“recommendations”
84 posts under this tag.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One)
Traditional U.S. motto
Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:
A young person in Palestine and Israel today looks forward to future with depression and with fear, but with Two Stars for Peace, the young people of Israel and Palestine can look forward to a future when they can travel freely throughout the United States, get their education in any part of the United States, or they can travel back and forth between Israel and Palestine. They can look forward to a future of instead of warring armies, everybody is part of a single United States army. The young people have no vested interest in the past of bickering and hostility. It’s depressing. But Two Stars for Peace gives them a way to have a good life.
This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.
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.
And as many have pointed out, “definitely for real” synchs up as well. There’s room for love within O/XK-CD.
It used to be the only option to streetmap Guadalajara WP was to use local mapmaker Guia Roji’s crappy—and I mean crappy—interface. Google, Yahoo, and the like had the nice satellite imagery but that isn’t nearly as useful to give directions. Street names are a whole lot more useful than trees to find your way around.
Englishman Gwyn once stepped in to teach a local (or was a local teaching an English man?) about MapQuest, which has a better interface than Guia Roji but still isn’t draggable.
But that’s all in the past. An unknown while ago Google Maps updated its database and now includes pretty, draggable street maps of Guadalajara (and a lot of other Mexican cities). This is major people.
Unfortunately, while you can search for businesses (in a so-so fashion, there isn’t yet much online info for Google to mine) you can’t yet search for particular addresses. This shouldn’t be much of a problem, Google Maps is the poster child of the new web for a reason—ah, the beauty of true interactivity!
Another unfortunately: the street map is oddly not yet available trough a Blackberry.
Statetris, a geographical tetris where states are the blocks. Besides Europe there are versions of Africa and several countries. Even more than its originality or its addictability (no surprise here, this is tetris after all), the most intriguing thing about it is how educational it is. One day with this in elementary school and kids would never get Malta’s position out of their heads. I know I can’t.
Another good thing that stemmed from High Fidelity was it’s introducing me to the first Bob Dylan song I actually liked: Most of the time (mp3, lyrics).
In an attempt to expand my melodic horizons I had previously downloaded his discography, planning to plod through it eventually. The going, though, proved sheer torture. I don’t like his voice nor his instruments, and all his songs seemed to blend into the same inane harmonica.
When I first listened to Most of the Time I thought an old black woman was singing. I liked the pace though, and I started listening. The structure revealed with a couple of lines and I was hooked. In its epistropheWP and nostalgia it reminds me a lot of Alberto Cortez’s Distancia (mp3, lyrics).
I started browsing around with more method (listening the intersection between his discography and Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time). I “discovered” I want you, Like a Rolling Stone, Lay Lady Lay, Blowing in the wind, Mr. Tambourine man, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and Visions of Johanna. Most I’d heard before, covered, but I’d never really listened to them. A masterful songwriter (he’s been nominated several times for a lit Nobel) with “unusual” voice and renditions, Dylan reminds me a lot of Jose Alfredo JimenezWP and Georges MoustakiWP: they’re all acquired tastes, popularized by covers, appreciated only after attentive overexposure. All of which is fine by me, acquired tastes tend, oddly, to be the most rewarding.
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.
A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.
When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy: I think that’s what it was for Jason; I think that’s what I didn’t understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence.
Robert Charles Wilson, SpinWP, AM
You gotta read Spin. You gotta read Spin.
Right up there among the two or three Best Novels I’ve Ever Read.
Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la MaitenaWP, IY) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.
No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatÃa, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^
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