“original content”
131 posts under this tag.
to blackbox could be to reify thru interface. To suggest or implement a conceptualization thru interface. A basic strategy for synthetizing reality, it stems from an active rewriting of the famous duck test: “If I make this look like a duck, and quack like a duck, I may as well be able to conceptualize it as a duck”. The conscious, deliberate, “I make” part is crucial; to blackbox is not just to simply conceptualize, is to wilfully conceptualize something by painting an interface on it.
(Contrived) Usage Examples:
- “In modern programming, we blackbox our way out of complexity thru functions, objects, aspects, macros, and the like.”
- “Money is our society’s blackboxing of wealth, that is, of ‘what people want.’ We ought to remember it when trying to ‘make’ money.”
- “With the magic of silicone, you too can blackbox yourself a pair of massive pointy hooters!”
- “At this point, perhaps a better title for this essay is probably ‘An easy way to blackbox your own file-extension.”
- “The Kuratowski definition of an ordered pair as {{a},{a,b}} is pure blackboxing.”
- “In defining the class PlanePoint, from the stored attributes xPos and yPos you can (and probably should) blackbox Distance from them thru the distance formula.”
- “Let’s wrap these almost-expired candies with this cute cellopane bag and this lace bow, and blackbox them into a ‘Super Saving Kit’.”
- “I’m dying for someone to blackbox reputation, population, authority—the whole memetic shebang—thru some kind of social software.”
- “Don’t you find it amazing how blackboxing lanes and pedestrian crossings on the street thru mere painting can be so useful?”
- “Let’s blackbox operating systems away thru browsers!”
The word comes, of course, from the technical meaning of blackbox: “a device or system or object when it is viewed primarily in terms of its input and output characteristics.”
Tio Victor: Imaginate, ahi en el restaurant de la casa de Liz Taylor el platillo mas barato—el mas barato—cuesta 500 pesos! De ahi p’arriba!
Papa: Pues que te daran? Lenguas de jilguero?
“No puedes corres, quieres vuelas.”—decia la abuela de Toño, mi muy apreciado maestro de frances.
I stumbled upon the .CBR extension some days ago and it was interesting to read its description, via filext:
This is a renamed .RAR file and can be decompressed with any .RAR file utility. The CDisplay program displays the comic book images so it is useful to use for this particular .RAR archive type.
Think about it, to create the ultimate comic-book format you simply wrap together some images (GIFs, JPGs, PNGs) and some (optional) introductory text (a .NFO or a .TXT) in a .RAR file and rename it. That’s it. A batch of pictures has been converted into a black-box, into a comic book. We’ve reified a comic out of thin pixels. That’s all CDisplay needs to let you seamlessly experience those images as a comic, but you could get as baroque in your specification of a file format as you like. For, say, a hypothetical .BIO file-extension used to store people’s biographies, you would specify a .RAR wrap of that person photo (that must be named, say, “mypic”, and must be a JPG), one photo as a kid (named “kidpic”), one photo of each parent (“mompic and “dadpic”), a curriculum vitae (“vitae”, must be a .TXT file),... you get the picture. Half of the magic, of course, resides in the reading-program, but that’s the easy part.
Here are two extra, contradictory advantages of creating file-formats thru .RAR wrapping:
the tying is loose
The elementary constituents are still available to anyone with a .RAR decompressing utility.
the tying is tight
You’re using a compression format after all, so you are probably saving at least a couple of bytes (though the time spent decompressing things on the fly could easily turn this into a disadvantage).
What struck me about this file-extension thing was how such a seemingly low-level nitty-gritty construct as a file-extension can be blackboxed mostly thru the high-level path of drag-and-dropping icons to WinRar.
Yo: Ah! O como te acuerdas de aquello del Principito1?
Chepe: Si! Ay, eso estaria padrisimo. La verdad, yo si hicieran algo asi, yo si iria!
Yo [con la mano en la frente, befuddled]: Queee?!??
1 He aqui el aquello:
Les hommes occupent très peu de place sur la terre. Si les deux milliards d’habitants qui peuplent la terre se tenaient debout et un peu serrés, comme pour un meeting, ils logeraient aisément sur une place publique de vingt milles de long sur vingt milles de large. On pourrait entasser l’humanité sur le moindre petit îlot du Pacifique.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
Es decir, actualizando los calculos, las aproximadamente 6 billones de personas que hay en el mundo cabrian (holgadamente) en un cuadrado de 80km (dandole poco mas de un metro cuadrado a cada quien).
“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).
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.
Me conmovio tanto la despedida de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su hermano que se la lei a mi mama unas horas mas tarde, traduciendola al hablar. Le impresiono mucho y me pidio inmediatamente que la tradujera en forma al Español. Eso he hecho. Espero que quien no tenia la oportunidad de leerla lo haga.
...it can only give you answers.
He died quite a few years before Google (or the Internet, for that matter) started, but I’m sure Picasso would have said that. And I think there would have been some truth in it.
