“lists”
66 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.
Si te gustan los refranes la mitad de lo que a mi me gustan no te pierdas la version en linea del Refranero Mexicano de Herón Pérez Martínez. Es una joya. (La version impresa tambien es muy buena y la consigues a unos 130 pesos en la Jose Luisa o directamente en fce.com.mx.)
“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?
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:
And where does the newborn go from here?
The net is vast and infinite.
Ghost in the Shell
2,151 persons visited Imagery 2 days ago, 6,790 visited yesterday, 3,655 have visited it today (as of this very moment). It made it to the del.icio.us homepage. It made it to LifeHacker. Blogs in 22 languages have talked about it.
It’s been overwhelming. I’m compulsively refreshing my stat counter every 20 seconds. I feel so tiny, so standalone everytime it hits me that as I go to the bathroom 30 more people, somewhere in the world, have tried the website. But that the world is a weird, humongous place you knew, what has baffled me as I obsessively researched where everyone was coming from was what a surreal, boundless nonplace the web is. These last two days have shown me a dazzling array of bizarre organisms—mashups, filters, feeds, composites, parasites, symbiots, recomposites, bots, leeches, scams, automators—that thrive on the web, underneath the hood.
Oh, and one more thing: the sheer, brutal, speed of it all. It took two days and one email to Emily Chang (Thanks Sean!) to go from a pretty much forgotten website to this.
The present’s baffling.
As an exercise in vanity, here’s some compulsively gathered, up-to-the-minute updated, biased media coverage of the website (mostly blogs):
Wrote this eons ago but I just found it yesterday. Got a sudden urge to do some minor tweaking and re-show it to the world. I know it’s oversimplified and naive but I still find it interesting to play with.
There are also some interesting thoughts on the intersection (and contrast) of art, design, decoration, and advertising on A List Apart’s The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes writeup.
Stereo Total —“yéyétronic, electropunky, kitsch & speed, sissilistening, bricolopop, Berliner juke-box”— is coming to Guadalajara! Yey! I still can’t forgive myself for not going to their now legendary 2003 concert (so long ago already?). In my defense, that concert (or more precisely, the notice thereof) was the first time I’d heard of them and it took me several weeks before I started to really dig them:
Ex fan de sixties (“Ex-fan des sixties, / Où sont tes années folles? / Que sont devenues toutes tes idoles?”), Babystrich (“Am Bahnhof Zoo hängt ein Riesenplakat: ‘Ego, Berlins größte Diskothek’”), Tokyo Mon Amour (“Ce jour-là en été sous le soleil”), Ma Radio (“Je ne peux pas vivre sans ma radio /
Mon transistor j’adore”), Schoen Von Hinten (“Geh, es ist vorbei / Goodbye!”), Heaven’s In The Back Seat Of My Cadillac (“Makin’ love, makin’ love to you / Is a beautiful thing to do”), L’amour à 3 (“Je sais c’est démodé / ça fait hippie complet / mais je le crie sur les toîts / j’aime l’amour à 3”), Kleptomane (“Je pique c’est un tic / j’adore ça, ça m’excite”).
The concert will be part of some sort of France-Mexico musical festival, Mundo Latino. Date: this Thursday, May 4. Time: somewhat confusing, all one knows is that it’s somewhat after 8PM. Place: ”Terreno localizado en López Mateos, entre Plaza del Ángel y Plaza del Sol”. Price: $150 or $350. Be there. And if you are, say hi.
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
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.
I simply love this kind of hyper-stylized vector girls:
(Parental Advisory: Some barely concealed nipples ahead.)
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