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Rants

43 posts under this tag.

I'm tired of my artist friends 2
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1
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Jan
30

I’m tired of my artist friends fetishizing pre-web media, feeling that to matter they have to print a book, get published at a magazine, or get funded to film a cinema movie or start a “real” startup. Fuck that.

You know how those over 40 make fluffy pronouncements about new digital literacies?

Well, the new literacy is PUBLISHING: reaching hundreds, thousands, millions through web media, for next to nothing, and learning to hold their attention. It’s only tangentially a technical challenge.

End rant. I love you artist friends.

Spain recap 2
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9
Aug
12

I lived for 3 months in Spain. I shared a room with 3 other people in a nice, simple flat in the northeast of Madrid. Less than 10 minutes away walking was a big mall with a cheap hypermarket, my gym, and the local public library. I was very happy.

Wolfram Alpha lives! 2
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9
May
18

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.

Dude, I love this country 2
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9
Apr
12

Predictably, I found this deeply, personally moving.

[Having to live in Canada so his spouse can work,] He misses interaction with colleagues. It hinders efficiency, slows work. He is physically drained from travel. He is frustrated that he cannot put down roots in America, and maybe start his own company, because he cannot leave Google, his visa sponsor.

He says he feels, on one hand, great gratitude that America gave him extraordinary opportunity. But he says he fulfilled his side of the bargain by striving and succeeding. [He became a multimillionaire with Google stock.] “Dude, I love this country,� he said.

But he doesn’t feel loved back: “My devotion is unrequited.�

Star
On romance, tangentially 2
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9
Mar
19

From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.

Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But … why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?

On Chinese writing 2
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9
Feb
04

So funny, so true.

Chinese [writing] does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves ”Why in the world am I doing this?” Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say “I’ve come this far—I can’t stop now” will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.

Insomnia 2
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9
Jan
14

Insomnia’s hitting me hard so I thought I might as well write some of the thoughts swirling in my head…

I got almost 20,000 songs in total, having recently recovered most of my music library from a backup I had in Mexico. Some 2,000 of those songs I absolutely love and keep track of them with a special playlist. Funny thing but that playlist alone is worth to me more than all my thousands of (illegal) songs.

Anyway, been listening to that playlist for hours now. Climaxing to is a better word. Music is such pure pleasure, ain’t it? (I wonder if the pleasure will fade with age as they say—does that mean that it is fake then? Do dogs listen to music?) This is why I tell you I just can’t stop marveling at technology: so much marvelous music, from all over the world and all over time, available for so little money to me—a 100 years ago it  would have been unthinkable, to die for.

It shocked me that you didn’t know the meaning of “marveling” today girl, because it’s such an important word to me. Like, about what we talked at Ice Berry, people bore me not because they don’t share my interests but because they’re barely interested at all.

I’m so hungry for passion, for intense and unreasonable interests, for people with dreams, for people to wonder and marvel with, you know? Pretty much all most people seem to care (superficially, unreflectingly) about is gossip, fucking, or kids.

So people are mostly uninterested, unawed, unmoved—or when they’re not they’re unbelievably pessimistic, negative, catastrophist, paranoid, bitter… People who marvel are so exceedingly, saddeningly rare.

Any dimwit can be bitter (and most are), it’s the easiest thing to do, human nature (have you ever wondered how common clinical, biological chronic depression is, while its opposite, biological, chronic euphoria, is so weird as to be almost unheard of?).

Marveling, being hopeful, is the exception, it’s what takes effort and imagination and daring.

Star
a theory of finance 2
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8
Oct
23

Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?
Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck?
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Apropos of the many pundits awoken by the finance crisis:

Foretelling MUST be part of any worthwhile understanding.
(We can all come up on demand with plausible histories after the fact
and “description—often bad description—hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.”)


Speculation’s to finance, what experimentation’s to science: THE TEST.
No one salubriously rich can claim to understand finance.
Whoever REALLY understands it is welcome to big bucks any day.

Heard that Douglas Adams’s creation story?
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Same thing may happen with finance:
Any understandable glimmer of it is too good an opportunity not to be instantly complicated away in the efforts to milk it.

This all but an instance of a bigger theory that claims:
your inability to foretell things foretelling abler (smarter) than you.
The future, society, others, and even you, among such things.

Star
No-need-to-spam-your-friends ad 2
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8
Oct
03

In record turnouts, 40% of eligible voters don’t vote. In other words, 60% of Americans don’t vote (because they can’t or won’t). Was thinking of something cool and snarky to answer that excellent celebrity video that’s making the ‘Tube rounds, but really, what need is there?

A lot of people, most on at least one count, aren’t wasting their time already. Some of the best propaganda in the world (the envy of any dictator), none for the cases against voting (1, 2, 3... just imagine if a true don’t vote ad went national—child porn would cause less mayhem), and yet so many still do what makes sense. Can’t really do anything for the rest. What I’ll do is humor the naive we all carry inside, do the simplest thing that could have some impact, this post, and move over to more productive stuff.

And please, please, were you a democra-zealot (good-natured pun, crazy, get it? :), take this not as a challenge to double your efforts, I’m truly saddened by all the misspent electoral effort as it is. Instead, why not make something you want happen that doesn’t need to (attempt to) change everyone else? As I’ll try doing now, over and out.

9/11 2
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8
Sep
28

Published the day after the towers fell, this the finest thing I’ve read on 9/11: Harry Browne’s When will we learn?

    And now, as sure as night follows day, we will be told we must give up more of our freedoms to avenge what never should have happened in the first place.

    When will we learn that it makes no sense to give up our freedoms in the name of freedom?
What should be done?

First of all, stop the hysteria. Stand back and ask how this could have happened. Ask how a prosperous country isolated by two oceans could have so embroiled itself in other people’s business that someone would want to do us harm. Even sitting in the middle of Europe, Switzerland isn’t beset by terrorist attacks, because the Swiss mind their own business.
When will we learn that without freedom and sanity, there is no reason to be patriotic?