My father, who is very fond of sayings and good phrases(a formist!), surprises one often with some bizarre and rather tactless answer that is however perfectly appropriate. “Stop looking for five legs in a dog1...”, he admonishes, tired of pointless dabbling, pausing to smile and lull you, ”...or tits in a hen”.
A while ago, building a huge and pretty warehouse, he had to endure a terribly inefficient contractor that was however friends with the client. He had a excuse for everything, a but, an it wasn’t my fault, a there’s no way, an it can’t be done. “Look, when one doesn’t know how to fuck…”, interrupts him my father one day, tired of delays and pretexts, “balls get in the way”.
Mi padre, que es muy dado a los refranes y las buenas frases(a formist!), sorprende de vez en cuando con respuestas mas bien bizarras y de poco, digamos, tacto que sin embargo suelen ser perfectamente atinadas. “No le busques tres pies al gato…,” te reganha, cansado de necios devaneos, pausando para sonreir y arrullarte, ”...ni chichis a las gallinas.”
Hace poco, construyendo una bodega enorme y muy linda, tuvo que aguantar un contratista ineficiente pero amigo del cliente. Para todo tenia una excusa, un pero, un no fue mi culpa, un no hay manera, un no se puede. “Mira, al que no sabe coger,” lo interrumpe mi padre un buen dia, cansado de retrasos y pretextos, “hasta los huevos le estorban.”
fn1. “Managers thinking about accounting issues should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite riddles: `How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?’ The answer: `Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg’.” Warren BuffetWQ, alleged.
Which is in itself quite wonderful news (artificial languages need all the help they can get), but the Globe and Mail article is also one of the best introductions to the language I’ve seen, so do check it out—web version or print scan—if you’re interested in Toki Pona(and if you speak Spanish, don’t forget to check out my Spanish manual on it).
A 16-line hack to make the JS DOM API a tad more humane.
...absolutely amazing. I’ve yet to find a smaller and yet more astounding example of how you can encapsulate functionality within JavaScript and create brand new APIs on the fly.
Web pages are written in HTMLWP but as they have become more and more complex, they now tend to be written, clientside, through JavascriptWP, which can manipulate and insert HTML. Google Images, for instance, uses Javascript to write the HTML that displays your image results.
Yes, it’s roundabout, but it’s due to the nature of the languages: Javascript does stuff, HTML displays stuff. When you want the browser to do things (instead of merely displaying dumbly what it receives) and when these things themselves involve a lot of displaying, you end up writing HTML through Javascript.
It’s a little like writing French through English (André went to Marie and said: ”Bonjour! Ça va, ma chérie?”) and just as frustrating, particularly because you sometimes have to narrate whole scenes in French (pidgin tends to be painfully verbose) and your English self is left completely in the dark—so you end up naming things in both French and English and it gets as ugly as you can imagine.
HyperScript is a bizarre and quixotic attempt to write French in English; that is, HTML in Javascript. Basically, you do what went on in the Norman conquest of EnglandWP: you anglicize as many French words as you can; that is, you turn into Javascript as many HTML words as you can.
The lark itself takes gratefully (and rather surpisingly) only 16 paltry lines of Javascript code (highlighting thanks to Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones.):
functioneach(a, f) { for(vari=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) }; each('a big blockquote br b center code div em form h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 hr img iframe input i li ol option pre p script select small span strong style sub sup table tbody td textarea tr ul u'.split(''), function(label){ window[label]=function(){ vartag=document.createElement(label); each(arguments, function(arg){ if(arg.nodeType) tag.appendChild(arg); elseif(typeofarg=='string' ||typeofarg=='number') tag.innerHTML+=arg; elsefor(varattrinarg){ if(attr=='style') for(varstyinarg[attr]) tag[attr][sty]=arg[attr][sty]; elsetag[attr]=arg[attr];
};
}); returntag;
};
});
and you can play with it right here, right now:
Test Area:
The translation between HTML and Hyperscript is straightforward, where you would have written
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
El tigre tiene que cazar, el pajaro que volar; el hombre tiene que sentarse y pensar, “Por que, por que, por que?” El tigre tiene que dormir, el pajaro regresar a su nido; el hombre tiene que decirse que ha comprendido.
I read this in a great post, 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will, soon after heWP died—which was, personally, surprisingly sad—SlaughterHouse 5WP, AM has got to be among the best books I’ve read. Anyway, I’m still fascinated by the phrase and particularly by the interpretation offered there (which seems obvious and inevitable now, but you never know so maybe you—virgin you—may want to make your own unadulterated meaning before reading the following):
[A] koan of sorts from Cat’s Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity, albeit from a removed, humoring, alien viewpoint. Man’s just another animal, it implies, with his own peculiar instincts, and his own way of shutting them down. This is horrifically cynical when considered closely: If people deciding they understand the world is just another instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. At the same time, there’s a kindness to Bokonon’s belief that this is all inevitable and just part of being a person. Life is frustrating and full of pitfalls and dead ends, but everybody’s gotta do it.
