fun

101 posts under this tag.

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TEDtalks 2
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7
Apr
20

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…

Fex—a maybe pointless but surely droll neologism (a drollogism!) 2
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Mar
19

Photoshop is deep software—take chezrump’s gallery, fex.
A: There are great, quirky restaurants a plenty in Guadalajara!
B: Fex?
A: Nippondo, La Zanahoria, Los Burritos de Moyagua, Las Corajes, La Fuente, Hotel Victoria, Santuario,...!
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up”—fex, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
With markets becoming saturated and mobile operators’ revenue-growth slowing—there are already 112 mobile devices for every 100 Austrians, fex—providing information about travel patterns could be a lucrative opportunity for telecoms firms.
The Economist, Go with the flow
The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England fex, the inferior races of animals are still.

Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living the same environment. Fex the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee and the more silica in the reed, the more manatee’s teeth get bigger and stronger.

Back and Forth: the endlessly recursive joke 2
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7
Mar
10

A: “We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.”
B: “That’s only a superficial view, eventually we’ll come to recognize how wise our ancestors truly were.”
A: “As I was saying, I’ll embarrass you.”
B: “Oh you’re right, you were right all along!”
A: “But then that means you‘re right! Now I can’t believe the things I said!”
B: “Don’t worry, that is moral progress.”
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My first (self-)published joke. They should lock me.

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New PokeCalendar(io)! 2
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7
Mar
02

Never would’ve thought designing calendars was this fun. (PokeCalendario, btw, is a great turn of phrase by James P. Wack)

Crisscross multiplying 2
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7
Feb
18

This really won’t save you any work at all but it’s sure to baffle casual onlookers.

At heart is just the usual distributiveWP algorithm we all use when multiplying arabicsWP, rearranged and visually rewritten using the immediate correspondence of crisscrosses to multiplication: .

Four overheards 2
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7
Feb
13

After an afternoon of sumptuous, unrestrained culinary indulgence, bursting at the seams, a friend of Ureña, one of dad’s best friends, liked to say, in fantastically black humor: ”Ojala hubiera muerto de niño—para no sufrir tanto.(“I wish I’d died a child—to save myself from so much suffering.”)

Trabajo que no da para levantarse a las 11[AM], no es trabajo.(“A job that doesn’t pay enough for sleeping after noon is no job.”) Used to say another, rather too fond of the good life, friend of Dad’s.

People usually said goodbye to my grandgrandmother Aurora—who is now just over a hundred—with a formulaic, yet earnest, “Take care!” To which she promptly responded, ”You take care! I’m over ninety years old, what I want to do now is die!”

Que puedes esperar Parra,(“What can you expect Parra”) used to say Ureña jokingly to my father, ”yo me crie con tortillas de sal y chile. Yo no comi pescado, ni leche, ni jamon.(“I was raised on tortillas with salt and chile. I didn’t get to eat fish, nor milk, nor ham.”)

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Faith in the quirky interweb 2
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7
Feb
11

My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.

You are five degrees away from Natalie Portman 2
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7
Feb
01

Sergio (MdC), one of my best friends, went last sixmonth to Ciudad JuarezWP for a paid internship he got through his school. He went there with a schoolmate that went for the same reason. This roommate, I learned a couple of days ago, turns out to have Gael GarciaWP as a cousin. Gael Garcia dated (dates?) Natalie PortmanWP So You → Me → Sergio → Roommate → Gael Garcia → Natalie Portman makes for five degrees of separation. Which is a deep, marvelous fact about the world that you should ponder at length.

(Five degrees is only an upper boundWP. You, dear reader, could be even closer to Natalie—if so, please detail in the comments. You could even be Natalie herself—if so, my cell number’s on the left. Thanks!)

My Calendar Proposal 2
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7
Jan
30

What was meant to happen, happened. I ended up participating in my own infodesign calendar challenge (where, of course, I’m one of the judges—my mom and a friend being the other two). Rather, I was one of the judges. The challenge’s doing a lot of soul-searching right now, looking for new judges, and even wondering whether it would be better to call itself a cooperation instead of a competition. (Thoughts?)

