“links”
94 posts under this tag.
Sometimes, I must confess, I can be such a jewpieU. Now, of course I regard Judaism with the same special scorn I reserve for all religions, of course I think endogamy and voluntary isolation are bullshit (“We have lost more Jews to intermarriage than to the Holocaust”; ”..better to lose a kid here and there and save the community”), and of course I condemn Israeli violence (I’ve never been able to wrap my head around Zionism—why would America’s elite give a rat’s ass for some piece of desert?). But the thing is, I not only resonate strongly with Jewish secular culture (with Richard RodriguezELZR arrogance I confess to trying to become more JewishELZR), I find secular Jews extremely over-represented among what I consider to be the very best things we as a species have made—y’know, science, physics, math, computers, technology, the web, economics, capitalism, business, philosophy, literature, academia, modern pop culture…
That above, only impromptu, was what I answered when Andrea, whom I love but who can be frighteningly fundie U some times, shocked me with some rather anti-semitic comments. She remained skeptical and demanded examples of such mensch. I stuttered two or three before I blanked out.
And this was how I started compiling a list of Jewish people I admire for some reason or other—a task surprisingly easier than I expected, thanks both to the famed Jewish self-obsession and to paranoiac antisemitism. I’ve included the intersection of influential AND admired-by-me Jews (so you won’t find, say, Freud or Marx, who while influential, are personally anti-admired) and I mention their books or accomplishments that have most impressed me. It’s been some months now of almost subconscious compiling and while the list is of course incomplete, it’s already intriguing.
So, a to-be-updated list of influential AND admired-by-me Jews:
Que magnifico ensayo este de Gabriel Zaid sobre la palabra civil. Que meticulosa recopilacion de tantas hebras de significado. Que claridad y que erudicion—de la buena.
Históricamente, civil ha servido para distinguir una nueva realidad por oposición a otra, de la cual emerge. Según lo que adjetive, puede significar: no astronómico, no de la corona, no eclesial, no en especie, no estatal, no exterior, no familiar, no militar, no natural, no noble, no penal, no religioso, no salvaje.
Zipping back and forth along Kottke’s Twitter some minutes ago I finally got Twitter. And I smiled. Like I smiled when I finally got Wikipedia (or blogs or Flickr or Facebook or Google or GMail)—a smile of wonderment at the great and totally unexpected.
His observations on it are spot on—no wonder he’s the web pundit par excellence.
Not, of course, that it needs any. But if you insist on one, what better answer than to let metaphor defend itself?
Some people (me among them) are often accused of Mixing Metapors. This is supposed to be a bad thing. I’ll admit it can be a bit confusing, but I really think it’s our only hope. The more different views you have of something—and the more different the views are—the more hope you have of understanding what the thing is really like. Of perceiving some aspect of its reality that isn’t apparent in any of the individual views.
The best metaphor I know of to explain this is the phenomenon of binocular visionWP, or stereo sound.WP We have two eyes and two ears, even though each one of them works fine alone. The other one isn’t just a spare, though, because using them in parallel provides information about what is being perceived that isn’t carried in either of the separate images. We perceive depth in visual or aural signals precisely to the degree we use separate, different signals and succeed in integrating them into a single percept.
This beautiful excerpt from John M. Lawler’s great essay on the use of metaphors in understanding and explaining computers, Metaphors We Compute By. Required interface design reading.
Which is in itself quite wonderful news (artificial languages need all the help they can get), but the Globe and Mail article is also one of the best introductions to the language I’ve seen, so do check it out—web version or print scan—if you’re interested in Toki Pona (and if you speak Spanish, don’t forget to check out my Spanish manual on it).
(via Sonja, the beautiful mama pi toki pona).
Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)
Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows EndWP, AM.
Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!
PLBRS.com – Super Poderes Lexicos
Finally, after complaining for more than a year about its terrible interface design, the first sketch of a new interface for RAE’s Spanish Dictionary is now live. Expect service to be bumpy and patchy since the algorithms are still green but things will get better soon—daily!
The main improvements over DRAE so far are:
- Definitions load in the same page, stacked newest on top, which means you effortlessly keep a history of lookups. Very handy.
- You don’t have to type a word’s accents (or its ñ’s) for PLBRS to grok what you mean—99% of the time (the other, harmless 1% is made of words like LÚcido and luCIdo, where there is ambiguity). This effectively solves the original complaint and brings tears of joy to my eyes.
- Various simple format improvements that make things more attractive, more compact, and easier to grok.
- That silly tilde (~) used in phrases to stand for the entry word is now actually replaced with the word. In general, DRAE is full of abbreviations that may have made sense for the print version but are a confusing, pointless legacy in digital expanses. They’ll go away in the next couple of days.
Been getting a lot of ideas from Ninjawords—a very cool, very fast English dictionary. Check it out.
gdl.Uruban.com – web local
Asked on Wikipedia’s secret, Jimbo Wales, recently remarked,
“We make the web not suck.”
and I found it a very fitting answer and possible second slogan to the whole project. The best way I’ve found to describe what I want to do with Uruban is by adapting that phrase,
Uruban is about making the local web not suck.
It will be a wiki, a local encyclopedia, a local yellow pages, a local guide (not just a tourist guide). The place to find the menu of your neighborhood taco stand or the nearest Tejuino selling carts, movie listings of all theaters or places to get a hooker, cafes open late at night or drugstores that print your photos in an hour. It will be the city digitized and digested, given a common, comprehensive, and always updated interface. Above all, it will be local, hyperlocal.