So the songpiece has lived inside me since and served as an interesting flashlightELZR. Hope it’s useful to you too.
Oh, and here’s an interesting elaboration on it, from, of all places, a Grey’s Anatomy writer (yup, I’ve become such a rabid fan I gobble up the writers’ blog…shut up already):
Real life—where terrible things happen to us, to our friends, and to the world around us without warning or explanation. And we’re human beings, most of us, so when terrible things happen, we want to know the reasons why. We want the suffering to mean something. And when the meaning isn’t immediately evident, we assign meaning as a way of comprehending, if not controlling, what seem like random acts of terribleness.When bad things happen, we make sense of them by calling them tests. Tests we either pass or fail before moving on to the next level of experience, but ones we hopefully learn from either way.
A Fair Ellen(noun)could be a roundabout, inefficient, sometimes extravagant and always pathetic behavior to get around a bug in a product. Particularly when it lingers on long after said bug has been fixed. From Bruce Tognazzini’s inspired collie metaphor.
Albert Payson Terhune, the author who taught the world to love collies (Lad, A Dog , et. al.), once wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post (March 26, 1927 issue) about his beloved collie, Fair Ellen.
Terhune explained that Fair Ellen.. had been born blind, but learned to live quite happily, except for one small quirk:
If I stand beside her kennel yard and call to her to come and be put up, she does not approach me in a straight line, but along an imaginary path which has perhaps six or seven twists and turns.
This used to puzzle me, until one day I saw her run against a wheelbarrow which one of the men had left in the open patch of fairway between the house and her kennel. That was three years ago. Never since then does she come to that spot without making a careful detour around the imaginary barrow.
Her twisting course, along all familiar bits of ground, is due to her effort to skirt some box or rake or other obstruction which at some times she has struck against. She has preternatural memory for such things and for the precise spot in which once they were.
Users do the same thing. Users’ behavior will not necessarily change..[when the bug that brought that behavior into being is fixed]. Once people have learned something no longer works, once they have formed a new habit, no matter how inefficient that habit is, they tend to perpetuate it.
That multimedia brings subjects “alive” is a painfully false cliche these days. For me at least. Maybe I’m just disappointed by the yawning gap between promise and (often gratuitous) delivery. Maybe I’m still too word-centric.
Thus my surprise with this animation of that most famous embroidered account of the 1066 Norman invasion of England (→), the Bayeaux TapestryWP. It’s so simple and yet so stunningly effective. (Though of course I have a sweet spot for animated tapestries…)
I can’t watch it without wondering what its weavers at the turn of the first millennium would say if they could look at their creations now.
(via Very Short List, which neatly sums up the work with a Venn diagram—as is their intriguing custom—, )
“Hello, how are you?” being written in Dasher. (Hit escape to halt animation.)
A text-entry interface for the tetraplegic, it’s like nothing you’ve seen. Not only does using it have the same rush and exhilaration of playing SonicWP, it is also unbelievably efficient. And again, sheer fun.
It will take you some 5 minutes to get the hang of it (not out of difficulty, out of profound weirdness) but believe you me, you won’t regret it. Read the quick, 3-page explanation and try the Java version in-browser or download it. It’s free software and there are localized versions in many languages.
If such deep novelty, such striking unrealityELZR lies in something as mundane as text-entry, what wonders lie yon in the craft of interface design?
Visual programming has been a perennial pipe dream of mine and just some three months ago the MIT Media Lab unveiled the best embodiment so far of my vague and unspecified dreams. It’s called Scratch and it’s meant to introduce children to computing by giving them easy, programmatic means to media manipulation.
The brilliant breakthrough has been to Lego-fy programming, making control blocks actually, well, blocks, and turning programming into block stacking. Yes, it’s messy and you have to fumble around for blocks but it’s visual, incredibly intuitive, and—get this—syntax error free (since blocks have shapes and will only fit in ways that make syntactic sense).
It was scary, you know, when I first knew about Scratch, just some days after it was launched, my evangelizing streak came back with a vengeance and I felt this strange calling to go and teach it somewhere, wherever. Here was finally an easy way to show “normal” people what programming was. Here it is.
Here some definitions—some funny, but all out of sadness. «Whimsical» to be (mostly) understood in the not so standard sense of “subject to our whims”—of course.
Reality: that which is not whimsical.
Technology: that which makes Reality whimsical.
Technologist: that who believes Realitycan and should be whimsical.
Hacker: a Technology maker.
Body: that which is whimsical and its manifold possibilities.
RSS
email
