“impossible ideas”
39 posts under this tag.
- 382: emotional dettachment
- 481: “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future” (personal favorite)
- 888: “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”
- 3: the desire to want to dial the the Penfield mood organ (interestingly, this emotion has a very low number, suggesting it’s a basic, heavily-relied-upon one)
- 594: “pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters”
- unknown 1: “a creative and fresh attitude toward his job”
- unknown 2: “ecstatic sexual bliss”
- unknown 3: “despair”
- unknown 4: “businesslike professional attitude”
- unknown 5: “self-accusatory depression”
The Penfield mood organ is a wonderfully original invention but what’s even most admirable is the masterful introduction to it Philip Dick pulls off: those 1,300 words are dense and microcapsuled enough to be able to stand alone as a great short story.
“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
Reading processors
Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,
I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.
, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,
and spacing (pdf),
What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?
I found this curious typographical layout in Ambient Findability and since then I’ve been trying to imitate it wherever I’ve been able to get away with it.
I know it seems like nothing special but I’ve come to find it strikingly elegant—specially when compared with what it might have looked had it been done in today’s more prevalent dummy bulletpoints. The laziness that such bulletpoints encourage would have probably led us to this:
But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
- When considering a decision, our minds are unduly influenced by the first information we find. Initial impressions and data anchor subsequent judgments.
- Through selective search and perception, we subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and avoid contradictory evidence.
Had we been lucky, there would be labels to each bulleted paragraph but they would still be obscured within the text and the typejunk bulletpoints:
But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
- Anchoring: When considering a decision, our minds are unduly influenced by the first information we find. Initial impressions and data anchor subsequent judgments.
- Confirmation: Through selective search and perception, we subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and avoid contradictory evidence.
And that’s why I like this layout so much: it lets you do without meaningless bulletpoints and it forces you, as a writer, to create a meaningful headline for each paragraph that greatly enhances reading speed and comprehension. I don’t know if it has a name yet but meaningful bulletpoints sounds good to me.
“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).
Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.
I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:
My belief is 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.
He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)
But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.
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.
To someone who dropped out of college and has argued along this lines to defend his decision, who has been playing with online reputation systems for a while now, this comment by Alex3917 —originally posted here in response to Paul Graham’s newest essay— was an epiphany, tying and explaining it all together:
So lately I have been thinking a lot about “qualified experts,” as mentioned in the article. Credentialism became prominent in the 20s because of advances in transportation technology. Before WWI everyone lived in the same town their whole lives, so anyone could vouch for you. Then after WWI there was increased mobility, so no longer could your neighbors provide the credibility needed to get a job or get startup funding. Thus college stepped up to fill the role of the middleman. This was essential to keep society functioning, although certainly credentialism hasn’t done much for the learning aspect of college.
Today, however, we have the Internet. Everyone is linked to everyone and anyone can vouch for you. I can email the management of any company and assuming I follow basic email etiquette I can usually get a response. As digital identity improves, everyone will be able to vouch for you based on the information you are supplying about yourself online. For example, PG has his essays and one of his books on his personal website. Surely this is as meaningful as a college degree.
Also, college credentialism is a hierarchy because you have one person making value judgements about many people. Anyone who knows anything about network theory knows that networks are more powerful than hierarchies, because Metcalfe’s law trumps Sarnoff’s law. Thus college supplied credentialism is much less effective than what we are capable of reaching if we use the Internet. This is why many of the “qualified experts” are so imcompetent, because hierarchies are so much weaker than networks.
Anyway, if someone wants to make a sh*tload of money I’d suggest developing some tools for the Internet that start to fill the credentialist role that colleges play currently. The value there will make the 2 billion Facebook is trying to get seem like peanuts. :-)
Btw, have I told you about Schank’s Law already? I think not. Here it is in all it’s glory:
Schank’s Law
Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.
Here’s an excellent formist intro to international auxiliary languagesWP written by Eward SapirWP himself (one of the most influential American linguists of the past century) in 1925:
There are many, many highlights to be made. Here’s four
- The “difficult and subjective concept” of the richness of a language, the “richness of connotations” (that phrase alone was worth the price of admission). This was precisely what I was getting at in my badly-received post On the Language of this Blog.
