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In this sense: In the physical world, perhaps one of the biggest, most basic hurdles to overcome for any creature (above plant) is navigating space. Whatever you may want (eat, talk, watch, mate..) you have to be there first. That’s the tyranny of space, a tyranny that lingers despite telecommunications easing it to a degree we can’t really imagine now.
But technology has uncovered a new hurdle, even more basic in some ways, that we hadn’t even glimpsed some decades ago (you don’t much care about space when you live in a pen). The new hurdle is interface—a device’s how, its ways of interaction, what you have to wrestle with to get things done through it. Whatever you may want to do through technology (moving, watching, writing, browsing, talking, killing,...) you have to overcome the interface first. The need is more acutely felt the more plastic and dynamic the technology. The web ranks right up there. The information superhighway delivered its promise of abolishing space but the freedom has shifted the load from our legs to our brains, from space to interface. The challenge is no longer motive, it’s cognitive.
Consider malls. Besides modern comforts and breathtaking opulence, the single main thing they have going for them, their reason for being, is that they get stuff closer. They ease space. That’s also why similar stores cluster together, closeness is so valuable for customers that they force owners to set shop right next to the competition. Big box stores are the climax of contiguity.
A very similar thing happens in the web under interface constraints. Beyond critical-mass, Amazon, eBay, and the myriad vertical marketplaces (etsy is a good one) thrive because there’s a nontrivial number of interface details you have to tiresomely learn, divine, or settle if you go somewhere else. And these details are particularly painful in shopping because the whole process is staggeringly complex: it involves a lot of searching, browsing, foraging, comparing, digesting, authenticating, etc.
But in other areas the reality of the tyranny of interface is just as real. Wikipedia, we’ve now come to realize, is useful chiefly because it provides a single unified interface to knowledge. The blog is one of the most significant web innovations in recent years and at bottom it’s just a genre for the efficient exploitation of interface, uniforming it, streamlining it, adapting content interfaces to the new realities of the web, kind of what convenience stores did for space and cars. Heck, even search engines, interface-saving devices in a way (the search engine is the modern steam engine, directories are human-powered transport), have nontrivial interfaces all their own, as I’ve attested recently trying out torrent engines (mininova, torrentSpy, and isoHunt are my favorites).
You could have once said that downloading was the web’s equivalent of moving but broadband quickly made that friction negligible. In our current web, figuring out interface is the new moving. Interface is the new space.
Charles S. Peirce has been called by Britannica “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced.” Bertrand Russell considered him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and the greatest American thinker ever,” and Karl Popper goes all out, seeing him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.”
I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.
How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?
For reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned within an icon.
OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”SOURCE
Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better (or shorter) intro than the logical reasoning pedia.
And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.
What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.
Mexico’s 2006 GDP Structure
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.
As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.
In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.
Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?
The second course, “shrimp and tarragon macaroons”, sang out loud. Clumsy as it sounds, it was among the most beautiful, thoughtful, well-composed dishes I’ve ever had. Three little white puffs sat on a stark white plate; each puff consisted of two meringue-like halves held together with a smear of reduced and pureed tarragon. The puffs had an etheral texture—with a slight pressure from the tongue, they melted—and a haunting, intense shrimp flavor that the tarragon complemented perfectly. Imagine those Indonesian shrimp puffs made by a classically-trained pastry chef, and you’re halfway there.
Beautiful? Thoughtful? Well-composed? Ratatouille did much to made me remember how much I’ve always enjoyed food, but Kandinsky in the Kitchen, the abovequoted review of the New York restaurant WD-50 floored me. I had never read food described with such words before, nor had I seen dishes more beautiful than most paintings, nor had I been so enthralled with so original a combination of ingredients (how about a dish made of cured hamachi, lemon leather, cilantro sorbet and paprika ?).
Another great review of the restaurant by The Gourmet Pig, made me realize the restaurant is part of a much wider movement: molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. Apparently they can now compress watermelon to give it the texture of raw tuna.
The pursuit of beauty and meaning will never end, will it?
Who would’ve guessed it? While chess playing programs grabbed all the headlines, the real world changing app was solving crossword puzzles.
(Google stock recently passed $600 for the first time btw.
It begun at $85 a share, in August 2004.)
...Is how Peter DruckerWP drives it home. “It” here was not originally the free market, though what a great defense for it it makes, no? Drucker was illustrating, rather, his brave belief that strong people always have strong weaknesses, that it is foolish to concern oneself with what a man cannot do instead of what he can, that the man who “leaves least to be desired” is invariably the mediocrity, that one builds on strengths, not on weakness. Moreover, that making strength productive and weaknesses irrelevant is “the unique purpose of organization.” A great short book, The Effective ExecutiveAM.
Been going to spinning daily for several weeks now (and when I say daily, it’s daily daily, not improv’d daily daily). Lately, however, I’ve gone back to hacker sleep and it has noticeably affected my stamina—meaning I get exhausted just mounting the bike and that it’s only minutes before I start mumbling silent insults to that pregnant teacher/bitch who just bosses you around without tasting her own medicine. The interesting thing is that just near the end of the class, when I’m close to fainting and have to cheat and lower the resistance (and when I’m just about to punch that preggo), we relax for a while and I drink some water, some plain old water. And… it takes better than it has ever, ever, tasted before. It lingers in my mouth for a while, because my breath is too fast and I’m choking, and—at least for the first sips—it has texture, I swear it! It’s probably only my congealed saliva mixing with the fresh water (yummy!) but I have sometimes felt—clearly, intensely—as if I was chewing a rare, delicious steak (a Cambalache one!). Oh, the mirage! It’s probably just my subconscious rebelling against my last months of vegetarianism but, boy, if you could only taste it.
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