My father, who is very fond of sayings and good phrases(a formist!), surprises one often with some bizarre and rather tactless answer that is however perfectly appropriate. “Stop looking for five legs in a dog1...”, he admonishes, tired of pointless dabbling, pausing to smile and lull you, ”...or tits in a hen”.
A while ago, building a huge and pretty warehouse, he had to endure a terribly inefficient contractor that was however friends with the client. He had a excuse for everything, a but, an it wasn’t my fault, a there’s no way, an it can’t be done. “Look, when one doesn’t know how to fuck…”, interrupts him my father one day, tired of delays and pretexts, “balls get in the way”.
Mi padre, que es muy dado a los refranes y las buenas frases(a formist!), sorprende de vez en cuando con respuestas mas bien bizarras y de poco, digamos, tacto que sin embargo suelen ser perfectamente atinadas. “No le busques tres pies al gato…,” te reganha, cansado de necios devaneos, pausando para sonreir y arrullarte, ”...ni chichis a las gallinas.”
Hace poco, construyendo una bodega enorme y muy linda, tuvo que aguantar un contratista ineficiente pero amigo del cliente. Para todo tenia una excusa, un pero, un no fue mi culpa, un no hay manera, un no se puede. “Mira, al que no sabe coger,” lo interrumpe mi padre un buen dia, cansado de retrasos y pretextos, “hasta los huevos le estorban.”
fn1. “Managers thinking about accounting issues should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite riddles: `How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?’ The answer: `Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg’.” Warren BuffetWQ, alleged.
Why doesn’t it have its Pepsi and its RC Cola? Its Burger King and its Carl’s Jr? Its Adidas and its Rebook? Everyone likes to dismiss it as overpriced McCoffee but if so, why haven’t competitors of remotely comparable size and ambition sprung up in its obviously profitable and still rather vacant niche—the third placeWP? Why is it instead that it has mushroomed globally to the point of cannibalization and watering down? The closest thing I know of a competitor is—and I’m surely biased by being in Mexico—Mexican Punta del Cielo. Though it at least gets the basic idea right and is at least as designed as Starbucks(a crucial point), it is still puny (20 stores) and not particularly innovative. So, again, why does Starbucks stand alone?
Espanhol llano es espanhol escrito sin acentos, ñ(que se suele sustituir por nh, nn o simplemente n), dieresis o signos de puntuacion iniciales(¿¡).
Perfectamente inteligible para hablantes del dialecto ortografico dominante, el espanhol llano entra en auge a la par que el teclado, cuya dificultad intrinseca para escribir caracteres especiales se vuelve el argumento original a su favor. Hoy en dia las razones para usarlo son enormemente variadas.
(A more detailed explanation to follow, it’s just that I had to get this out—too much brain crackELZR already and this idea had been within for way too long.)
A 16-line hack to make the JS DOM API a tad more humane.
...absolutely amazing. I’ve yet to find a smaller and yet more astounding example of how you can encapsulate functionality within JavaScript and create brand new APIs on the fly.
Web pages are written in HTMLWP but as they have become more and more complex, they now tend to be written, clientside, through JavascriptWP, which can manipulate and insert HTML. Google Images, for instance, uses Javascript to write the HTML that displays your image results.
Yes, it’s roundabout, but it’s due to the nature of the languages: Javascript does stuff, HTML displays stuff. When you want the browser to do things (instead of merely displaying dumbly what it receives) and when these things themselves involve a lot of displaying, you end up writing HTML through Javascript.
HyperScript is a bizarre and quixotic attempt to write French in English; that is, HTML in Javascript. Basically, you do what went on in the Norman conquest of EnglandWP: you anglicize as many French words as you can; that is, you turn into Javascript as many HTML words as you can.
The lark itself takes gratefully (and rather surpisingly) only 16 paltry lines of Javascript code (highlighting thanks to Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones.):
functioneach(a, f) { for(vari=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) }; each('a big blockquote br b center code div em form h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 hr img iframe input i li ol option pre p script select small span strong style sub sup table tbody td textarea tr ul u'.split(''), function(label){ window[label]=function(){ vartag=document.createElement(label); each(arguments, function(arg){ if(arg.nodeType) tag.appendChild(arg); elseif(typeofarg=='string' ||typeofarg=='number') tag.innerHTML+=arg; elsefor(varattrinarg){ if(attr=='style') for(varstyinarg[attr]) tag[attr][sty]=arg[attr][sty]; elsetag[attr]=arg[attr];
};
}); returntag;
};
});
and you can play with it right here, right now:
Test Area:
The translation between HTML and Hyperscript is straightforward, where you would have written
May 10 yesterday was Mother’s dayWP here in Mexico and it was a messy affair, what with my now heart-wrenchingly weak grandfather back in our house and all the sad, crowded tension. Me, I put particular attention to the music. The undisputed classic poem for the day and inevitable tearbomb at elementary schools across the country is El brindis del bohemio(lyrics: “Sólo faltaba un brindis, el de Arturo, el del bohemio puro, de noble corazón y gran cabeza; aquel que sin ambages declaraba que sólo ambicionaba robarle inspiración a la tristeza.”), most famously declaimed by Juan Manuel Bernal. It is terribly cursi, pure schwarmerei and maudlin gesticulation, but at least it’s unabashedly so and good at it. That said, I’m glad we managed the day without it.
What surprised me yesterday was our reaction, my family’s and my cousins’, late at night and with some alcohol involved, to Denisse De Kalafe’s Señora, señora(lyrics). The song’s of course more than schmaltzy enough for the occasion but it is actually not that bad. And all of a sudden we all started singing it. We had all heard the song countless times and had been forced to learn the lyrics more than once for school recitals. It wasn’t this big emotional singing, at least not at first nor all along. It all started as some sort of joke but the song has a definite mood. And it was good to sing it.
