“favorites”

Today I acquired a newfound respect for journalists and a new reminder of just how easy it is to fool oneself. More details will follow but this note tonight is for me, I don’t want to forget this moment.

What a wonderful surprise! Reading about Google’s Marissa Mayer —I have this obsession in which I obsess for days about certain people— I found out she got a BS in Symbolic Systems in Stanford. That’s right, there is such a thing! I’m shaking with excitement. I’m reading the career description online but my eyes just keep pushing ahead. It’s a weird mixture of “artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and symbolic logic.” Even “human-computer interaction” is thrown into the mix. I mean, a degree with symbol in its title! Could you possibly ask for more?

All the more reason to visit Stanford this May 13!

Will we (or rather, will our avatars) wear words when fully-immersive, massively multiplayer, 3d computer environments really start to take off?

Will it look like Matrix green code view? Will future fashionistas argue endlessly about the merits of serif vs. sans-serif? Bembo vs. Helvetica? Bodoni vs. Garamond? Will a future girl flaunting her sexuality wear a top bikini made of nothing but two rings out of the word “perky” barely concealing her nipples¹? Will you wrap yourself in lyrics? In short stories? In emo text? Will I wear Borges’s while you wear Charlie Stross’s? While she wears Melville’s? Will you wear your favorite quotes as bracelets? As necklaces? As belts? Will HarperCollins be the new Gap?

Before you nonchalantly dismiss this idle rumination as the work of a feverishly formist mind, I ask you to pause for a moment and look around at today’s ubiquituous (and perpetually crammed) IM nick-names and personal messages, email and forum signatures, “witty” t-shirts, and the like.

The review itself is long and, though interesting at times, overall not that good, but there was a quiet, demure paragraph in it that kept me laughing the whole (did I say it was long?) review. Today I reread the paragraph in my notes and I’ve had a smile in my face ever since. This one’s a keeper:

Here’s an excellent formist intro to international auxiliary languages^WP written by Eward Sapir^WP himself (one of the most influential American linguists of the past century) in 1925:

There are many, many highlights to be made. Here’s four

1. The “difficult and subjective concept” of the richness of a language, the “richness of connotations” (that phrase alone was worth the price of admission). This was precisely what I was getting at in my badly-received post On the Language of this Blog.
2. “It is true that English is not as complex in its formal structure as is German or Latin, but this does not dispose of the matter. The fact that a beginner in English has not many paradigms to learn gives him a feeling of absence of difficulty, but he soon learns to his cost that this is only a feeling, that in sober fact the very absence of explicit guide-posts to structure leads him into all sorts of quandaries.. The simplicity of English in its formal aspect is.. really a pseudo-simplicity or a masked complexity.”
3. His dazzling insight that the problem of finding an adequate international auxiliary language is really the problem of how best to “symbolize thought.” Wow. Just wow.
4. ”A common allegiance to a form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.” ‘Nuff said.

Y’know, just between you and me, when the time is ripe—that is, in around 10 years—I would love to plunge myself in language: I would love to speak (and think in) Esperanto, Japanese, German, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Sweddish, Arab, Hindi… —Oh! Were languages not the harsh mistresses that they are! I’d love to work (and solve!) the problem of automatic machine translation (which, according to Kurzweil, will be the last task left for AI to emulate, the crucial last stepping stone to consciousness). I’d love to read both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I’d love to construct all sorts of constructed and auxiliary languages. I’d love to write in Esperanto and join la movado. I’d love to become a Wiktionary super-freak. I’d love to write language textbooks. I’d love to create a compiler and write programming languages. I’d love (in a most masochistic kind of way) to be a professional translator and translate a novel. I’d love to study some serious linguistics. I’d love to do advanced algebra. I’d love to become a Lisp super-freak or, quite oppositely, think in assembly code. I’d love to understand Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. I’d love to work in the semantic web. I’d love to create software to help one read and absorb written information (we have software to write, word processors, so why don’t we have software to read?).

Oh well, please excuse the future lapse.

1. A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
2. A form is a linguistic pattern.
3. A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
4. Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
5. It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
6. Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
7. Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
8. Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
9. Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
   Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.

   I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
10. Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
11. Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
12. Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
13. Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.

14. We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.

    [...]

    A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.

    The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine)
15. Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.

    What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?

    “Make me one with everything.”

    * * *
    
    When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”

    Formists just want to have fun.

16. A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
17. Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
18. Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
19. Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
20. Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
21. A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugar^WP .”
22. It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
23. This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
24. All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.

    Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!

    Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]

    Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain
25. Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.

A few months ago my family got a new van, a Windstar. It’s a pretty good car and, being a luxe edition, has many interesting gizmos. My favorite one is a sensor that starts screeching when you get too close to something in the back.

It is not its human-augmentation side what fascinates me the most, but the possibilities that such a sensor suggests. Why not go crazy and make this a gizmo that truly represents space, in all its subtleties, through sound?

I envision a somewhat thick, solid, black band that you would close around your head, completely covering your eyes and your ears; somewhat like a headband worn too low.

