“favorites”

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.)

The test.

...Is how Peter Drucker^WP 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 Executive^AM.

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.

Web pages are written in HTML^WP but as they have become more and more complex, they now tend to be written, clientside, through Javascript^WP, which can manipulate and insert HTML. Google Images, for instance, uses Javascript to write the HTML that displays your image results.

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.

The lark itself takes gratefully (and rather surpisingly) only 16 paltry lines of Javascript code (highlighting thanks to Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones.):

function each(a, f) { for(var i=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(){

            var tag=document.createElement(label);

            each(arguments, function(arg){ 

                if(arg.nodeType)                                         tag.appendChild(arg);

                else if(typeof arg=='string' || typeof arg=='number')    tag.innerHTML+=arg;

                else for(var attr in arg){

                        if(attr=='style') for(var sty in arg[attr]) tag[attr][sty]=arg[attr][sty];

                        else tag[attr]=arg[attr];

                };

            });

            return tag;

        };

    });

and you can play with it right here, right now:

Instead of

now it’s,

And so on.

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

I read this in a great post, 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will, soon after he^WP died—which was, personally, surprisingly sad—SlaughterHouse 5^{WP, 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):

So the songpiece has lived inside me since and served as an interesting flashlight^ELZR. 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):

Always have loved them. Always have obsessed about them. I treasure my favorites and revisit them again and again—I could barely think without them. I have a tag for them in this blog (here) and I almost started “a collection of beautiful definitions” to go with my eemadges website (“a collection of beautiful descriptions”).  A good definition more than justifies a whole book. A good book always has many good definitions in it. Good people always carry several good definitions with them—you just have to know how to tease them out.

You see, most people seem to never have moved over the idea of a definition as distilled truth—the one true essence which both captures everything that should be captured and leaves nothing that shouldn’t be left out. Definitions as platonic ideals—the perfect divine forms of which we only see shadows. The one golden fiber that runs trough all the thread.

In their supposed perfection, definitions only become cages. And we easily get to the point when not only it isn’t believed that things like “love”, “mind”, “conscience”, or “happiness” could ever be defined (again, as if there was one true definition to rule them all), but the very possibility is viewed with dread. Dread that what once was magic and alive is cramped and crippled into a cage.

Definitions are semantic flashlights, casting light on some meaning corners, shadow on some others. That everything be alight is only one criteria (ultimately impossible; only emptiness can be shadelessly illuminated), there are others—that it be bright, that it be dim, that it illuminate (or obscure!) a particular patch, that it be pristinely white, that it tint its subjects with its color, that it be diffuse, that it be focused, that it be favorable, that it be unfavorable… We say, teasingly, that an American is a “man with two hands and four wheels” not because we believe that it happens to be a perfect embodiment of what it means to be an American, but because we believe it casts them in an interesting light.

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.

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…