“ideas”
61 posts under this tag.
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Series Blenders
With the new 60GB DVDs hitting the markets, it is now possible to store an entire series in one disc and this presents many, many untold possibilities. Here’s one: you know the short clips at the beginning of a two-part episode in which they recap the previous one? Well what about if we make, say, a similar kind of recap but for an entire series worth of episodes. For, say, Gilmore Girls’s 130+ 40+min episodes you’d have a 2-hour episode summarizing everything that has transpired during the series. It would be a wonderful (albeit challenging) exercise in synthesis but I think it’d be interesting. You could make it so that hitting play during one of the clips will plunge you smoothly into that episode until you hit stop to return to the blender. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve always felt I’m still too media illiterate: create a novel (or movie or short story) written entirely from quotes and excerpts from our media landscape. I mean entirely. Every dialogue a pastiche, every description a hodgepodge, every paragraph a potpourri. (In fact I would do it as an experiment of sorts. Of what? Of the erosion of self in our present and future.) What with that new movie or series or discography, these days I’m always letting the computer on overnight to keep downloading torrents. It seems like a big waste (and its fan-noisy too) so I wonder if one couldn’t outsorce the downloading business out of the cpu tower. It would ideally be just a small wiFi-enabled cube with at the most one or two status LEDs. You would usb it to your computer and interact with it through your monitor. At night you could turn off the computer and leave the little guy do its late night job. I’m no hardware expert whatsoever but it seems feasible to me. It’s the next leeching step.
iPod web
 I guess it isn’t exactly a revelation but today it hit me as a fairly obvious thing: the next iPod in the family—iPod mini, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod photo, iPod video—is going to be the iPod web. WiFi in mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs and whatnot) is gaining strenght and it is the (only?) logical next step for the iPod to take. If Apple manages to pull it off with grace and style, the iPod would truly become the one gadget to rule them all (just imagine the open-endedness of having the web in your pocket).
The device I envision is about the size of an iPod video, has a minimal, ultra-fast and responsive OS (mere scaffolding for the browser), a 100+ GB harddrive, a huge screen (say, 4X2.5 inches), and, most importantly, an updated, vastly more capable interface that is still as brilliant as the clickwheel. I only hope Apple has the vision to try it (soon).
This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.
Most of what I’ve been doing this past month or so has been reading my ass off. Oh boy, have I good taste or what:
...it can only give you answers.
He died quite a few years before Google (or the Internet, for that matter) started, but I’m sure Picasso would have said that. And I think there would have been some truth in it.
Yesterday I spent most of my day just trying to find out why my local web-apps had crashed horribly ever since I upgraded to Rails 1.1. It was all a complex dance between Google, my web-apps, and all sort of forums. I painstakingly build my web-apps one-step at a time, several times, just trying to find out exactly what step was causing the problem.
And finally the question emerged: ¿Is there a known problem between RMagick, a ruby image-manipulation library that I use, and Rails 1.1? The answer from Google was nigh immediate: Rails 1.1 requires Ruby 1.84, which in turn kills RMagick. I’ll simply have to do without it until a fix is posted.
It is not the results that drive us, but the query.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of a search engine is not that it provides with immediate answers, but that this immediacy allows us to pose far more questions.
This preponderance of questions over answers is what makes me believe there might be some future in clustering techniques (Marissa Mayer to the contrary): when it works best, clustering works by hinting at good questions.
