can do only so much. Thinking without them is like hammering with your bare fists—it’s painful and ineffectual. Yes, they are only one (verbal) kind of tool and we run the risk of starting to see everything as a nail, but they are still one of the most basic and powerful tools we have and they have so far been needlessly feared and vilified.

Definitions are semantic flashlights, casting light on some meaning corners, shadow on some others. That everything be alight is only one criteria (ultimately impossible; only emptiness can be shadelessly illuminated), there are others—that it be bright, that it be dim, that it illuminate (or obscure!) a particular patch, that it be pristinely white, that it tint its subjects with its color, that it be diffuse, that it be focused, that it be favorable, that it be unfavorable… We say, teasingly, that an American is a “man with two hands and four wheels” not because we believe that it happens to be a perfect embodiment of what it means to be an American, but because we believe it casts them in an interesting light.

So the effort to define “play” or “capital” or “freedom” is not to pin the butterfly down and put it in formaldehyde, it’s to find new ways to look at it, new sources of joy and understanding. Definitions do not diminish their subjects, they reveal them.

I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:

1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty. 2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a design^ELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy Bliss^WP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century. 3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

Early Saturday morning he was driving back home when he crashed with a light post and a tree. His body almost unscathed (so much so he was a perfect organ donor candidate), his head suffered massive trauma. Yesterday he died. So fragile, so stupid a death.

We knew each other since middle school, when we hung out often. We often did projects together and were at each other houses several times. He was frankly a weird guy, always strangely bothering girls, always quirkily, somewhat affectedly hyperactive. But underneath that you could talk to him and he would listen. And he was always smiling. They started calling him “Tope” (speedbump) back then, I don’t exactly remember why, but I always thought the later “Bamm bamm”^WP, which never quite caught on, was much more fitting. I always called him Edgar, for me “Tope” was the bumbling school persona, Edgar—Edgar Quirarte Munguía—was the keen, sensitive friend I glimpsed occasionally.

We then went to the same high school, where he stayed afterwards and majored in Computer Engineering last December. We met less often in the bigger high school and only rarely at college. Last time I got hold of him he was in the Netherlands but he arranged for her mother to give me the photo CD (that he had compiled for our graduation) with which I started this Flickr high school pool.

So he became for me one of those background people you ask for at parties or hear from mothers or expect to casually meet one day or perhaps, sadly but unconsciously, expect never to hear again. And yet, happily and just as unconsciously, you also expect them to live out lives, to love, to be happy—and you’re happy just to take them for granted, to have them glowing from afar.

Didn’t know what to do at his wake. Postponed the whole thing as long as I could. Angry, that such a stupid thing still happened. That we are still so fragile. That he was just starting to live, just majored. He liked doing websites, we might have worked together. He was always doing some strange business or other, we might have ended up doing something together. He liked hanging out with teachers, they adopted him. He was a good man, the youngest son, impossibly tall, childishly handsome. He may have been DUI that morning, so what? It’s still so stupid. Still so senseless.

I know now what I’m going to do. In Eliezer Yudkowsky’s spirit^ELZR, I’m donating a 100 dollars to the Singularity Institute, a fledgling organization to confront both the opportunity and the risk of a(n A.I.) singularity. They’re currently in the midst of a Matching challenge and a group of donors will match your contributions dollar for dollar until July 6th.

I remember my astonishment when I chanced on Marvin Minsky’s queer idea that there was nothing special about the 21st century for it to be the birth of a singularity—we could have been there by, say, 300 CE; centuries ago at any rate. We should have been.

So I’ll donate a 100 dollars today. And the next stupid time someone close to me dies I’ll donate 200. And 300 the next time. And so on. Till it’s over.

I really should know better than spending the better part of three days on a whim…

Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.

Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.

It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).

As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.