| Alice Lakwena | 2 0 0 7 |
Jan 26 |
You know how reality is stranger than fiction, right? Yeah you think you do. Now you go read Alice Lakwena’s obituary. (Afterwards, if you can bear it, follow the link to the LATimes photo essay)
Death
28 posts under this tag.| Dear old Grandma June | 2 0 0 6 |
Dec 06 |
When I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
Natalie AngierNYT, ’The End of Faith’: Against Toleration
<insert wry, sad smile here>
| The Friedmans | 2 0 0 6 |
Nov 24 |
Milton Friedman WP, E died 9 days ago, November 16, and though I wanted to write about it that day, I dared not. I had mostly read only about him, his life, his reputation, and reverberations of his arguments; I had bought but not yet read two of his booksELZR; treasured a sentence (“The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”) found in the only thing I had read from him (the prologue to Hayek’s Road to SerfdomAM ); and deeply admired his son, David FriedmanELZR. In other words, I could only lay claim to love the idea of the idea of the man (2nd degree platonic love, common personal affliction). I knew I’d fall in love with him, I only needed time, and so I didn’t dare write an obituary that Thursday—but I’m gonna.
I’ve downloaded Friedman’s Free to Choose series (also available as a free stream) to watch as I read the sametitled bookAM and the first episode has already confirmed Friedman as a most worthwhile man. Far as I can gather from a sample of 1, the series consists of a brief, excellent documentary narrated by Friedman, followed by lively debate with a group of economists, politicians, and businessmen. As much as I’m lately having serious misgivings about arguing in general, it’s a pleasure to watch him passionately refute and belie his often downright frightening partners in debate (“It’s demagoguery, if you’ll pardon me, Michael Harrington…”).
Seeing those suited men from the seventies I couldn’t help but think of what future debates on the subject will be like. One of the intriguing things about Milton Friedman is how his ideas have been carried on by his children. Himself the greatest XXth century defender of capitalism, he still didn’t dare (?) take the leap to anarchism (he couldn’t have put it more bluntly at the debate from Free To Choose’s first episode: “I am not an anarchist. I am not in favor of eliminating government. I believe we need a government.”). His son, David Friedman ELZR, is on the other hand the most prominent anarchocapitalist alive, and David Friedman’s son, Googler Patri Friedman, wants to homestead the oceans in turn.
One can only wonder what little Tovar Miles Friedman will come up with.
| Fantastica Tela de Excelencia | 2 0 0 6 |
Nov 21 |
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).
| The Fountain | 2 0 0 6 |
Oct 31 |
A movie on death, by Darren AronofskyWP (!), spanning a millennium, ending in 2505 A.D, opening November 22. Damn, I’m gonna be waiting.
| Oodles of people and bytes | 2 0 0 6 |
Oct 31 |
I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:
As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of Video Invaders, more than four billion quarters had been dropped into Space InvadersWP games around the world—that’s roughly “one game per earthling.”
B. ShneidermanWP, Direct manipulation: A step beyond programming languages
Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.
More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.
I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.
Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.
The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:
[Starting around minute 3.25:] Most people are familiar with the concept that computers get faster all the time, they get about twice as fast every two years. It’s a law inside of computer science. But it turns out the same thing is happening with hard drives. So, around every thirteen months you can store as much information in the same amount of space on a hard drive, because the technology has advanced. Which means that every ten years you can store a thousand times as much information. So I thought I would again try and give you a sense of, in everyday form, how much content that is or how much this could change things. What this means is that if you consider a typical iPod, which today can hold tens of thousands of songs, [it] means that something the size of an iPod could actually, in the year 2012, carry an entire year of video on it, playing nonstop without repeats. By 2015 it could have all commercial music ever produced. Imagine buying an iPod where all the music is already loaded on it and you just decide what you want to access. By 2019 it could carry an entire lifetime of video in the palm of your hand, 85 years worth of video will be able to fit in an iPod. And by somewhere in the years 2020 you’ll be able to have every content ever created, sitting in the palm of your hand. Hhmmm…huuumm. Hhmmm…huuumm.
Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.
| Long, stupid night | 2 0 0 6 |
Oct 25 |
Almost got myself killed driving—too distracted—to the worst theater performance of my life. Saw a girlfriend’s mean true colors. Lost my car keys, panicked, found them later in my own satchel. Back home, found the little brother of one of my high school’s closest friends died tonight. Ran at 2AM to the wake, dazed, crashed into the neighbour’s pickup. So many old friends there, so adult now. And my friend impossibly tall, so beautiful, so sad—his little bro killed himself.
| A Guilty Pleasure | 2 0 0 6 |
Oct 16 |
As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures1. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.
My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.
The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li ZhenshengWP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News SoldierAM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:
More typical, and more tragic, was Wu Bingyuan, a technician accused of counterrevolutionary activities (a pamphlet). Li recalls that when Wu heard his sentence, death, “he looked into the sky and murmured, “this world is too dark”; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them.” The photographs show Wu being paraded through the streets of the city. Later, shackled and bound, he’s pictured at his place of execution. His eyes are still shut. We see him kneeling, back turned to the firing squad. His eyes are still shut. The final image is of Wu’s corpse. His eyes are still shut.
I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.
The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond AgeAM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.
So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.
1 And I indulge it at GoDaddy, which despite its overcommercial ethos is actually a decent, self-improving registrar.
2 Oh, the stupidity of MAZ’s (Zapopan’s Art Museum) website. Annoyingly flashy (two unlinked image (!) pop-ups welcome you), splashy, pointlessly animated, marketese driven, almost content-free (any drop of content that somehow escaped their stringent tests presented an uncopiable word at a time), unlinkable (!), unbackable… stupid. A case study of the atrocities possible (and oh so common) with Flash.
| Exhausta, no aburrida | 2 0 0 6 |
Aug 24 |
“I have this great illusion of dying exhausted rather than bored” has become of late something like Andrea’s personal slogan. I love the phrase—wrapped in downbeat words, it’s a souvenir of our own mortality that still manages to resolve in cheerful (maudlin) upbeatness—and so I thought it was time for a personal logo too. This came out after some fiddling and I quite like it, if I say so myself. (You will notice I’m still deep in my Bembo phase.) Tomorrow we’ll see if Andrea likes it.
The girl’s Sandman’s Death, which adds a nice layer of meaning (and copyright infringement for good measure) to the logo.