This gadget, the soundscape (scape for short), will simply translate space into sound. Let’s imagine the simplest case. A soundscaper standing in the center of a medium-sized, empty, white, circular room. What would that sound like? Well, as the soundscaper turns, it’d probably be a soft hum in all directions; medium-volumed to represent a medium distance; high-pitched to represent the whiteness of the walls; equal in all directions to parallel the physical reality.

If we increase the diameter of this circular room, the walls move farther away, and thus the (sound) volume will decrease; if we decrease the diameter, the walls come closer and the volume increases. If this room now had a door and it were open, the soundscaper would notice it as it turns around to “hear” the room: it would be a sudden sharp decrease in the volume.

If we now put a black square somewhere in the room close to the soundscaper, it’d sound like a squared speaker the size of the black square, emitting a somewhat loud, low-pitched noise.

Can you imagine it? Yeah, who knows if it would have a practical use (assist the blind?) and it’d probably never be advanced enough to allow you to, say, “read” a book through pure sound, but it sure’d be interesting to use it.

Of course, there’s no reason to stop at sound, maybe space can be represented through smell too (and maybe, just maybe, through taste). We always think of space as something fundamentally visual but that’s only because we’re all so visually biased. There are other possibilities.

And yet, sight is probably the best way to represent space. It’s by far the sense with the biggest bandwith. So much, in fact, that I think at least two other senses (hearing and smelling) can be merged into it. Thanks to sci-fi movies we’re all familiar now with some sort of thermal vision—in which red represents hotness, blue coldness. Hearing and smelling could be added in a similar fashion. Sound could be represented as an overlay of 3d waves expanding rapidly through space. The sound of birds chirping outside would look like a pond under a light rain, only in 3d. And smell could be represented as an overlay of little colored dots. A nubile girl passing by would leave a rainbow cloud of dots behind her.

But the soundscape still sounds the most daring, maybe because the possibility of replacing sight is as frightening as it is exciting. Just imagine, sound as light!

Update August 24, 2006: ABC News’ Humans With Amazing Senses: Blind People Who Interact With the World Like Dolphins and Bats

Update April 24, 2007: Wired’s Mixed Feelings: See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). I blogged about it here.

I’m fascinated and disgusted in equal measure with a recent Village Voice cover article: “Do you wanna kiss me?” (How New York’s women are wising up to The Game’s pickup tips). Fascinated because what it describes is such an interesting, natural, and inevitable step for men to take in relationships; disgusted because it seems to betray the all-important honesty upon which conversation relies. The rightly famous cluetrain manifesto is about the need for companies to speak with an honest, human voice; I guess we’ll soon need one for people too (but then again, what could be more positively human than artifice?). Magda, from William Gibson’s delightful Pattern Recognition, comes to mind:

And now, after reading the Voice article—let alone reading The Game, for whatever purpose—, how can you not act differently? How can you help from negging, from creating a yes-ladder or a false time constraint? (Or from recognizing them?) I now know that the style of conversation I’ve evolved over the years, mostly unconsciously, is quite neggish; doesn’t being aware of what one’s doing changes the very nature of the act? “Being natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

Perhaps Dolly is right. These techniques may be nothing but conversation cosmethics (or rather, prosthetics) and I can surely appreciate their playful side, the way they’re “the grown-up version of hair-pulling on the playground.” But I’m still wary—it’s conversation we’re talking about here and there are few things I value more.

Oh, and I’m well aware that at least some parts of the article have been fabricated, as rumored first in Gawker, and then acknowledged by the Voice and the author himself. This is a shame (not least because of the wimpy apology by the author) but the article is still interesting and worth reading; that’s why I made a verbatim copy of it in my website.

Haciendo mandados, me toco platicar hoy con una señora que dirige un cibercafe mientras los dos haciamos fila. Le pregunte sobre su negocio y dos cosas me llamaron mucho la atencion. La primera es que un cibercafe gasta mas, mucho mas, en luz que en el internet mismo. Mientras que esta señora pagaba 650 pesos por internet al mes, la luz le salia de 2,600 a 3,000 pesos—casi 5 veces mas. Asi que lo que uno paga es mas bien la electricidad, no el internet. En vez de cibercafes deberian pues llamarlos electrocafes.

La otra cosa que me intereso fue que los cibercafes locales se aliaron para fijar el precio minimo por una hora de internet (12 pesos, si mal no recuerdo). Que, segun eso, a menos no les sale. Lo que no alcanzo a entender es porque necesitan imponer un precio minimo. Si alguien lo da a ese precio y no le sale, pues alla su problema si quiere regalar su dinero, no? Me recuerda una platica con un taxista que me decia que si no estuvieran restringidas las licencias para taxis, habria tanta competencia que ya para nadie saldria. Sera?

Bueno, hubo una cosa mas, una meta-cosa, que tambien me llamo la atencion en la platica: cuanto puede enseñarte una conversacion casual sobre esferas tan distantes a las tuyas.

If you’ve decided to browse with Firefox,^[1] why not learn to do it gracefully? It’ll make you happier and more efficient.

Before we begin, be sure to have the latest Firefox. As of 28/Feb/2006, the current version is 1.5.0.1 and what follows will assume you have that version or a higher one. You get Firefox from GetFirefox.com.

With that you’re ready. Here is my guide (for non-techies) to using Firefox with flair: