Quotes

I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:

1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty. 2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a design^ELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy Bliss^WP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century. 3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

I don’t even remember how it was that last Thursday morning I ended up reading Sutherland’s classic article. But I’m glad I did. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you Mr Sutherland.

Never had read anything by Larry Wall^WP before. I’m dazzled, through and through. Don’t walk, run out to read his Perl, the first postmodern computer language speech. It’s an important rambling, with a scope far beyond that of programming.

My first (self-)published joke. They should lock me.

Posted in a comment by Thomas Buckner to that famous letter of Eliezer Yudkowsky to his brother Yehuda ^ELZR. No idea about its accuracy. Interestingly, I don’t care one whit.

(Used the Wikipedia trick^ELZR to translate Tuilleries^WP into Spanish—neat!)

So true. So true.

Turns out you can easily break DRM-ed LIT ebooks while as far as I know your PDF ones—if tightly DRM-ed, and these days they all are—are lost for good—leaving you as a sucker who can’t even copy paste and interesting quote; heck, a sucker who can’t even lend the ebook to a friend (hurrah for technology!).

Interesting how piracy can actually be a good thing for business: yesterday I bought a digital version of Peter Watson’s 800-paged Ideas^AM (to go with my paper version) only because it was available as a LIT. I then immediately broke the DRM (Microsoft Reader is a joke) and had the—again, 800-paged book—as an HTML mine to edit and tweak. This is just the encouragement I needed to start reading the book—just imagine, I can now tweak the format just like I want it (and as you may have noticed I am a format freak—I like my italics in a slightly more remarkable tone, my parenthetical text slightly subdued, my quotes highlighted), I can turn footnotes into sidenotes, I can 1-click-Answers.com every word, I can copy-paste to Evernote and Devonthink (these days I just can’t conceive of reading a book without highlighting, now it’s getting intolerable not being able to immediately save select quotes in a digital form¹), I can upload to my webserver and have it always some seconds away, I can read it in my berry, I can print it, I can find-as-I-type, I can link, annotate, or rewrite, I can…

Being the neophilic¹ I usually am, I don’t usually get scared with technology but I admit to getting the shivers when viewing System One’s screencast. The webapp seems to be something very similar to 37Signals’ Backpack—a web 2.0 CMS^WP that is—only at the enterprise level, and on first blush I almost dismissed it as a staid attempt to bring consumer-level webapps to the office (and, come on, what kind of name is System One?).

It may still be just that, but here’s the idea that blew my mind: search-as-you-write. Not search-as-you-type, which is also called incremental search, and is when you are presented results for a query as you type it; no, it’s, search-as-you-write: automatic, real-time search as you’re writing a non-query—a post, a comment, your thesis, a love letter. You really have to see the screencast to get the feel of it but just think about the momentous, qualitative jump this represents—automatic, ubiquitous polling of the hive-mind. Talk about erosion of the self.

Yes, it’s only a natural progression, but still—let me be nebulously apprehensive today for a change.