Subscribe!
+by  RSS+by  emailMy Web Apps  -Plbrs: Super Poderes Lexicos -Domburi: Search Super Powers -Uruban: Web Local Other Stuff-KinKey: Painless Accents with a US Keyboard-Toki pona en 76 Lecciones Ilustradas ArchivesList of all posts 639
Random Post!
|
“lyricism”33 posts under this tag.
I’m so set in my (fetishy) ways. Again, I feel compelled to say that I’m not on the look out for such pictures. They come my way. Though come on, maybe I should be… The responsible for the baci saffici is the most talented Alessandro Pautasso. 
And an orator said, “Speak to us of Freedom.” And he answered: At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom, Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them. Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff. And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
Kahlil GibranWP, The Prophet
So true. So true.
Jaron Lanier’s answer to the 2007 Edge question, What are you optimistic about?, is, predictably enough, post-symbolic communication. But the more I hear about it, the more I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur and sheer magic of the vision. As beautiful a dream as I’ve ever seen.
One extravagant idea is that the nature of communication itself might transform in the future as much as it did when language appeared. This is not easy to imagine, but here’s one approach to thinking about it: I’ve been fascinated by the potential for “Post-symbolic Communication” for many years. This new style of interpersonal connection could become possible once large numbers of people become virtuosos at improvising what goes on in Virtual Reality. We are virtuosos at spoken language. Adults speak with what seems like no effort at all, even though everyday chats might be the most complicated phenomena ever observed. I see no reason why new virtuosities in communication could not appear in the future, though it’s hard to specify a timeframe. Suppose you’re enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today. Why bother? It’s a reasonable hunch. Words have done so much for people—so alternatives to them with overlapping but distinct functions ought to lead to new ways of thinking and connecting. An alternative to abstraction might arise—the possibility of expression through a fluid and capable concreteness. Instead of the word “house” you could conjure up a particular house. How do you even know it’s a house without using the word? Instead of falling back on whatever the word “house” means, you might toss around a virtual bucket that turns out to be very large on the inside- and contains a multitude of house prototypes. In one sense this “fuzzy” collection is more precise than the word, in another, less so. It is different. If all this sounds a little too fantastic or obscure, here’s another approach to the same idea using more familiar reference points. Imagine a means of expression that is a cross between the three great new art forms of the 20th century: jazz improvisation, computer programming, and cinema. Suppose you could improvise anything that could be seen in a movie with the speed and facility of a jazz improviser. What would that mean for the sense of connection between you and someone you love? The most valuable optimisms are Infinite Games, and imagining that new innovations as profound as language will come about in the future of human interaction is an example of one.
I’ve been drooling as much as anyone for one ever since Jobs announced it last January 9 in a brilliant demo (just for some historical fun, compare it with the 1968 “Mother of all demos”), and an interesting, in-depth review of it by Bruce Tognazzi got me thinking more deeply about it and all the possibilities it foretells. But just as I was guzzling the last Kool-aid dregs I started choking: I found out, to my unending disbelief, that it’s going to be a closed platform—meaning one won’t be able to independently develop software for it. This matters. It’s not a chink in the diamond, it’s a rupture—tantamount to forcing you to surf only within apple.com. The web could of course be an innovation lifeline but I’m skeptical of Safari—it’s not a good web 2.0 base at the desktop, I doubt it’ll be one for the palmtop. And my experience with the Blackberry is that mobile-device webapps demand more speed and immediacy (and ubiquity!) than the current web can provide. So no, it will at best be only a partial solution. (The reason given for the apartheid, security, has—to use a commenter’s phrase—the faint whiff of horse manure.) So that’s that. I now want to remark a little on that iPhone review I just mentioned. Bruce Tognazzi is no Joe Blogger, he was Apple employee #66 and is a famous interaction designer. His website, AskTog, is a classic resource on interface design. But it’s not his interaction insights I want to point out now—though there are plenty of good ones. What impressed me most was his language. Three quotes in particular strike me as true language-forging moments.
What strikes me about the iPhone interface in general is that it gives ordinary people access to features that have been the private purview of the young and the geeky. For example, cell phones have long had contact lists, but they were typically difficult to build, maintain, and sync.
The young and the geeky. Witness the birth of a new wordchain. It won’t be the last time you’ll hear it.
The industrial design is brilliant. Apple has created another piece of high-tech jewelry. Some fogies of advancing years have suggested the initial price point of $499 is too high. They fail to understand: The “cool” of owning this phone, particularly for the early adopters, is worth an easy $497, bringing the phone itself down to $2 even.
High-tech jewelry. That’s a beautiful, zeit-geist defining phrase—electronics “becoming… works of art to be fondled in stores before a purchase.”E
Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.
