| 100% Cotton | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 10 |
This is some fiendishly impressive photoshop.
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Random Post!
| butt-crack is the new cleavage | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 08 |
“Roughly speaking, the thing we need a name for is a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.”
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Phrases for lazy writers in kit form
X is the new Y.
Original X: “pink”; original Y: “black”; commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt (original 1960s, popularized 1980s)
X. Y X.
Original X: “Bond”; Y: “James”; from the film Dr. No (1962) and all subsequent James Bond movies.
Dammit, Jim! I’m a X, not a Y!
Original X: “doctor”, original Y: “magician”; from a famous misquotation of a line from Star Trek. (c. 1966)
If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.[1]
See Eskimo words for snowWP.
X, M dollars. Y, N dollars. Z? Priceless.
Strapline from MasterCard advertising campaign (2000)
From Wikipedia’s List of Snowclones
Glenn Whitman finally dubbed the linguistic artifact a snowcloneWP (at 22:56:57 on Thursday, January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California, btw) and the meme just bit me. It just bit you.
(oh, and regarding the gratuitous snowclone I used for title: it’s true, but the jury’s still out on whether this is a passing Hollywood fancy or a giant step for butt-kind.)
| same here | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 08 |
(..if I end up in a cult led by Ted NelsonWP developing an interactive n-dimensional hypertext client, call my parents, ok?)
Lukas, comment on apophenia’s HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead
| The annotated work spaces pool | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 08 |
I knew I wasn’t the only workspace-obsessed geek out there: there’s an 800-photo-strong Flickr group of like-minded fellas!
| Skepticism | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 08 |
There’s an old story about two men on a train. One of
them, seeing some naked-looking sheep in a field, said,
“Those sheep have just been sheared.’; The other looked
a moment longer, and then said, “They seem to be—
on this side.” It is in such a cautious spirit that we
should say whatever we have to say about the workings
of the mind.
John Holt, How Children LearnWP
And since we’re at it, I might as well show off my other train-and-grazing-animals-through-the-window joke:
Two Englishmen are going by train. A conversation isn’t getting on. The train passes a meadow, on which a herd of sheeps pastures. One of the passengers says:
—1356.
The other man is surprised, but gives no answer. In some time the train passes another pasture. The first passenger says:
—1693.
His neighbor brakes and asks:
—Sir, our train moves at speed 60 miles per hour. How can you count so quickly?
—Oh, sir, it’s very simple! First I count a quantity of legs in a herd and then I divide this number by four.
All Elementary Mathematics, New method of fast calculus
| Why would a deaf be a good cook? | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 08 |
That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in MindfulnessAM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?
No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:
Above-average manual dexterity
Since most of the deaf speak sign languageWP and since sign language relies heavily on hands as the primary vehicle of expression, it is likely that the deaf develop above-average manual dexterity, which would sure come handy in many cooking tasks (say, chopping or cutting).
Flavor focusing
Since they have one less sense to distract them, they can focus more on flavors. The blind are known to have very refined senses of hearing and smelling, perhaps something similar happens to the deaf?
No stress in noisy environments
Kitchens can be pretty hectic environments, right?
Clear, quick note-writing (and reading)
It is likely that they have had to rely many times on writing clear, quick notes to strangers so they might have developed systems or experience for making them easily understood. That may come in handy in busy kitchens were a lot of information is passed on written notes (so that, say, orders don’t get all mixed up).
Different food cues
They may have discovered different cues for food quality or meal readiness (say, since they can’t hear milk burbling, they might smell when milk is just about to boil over).
Sign language is a noiseless language
So it might be better at restaurants where absolutely no noise is desired from the kitchen. (On the other hand, perhaps it’s hard for a deaf person to accurately assess just how much noise they inadvertently make with cooking instruments.)
More accurate people-reading
A deaf may have learned to rely more on other people’s body language and thus may be more accurate gauging whether people honestly liked her dishes or not.
Any thoughts?
| Starsea | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 07 |
A dolphin’s ability to invent novel behaviours was put to the test in a famous experiment by the renowned dolphin expert Karen Pryor. Two rough-toothed dolphins were rewarded whenever they came up with a new behaviour. It took just a few trials for both dolphins to realise what was required. A similar trial was set up with humans. The humans took about as long to realise what they were being trained to do as did the dolphins. For both the dolphins and the humans, there was a period of frustration (even anger, in the humans) before they “caught on”. Once they figured it out, the humans expressed great relief, whereas the dolphins raced around the tank excitedly, displaying more and more novel behaviours.
Anuschka de Rohan, Deep thinkers (via reddit)
| What is a decision? | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 06 |
It’s a tool to remove confusion!
Are you confused?
If so, then make the decision and let’s move on!
Are you confused?
If so, then make the decision and let’s move on!
| Conceptual Algebra | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 06 |
Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some.
Conceptualization is man’s method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one’s perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.
Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.”
The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.
Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Dr. Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief SummaryPDF
I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.)
| The Humane Interface | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 03 |
I’m knee-deep in Jef Raskin’s The Humane InterfaceAM. You’ve got to love a book on interface design so fundamental and visionary that it dares to ponder such deep digressions as, say,
There is but one “I” in each us. But to say that there is one personhood per human being begs the question. That is, why are there not multiple personhoods per mind-body ensemble?
Jef Raskin, The Humane InterfaceAM, p28
or take,
Studies of the brain performed with such techniques as magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI)WP and positron-emission tomography (PET)WP are helping researchers to elucidate the physical correlates of various mental activities. These technologies are mentioned because they may, at a future time, be directly helpful in the design—and, especially, in the testing—of interfaces. For example, there is an inverse correlation between a person’s localized glucose uptake—an indicator of how much energy the brain is using in a particular physical structure—and the ease with which that person uses a tested interface feature. Interface testing in the future may well make increasing use of direct measures of brain activity, but a further exploration of these methods lies outside the scope of this book.
Jef Raskin, The Humane InterfaceAM, p15
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