“present shock”

I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.

So I created this experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story, linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to first sources as much as possible. The favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.

Mixtecs are an indigenous group of southern Mexico, one of the most classic, important and populous. Well, this number of the Antropologia Mexicana magazine buriedly reports that there are now more Mixtec speakers in the US!

No wonder then that I heard more Native American languages in California than in my Mexican hometown.

Mexico should make peace with the fact that, under the pressure of geography and economic complementariness, it is now more linked to Anglo America than to Latin America.

Similar cover articles have been common for more than a decade now.
In computer magazines.
This is a women’s fashion magazine (!).
220 sites you’ve never heard of, devoted to makeup, fashion, beauty, style..
The jocks, the cheerleaders, the geeks—we’re all webheads now.

This kind of video (rebus rap) is almost a genre already and it’ll just keep getting better.

We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.

What I remembered was that it was written by that famous author who committed suicide, I googled that but that’s sadly too broad a description. So I kept thinking and I also remembered that he was famously very much a fan of that famous swiss tennis player, whose name of course also evaded me. But googling was successful this time, retrieving not Martina Higgins, but ah, yes, Roger Federer. So now I google “federer author suicide” and that finally got me David Foster Wallace. With the name it was a snap to find the quote in my collection, and all of it happened real-timely enough to keep the flow of the IM conversation.

This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.

The quote?

This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.

From the prolific interface genius that is Chris Harrison. Jump to 3:14 for the best concrete example of the technology in use: controlling your phone with gestures on a normal table with nothing but a stethoscope on it.

Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.

I went to Lisbon because I got hostel stranded for the weekend in Spain: all the hostels in Madrid and Barcelona were booked and hotels were so expensive that it was cheaper, and more interesting, for me to take a night bus to Lisbon. Of Lisbon I knew close to nothing.

I arrived at downtown just as the sun was coming out, groggy from barely catching a wink, without a reservation because the hostel aggregators showed there were rooms aplenty (were I not recklessness I would not have gotten stranded in the first place). I decided, at a whim, to follow the first pair of backpackers that I saw. Which I did, and ended up at the other bus station.

Believe the hype. Please take a while and go play with it! Its help, as is Wolfram’s tradition, is excellent, the best introduction.

How to describe it? It’s for data what Google was to text, what Wikipedia was to knowledge. It’s to the calculator what Wikipedia was to the encyclopedia, what Google was to the library catalog. It’s the most exciting, hopeful thing to happen to the web, to the world, since both Google and Wikipedia.

And with a mission “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”, it opens up as big and inspiring a project for this generation.

I believe it’s a historic moment and could not let it pass unmarked.

As David, to whom I own the Big Dog acquaintance, said: its movements are so fluid, so eerily natural, biological, one just knows the days of the flesh are counted. “It was nice being human.”

I’d rather be me, right now, right here —an upper middle class 22-year-old male Mexican in Guadalajara—, than any other human —emperor, king, sultan, noble, philosopher, artist, scientist, genius,...— from any time before, any place. We have been humans for some 15 thousands years and there’s no time past I’d rather be at.

I don’t mean this as some outburst of excitement, it’s just a calm realization that downed on me a while ago, out of the blue—a surprising measure of the reality of progress, the splendor of the present, the promise of the future.