“quote collages”
69 posts under this tag.
[Vernor Vinge] added a third [future] trend: “The great conspiracy against human freedom.” As novelist Doris Lessing has observed, barons on opposite sides of the river don’t need to be in cahoots if their interests coincide. In our case, defence, homeland security, financial crime enforcement, police, tax collectors and intellectual property rights holders offer reasons to want to control the hardware we use. Then there are geeks, who can be tempted to forget the consequences if the technology is cool enough. Vinge quotes the most famous line from the comic strip Pogo: ”We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Vinge’s technology to satisfy these groups’ dreams is the Secure Hardware Environment (She), which dedicates some bandwidth and a small portion of every semiconductor for regulatory use. Deployment is progressive, as standards are implemented. Built into new chips, She will spread inevitably through its predecessors’ obsolescence.
This part is terribly plausible. It sounds much like the Trusted Computing Platform, implemented in Intel chips and built into machines from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and others. Most people don’t realise their new computer contains a chip designed to block the operation of any software not certified by the group. Now enhance that and build it into RFID chips, networked embedded systems, shrink and distribute as “smart dust”. All are current trends or works in progress.
Geeks are willing to fight Trusted Computing on the grounds that it could be used to block open-source software or to enforce draconian digital rights management. But what if accepting it meant less visible security, less bureaucracy, even slight profit? She automatically sends taxes, enables much less noticeable surveillance and gets you through security checkpoints with no waiting. There’s less crime, because legislative reality can be enforced on physical reality. Fewer false convictions. Make regulation automatic, and it seems to go away. New laws can be downloaded as a regulatory upgrade.
One of the great hazards of supermarket shopping has always been the tabloids lining the checkout lane, assailing us with tawdry tales of celebrity misfortune. Infidelity, infertility, addiction—all are grist for our sadistic lust to see stars brought down to the same lowly level as us. As French intellectual Edgar Morin wrote in The Stars, his classic book about movie idolatry, ”Every god is created to be eaten.”
With this in mind, enjoy the surprisingly thoughtful (verbal abuse is an art form, as Borges himself once wrote about), unrelenting Washington Post article on Britney. Here some teasers:
Pregnancy cleavage can be a beautiful development, but serving up one’s bosom like melons at a picnic is aggressively self-indulgent, enormously distracting and, unless you’re auditioning for a spread in Penthouse, unnecessarily vulgar.
Spears fidgeted, blathered and wept through the interview last week and one couldn’t help but gape in amazement at her astonishing aesthetic meltdown. It’s hard to recall the last time someone as famous as Spears—without any accompanying substance-abuse rumors—appeared so startlingly, slovenly wretched. The pop singer’s golden glow of stardom had been dimming, but this was the moment when it dropped below the horizon.
During the “Dateline” interview, Spears tearfully implored the paparazzi to leave her alone. Her pleas were reasonable and tugged at the heart. One came close to forgetting that she had encouraged the attention with her provocative videos, snake-charming stage performance, open-mouthed Madonna-kissing, 15-minute marriage, grotesquely narcissistic reality show and second husband known for displaying the tawdry, laconic demeanor of a pimp on weed.
As I said, today I’m happy and since my father isn’t coming to dinner (he has some appointment) and I’m home alone, I’m off to give myself a treat. I’ll go buy the previous-week Economist, which looks to be quite something (Inequality and The American Dream is the cover article, and the edition’s suvey is on logistics—need I say more?) and read it under a tree somewhere after eating Hindu rice at this very nice restaurant on Lopez Cotilla.
Next day update: Dinner was great, not so much for the rice (Biryani Hyderabad), which was a bit too spicy for my taste, but because I got to some interesting talking with the restauratrice, who gave me some very useful advice on my Honda: I could get almost free service checkups at Centro Magno’s agency, and they actually give free tours of the Honda plant here in Guadalajra (where they supposedly build a car in under two hours). I’m baffled at the incredible amount of local knowledge available if one will only listen.
