“criticism”

Local Red Cross ads¹ (there are several versions of’em) are really good this year:

They make me think of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sad, true words: “Death hurt us, so we will unmake Death. Let that be the outlet for our anger, which is terrible and just.”

¹ Their website’s flashy welcome is, alas, hideous.

I found this curious typographical layout in Ambient Findability and since then I’ve been trying to imitate it wherever I’ve been able to get away with it.

I know it seems like nothing special but I’ve come to find it strikingly elegant—specially when compared with what it might have looked had it been done in today’s more prevalent dummy bulletpoints. The laziness that such bulletpoints encourage would have probably led us to this:

Had we been lucky, there would be labels to each bulleted paragraph but they would still be obscured within the text and the typejunk bulletpoints:

And that’s why I like this layout so much: it lets you do without meaningless bulletpoints and it forces you, as a writer, to create a meaningful headline for each paragraph that greatly enhances reading speed and comprehension. I don’t know if it has a name yet but meaningful bulletpoints sounds good to me.

This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.

Wrote this eons ago but I just found it yesterday. Got a sudden urge to do some minor tweaking and re-show it to the world. I know it’s oversimplified and naive but I still find it interesting to play with.

There are also some interesting thoughts on the intersection (and contrast) of art, design, decoration, and advertising on A List Apart’s The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes writeup.

That’s your run-of-the-mill —even white-bread (blue liquid… how intriguing)— kind of paragraph, ne? I thought so too but then there was that word,

and it casts the whole scene into a wholly different light, doesn’t it? It wasn’t evident at first but that’s not the omniscient narrator speaking—it’s our lovingly perverted BDSM geek protagonist, Manny, painting the world with his colors.

And that’s what I mean when I say Accelerando is dense: it is chock-full of such all-important words. Since they are generally very technical or speculative, and since Stross has the habit of studding them like raisins into any given sentence, you’ll be tempted to just skip over them. Don’t.

Siempre me ha gustado su estilo pero no suelo leer mucho a Germán Dehesa. Ayer que lo hice me sorprendi. La Gaceta del Charro, su columna en Mural, es tan evidentemente un blog! Es cierto que toda columna periodistica es, bien vista, nada mas que un blog atrapado en el papel pero la de Dehesa es cosa aparte. Irrepresiblemente personal y opinionated, plagada de in-jokes y referencias personales, es un filtro de temas muy diversos, como todo buen blog, pero el hilo conductor de todos ellos es siempre visible: Dehesa mismo.

...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?

I’ve been pretty uncomfortable these days with this blog.

I understand that and yet I want a change of cage. It may be foolish, but so what? It may not. I want something more à la Gelernter’s information beams. I want my blog to be a stream-of-consciousness. The textstream to the right of this blog has been one of my favorite and most active sections lately but I’m sure most simply miss it. It feels odd there, buried at the side, violating some deep semantic principle, overcrowding the already overcrowded sidebar.

These days, even pigeons have blogs. They provide them with electronic recording equipment and their output is automatically fed into a blog.  —Wait! Pause for a minute to wonder how profoundly weird that is. Done? Go!—  In a way I’m like that, sometimes I’m but a text pigeon, reporting what I find amid the words. And I’m proud of that.

“Y mi mente ha parido nostalgia por no verte ya… Hasta en sueños he creído tenerte devorándome, y he mojado mis sábanas blancas recordándote”. Extraña esta cancion de Lalo Rodriguez, Ven devórame otra vez. Es tan burda que es chida in a campy sort of way. De cualquier forma, es destacable por el solo hecho de ser una canción inmensamente popular (hasta yo la conozco) que menciona (aunque algo eufemísticamente) la masturbación y los “sueños húmedos”.

A pesar de sus terriblemente anacronistas definiciones y su interfaz decimononica, el diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española es utilisimo y le agradezco sinceramente a la Real Academia que lo tenga en linea gratuitamente. Aclarado eso, el pet peeve que me mueve hoy a escribir sobre ella es su extraña fijacion con los acentos. A pesar de que dispone, sensatamente, de una busqueda por aproximacion que me permite buscar palabras sin tener que escribir acentos, me restrega siempre en la cara el no haberlos escritos. Por ejemplo, si yo busco “redaccion”, me manda a una pagina de redireccionamiento en la que me dice que “La palabra redaccion no está registrada en el Diccionario.” y procede a darme una larga lista de un link, obviamente, “redacción”. Es decir, me fuerza a aceptar conscientemente una opcion que se da, de sobra, por entendido. Parecera poco y hasta me rei la primera que lo vi pero ya por la sexagesima vez que ocurre empieza a perder lo gracioso.

Claro que quizas todo sea solo pesimo usability design de su parte, pero conociendo a la Academia lo dudo, a mi me huele a pura mala leche linguistica, a esa sabida preferencia real-academica de la prescripcion sobre la descripcion.