“formist”
97 posts under this tag.
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.
As if there weren’t enough books to read—let alone buy—already, here are six unread ones that have particularly caught my fancy. Just reading about them has been fascinating.
And as many have pointed out, “definitely for real” synchs up as well. There’s room for love within O/XK-CD.
Mugatu: Yes Derek, what Maury said I was willing to do for you. Let’s get back to the reason why you’re really here. Without much further ado, I give you—the Derek Zoolander center fo kids who can’t read good.
Zoolander: What is this? A center for ants? How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read… if they can’t even fit inside the building?
Mugatu: Derek, this is just a small…
Zoolander: I don’t wanna hear your excuses! The center has to be at least… three times bigger than this!
Mugatu: He’s absolutely right.
Zoolander: Thank you. I have a mission.
21C’s Treachery of ImagesWP. From Ben Stiller’s ZoolanderWP. This may well be one of the funniest things ever.
134 sayings by John McCarthyWP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.
Here 8 of the very best:
As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.
Malthus was right. It’s hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people or the universe more than 10^50.
If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle.
People mourn when a person dies, but no-one mourns the billions of intestinal bacteria that his death dooms. Speciesism, I calls it.
It’s possible to program a computer in English. It’s also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs.
If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.
Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.
When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.
Que magnifico ensayo este de Gabriel Zaid sobre la palabra civil. Que meticulosa recopilacion de tantas hebras de significado. Que claridad y que erudicion—de la buena.
Históricamente, civil ha servido para distinguir una nueva realidad por oposición a otra, de la cual emerge. Según lo que adjetive, puede significar: no astronómico, no de la corona, no eclesial, no en especie, no estatal, no exterior, no familiar, no militar, no natural, no noble, no penal, no religioso, no salvaje.
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”.
Ahora en el Espanhol original, (llano, claro)
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.”
Not, of course, that it needs any. But if you insist on one, what better answer than to let metaphor defend itself?
Some people (me among them) are often accused of Mixing Metapors. This is supposed to be a bad thing. I’ll admit it can be a bit confusing, but I really think it’s our only hope. The more different views you have of something—and the more different the views are—the more hope you have of understanding what the thing is really like. Of perceiving some aspect of its reality that isn’t apparent in any of the individual views.
The best metaphor I know of to explain this is the phenomenon of binocular visionWP, or stereo sound.WP We have two eyes and two ears, even though each one of them works fine alone. The other one isn’t just a spare, though, because using them in parallel provides information about what is being perceived that isn’t carried in either of the separate images. We perceive depth in visual or aural signals precisely to the degree we use separate, different signals and succeed in integrating them into a single percept.
This beautiful excerpt from John M. Lawler’s great essay on the use of metaphors in understanding and explaining computers, Metaphors We Compute By. Required interface design reading.
PLBRS.com – Super Poderes Lexicos
Finally, after complaining for more than a year about its terrible interface design, the first sketch of a new interface for RAE’s Spanish Dictionary is now live. Expect service to be bumpy and patchy since the algorithms are still green but things will get better soon—daily!
The main improvements over DRAE so far are:
- Definitions load in the same page, stacked newest on top, which means you effortlessly keep a history of lookups. Very handy.
- You don’t have to type a word’s accents (or its ñ’s) for PLBRS to grok what you mean—99% of the time (the other, harmless 1% is made of words like LÚcido and luCIdo, where there is ambiguity). This effectively solves the original complaint and brings tears of joy to my eyes.
- Various simple format improvements that make things more attractive, more compact, and easier to grok.
- That silly tilde (~) used in phrases to stand for the entry word is now actually replaced with the word. In general, DRAE is full of abbreviations that may have made sense for the print version but are a confusing, pointless legacy in digital expanses. They’ll go away in the next couple of days.
Been getting a lot of ideas from Ninjawords—a very cool, very fast English dictionary. Check it out.
gdl.Uruban.com – web local
Asked on Wikipedia’s secret, Jimbo Wales, recently remarked,
“We make the web not suck.”
and I found it a very fitting answer and possible second slogan to the whole project. The best way I’ve found to describe what I want to do with Uruban is by adapting that phrase,
Uruban is about making the local web not suck.
It will be a wiki, a local encyclopedia, a local yellow pages, a local guide (not just a tourist guide). The place to find the menu of your neighborhood taco stand or the nearest Tejuino selling carts, movie listings of all theaters or places to get a hooker, cafes open late at night or drugstores that print your photos in an hour. It will be the city digitized and digested, given a common, comprehensive, and always updated interface. Above all, it will be local, hyperlocal.
So that’s the dream. For now I had to get myself to start and so I just transcribed a list of all churches in the metro area and their Sunday mass hours (I needed them when my grandfather was staying here and it disappointed me to no end they weren’t online anywhere). Expect bits and scraps of content added in the next couple of days and a full featured wiki (I’ll probably use MediaWiki) in a week or so.
Hope you like these two and please do tell me your first impressions-what works, what doesn’t? are these things at all helpful to you?
Thanks.
22 and 23/jun/07
Bad time management. Sorry. :)
24/jun/07
Plbrs
- Better Definition Structure. Definitions are now grouped visually under grammatical category (like, say, all the definitions of the word as a noun, and then all those of it as an adverb). They’re already grouped sequentially in the original dictionary but it’s all very redundant and clumsy (every definition has the grammatical category indicated at the beginning). This is a big improvement. Try it out by searching for “correr” in both plbrs and DRAE.
- Expanded Abbreviations. Most abbreviations are now automatically expanded, which works wonderfully in most cases though there are still several fringe cases like “usado o usada o usadas o usados”, which will be corrected tomorrow.
- Improved the simple design. Added a “definir” button, a neat magnifying glass icon, made topbar type smaller, and chose slightly better color combinations. Moved slogan below and added a small explanatory sentence. Added Improv’dDaily and NotReality icons.
- Improved status reporting. Now besides the loading image a message appears saying that your query is being searched. If multiple queries are being currently searched all of them appear in the message.
- Improved Not Found message. The query you were looking for now appears on the message (duh!)—thanks chemito! Message trimmed. Added fallback link to a Google search for your query.
Uruban
- Much new content! 8 new places added, together with photos and descriptions. It’s all terribly paltry and sketchy but it’s a beginning.
- Improved design. Gave the website a blue-green color scheme and generally beautified the whole thing. Added Improv’d Daily link.
- New copy. “Enciclopedia Local” is the new main slogan, “Haciendo que la Web Local No Apeste” the subslogan.
Remember to hard refresh (Ctrl-R) to see the most recent changes!
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