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Second LifeWP, a 3d online community, recently hosted a live concert by Suzanne VegaWP and of course someone had to make her and her guitar’s avatars. Robbie Dingo did. And he made a video of the making (of the guitar avatar). Breathtaking. Go straight to the Quickitime video or see it embedded as a flash in Second Life’s website. 
Remember those classic time-lapseWP videos of fluid cloudscapes and opening flowers? (Or, to be more uptodate, of girls taking a pic of themselves every three years?YT.) Well, this is something similar: Justin FrankelWP, ELZR, Winamp creator and one of this generation’s software virtuosos, spent the better part of a year creating an audio-editing program called Reaper, took pictures as the developement months went by and mashed them together into a webpage. Amazing. (via Justin’s blog: c[a,o]s[a,o][s] de justin) 
In what must be one of its most bizarre moves to date, Google just released a collaborative-tagging game (!): Google Images Labeler. It frankly seems against the company’s algorithmic DNA and I almost dismissed it at first, but perhaps it’ll work… for a while: it’s actually interesting to play but the interest fades quickly. (Via John Battelle) 
“Roughly speaking, the thing we need a name for is a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.”
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Phrases for lazy writers in kit form
X is the new Y.
Original X: “pink”; original Y: “black”; commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt (original 1960s, popularized 1980s)
X. Y X.
Original X: “Bond”; Y: “James”; from the film Dr. No (1962) and all subsequent James Bond movies.
Dammit, Jim! I’m a X, not a Y!
Original X: “doctor”, original Y: “magician”; from a famous misquotation of a line from Star Trek. (c. 1966)
If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.[1]
See Eskimo words for snowWP.
X, M dollars. Y, N dollars. Z? Priceless.
Strapline from MasterCard advertising campaign (2000)
From Wikipedia’s List of Snowclones
Glenn Whitman finally dubbed the linguistic artifact a snowcloneWP (at 22:56:57 on Thursday, January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California, btw) and the meme just bit me. It just bit you.
(oh, and regarding the gratuitous snowclone I used for title: it’s true, but the jury’s still out on whether this is a passing Hollywood fancy or a giant step for butt-kind.)
Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some. 
Conceptualization is man’s method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one’s perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.
Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.”
The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.
Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Dr. Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief SummaryPDF
I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.) 
“I have this great illusion of dying exhausted rather than bored” has become of late something like Andrea’s personal slogan. I love the phrase—wrapped in downbeat words, it’s a souvenir of our own mortality that still manages to resolve in cheerful (maudlin) upbeatness—and so I thought it was time for a personal logo too. This came out after some fiddling and I quite like it, if I say so myself. (You will notice I’m still deep in my Bembo phase.) Tomorrow we’ll see if Andrea likes it. 
The girl’s Sandman’s Death, which adds a nice layer of meaning (and copyright infringement for good measure) to the logo.
Rob Bryanton, Imagining the Tenth Dimension
Your head will hurt afterwards (mine does), but it’s really a fascinating theoretical-physics presentation. |
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