A question machine
Do we need a question-machine? What is a question-machine? Is that the question to ask? Is the name of god a question? Where can I buy the Whole Earth Review? Is the universe recursive? What is this “fly on the wall” syndrome? When did I first hear the song There Was An Old Woman? What might Sergio Rivas be doing this very moment? Where is that story we wrote together? Was it any good? What is a question? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis true? How is Ray Kurzweil like? Is it true that “the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use?” Is the universe discrete or continuous? Will they come when you do call for them? Will we ever achieve post-symbolic communication? Is symbolic systems a career for me? What does a “reality conversation” look like? Will there be a singularity? Are we becoming a Gaia? Is there an I? Is everything a prosthesis? Is everything an interface? Will interface design be the art form of the twenty first century? Will I be any good as a web-app craftsman? Will sex ever be free? What are the classic walks of the world? What is meaning? Will I ever find out? Is copyright fair? Are there better solutions? Is it wrong for me to download music illegally? When will this post be lost forever? Why are there so few women in scientific careers? How can Orson Scott Card be so smart and yet so frighteningly conservative? Is abortion the cause for a drop in U.S. crime rates? Was the pill the cause of the sudden increase in U.S. crime rates? Is technology the answer? Will they really build a robotic team that can compete and defeat the world soccer champions by 2050? Is it too late for Esperanto? Will an A.I. ever read these very words? Will anyone? How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? Will I die? Will I really be rich by 30? How was Borges like? Did AMLO know about Bejarano and Ponce? Which is the best candidate in this presidential elections? Will Caja Negra work? Will I work at Google? Should I’ve taken that Etsy offer? Would I be happier in New York? Am I scared? Am I too easy on myself? Is it wrong that I don’t finish what I start? Is this good or bad procrastination? Will I ever meet annzah? Am I foolish to believe, deep down inside me, that in my life “everything happens for the best”? How should I love her? What’s char doing right now? Is she happy? Did she find out the title of the song of that ad? What is the equivalent of a word-processor for reading? How can you improve reading? How can you automate understanding? As in, say, how can you automate or speed up the process of understanding a legal document? With diagrams? Is Doug Engelbart’s idea of a parts-of-speech highlighter any good? Is speed-reading real? If it is, why is it so marginal? Will Jef Raskin’s Archy ever pan out?
“Once long ago, when Japan was still struggling to enter the modern age, we let ourselves be ruled by our military. Soldiers were our masters, and they led us into an evil war, to conquer nations that had done us no wrong.”
“We paid for our crimes when atomic bombs fell on our islands.”
“Paid?” cried Aimaina. “What is to pay or not to pay? Are we suddenly Christians, who pay for sins? No. The Yamato way is not to pay for error, but to learn from it.”
Children of the Mind, Orson Scott Card
I’m hungry for Japan.
Btw, Children of the Mind is the 4th book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga. Card noticeably risks a whole lot more than in previous books, too much at times and he often fails, but at others, he really shines.
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.
I hope you are—just as I was—blissfully ignorant of the following quote and the game it portrays, for, if that’s the case, you’ll probably end up—just as I did1—with a day-long smile on your face. I mean, isn’t this something2?:
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
Wikipedia, as usual, is a great intro to the topic.
1 I’m riffing the structure of this paragraph from Matrix’s Morpheus memorable quote: “Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize, just as I did, that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Did you got that before I told you? Is there someone out there as linguistically disturbed as I am?
2 That beat comes from this other article, interestingly, on luck.
Neural nets are a popular technique in Artificial Intelligence based on simplified models of neurons and interneuronal connections gathered from brain research. Ray Kurzweil describes them pretty well here:
One basic approach to neural nets can be described as follows. Each point of a given input (for speech, each point represents two dimensions, one being frequency and the other time; for images, each point would be a pixel in a two-dimensional image) is randomly connected to the inputs of the first layer of simulated neurons. Every connection has an associated synaptic strength, which represents its importance and which is set at a random value. Each neuron adds up the signals coming into it. If the combined signal exceeds a particular threshold, the neuron fires and send a signal to its output connection; if the combined input signal does not exceed the threshold, the neuron does not fire, and its output is zero. The output of each neuron is randomly connected to the inputs of the neurons in the next layer. There are multiple layers (generally three or more), and the layers may be organized in a variety of configurations. For example, one layer may feed back to an earlier layer. At the top layer, the output of one or more neurons, also randomly selected, provides the answer.
What hit me as I was reading this was how eerily close is society (as in human society) to a neural net. Think about it. Have you ever wondered how there are so many great and worthy causes being fought out there that you are not taking part of? You read, listen, think, and sometimes chat about them (you’re adding up the signals coming into you), but the signals simply do not exceed your (mostly random) threshold, and you don’t “fire”, you don’t act, your output is zero. (Street children and the EFF are the first examples that come to my mind, what are yours?)
Take me, for example: after many years of almost total political apathy, I’m close to releasing a web-app about Mexican Politics —in other words, I’ve become political (!)— because in the previous weeks several inputs conspired (somewhat randomly) to spur me into action. I’m an excited neuron in this weird, tragic brain that is Mexico and I only wish that I can get my next layer of neighboring neurons to fire.
Here’s a parting thought: media (and particularly ads) are the neurotransmitters of the hive mind.