I started the challenge because while I thought designing a better calendar was a fascinating problem, I had no idea whatsoever of how to attack it. Then a magical thing happened with other people’s submissions: no big idea came, but a myriad minor improvements suggested themselves. So I started building mockups and tweaking them a little here, a little there, to prove minor points to myself. The tweaking got out of control, ate more and more of my time, and suddenly biggish, elegant ideas started coming up.

So I spent the past 5, 6 days drawing calendars over and over (and over). It was part escapism from my grandfather dying in the room below mine, but it was also unbelievable fun designing something and then have it be extruded into atoms by my clunky but trusty HP—how concrete and intricate, how physical!EEM I felt like a miniature artisan or a clockworker. And it really is wonderful to work in a simple problem you can easily explain to people.

This down here is the current outcome (there’s a Spanish version here). Click on it for detailed instructions (if you need’em), descriptions and critique. It’s the end result of a lot of incremental improvements I’ve painstakingly tried to document in this Flickr set—funny it now looks so glaringly obvious.

Final Version (English)
Multicolored table Horizontal rainbow tetris Vertical rainbow tetris with middle numbers Bluered tetris with sidemonths Bluered tetris with months as Mondays Narrow bluered tetris w/o dayname labels Narrow bluered tetris w/o dayname labels and some numbers Version Final (Espanhol) Final Version (English) Alternative, almost universally disliked version Pink rows only Measurements Size Comparison Size Comparison Sketches Diagonal, checkered rainbow Orange diagonal with outer numbers Rainbow diagonal with inner numbers Bluered diagonal with inner numbers Narrow, ordered, grey tetris One of endless (fruitless) drawings Many prototypes Knuckle dates Final Version (English </del> Digital)

What do you think? I’ve fiddled with it for several days now and have returned to it again and again. My tired eyes see no clear way of improving it—how about yours? (Here, btw, is the (Excel 2007) source file—yours to fiddle with and build upon.)

(btw2: I did all my prototypes in my beta-testing version of Excel 2007ELZR. Thought it would be a good chance to take it for a spin and see what the much-vaunted interface improvements amounted too. Turns out they’re rightly vaunted. It’s as good as they told you and then a little better. It’s just so much easier, so much more pleasurable to use the program when so many options are so neatly displayed. The live previews I thought so little of in the videos turn out to be surprisingly helpful. Goodbye toolbar clutter, welcome ribbon. It’s a revolution worth Vista’s failed one.)

The First Decade 2
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7
Jan
23

Here I go trying to coin yet another neologism ELZR in yet another abuse of the universal soapbox that is the blog. This time, why not be grand?, I’m going to tackle the most famous neologism lack of all: a name for the decade that yawns between 2000 and 2009. In written form, one usually calls it the 2000s but the “two thousands” is just plain silly. Other proposed names, taken from the 2000s pedia, are the “noughties” (the least narrowspread of the proposals), “the zeroes”, “double zeroes”, the “aughts”, “double-aughts”, “oh’s”, “double oh’s”, “oh-oh’s” “aughties”, “oughties”, “2K’s”, “uh-ohs”, “zoogs”, and “ozies”. Obviously, the search still continues.

So here’s my stab at it: let’s call it, elliptically, “the first decade”. It’s a tad millenialist but also fittingly portentous. It is also universal (“la primera decada”, “la première décennie”, “die erste Dekade”, “最初の十年”, “a primeira década”, “Первое десятилетие”, “la prima decade”), easily extendable (2010-2019 is “the second decade”, 2020-2029 “the third decade”, and so on), perfectly memorable, immediately understandable, and, let’s face it, just plain cool. It’s a whole new language for talking and thinking about our century.

Here some usage examples:

  • Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project, born with the first decade.WP
  • By the second decade, we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.ELZR
  • Third-decade ipods will be able to carry every piece of content ever created.ELZR
  • At the beginning of the fifth decade, there will be 9 billion people on the planet.ELZR