Much less known (at least here in Mexico) is Los Churumbeles’ Cariño Verdad(lyrics), which, again, and this is perhaps inevitable, is guilty of sentimentalism, but it is all drown in some fantastic music. I didn’t even know what the song was about for a long time, always mesmerized by the tune alone.
Oh and one more song: Gloria Trevi’sWP thankfully-breaking-the-maudlin-mood A la madre, which was actually quite an innovative, playful song back in the time.
btw, I came from the party with a cool CD Faby lent me: Rhythms del Mundo | Cuba. I had heard one of their songs thanks to Chef and it was very intriguing. The project describes itself as a “collaboration of Western artists and the Buena Vista Sound” (as if Latin America wasn’t Western) and the results are oddly arresting (Latin America appropriating the outside world!). It’s pop made salsa. It doesn’t always work wonders but it is always worth hearing. The two best tracks in my opinion are Coldplay’s Clocks and Maroon 5’s She’ll be loved. Check them out.
Why, if white is the coolest “color” (it reflects all the light) and black is the hottest one (it absorbs all the light)—just compare walking in the beach with a white vs. a black t-shirt—, are people in sunny regions darker than those in less sunnier ones?
In other words, why isn’t being white (i.e., more light-reflecting) in sunny regions an evolutionary advantage? Whatever melaninWP does (I think it’s supposed to be a sun-blocker), shouldn’t it do it better with the advantage of a more light-reflecting skin?
Why do we call something a “number”?: Well, perhaps because it has a “direct” relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name.
And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of the fibers.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical InvestigationsEEM
Always have loved them. Always have obsessed about them. I treasure my favorites and revisit them again and again—I could barely think without them. I have a tag for them in this blog (here) and I almost started “a collection of beautiful definitions” to go with my eemadges website (“a collection of beautiful descriptions”). A good definition more than justifies a whole book. A good book always has many good definitions in it. Good people always carry several good definitions with them—you just have to know how to tease them out.
And yet I seem to get into all kinds of tiresome, silly discussions when I try to share them with friends. Besides my not to be belittled incompetence as an explainer and my fabled monomanias, I believe a basic misunderstanding regarding their nature is at the heart of the matter.
You see, most people seem to never have moved over the idea of a definition as distilled truth—the one true essence which both captures everything that should be captured and leaves nothing that shouldn’t be left out. Definitions as platonic ideals—the perfect divine forms of which we only see shadows. The one golden fiber that runs trough all the thread.
The problem with this view, of course, is that it is crippling in its obsession with perfection. It intimidates and nurtures ridiculous expectations. If we had had to delay mathematics until we had a “perfect” definition of number we would still be waiting.
In their supposed perfection, definitions only become cages. And we easily get to the point when not only it isn’t believed that things like “love”, “mind”, “conscience”, or “happiness” could ever be defined(again, as if there was one true definition to rule them all), but the very possibility is viewed with dread. Dread that what once was magic and alive is cramped and crippled into a cage.
A much more interesting view of definitions, in my opinion, is to regard them as tools for thought, and as such, to value them on their usefulness and pick the one appropriate for the task at hand—platonic truth is only one of the many, many things we can ask of them. Most importantly, we ought to recognize that we need them—a brain unaided can do only so much. Thinking without them is like hammering with your bare fists—it’s painful and ineffectual. Yes, they are only one (verbal) kind of tool and we run the risk of starting to see everything as a nail, but they are still one of the most basic and powerful tools we have and they have so far been needlessly feared and vilified.
Definitions are semantic flashlights, casting light on some meaning corners, shadow on some others. That everything be alight is only one criteria (ultimately impossible; only emptiness can be shadelessly illuminated), there are others—that it be bright, that it be dim, that it illuminate (or obscure!) a particular patch, that it be pristinely white, that it tint its subjects with its color, that it be diffuse, that it be focused, that it be favorable, that it be unfavorable… We say, teasingly, that an American is a “man with two hands and four wheels” not because we believe that it happens to be a perfect embodiment of what it means to be an American, but because we believe it casts them in an interesting light.
So the effort to define “play” or “capital” or “freedom” is not to pin the butterfly down and put it in formaldehyde, it’s to find new ways to look at it, new sources of joy and understanding. Definitions do not diminish their subjects, they reveal them.
Some weeks ago water vapor was found on HD209458bWP, an extrasolar planet some 150 light years away. Just yesterday Gliese 581 cWP, E was discovered. With a radius only 50% bigger than that of Earth and within the “habitable zone”WP—”the region surrounding a star where water would be liquid”—of its star, it is the best candidate so far for extraterrestrial life.
The perennial wild card of the discovery of alien life looks ever closer and I’m teetering already—with excitement, with fear, with awe.
Here some definitions—some funny, but all out of sadness. «Whimsical» to be (mostly) understood in the not so standard sense of “subject to our whims”—of course.
Reality: that which is not whimsical.
Technology: that which makes Reality whimsical.
Technologist: that who believes Realitycan and should be whimsical.
Hacker: a Technology maker.
Body: that which is whimsical and its manifold possibilities.
Click somewhere in this post. Move the cursor somewhere else in it. Shift-click. Intermediate text is selected!
Just found out about this a couple of days ago. It’s always weird and somewhat shameful to learn so late something so basic but by the same token it is always oddly exhilarating. Seems to be particularly useful in cases where click-holding selection becomes unwieldy: when long fragments have to be selected or when a crappy touchpad is the selection tool. (Seems to work only on Windows so far. Seems to work on Windows and Mac so far.)
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