“readings”
85 posts under this tag.
Jump Point’s presentation the other day neither captivated nor disappointed me. Author Tom Hayes rapid-fired commonplaces for every enticing bit. About to forget it as yet one more glib futurist book, I saw it again today at my B & N, added it to my skimming pile (oh, the joys of American bookstores: they’re even better places for free reading than public libraries), and stumbled on a quote that took my heart away:
 ..they simply believed anything was possible and that the path forward would reveal itself eventually. When they hit a wall, they turned to the Internet, to the crowd, for help.
Their story is not an uncommon one. Everywhere you look, you can see entrepreneurs and true believers hurling themselves into the unknown, fortified only with a faith that the “net” will catch them, that small acts by many everyday people can be as useful as the influence of the connected and powerful.
 After 3 years of searching for local soulmates in this middle-of-Mexico, beautiful-but-digitally-backward city of mine, as I’m packing for the states, I google idly on San Francisco and, behold, I find the incredible blog of a Guadalajara genius with the same web obsession, the same reading compulsion, the same format fiddly inclinations, the same penchant for writing only in overcrafted English, the same relocation (his some 2.5 years ago, to go work with Max Levchin ELZR, no less).
His name’s Sergio I. Villarreal Pou and following his commenters’ links I’ve found a tangle of worthy local websites (say, the multiple-personality disorder No Limit studio or the gorgeous Arathael) that opens up what is to me a wholly uncharted local sphere. Which I’ll probably be exploring some thousand miles away…
“Jalisco va a dominar el mundo,” says one of dad’s friends from Los Altos, a migrant region of Jalisco. “Estados Unidos va a dominar el mundo y los Jalisquillos van a dominar Estados Unidos.”
For those armchair observers of the breathtaking world of quants and structured finance, as myself, Technology Review’s current issue carries a wonderfully didactic and gripping introduction, The Blow-Up: (pesky but FREE registration required).
“How many think spreads will widen?” she asked.
The hands of about half the smartest people on Wall Street shot up.
“And how many think they’ll narrow?”
The other half—equally smart—raised their hands.
“Well,” she said. “That’s what makes a market.”
If they didn’t know, nobody could.
Focused only in securitization, When it goes wrong, from The Economist (YubNub’s “eco“), is also a good overview and glimpse:
..it is hard to overstate the effect that securitisation has had on financial markets. Until the early 1980s, finance hewed to an “originate and hold” model. Banks generally held loans on their balance sheets to maturity; some debts were sold on loan-by-loan, but this market was small and lumpy. This began to give way to an “originate and distribute” model after America’s government-sponsored mortgage giants issued the first bonds with payments tied to the cash flows from large pools of loans.
Wall Street built on this innovation, and securitisation took off soon after, then paused before exploding in the 1990s.. It was given a lift by America’s savings-and-loan crisis, which encouraged mortgage lenders to jettison their riskier loans, and by new technologies, such as credit-scoring, that facilitated loan-pooling. Around 56% of America’s outstanding residential mortgages were packaged in this way, including more than two-thirds of the subprime loans issued in 2006. Thanks largely to securitisation, global private-debt securities are now far bigger than stockmarkets.
Answers.com (YubNub’s “a“), btw, is invaluable in navigating jargony fields like finance.
Charles S. Peirce has been called by Britannica “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced.” Bertrand Russell considered him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and the greatest American thinker ever,” and Karl Popper goes all out, seeing him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.”
I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.
How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?
For reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned within an icon.
OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”SOURCE
Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better (or shorter) intro than the logical reasoning pedia.
And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.
As if there weren’t enough books to read—let alone buy—already, here are six unread ones that have particularly caught my fancy. Just reading about them has been fascinating.
Que magnifico ensayo este de Gabriel Zaid sobre la palabra civil. Que meticulosa recopilacion de tantas hebras de significado. Que claridad y que erudicion—de la buena.
Históricamente, civil ha servido para distinguir una nueva realidad por oposición a otra, de la cual emerge. Según lo que adjetive, puede significar: no astronómico, no de la corona, no eclesial, no en especie, no estatal, no exterior, no familiar, no militar, no natural, no noble, no penal, no religioso, no salvaje.
And enjoy it you should. If you’re not a thief or a politician you earned it, which, being clear about it, is just a handy way of saying that you did stuff that Other People voluntarily value enough that Apple is willing to exchange an iPhone for your stuff (confident that it can then exchange it with Other People for what it itself really wants). The iPhone is yours and yours alone to enjoy. You earned it. You owe nothing to anyone—not, particularly, guilt.
What is more, both you and Apple, by freely exchanging only for how much each could get from each other, are subtly but importantly cementing the worldwide enterprise that has made it possible for the output of 4 Hindu villagers to seem tiny by comparison.
Zipping back and forth along Kottke’s Twitter some minutes ago I finally got Twitter. And I smiled. Like I smiled when I finally got Wikipedia (or blogs or Flickr or Facebook or Google or GMail)—a smile of wonderment at the great and totally unexpected.
His observations on it are spot on—no wonder he’s the web pundit par excellence.
Not, of course, that it needs any. But if you insist on one, what better answer than to let metaphor defend itself?
Some people (me among them) are often accused of Mixing Metapors. This is supposed to be a bad thing. I’ll admit it can be a bit confusing, but I really think it’s our only hope. The more different views you have of something—and the more different the views are—the more hope you have of understanding what the thing is really like. Of perceiving some aspect of its reality that isn’t apparent in any of the individual views.
The best metaphor I know of to explain this is the phenomenon of binocular visionWP, or stereo sound.WP We have two eyes and two ears, even though each one of them works fine alone. The other one isn’t just a spare, though, because using them in parallel provides information about what is being perceived that isn’t carried in either of the separate images. We perceive depth in visual or aural signals precisely to the degree we use separate, different signals and succeed in integrating them into a single percept.
This beautiful excerpt from John M. Lawler’s great essay on the use of metaphors in understanding and explaining computers, Metaphors We Compute By. Required interface design reading.
Which is in itself quite wonderful news (artificial languages need all the help they can get), but the Globe and Mail article is also one of the best introductions to the language I’ve seen, so do check it out—web version or print scan—if you’re interested in Toki Pona (and if you speak Spanish, don’t forget to check out my Spanish manual on it).
(via Sonja, the beautiful mama pi toki pona).
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