“rants”

Thought I had already written about this obsession of mine but since I can’t find the post I’ll assume a better part of me reigned in and I had spared you. Most friends, however, haven’t been so lucky and usually win me to point it out in the hope that I shut up quickly: the oh-so-unnecesary “www.” bit one sees in most URLs. There was a time when it may have been needed—like, 1995—but why now? Now, some URLs actually won’t work without it, but that’s usually because of net administrator negligence; in most cases doing away with the appendix is a very minor setting. Once you know this, you die a little (literally!) every time you’re forced to stand it—and you’ll start to notice how often you are.

Today I just found there are in this topic—as in, we are remembered everyday, everything else—fellow anal freaks (tongue-in-cheek-ly, this ones). They even set up a website to spread the meme: . Of course I had to oblige. Even learned that there were futher Super Saiyan^WP levels to attain. So as of now, this is is a ”class B” website, which is the “classification [that] helps remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary. In Class B, www.example.net is a valid address, but it redirects all traffic to example.net.”

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.

It has taken me some three years to realize it but when I did it was obvious. The crazy sleep schedule I’ve been riding since I dropped out of college is more than the pale-hacker tropism for long quiet nights. It’s more than manic-depression, which for a time I was sure of having. It’s more than youthful immaturity, which I’m sure of having.

I remember the first nights out from college, and some before, I would curl up on my bed, scared as I’ve ever been—fingers curled, fetal, with hamsters in my head and a stomach full of nothing, churning away anyway. Scared of what you say? Oh, the usual I guess, scared of failure, of success, of not being up to the challenge, of blowing it all away in search of some silly dream. Mostly, though, scared of this fear I knew not inside of me.

Those nights stopped without my realizing but I now know what happened to them: I tired them away. I would work (or idle) my way to exhaustion, till there was nothing left for me to do but tumble down. Sleeping was sure easier than facing my fears, and since everything could wait, what was the harm of sleeping on it? Again and again.

I knew Luis González de Alba for his controversial, non-PC^WP opinions and that’s why I bought a popular science book of his in the last Spanish bookfair here in Guadalajara. The essays I have read have so far been overly digressive and frankly tedious overall, but there have been several fascinating insights here and there. My favorite of all:

I remember Andrea cringing when I read this to her, denying any link with the brutish Spaniards—Andrea, my beautiful, western-named, Spanish-surnamed, milk-white, hazel-eyed Mexican friend.

I’ve been drooling as much as anyone for one ever since Jobs announced it last January 9 in a brilliant demo (just for some historical fun, compare it with the 1968 “Mother of all demos”), and an interesting, in-depth review of it by Bruce Tognazzi got me thinking more deeply about it and all the possibilities it foretells. But just as I was guzzling the last Kool-aid dregs I started choking: I found out, to my unending disbelief, that it’s going to be a closed platform—meaning one won’t be able to independently develop software for it. This matters. It’s not a chink in the diamond, it’s a rupture—tantamount to forcing you to surf only within apple.com. The web could of course be an innovation lifeline but I’m skeptical of Safari—it’s not a good web 2.0 base at the desktop, I doubt it’ll be one for the palmtop. And my experience with the Blackberry is that mobile-device webapps demand more speed and immediacy (and ubiquity!) than the current web can provide. So no, it will at best be only a partial solution. (The reason given for the apartheid, security, has—to use a commenter’s phrase—the faint whiff of horse manure.)

So that’s that. I now want to remark a little on that iPhone review I just mentioned. Bruce Tognazzi is no Joe Blogger, he was Apple employee #66 and is a famous interaction designer. His website, AskTog, is a classic resource on interface design. But it’s not his interaction insights I want to point out now—though there are plenty of good ones. What impressed me most was his language. Three quotes in particular strike me as true language-forging moments.

The young and the geeky. Witness the birth of a new wordchain. It won’t be the last time you’ll hear it.

High-tech jewelry. That’s a beautiful, zeit-geist defining phrase—electronics “becoming… works of art to be fondled in stores before a purchase.”^E

There’s an image! It reminds me a lot, both alluding to pseudo-scientific science^{WP, WP}, of that classic Spanish insult, ”No tener ni dos dedos de frente!” (“Not have even two fingers of forehead!”)—trying to find an appropriate translation, btw, I stumbled upon an instant new classic, ”Tiraron al niño y se quedaron con la placenta^F” (“They threw the child and kept the placenta!”).

Here I go trying to coin yet another neologism ^ELZR in yet another abuse of the universal soapbox that is the blog. This time, why not be grand?, I’m going to tackle the most famous neologism lack of all: a name for the decade that yawns between 2000 and 2009. In written form, one usually calls it the 2000s but the “two thousands” is just plain silly. Other proposed names, taken from the 2000s pedia, are the “noughties” (the least narrowspread of the proposals), “the zeroes”, “double zeroes”, the “aughts”, “double-aughts”, “oh’s”, “double oh’s”, “oh-oh’s” “aughties”, “oughties”, “2K’s”, “uh-ohs”, “zoogs”, and “ozies”. Obviously, the search still continues.