There’s an image! It reminds me a lot, both alluding to pseudo-scientific scienceWP, WP, of that classic Spanish insult, ”No tener ni dos dedos de frente!” (“Not have even two fingers of forehead!”)—trying to find an appropriate translation, btw, I stumbled upon an instant new classic, ”Tiraron al niño y se quedaron con la placentaF” (“They threw the child and kept the placenta!”).
Ayn Rand’sWP, ELZR Atlas ShruggedAM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on. The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.
I feel — numb. Distant. Detached. Separate. Futile. Tepid. Coward. Been on a media breakdownELZR for too many days now—ScrubsWP, NausicaaWP, The Economist, The New York Times, porn, (Ben Shneiderman’s) interface design articles, Wired, (so many) books. Unprecedented amounts of physical exercise sprinkled throughout (bizarre, I know). Much been thought, outcomes uncertain (to put it hopefully). Only 30 pages into Finite and Infinite GamesAM I think it’s the best book I’ve read. ”Seriousness,” it says, ”is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.” Been far too serious in my life lately. Too scared. Stupid death won’t go away. Seems my (maternal) grandfather has lung cancer—most likely metastatic. Brutal prognosis. He’s been staying here at home and I’ve been escaping it all—so far away. So serious. And yet I’m hopeful now. I can never force myself to post something until I’m hopeful. Until I’ve a plan. Until I’m back. (Too scary otherwise.) Gonna play.
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.) 
William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled bookAM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late. It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.
I used to dig Greek mythology as a pimpleless child and one of the myths I recall more vividly is the one of ArachneWP—I still remember my childish confusion and anger at the Greeks’ twisted moral sense. |
| Why are hyperlinks underlined? | 2 0 0 6 |
Aug 18 |
Indeed it is, but then we might as well feel warranted to pose the seldom-asked question of why are hyperlinks underlined. Dull utilitarian answers aside, an intriguing yet plausible historical explanation (or rather, re-interpretation) herefollows.
I believe our answer traces back to the humble clothe buttonA, that immemorial “knoblike appendageWP used on wearing apparel either for ornament or for fastening,” forgotten (as much else) during the Middle Ages, dismissed as vanity by the Puritans, and traded to Native Americans by early settlers.
With society’s mechanization through the first and second Industrial RevolutionsWP, there was dire need to create appropriate interfaces for the control of the suddenly ubiquitous machines and one of the simplest, most versatile methods invented came to be called “button”WP, owing to its creative resemblance to the former fashion accessory (both were usually round after all).
One subtle point, which shall prove of great importance later, must be remarked now: Owing to human factorsWP, most control buttons are usually seen from a very specific angle. Words fail me to further describe it but perhaps some pictures can help to illustrate the matter: 
the keyboard on the ←left shows the usual, canonical perspective of buttons we’ve grown accustomed to since the late 18th century, and any other perspective, say, the keyboard on the right→, feels immediately awkward.
But back to our story: When the turn came for society’s computerization, there was again dire need to come up with suitable interfaces for the novel symbolic devices. Abstruse command-lineWP interactions followed at first, but thanks to Xerox PARC’sWP bitmap revolution1 graphical interfacesWP were envisioned (and, eventually, accepted). The new art form required new metaphors2 and prompted a creativity explosion that continues to this day, but few metaphors proved more fertile or intuitive than the visual staple that became the “graphic button”. Beveled out, it’s “push affordance”3 invites interaction (a click, a push, a press) like nothing else we’ve come up with since.
With the advent of the inter-network, you guessed it, that direst of needs—the interface—made itself felt again. We needed a way to link geographically and semantically far-flung documentsEE together. So what if Ted NelsonWP himself, hypertext’s father, was thinking in our trusty ole friend, the button, when he came up with his gift to the world?
The hyperlink might just be the latest, abstract, stylized reincarnation of our centuries-old pal, the button.
1 “The word itself [bitmap] suggested an unlikely alliance of cartography and binary code, an explorer’s guide to the new frontier of information.” Steven Johnson, Interface CultureAM, p21
For insight into the bitmap revolution see M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream MachineAM, p366-8, and the raster graphics pedia.
2 Among which the worst yet best-known is probably the so-called “desktop metaphor”WP.
3 See Larry L. Constantine, Lucy A. D. Lockwood, Instructive Interaction: Making Innovative Interfaces Self-Teaching, p8, and also the affordance pedia to understand how the term is used by interaction designers.
4 Notice how of all the buttons showcased only MacOs X’s corner balls break that familiar perspective talked about in the 4th paragraph (usually hinted at through internal shadowing). I finally understand why they felt so jarring when I first saw them: not only are they overcolored for their humble functions, they’re not buttons, they’re weirdly lighted marbles.
Recent Favorites
