| Formist comic of the year | 2 0 0 7 |
Oct 14 |
And as many have pointed out, “definitely for real” synchs up as well. There’s room for love within O/XK-CD.
Patterns
8 posts under this tag.
| Synthetic Synesthesias | 2 0 0 7 |
Apr 24 |
Sunny Bains’s Mixed Feelings is a cool article in last month’s Wired about synthetic synesthesias: using technology to give us new senses by using old ones’ bandwidth. Stuff like using the tongue to see, or, below, using touch to locate.
For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it’s time to build them.
“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, ”I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place1.”Some intriguing stories here about the brain that will delight anyone who has read Jeff Hawkin’s mind-bendingly good On IntelligenceAM. Another example:
More than 50 years ago, Austrian researcher Ivo Kohler gave people goggles that severely distorted their vision: The lenses turned the world upside down. After several weeks, subjects adjusted — their vision was still tweaked, but their brains were processing the images so they’d appear normal. In fact, when people took the glasses off at the end of the trial, everything seemed to move and distort in the opposite way.Of course any true Jeff fan would nod knowingly and immediately quote back with:
Patterns are all the brain knows about. Brains are pattern machines. It’s not incorrect to express the brain’s functions in terms of hearing or vision, but at the most fundamental level, patterns are the name of the game. No matter how different the activities of various cortical areas may seem from each other, the same basic cortical algorithm is at work. The cortex doesn’t care if the patterns originated in vision, hearing, or another sense. It doesn’t care if its inputs are from a single sensory organ or from four. Nor would it care if you happened to perceive the world with sonar, radar, or magnetic fields, or if you had tentacles rather than hands, or even if you lived in a world of four dimensions rather than three.
Jeff Hawkins, On IntelligenceAM, p2
Being a fan of the concept since my soundscape post, however, I was surprised the article doesn’t mention the inspiration for my post and the most widespread example yet of a synthetic synesthesia: the beeping proximity sensor in many vehicles—space as sound. My brain has become so used to it that at times glancing back seems like a distraction.
fn1. This quote on space perception got me thinking about time. Is time perception a sense? Are there animals who can, say, stand in an isolated room and yet be able to tell the time? Do watches (time perception through vision) count as synthetic synesthesias? Would something like the above belt—with different intensity buzzers in the place of clock hands—work for time? It would be different from a watch in that you would always know the time, probably not even be conscious of knowing it after a while. Would people become time oriented in a similar way that they become space oriented? Would time become intuitive?
| Happy, tiny Gmail tip | 2 0 0 7 |
Feb 01 |
Click a message checkbox, then, holding shift, click another one a couple of messages apart—all intermediate checkboxes are automatically checked.
One of the most universal uses of the ShiftWP key is to aid in selecting ranges (think how you use it to select text or several files) and yet it was only today that it occurred to me that it just might work for checkboxes. I blame years of crappy webmail for that. I checked Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (the “standard version”, the cool beta version does implement something along these lines), and my university mail and it won’t work there—which is bollocks: it’s a tremendously useful feature that costs near nothing to implement.
| butt-crack is the new cleavage | 2 0 0 6 |
Sep 08 |
“Roughly speaking, the thing we need a name for is a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.”
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Phrases for lazy writers in kit form
X is the new Y.
X. Y X.
Dammit, Jim! I’m a X, not a Y!
If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.[1]
X, M dollars. Y, N dollars. Z? Priceless.
Original X: “pink”; original Y: “black”; commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt (original 1960s, popularized 1980s)
X. Y X.
Original X: “Bond”; Y: “James”; from the film Dr. No (1962) and all subsequent James Bond movies.
Dammit, Jim! I’m a X, not a Y!
Original X: “doctor”, original Y: “magician”; from a famous misquotation of a line from Star Trek. (c. 1966)
If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.[1]
See Eskimo words for snowWP.
X, M dollars. Y, N dollars. Z? Priceless.
Strapline from MasterCard advertising campaign (2000)
From Wikipedia’s List of Snowclones
Glenn Whitman finally dubbed the linguistic artifact a snowcloneWP (at 22:56:57 on Thursday, January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California, btw) and the meme just bit me. It just bit you.
(oh, and regarding the gratuitous snowclone I used for title: it’s true, but the jury’s still out on whether this is a passing Hollywood fancy or a giant step for butt-kind.)
| Design Pattern: Don't enclose | 2 0 0 6 |
Jul 27 |
Today, just after finishing a slight redesign of my blog (inspired by caterina’s) and comparing it with other redesigns of other websites I’ve made along the past 2 years, I became aware of a small pattern to my madness: don’t enclose unless you must.
Before
Now
I’m not sure why—tenderfootness I guess—but my first website designs have always been unnecessarily enclosed, too many fences, too many cages. Only after much pruning and shuffling do I realize that much of it is extraneous, just clutter.
Much Much Before
Much Before
Before
Now
Most of the time you don’t need that box around that text, you almost certainly don’t need that big box to enclose your entire website, and you probably don’t need so many borders. Try erasing them and watch your website become more “flowing”, more open.
(For an example of what not to do, check my local newspaper’s hideous, caged redesign.)
| Today's reading: The Psychology of Learning | 2 0 0 6 |
Jul 19 |
I didn’t think much of this essay the first time around but it has worked its way into my head since. The distinction it makes, between perfection-oriented and performance-oriented individuals is crucial and thought-provoking. Read it.
| Wisdomous | 2 0 0 6 |
Jun 25 |
I set out to serve me. Rails is a very selfish project in that respect. It gained a lot of its focus and appeal because I didn’t try to please people who didn’t share my problems. Differentiating between production and development was a very real problem for me, so I solved it the best way I knew how.
It’s hard enough to solve your own problems with eloquence. Trying to solve other people’s problems is damn near impossible—at least to do so to the level of satisfaction that would make me interested in the solution.
That’s why we hold the notion that ”frameworks are extractions” so very dear in the Rails community. Frameworks are not designed before the fact. They’re extracted when you’ve proved to yourself that an approach works. Whenever we get ahead of ourselves and try to leap over the extraction process, we come back sorely disappointed.
I believe that’s why Rails just feels right for so many people—because it’s been used by real people for real work before we dished it out for others to reuse.
I may be besotted with infatuation right now, but I believe there’s true wisdom—hard, distilled, endlessly applicable wisdom (well, what is wisdom if not particularly broad and useful patterns?)—up there.
And as a sidenote, I propose a new dictum based on the quote’s last paragraph: Use before you reuse.
| Formists | 2 0 0 6 |
Mar 12 |
- A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
- A form is a linguistic pattern.
- A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
- Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
- It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
- Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
- Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
- Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
- Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
- Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
- Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
- Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
- Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.
-
We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.
[...]
A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.
The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine) - Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.
What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?
“Make me one with everything.”
* * *
When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”Formists just want to have fun.
- A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
- Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
- Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
- Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
- Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
- A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugarWP .”
- It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
- This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
- All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.
Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!
Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]
Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain - Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.