So here’s my stab at it: let’s call it, elliptically, “the first decade”. It’s a tad millenialist but also fittingly portentous. It is also universal (“la primera decada”, “la première décennie”, “die erste Dekade”, “最初の十年”, “a primeira década”, “Первое десятилетие”, “la prima decade”), easily extendable (2010-2019 is “the second decade”, 2020-2029 “the third decade”, and so on), perfectly memorable, immediately understandable, and, let’s face it, just plain cool. It’s a whole new language for talking and thinking about our century.

Here some usage examples:

• Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project, born with the first decade.^WP
• By the second decade, we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.^ELZR
• Third-decade ipods will be able to carry every piece of content ever created.^ELZR
• At the beginning of the fifth decade, there will be 9 billion people on the planet.^ELZR

I loved Little Miss Sunshine^{WP, IMDB}! Deeply. Hadn’t had this fun with a movie in years. Please do go watch it. Now. (Particularly if you live here in Guadalajara. I doubt it’ll be on theaters beyond this week—there are some 7 people per screening.)

Here’s a (controversial) idea for a language test inspired by the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence^WP:

The test could be easily constrained to test for more specific capabilities: one could test for written command of language X by only permitting written communications, test only for accent by limiting “communication” to the spoken repeating of the judge’s written sentences, and so on.

It is simply stated but almost a “thought test”^WP—it could be done, but there would be a myriad practical complications and scaling would be a bitch. What’s important about it, though, is that it is a valid test to demand of (foreign) language learning: passing it should at least be its hypothetical goal.

The problem is that ridiculously few people would pass it if it where applied today. And because it seems impossibly difficult most people turn away, dismiss the test as wrong or irrelevant, and sink their heads in the sand (“what shouldn’t be, can’t be right”). Which only highlights the current sorry state of language education. It is NOT asking too much. It is not asking for exceptional performance—it doesn’t ask of you to be a Nobel-prize, a literati, or a rapper. It’s merely demanding average, pick-a-guy-from-the-street native-speaker capabilities. Why isn’t that a valid goal to ask of language education?

You could say that most people don’t need native-speaker level to start benefiting from a foreign language and that’s entirely true. But it is just as true that not reaching it is a serious, frustrating, even painful hurdle to communication. A hurdle that will plague ever more people the more the world shrinks. Some of the world’s smartest people can’t get their r’s right hard as they try. And we mock them for it. (Soon, we will be the mocked ones for not getting our intonations right.)

Well looked, Turing level is perhaps even a modest goal. We all possess it already in the language we are born into and we all contained within us the same language potentiality at birth. So it should be perfectly achievable and shouldn’t take nearly as much time as starting from zero.

Yes, I know. We are nowhere near knowing how to reach such a level efficiently. It’s too hard and too long a goal—currently. But we should at least strive for it. (And be honest with students on what the status quo of our language technology is: no more “Learn to speak Chinese in 21 days!”—for now.) Languages are some of the most complex and powerful artifacts we have created. It’s only to be expected that their learning is one of the most complex and difficult challenges we face.

But it is also one of our most rewarding (and valuable) experiences. I want to commoditize it.

Chances are we are on the brink of Turing level language translation^ELZR. Why aren’t we even close to practical Turing level language learning? I’d still want it.

If there was one fragment from Richard Dawkins’s Why There Almost Certainly Is No God that startled me, and that has continued to do so for over a week, is this counterfactual.

You could think of money as a bundle of alternatives, options—and you wouldn’t be wrong. (With these five bucks I could buy this week’s Economist, or get an Oreo Blizzard, or go watch El Laberinto del Fauno, or give something to eat to a street kid, or gift Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!^AM to Sergio, or save for my old age, or pay one more month of the gym, or pay someone to do my dry-cleaning and lie on the grass instead.)

You could think of life as a bundle of options—and you wouldn’t be wrong. (With these one more hour of life, I could read part III of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom^AM, or talk to Chemito in Monterrey, or to Sergio in Ciudad Juarez, or write that email for Adolfo, or go to the gym, or flirt with that girl, or masturbate, or work at Domburi, or write my next post, or think through why I believe the government is only legitimized force, or go lie on the grass instead.)

Thus, you could think of money as life—and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Options are our universally valued currency.

Now, of course money isn’t always life. There are some options that we think of as life that may be impossible to get in exchange for money. (I may spend all my money trying to revive my grandmother and, in all likelihood, never be able to do it.) And there are some options that we think of as economical that may be impossible to get in exchange for life. (I may spend my life trying to buy a space station and, in all likelihood, never be able to afford it.)

But there’s still undoubtedly a huge overlap between them that most people are uncomfortable to acknowledge—the most they’re usually willing to concede is the common wisdom that «you need some minimal amount of money to live», which translated yields the tautological «you need some minimal amount of options to have options». The difficulty, seems to me, is that by life we mean both «options» and «taking options». What is the point of always striving for money (options) if you’re not going to live with it (take them!)? Under this light, common wisdom translates to «to be able to take options you need to have a minimal amount of options.» Which is still fairly obvious, but far more wisdomous.