They didn’t have the previous-week Economist at Galerias’ Sanborns so I had to settle with the previous-previous-week one, to which I gladly agreed once I realized it contained the 26-page technology quarterly. I gobbled up some it at the restaurant and then the rest up until late at night at Minerva’s Starbucks (it was too rainy outside for a tree and anyway, outdoors are heavily overrated). It was a wonderful edition—I was laughing so hard at times I got quite a few surprised looks. It felt like talking with a very witty, very sharp ole friend. And I found out two important things: I’d much rather read the day away than go watch a movie (and they cost about the same) and The Economist is far and away my favorite magazine.
Lorelai: Come on!
Rory: Wait. Come on where?
L: Inside.
R: We can’t go inside.
L: Why? Is there a force field or something around the place?
R: This is Harvard.
L: I know.
R: This. Is. Haaarvard.
L: I. Knooow.
R: You can’t just go inside. You need a guide.
L: I’ll be your guide.
R: What do you know about Harvard?
L: I know this: Look. There is Harvard.
R: Mooom…
L: Hey, don’t you want to see it? Huh? The place where you be living and studying and developing very naive but pretentious worldviews that will come crashing down the minute you graduate.
R: Yeah, I do…
Gilmore Girls, The Road Trip to Harvard
Out of college but still smack in the very-naive-but-pretentious-worldviews phase.
“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
Reading processors
Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,
I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.
, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,
and spacing (pdf),
What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?
I should tattoo myself these words. Somewhere prominent and unforgettable.
In my lifetime, I’ve had more than a dozen managers. It’s safe to say that many of them were forgettable, and some were awful. But the few that I admired or wanted to emulate took time to earn my trust. They wanted me to do my best work, and they knew that this was possible only if I could rely on them on a daily basis. This didn’t mean they’d do whatever I asked or yield to my opinions by default. But it did mean that their behavior was predictable. More often than not they were up front with me about their commitments, motivations, and expectations. I knew where I stood, what my and their roles were, and how much support was available from them for what I needed to do.
As a leader or significant contributor to a team, everything depends on what assumptions people can make of you. When you say “I will get this done by tomorrow” or “I will talk to Sally and get her to agree with this,” the other people in the room will make silent calculations, perhaps subconsciously, about the probability that what you say will turn out to be true. Over time, if you serve your team well, those odds should be very high. They will take you at your word and place their trust in you.
Although movies and television shows often portray leadership as a high-drama activity with heroes running into burning buildings or bravely fighting alone against hordes of enemies, real leadership is about very simple, practical things. Do what you say and say what you mean. Admit when you’re wrong. Enlist the opinions and ideas of others in decisions that impact them. If you can do these things more often than not, you will earn the trust of the people you work with. When a time comes where you must ask them to do something unpleasant or that they don’t agree with, their trust in you will make your leadership possible.
This implies that to be a good leader, you do not need to be the best programmer, planner, architect, communicator, joke teller, designer, or anything else. All that is required is that you make trust an important thing to cultivate, and go out of your way to share it with the people around you.% Therefore, to be a good leader, (pink)you must learn how to find, build, earn, and grant trust to others as well as learn how to cultivate trust in yourself.*
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
Here’s an excellent formist intro to international auxiliary languagesWP written by Eward SapirWP himself (one of the most influential American linguists of the past century) in 1925:
There are many, many highlights to be made. Here’s four
- The “difficult and subjective concept” of the richness of a language, the “richness of connotations” (that phrase alone was worth the price of admission). This was precisely what I was getting at in my badly-received post On the Language of this Blog.
- “It is true that English is not as complex in its formal structure as is German or Latin, but this does not dispose of the matter. The fact that a beginner in English has not many paradigms to learn gives him a feeling of absence of difficulty, but he soon learns to his cost that this is only a feeling, that in sober fact the very absence of explicit guide-posts to structure leads him into all sorts of quandaries.. The simplicity of English in its formal aspect is.. really a pseudo-simplicity or a masked complexity.”