So that’s the dream. For now I had to get myself to start and so I just transcribed a list of all churches in the metro area and their Sunday mass hours (I needed them when my grandfather was staying here and it disappointed me to no end they weren’t online anywhere). Expect bits and scraps of content added in the next couple of days and a full featured wiki (I’ll probably use MediaWiki) in a week or so.
Hope you like these two and please do tell me your first impressions-what works, what doesn’t? are these things at all helpful to you?
Thanks.
22 and 23/jun/07
Bad time management. Sorry. :)
24/jun/07
Plbrs
- Better Definition Structure. Definitions are now grouped visually under grammatical category (like, say, all the definitions of the word as a noun, and then all those of it as an adverb). They’re already grouped sequentially in the original dictionary but it’s all very redundant and clumsy (every definition has the grammatical category indicated at the beginning). This is a big improvement. Try it out by searching for “correr” in both plbrs and DRAE.
- Expanded Abbreviations. Most abbreviations are now automatically expanded, which works wonderfully in most cases though there are still several fringe cases like “usado o usada o usadas o usados”, which will be corrected tomorrow.
- Improved the simple design. Added a “definir” button, a neat magnifying glass icon, made topbar type smaller, and chose slightly better color combinations. Moved slogan below and added a small explanatory sentence. Added Improv’dDaily and NotReality icons.
- Improved status reporting. Now besides the loading image a message appears saying that your query is being searched. If multiple queries are being currently searched all of them appear in the message.
- Improved Not Found message. The query you were looking for now appears on the message (duh!)—thanks chemito! Message trimmed. Added fallback link to a Google search for your query.
Uruban
- Much new content! 8 new places added, together with photos and descriptions. It’s all terribly paltry and sketchy but it’s a beginning.
- Improved design. Gave the website a blue-green color scheme and generally beautified the whole thing. Added Improv’d Daily link.
- New copy. “Enciclopedia Local” is the new main slogan, “Haciendo que la Web Local No Apeste” the subslogan.
Remember to hard refresh (Ctrl-R) to see the most recent changes!
Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la MaitenaWP, IY) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.
No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatÃa, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^
Remember that wacky koanELZR about reading processors (“what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) and how it led to the idea of a text spacer (illustrated at length in this example)?
Well, I just found out about Live Ink by Walker Reading Technologies (via KurzweilAI.net’s newsletter, though it was slashdotted earlier) and realized people have been toying with the idea for over a decade now. Live Ink is clumsy marketese for what they also elegantly and precisely describe as visual-syntactic text formatting and these guys have not only coded it and are now marketing it, but they have already done some interesting homework, carrying on a year-long experiment where it allegedly improved reading proficiency. They offer a 30-day trial program implementing the technology called ClipRead (screencast) and though the interface is positively abysmal (why, god, why, must bad interfaces happen to good people?), it’s still very much worth downloading to play with.
Here below is a (fitting) paragraph from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando for comparison.
Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards—a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for – or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.
I like how they limited the spacing to linebreaks and indents; it’s a good starting constraint—it simplifies the task enormously and the results are still quite good. Highlighting the verb is also a clever touch—the nuance with the biggest syntactic payoff. Overall, while the simple flaws do stand out (because we’re such effortlessly gifted syntactic parsers), what surprises me is how decently it works, how the formatted text feels more accessible than the monolithic paragraph. At several points—interestingly, at some of the most usefully formatted parts—the algorithm at work seems oddly straightforward: nestedly indent and linebreak prepositions. Ahh… I’m itching to write some regex hack… Probably will write one in a couple of days, together with some handcrafted spacing of the above paragraph, just to see what we’re aiming at.
According to VentureBeat, meanwhile, the company is poised to taking the world any minute now. I doubt it. But they have given spacing (visual-syntactic text formatting) a broad hearing and there’s now a flurry of attention on it and, probably, on the broader idea of reading processors. There are bound to be some intriguing reinterpretations and extrapolations in the coming months.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s CraddleWP, AM
El tigre tiene que cazar, el pajaro que volar; el hombre tiene que sentarse y pensar, “Por que, por que, por que?” El tigre tiene que dormir, el pajaro regresar a su nido; el hombre tiene que decirse que ha comprendido.
I read this in a great post, 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will, soon after heWP died—which was, personally, surprisingly sad—SlaughterHouse 5WP, AM has got to be among the best books I’ve read. Anyway, I’m still fascinated by the phrase and particularly by the interpretation offered there (which seems obvious and inevitable now, but you never know so maybe you—virgin you—may want to make your own unadulterated meaning before reading the following):
[A] koan of sorts from Cat’s Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity, albeit from a removed, humoring, alien viewpoint. Man’s just another animal, it implies, with his own peculiar instincts, and his own way of shutting them down. This is horrifically cynical when considered closely: If people deciding they understand the world is just another instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. At the same time, there’s a kindness to Bokonon’s belief that this is all inevitable and just part of being a person. Life is frustrating and full of pitfalls and dead ends, but everybody’s gotta do it.
So the songpiece has lived inside me since and served as an interesting flashlightELZR. Hope it’s useful to you too.
Oh, and here’s an interesting elaboration on it, from, of all places, a Grey’s Anatomy writer (yup, I’ve become such a rabid fan I gobble up the writers’ blog…shut up already):
Real life—where terrible things happen to us, to our friends, and to the world around us without warning or explanation. And we’re human beings, most of us, so when terrible things happen, we want to know the reasons why. We want the suffering to mean something. And when the meaning isn’t immediately evident, we assign meaning as a way of comprehending, if not controlling, what seem like random acts of terribleness. When bad things happen, we make sense of them by calling them tests. Tests we either pass or fail before moving on to the next level of experience, but ones we hopefully learn from either way.
|
RSS
email