Yesterday I spent most of my day just trying to find out why my local web-apps had crashed horribly ever since I upgraded to Rails 1.1. It was all a complex dance between Google, my web-apps, and all sort of forums. I painstakingly build my web-apps one-step at a time, several times, just trying to find out exactly what step was causing the problem.
And finally the question emerged: ¿Is there a known problem between RMagick, a ruby image-manipulation library that I use, and Rails 1.1? The answer from Google was nigh immediate: Rails 1.1 requires Ruby 1.84, which in turn kills RMagick. I’ll simply have to do without it until a fix is posted.
It is not the results that drive us, but the query.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of a search engine is not that it provides with immediate answers, but that this immediacy allows us to pose far more questions.
This preponderance of questions over answers is what makes me believe there might be some future in clustering techniques (Marissa Mayer to the contrary): when it works best, clustering works by hinting at good questions.
A question machine
Do we need a question-machine? What is a question-machine? Is that the question to ask? Is the name of god a question? Where can I buy the Whole Earth Review? Is the universe recursive? What is this “fly on the wall” syndrome? When did I first hear the song There Was An Old Woman? What might Sergio Rivas be doing this very moment? Where is that story we wrote together? Was it any good? What is a question? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis true? How is Ray Kurzweil like? Is it true 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?” Is the universe discrete or continuous? Will they come when you do call for them? Will we ever achieve post-symbolic communication? Is symbolic systems a career for me? What does a “reality conversation” look like? Will there be a singularity? Are we becoming a Gaia? Is there an I? Is everything a prosthesis? Is everything an interface? Will interface design be the art form of the twenty first century? Will I be any good as a web-app craftsman? Will sex ever be free? What are the classic walks of the world? What is meaning? Will I ever find out? Is copyright fair? Are there better solutions? Is it wrong for me to download music illegally? When will this post be lost forever? Why are there so few women in scientific careers? How can Orson Scott Card be so smart and yet so frighteningly conservative? Is abortion the cause for a drop in U.S. crime rates? Was the pill the cause of the sudden increase in U.S. crime rates? Is technology the answer? Will they really build a robotic team that can compete and defeat the world soccer champions by 2050? Is it too late for Esperanto? Will an A.I. ever read these very words? Will anyone? How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? Will I die? Will I really be rich by 30? How was Borges like? Did AMLO know about Bejarano and Ponce? Which is the best candidate in this presidential elections? Will Caja Negra work? Will I work at Google? Should I’ve taken that Etsy offer? Would I be happier in New York? Am I scared? Am I too easy on myself? Is it wrong that I don’t finish what I start? Is this good or bad procrastination? Will I ever meet annzah? Am I foolish to believe, deep down inside me, that in my life “everything happens for the best”? How should I love her? What’s char doing right now? Is she happy? Did she find out the title of the song of that ad? What is the equivalent of a word-processor for reading? How can you improve reading? How can you automate understanding? As in, say, how can you automate or speed up the process of understanding a legal document? With diagrams? Is Doug Engelbart’s idea of a parts-of-speech highlighter any good? Is speed-reading real? If it is, why is it so marginal? Will Jef Raskin’s Archy ever pan out?
I really don’t know what led me to spin this whole tale from the vaguest of memories when I read this post but it did. (The teacher, btw, is almost surely Dorothy, my Mexican History teacher… or perhaps that cool Spanish teacher whose name I’m forgetting now.) Parece que tengo futuro como redactor de comerciales de Aplijsa.
I remember a high school teacher used to
tell us a story about a young prince of a faraway kingdom. His father, the king, had gifted him on the day he came of age a fine ring of pure gold with only the engraving “This will pass” on its surface. “You will live through hard times,” said the old king with a sad smile, “when everything around you will seem to fall apart, when you’ll be powerless, when you’ll be hopeless. That is the lot of man.”
“But,” and the monarch looked at his son in the eye as he put the ring on his finger, ”’they will pass’, and that wisdom is my gift to you.” The prince nodded gravely and yet distant, blithely enveloped in the abstractness of youth.
“Wait,” said the king, as his son was leaving his royal chamber, “there’s one more thing. Perhaps the day will come to you, as it came to me, when not even these words will be enough. There’s a hidden message on the back of this ring, therein lies the rest of my wisdom. It shall give you hope, as it gave it to me. You must not read it until then.” And with that, he sent his son away to enjoy his day.
Time passed. The king died a few years later and our prince succeeded him, proving himself a king as noble and wise as his father. He was very successful but he was not without his share of tragedy; the ring was his companion at those times, and indeed it gave him hope when there was none.
But soon after his 40th birthday, terror stroke his kingdom, a plague with no parallel even in legends devoured his entire country. It took her wife and his two children away, and so it did to almost half of his subjects. His kingdom was crumbling, reverting to a state of chaos, and there was generalized despair. His people turned to him for guidance but he found none within himself. But just when he entertained thoughts on his own death he remembered his father’s ring. He took it away slowly and, after some hesitation, read the hidden message. He cried happy tears at the sight of those four letters; he had found his hope.
In clear-cut white letters, the back of the ring read only: “This, too, shall pass.”
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