- His dazzling insight that the problem of finding an adequate international auxiliary language is really the problem of how best to “symbolize thought.” Wow. Just wow.
- ”A common allegiance to a form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.” ‘Nuff said.
* * *
Y’know, just between you and me, when the time is ripe—that is, in around 10 years—I would love to plunge myself in language: I would love to speak (and think in) Esperanto, Japanese, German, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Sweddish, Arab, Hindi… —Oh! Were languages not the harsh mistresses that they are! I’d love to work (and solve!) the problem of automatic machine translation (which, according to Kurzweil, will be the last task left for AI to emulate, the crucial last stepping stone to consciousness). I’d love to read both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I’d love to construct all sorts of constructed and auxiliary languages. I’d love to write in Esperanto and join la movado. I’d love to become a Wiktionary super-freak. I’d love to write language textbooks. I’d love to create a compiler and write programming languages. I’d love (in a most masochistic kind of way) to be a professional translator and translate a novel. I’d love to study some serious linguistics. I’d love to do advanced algebra. I’d love to become a Lisp super-freak or, quite oppositely, think in assembly code. I’d love to understand Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. I’d love to work in the semantic web. I’d love to create software to help one read and absorb written information (we have software to write, word processors, so why don’t we have software to read?).
Oh well, please excuse the future lapse.
I’m fascinated and disgusted in equal measure with a recent Village Voice cover article: “Do you wanna kiss me?” (How New York’s women are wising up to The Game’s pickup tips). Fascinated because what it describes is such an interesting, natural, and inevitable step for men to take in relationships; disgusted because it seems to betray the all-important honesty upon which conversation relies. The rightly famous cluetrain manifesto is about the need for companies to speak with an honest, human voice; I guess we’ll soon need one for people too (but then again, what could be more positively human than artifice?). Magda, from William Gibson’s delightful Pattern Recognition, comes to mind:
[Cayce:] “You’re in advertising? What do you do?”
[Magda:] “Look sorted, go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up. While I’m at it, I mention a client’s product, of course favorably. I try to attract attention while I’m doing it, but attention of a favorable sort. I haven’t been doing it long, and I don’t think I like it.”
[...]
“I mean you’re in a bar, having a drink, and someone beside you starts a conversation. Someone you might fancy the look of. All very pleasant, and then you’re chatting along, and she, or he, we have men as well, mentions this great new streetwear label, or this brilliant little film they’ve just seen. Nothing like a pitch, you understand, just a brief favorable mention.”
[...]
“But it’s starting to do something to me. I’ll be out on my own, with friends, say, not working, and I’ll meet someone, and we’ll be talking, and they’ll mention something.”
“And?”
“Something they like. A film. A designer. And something in me stops.” She looks at Cayce. “Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“I’m devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I’m starting to distrust the most casual exchange.” Magda looks glum.
And now, after reading the Voice article—let alone reading The Game, for whatever purpose—, how can you not act differently? How can you help from negging, from creating a yes-ladder or a false time constraint? (Or from recognizing them?) I now know that the style of conversation I’ve evolved over the years, mostly unconsciously, is quite neggish; doesn’t being aware of what one’s doing changes the very nature of the act? “Being natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
Is it sneaky for men to employ said techniques? No sneakier than it is for a woman to color her hair or wear a push-up bra or high heels. We do what we need to in order to get the attention of the opposite sex.
Perhaps Dolly is right. These techniques may be nothing but conversation cosmethics (or rather, prosthetics) and I can surely appreciate their playful side, the way they’re “the grown-up version of hair-pulling on the playground.” But I’m still wary—it’s conversation we’re talking about here and there are few things I value more.
Oh, and I’m well aware that at least some parts of the article have been fabricated, as rumored first in Gawker, and then acknowledged by the Voice and the author himself. This is a shame (not least because of the wimpy apology by the author) but the article is still interesting and worth reading; that’s why I made a verbatim copy of it in my website.
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