I used to laugh at the elaborate calculations and stratospheric numbers you always find when reading papers about the limits of computation —as in, say, “Just how much computations per second might the entire universe theoretically support?”. It was something more than my incredulity (it involves too much hand-waving at times), it was simply indifference. So what if the universe could theoretically handle one zillion jillions to the gazillion cps? We might as well ponder how many angels might fit on the head of a pin…
I read Ray Kurzweil answer 3 weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped resounding on my head ever since:
Because computation underlies the foundations of everything we care about, from the economy to human intellect and creativity, we might well wonder: are there ultimate limits to the capacity of matter and energy to perform computation? If so, what are these limits, and how long will it take to reach them?
Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?
Platicaba antier con Adolfo en el Starbucks cerca del TEC y como enseguida tenia el una conferencia sobre la pobreza, decidi acompañarlo. Me dio mucho gusto ver que la conferencia la organizaba y conducia Lalo, uno de los mejores maestros de mi prepa, pero la conferencia en si fue perfectamente olvidable: los mismos lugares comunes de siempre, el mismo rollo, el mismo izquierdismo self-righteous, los mismos rezagos ancestrales, las mismas discusiones bizantinas (Cuantos tipos de pobreza hay? Son mejores los programas universalistas que los focalizados? Como definimos indigena? Cuantos angeles caben en la cabeza de un alfiler?).
En medio del choro mareador de uno de los ponentes oi la gastadisima frase “inequidad en la distribucion de la riqueza” y alguna minuscula sinapsis debio unir a dos neuronas olvidadas, pues vi de repente la concepcion (en mi opinion erronea) de la riqueza que esa oracion implicaba. Ya en mi casa repase los ensayos de Paul Graham y, efectivamente, es un ensayo suyo, Mind The Gap, el que maravillosamente desenmascara y desacredita esta concepcion (que el llama el Modelo Papi de la Riqueza):
When I was five I thought electricity was created by electric sockets. I didn’t realize there were power plants out there generating it. Likewise, it doesn’t occur to most kids that wealth is something that has to be generated. It seems to be something that flows from parents.
Because of the circumstances in which they encounter it, children tend to misunderstand wealth. They confuse it with money. They think that there is a fixed amount of it. And they think of it as something that’s distributed by authorities (and so should be distributed equally), rather than something that has to be created (and might be created unequally).
En fin, se lo comente a Adolfo (rayandole su cuaderno) y el me contesto con su ya famoso “Ashh…”©, pero aun asi me motivo a hacerles el comentario a los ponentes (darle valor a otra gente es la cosa mas facil del mundo). Cuando (dei gratia) acabo la conferencia y llego la hora de las preguntas, dije lo siguiente (o algo muy parecido, el original quedo escrito en la libreta de Adolfo):
Que tal Lalo? ... Bueno, lo mio no es una pregunta sino un comentario breve. Se me hace curioso, y es algo tipico de los academicos, la forma en que articulan su pensamiento sobre la pobreza. Dicen cosas como “la inequidad en la distribucion de la riqueza”, como si la riqueza fuera un pastel que le toca a papa gobierno distribuir, y nunca “inequidad en la generacion de riqueza”. Bueno… eso es todo. Sobretodo para… que lo piensen.
Silencio. Mi corazon golpeteaba y yo solo agradecia no haber tartamudeado severamente. Creo que oi un “Uhhhhhh” de “Tomen eso!” de alguien del auditorio. Adolfo dice que oyo un aplauso aislado. Mas silencio. Lalo interviene, levantando por fin su mirada de mi y llevandola al punto de fuga, “Alguien mas tiene otra pregunta?”.
- A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
- A form is a linguistic pattern.
- A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
- 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.
- 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.
- Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
- Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
- Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
- 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
- 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.
- Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
- Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
- Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.
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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)
- 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.
- A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
- 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.
- Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
- 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.
- Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
- A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugarWP .”
- It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
- This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
- 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
- Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.
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I guess it isn’t exactly a revelation but today it hit me as a fairly obvious thing: the next iPod in the family—iPod mini, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod photo, iPod video—is going to be the iPod web. WiFi in mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs and whatnot) is gaining strenght and it is the (only?) logical next step for the iPod to take. If Apple manages to pull it off with grace and style, the iPod would truly become the one gadget to rule them all (just imagine the open-endedness of having the web in your pocket).
