“droll”
102 posts under this tag.
Where, but the web, would you find someone like Oliver Steele? This ain’t no metaphor. That name was a link. I’m not talking about Oliver Steele the person, I haven’t met him (though I apparently am 1-degree of separation from him; weird, that). I’m not talking about the sweating, walking, pinchable, space-and-time-and-flesh-bound avatar, I’m talking about his online persona. And either I’ve gotten crazy enough or technology has advanced enough that I’m ready to treat Oliver Steele —the link, his blog, words, diagrams, code, and further media— as a person by its own merits.
And, boy, is he an interesting guy:
The world is changing, music is changing, drugs are changing, even men and women are changing. One thousand years from now there’ll be no guys and no girls, just wankers. Sounds great to me.
Trainspotting, screenplay by John Hodge, based on the novel by Irvine Welsh
Head out to The Sex Singularity: When Machines Surpass Human Hotness for a fascinating scifi glimpse at our impending sexdoll future. Written in the sparse but suggestive Strossian infodump style, the piece is a rambling scrapbook of future news, some of them wonderfully imaginative: (via BoingBoing)
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court rules for the defendant in Easy vs. Springfield Board of Education, affirming the right of anyone to publicly walk in the controversial robotic manner that’s gaining popularity among some teenage girls. In the dissenting opinion, Justice Scalia writes, “We have come to a time when this unnaturally affected and clearly recognizable gait can only be interpreted as an open invitation to sex, which makes walking in this manner an obscene expression with no legal place in a publically-funded educational institution. The gravity of this obscenity is doubled when the expression comes from a young woman who has not yet reached the statutory age of consent.”
A wonderfully clever contraption by David Seah: The Procrastinators clock. For those who set their clocks ahead to stand on their toes only to become habituated after a while, a randomly ahead clock. Web & desktop versions available.
Ah, clocks were an early obsession of mine (see for instance this color clock), earlier than calendars…
Apropos of Elie Wiesel, I’m in the strange process of choosing a name for myself that Americans can pronounce. Most automatically call me “ely” (ee-lie, rhymes with fry) but I’m not a big fan. I think I’m going to go with “elie” (eh-lee, rhymes with jelly), which I like the sound of. Plus, I totally dig girlboy names.
A fun thing, renaming oneself. We should do it more often.
This just in (via KurzweilAI.net), I can hardly believe it myself:
[..a scientific team] has discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers found they were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to turn the flies’ homosexual behavior on and off within hours.
”Homosexual courtship might be sort of an ‘overreaction’ to sexual stimuli,”..
Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.
But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.
The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.
After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.
Que puta entre sus podres chorrearia
por entre incordios, chancros y bubones
a este hijo de tan multiples cabrones
que no supo que nombre se pondria?
Salvador Novo en Un Marof, poema que forma parte de Sátira, su colección de diatribas
podre = pus
incordio = tumor
chancro = ulcera sifilitica
bubon = ulcera sifilitica, particularmente en las ingles
Our trusted old friend very, I just found out, comes straight from the Latin VERus, truth! It’s the same root that gives us VERitable, VERacity, VERism, VERdict, (“truth-speaking”), or the Spanish VERdad. Every single very you’ve gushed has been a truly in disguise. When you say, say, “Damn Ivonne, you’re very hot!”, what you’re really saying across millennia to Yvonne is that she’s truly hot. Which she is. Now aren’t you glad you read this blog religiously?
I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.
After days of shopping around town (after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.
Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,
how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?
The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.
This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
-Anonymous
By focusing on the number of individuals (genders) required for reproduction we can distinguish species into three classes: those that require one individual (self-reproducers), those that require two (pair reproducers), and those that require three or more (group reproducers). The question is thus: are there group reproducer species? why?
We usually refer to the first class as asexuals, the second as sexuals, and it is a major puzzle of evolutionary biology to account for the existence of the latterD, WP. Like the bee that fluttered in the face of our best aerodynamic theories, sexuals mate impudently in the face of our best evolutionary theories.
But sexuals exist. Everywhere, in fact, at our order of magnitude. So we can’t just sweep pair reproducers aside and carry on our happy, simple theorizing of a self-reproducing world.
Asking the group reproducer question, on the other hand, I’ve been surprised by people to whom it comes as a revelation that the class is obviously empty. I don’t think it is. Obvious, that is. Life on earth does some pretty
fucked up stuff, natural gangbanging doesn’t strike me as particularly eccentric. Asimov describes a group reproducer species in great detail in The God Themselves and neither the author nor I (before) ever thought the point merited any explanation.
And if there are no group reproducers (or precious few) their non-existence (or extreme dearth) is as much a fact in need of explanation as their existence (or abundance).
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