- “It is true that English is not as complex in its formal structure as is German or Latin, but this does not dispose of the matter. The fact that a beginner in English has not many paradigms to learn gives him a feeling of absence of difficulty, but he soon learns to his cost that this is only a feeling, that in sober fact the very absence of explicit guide-posts to structure leads him into all sorts of quandaries.. The simplicity of English in its formal aspect is.. really a pseudo-simplicity or a masked complexity.”
- His dazzling insight that the problem of finding an adequate international auxiliary language is really the problem of how best to “symbolize thought.” Wow. Just wow.
- ”A common allegiance to a form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.” ‘Nuff said.
* * *
Y’know, just between you and me, when the time is ripe—that is, in around 10 years—I would love to plunge myself in language: I would love to speak (and think in) Esperanto, Japanese, German, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Sweddish, Arab, Hindi… —Oh! Were languages not the harsh mistresses that they are! I’d love to work (and solve!) the problem of automatic machine translation (which, according to Kurzweil, will be the last task left for AI to emulate, the crucial last stepping stone to consciousness). I’d love to read both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I’d love to construct all sorts of constructed and auxiliary languages. I’d love to write in Esperanto and join la movado. I’d love to become a Wiktionary super-freak. I’d love to write language textbooks. I’d love to create a compiler and write programming languages. I’d love (in a most masochistic kind of way) to be a professional translator and translate a novel. I’d love to study some serious linguistics. I’d love to do advanced algebra. I’d love to become a Lisp super-freak or, quite oppositely, think in assembly code. I’d love to understand Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. I’d love to work in the semantic web. I’d love to create software to help one read and absorb written information (we have software to write, word processors, so why don’t we have software to read?).
Oh well, please excuse the future lapse.
In which the soundscape is presented and used as an introduction to other synthetic synesthesias.
A few months ago my family got a new van, a Windstar. It’s a pretty good car and, being a luxe edition, has many interesting gizmos. My favorite one is a sensor that starts screeching when you get too close to something in the back.
It is not its human-augmentation side what fascinates me the most, but the possibilities that such a sensor suggests. Why not go crazy and make this a gizmo that truly represents space, in all its subtleties, through sound?
I envision a somewhat thick, solid, black band that you would close around your head, completely covering your eyes and your ears; somewhat like a headband worn too low.
This gadget, the soundscape (scape for short), will simply translate space into sound. Let’s imagine the simplest case. A soundscaper standing in the center of a medium-sized, empty, white, circular room. What would that sound like? Well, as the soundscaper turns, it’d probably be a soft hum in all directions; medium-volumed to represent a medium distance; high-pitched to represent the whiteness of the walls; equal in all directions to parallel the physical reality.
If we increase the diameter of this circular room, the walls move farther away, and thus the (sound) volume will decrease; if we decrease the diameter, the walls come closer and the volume increases. If this room now had a door and it were open, the soundscaper would notice it as it turns around to “hear” the room: it would be a sudden sharp decrease in the volume.
If we now put a black square somewhere in the room close to the soundscaper, it’d sound like a squared speaker the size of the black square, emitting a somewhat loud, low-pitched noise.
Can you imagine it? Yeah, who knows if it would have a practical use (assist the blind?) and it’d probably never be advanced enough to allow you to, say, “read” a book through pure sound, but it sure’d be interesting to use it.
Of course, there’s no reason to stop at sound, maybe space can be represented through smell too (and maybe, just maybe, through taste). We always think of space as something fundamentally visual but that’s only because we’re all so visually biased. There are other possibilities.
And yet, sight is probably the best way to represent space. It’s by far the sense with the biggest bandwith. So much, in fact, that I think at least two other senses (hearing and smelling) can be merged into it. Thanks to sci-fi movies we’re all familiar now with some sort of thermal vision—in which red represents hotness, blue coldness. Hearing and smelling could be added in a similar fashion. Sound could be represented as an overlay of 3d waves expanding rapidly through space. The sound of birds chirping outside would look like a pond under a light rain, only in 3d. And smell could be represented as an overlay of little colored dots. A nubile girl passing by would leave a rainbow cloud of dots behind her.
But the soundscape still sounds the most daring, maybe because the possibility of replacing sight is as frightening as it is exciting. Just imagine, sound as light!
Update August 24, 2006: ABC News’ Humans With Amazing Senses: Blind People Who Interact With the World Like Dolphins and Bats
Update April 24, 2007: Wired’s Mixed Feelings: See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). I blogged about it here.
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