| Food or Sex? | 2 0 0 7 |
Oct 06 |
Food. Hands down.
Though, strangely, if it’s between hunger and lust, then lust. Hands down.
You? Food or Sex? Hunger or Lust?
/blag
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Welcome, Eli writes
here.
See also Imagery and his other projects. |
| Food or Sex? | 2 0 0 7 |
Oct 06 |
Food. Hands down.
Though, strangely, if it’s between hunger and lust, then lust. Hands down.
You? Food or Sex? Hunger or Lust?
| Distilled McCarthy | 2 0 0 7 |
Oct 06 |
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.
| Marketing Challenge | 2 0 0 7 |
Sep 21 |

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to produce an ordered list of all the reasons you can think for Starbucks’s use of cash cards. (They’ve just been introduced in Mexico, though they’ve been around in the US for some 6 or so years). Something like:
Remember, this is about why Stbx does this, not why customers buy the cards (which is another mystery onto itself).
Submissions will be accepted until Sunday midnight, September 23th and should be sent to ely.parra@gmail.com. I, elzr.com, shall decide the winner based on the following criteria:The winner will be announced at elzr.com/posts/Marketing-Challenge on Monday, September 24th. All lists shall be published in said post. The prize will be 25 dollars in Starbucks card credit.
You’re encouraged to resend this challenge to anyone who might have interesting thoughts on the subject. Anyone may participate. (Though Stbx card credit will probably not be very valuable for those living in countries where the local Starbucks don’t accept it yet, not to mention countries without Stbx.)It may prove a fun marketing challenge. Happy listing!
Resolution:
Julio SangabrielI rather like this challenge-making thing, it’s like outsourcing thinking! Besides, it’s just nice to give things away.
Thanks a lot to those who participated and the many more who told me they thought this an interesting challenge (I was frankly afraid people would thought it stupid).| Sandia Season | 2 0 0 7 |
Aug 09 |

It’s watermelon season here in town. Which means the cheapest, sweetest sandias of the year. The green bellies crack open at the slightest cut, roar, and out bulges sweet, sweet candy-cotton. I tell you friends, it’s a good time to be a frugivoreWP mammal.
| HyperScript | 2 0 0 7 |
Jul 06 |
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...absolutely amazing. I’ve yet to find a smaller and yet more astounding example of how you can encapsulate functionality within JavaScript and create brand new APIs on the fly.
Ian Smith, 3 must read JavaScript articles
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Yes, it’s roundabout, but it’s due to the nature of the languages: Javascript does stuff, HTML displays stuff. When you want the browser to do things (instead of merely displaying dumbly what it receives) and when these things themselves involve a lot of displaying, you end up writing HTML through Javascript.
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.HyperScript is a bizarre and quixotic attempt to write French in English; that is, HTML in Javascript. Basically, you do what went on in the Norman conquest of EnglandWP: you anglicize as many French words as you can; that is, you turn into Javascript as many HTML words as you can.
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; }; });
Instead of
now it’s,
And so on.
HTML in a Javascript syntax. Enjoy!
| I know why manga are so good | 2 0 0 7 |
Jun 20 |
It’s because they’re so bad.
Some days ago I bought my first mangaWP on a whim (Kare KanoWP, IH and FurubaWP, 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.
| On Definitions | 2 0 0 7 |
May 02 |
And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of the fibers.
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.
And yet I seem to get into all kinds of tiresome, silly discussions when I try to share them with friends. Besides my not to be belittled incompetence as an explainer and my fabled monomanias, I believe a basic misunderstanding regarding their nature is at the heart of the matter.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.
The problem with this view, of course, is that it is crippling in its obsession with perfection. It intimidates and nurtures ridiculous expectations. If we had had to delay mathematics until we had a “perfect” definition of number we would still be waiting.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.
A much more interesting view of definitions, in my opinion, is to regard them as tools for thought, and as such, to value them on their usefulness and pick the one appropriate for the task at hand—platonic truth is only one of the many, many things we can ask of them. Most importantly, we ought to recognize that we need them—a brain unaided can do only so much. Thinking without them is like hammering with your bare fists—it’s painful and ineffectual. Yes, they are only one (verbal) kind of tool and we run the risk of starting to see everything as a nail, but they are still one of the most basic and powerful tools we have and they have so far been needlessly feared and vilified.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.
So the effort to define “play” or “capital” or “freedom” is not to pin the butterfly down and put it in formaldehyde, it’s to find new ways to look at it, new sources of joy and understanding. Definitions do not diminish their subjects, they reveal them.| Faith in facedesign | 2 0 0 7 |
Apr 25 |
Steven Johnson, Interace Culture, p213
A text-entry interface for the tetraplegic, it’s like nothing you’ve seen. Not only does using it have the same rush and exhilaration of playing SonicWP, it is also unbelievably efficient. And again, sheer fun.
It will take you some 5 minutes to get the hang of it (not out of difficulty, out of profound weirdness) but believe you me, you won’t regret it. Read the quick, 3-page explanation and try the Java version in-browser or download it. It’s free software and there are localized versions in many languages.If such deep novelty, such striking unrealityELZR lies in something as mundane as text-entry, what wonders lie yon in the craft of interface design?
The brilliant breakthrough has been to Lego-fy programming, making control blocks actually, well, blocks, and turning programming into block stacking. Yes, it’s messy and you have to fumble around for blocks but it’s visual, incredibly intuitive, and—get this—syntax error free (since blocks have shapes and will only fit in ways that make syntactic sense).
It was scary, you know, when I first knew about Scratch, just some days after it was launched, my evangelizing streak came back with a vengeance and I felt this strange calling to go and teach it somewhere, wherever. Here was finally an easy way to show “normal” people what programming was. Here it is.
| Some definitions | 2 0 0 7 |
Apr 24 |
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.
Reality: that which is not whimsical.
Technology: that which makes Reality whimsical.Hacker: a Technology maker.
Body: that which is whimsical and its manifold possibilities.
Health: the body’s actual whimsicality.Culture: the exploration of Body.
Art: Culture making.
Artist: a Culture maker.Scientist: a Knowledge maker.
Good: the creation or exploration of Body.
Evil: the destruction of Body.Virtual Reality: whimsical Reality; Technology’s ultimate success.
Religion: the belief that Reality is self-servingly whimsical.