“recommendations”

Why read David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom^AM:

Vaya, me tomo algo asi como 8 meses pero hoy por fin termine de transcribir¹ Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? de Jorge Wagensberg. Estan ya en linea los 531 pensamientos que tiene el libro y el texto introductorio. Solo faltan los textos al principio de cada capitulo, que no he transcrito y que probablemente ya no transcriba.

Lo mejor de transcribir todo el libro fue poder releer y pensar lentamente cada una de las frases. Hay muchas todavia que no entiendo y algunas que me parecen equivocadas, pero en cambio hay demasiadas otras que no agoto por mas que las repienso (y he puesto en negritas las mejores). He dicho ya que suelo juzgar una frase en medida de su «permanencia». Estas son de las mejores frases que conozco.

Firefox 2.0 is out. Frankly, not many things of direct consequence have changed and the best of those that have should have been included a long time ago (tab closing undo, session resuming, and tab arrows)... but there’s integrated spell check (!) and that and a painless installation (most all your extensions will follow you along painlessly) make this a must.

Update 28/Oct/2006: FF2’s find-as-you-type now searches inside textareas too! I used to copypaste back and forth between Vim and a textarea just to jump to particular text spot. Ahh… the joy!

As far as blog-intros go, Rondam Ramblings’s is one of my favorites—both because I happen to agree with much of it (and thus, of course, think highly of such a sound writer) and because it honors the blog’s name from digressive paragraph 1. Here four clips:

Whoa, just discovered SongMeanings an hour ago. Excellent idea (add criticism to lyrics), clean interface (several ads notwithstanding), massive execution (Artists: 25,245 | Lyrics: 295,933 | Albums: 11,073 | Members: 228,392 | Comments: 723,538). Can’t believe never heard of it before.

Perhaps most intriguing is how clearly it shows the possibilities (instant participation, individuality, the work is the history, evolution is visible, filtering by time is easy, contributions are isolated) and limitations (signal-to-noise ratio, self-healing’s hard or impossible, the work is the history, lack of structure, lack of pruning, parallelism, unnecessary repetition, digressiveness) of criticism based on sequential comments. Reddit’s comment pages are good examples of how simple voting can advance the medium (because though we lack a name for it, “sequential comments/notes” is a medium, just like comics is the medium of sequential images), but, fuck, for the purposes of criticism my bets for medium still go to collaborative-writing, wiki, (my) WikiCriticism. (If only I could fork myself into better, harder-working, single-minded mes…)

I can’t remember where I got this notion that Google Finance was just an uninteresting, me-too product¹ from Google, but the prejudice set in without my noticing (as, alas, so many do) and it was strong enough that I hadn’t deigned to pay them a visit until I chanced upon them today.

Here are some screenshots of both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance (the current king of the hill) set to display Google’s stock information. There’s simply no comparison: Google outshines Yahoo “in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.”^EEM

¹ Perhaps it filtered somehow from the popularish blog GigaOM, who to my utter amazement finds Google Finance “downright tiresome and plain ugly.. clearly.. a me-too move.”

Sexy Loners^WP is (or rather, was, it just closed this March) one fetishy, weird, morbid, scabrous, bizarre, twisted, risqué, potentially-offensive webcomic (really, so don’t click ahead and complain about it!) with subtitles to match (Story of my life… got the right girl, got the wrong sexual fetish—I jerked myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the stain, the only thing that’s real.—Sometimes I think God hates me, but then I remember that it’s probably because I do strips like this one.—When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers—The biggest threat to otakus is natural selection.—If I really knew a surefire way of getting laid, do you think I would have time to write a strip about it?). It also has the best interface I’ve seen for a webcomic and got me excited all over again at the possibilities of a wikicriticism (see The Lighter Side of Tentacle Hentai or Video Girl Etchi I to see how much the commentary adds to the strips).

William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled book^AM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late.

It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.

My final discovery of A List Apart—a magazine “for people who make websites”—has been late coming, but as the article I’m about to talk about explains, relationships in the web are just difficult to establish (they require “an exorbitant amount of synergy”, why-the-lucky-stiff would say). I’ve been visiting them fairly frequently along the past couple of years and almost always I’ve learned something valuable. It is not only top-notch content, the attention to detail is painstaking too, though it takes you several visits to start noticing it: from the spot-on illustrations (most by the very talented Kevin Cornell), to the helpful snapshot feature at the right, to the issue-number stamp, to the tasteful ads, to the impeccable atmosphere they maintain throughout, to Zeldman’s and Kissane’s careful editing—it’s not a print wannabe, it’s the first web-only alreadyam.

The cover article of issue 221 (as of this moment, the latest) is a gem and the reason I started writing this post. By Amber Simmons, it is wonderfully titled ”Gentle Reader, Stay Awhile; I Will Be Faithful” and deals with how to write (particularly, with how to write for the web) by introducing the never-before-better-named idea of a faithful writer—a writer who thinks of her reader, who anticipates her questions and curiosities; a loyal writer, respectful of her reader’s time and intelligence; a writer who delivers. Truly great advice—I know I’ll never write the same again.

Yesterday’s post^ELZR on a recent essay by Thomas L. Friedman made me remember just how good the man is and how much I enjoyed his latest book, The World is Flat. Today I chanced upon this MIT lecture1 in which he discusses the book at length and it may be even even better than the book itself. Friedman’s a master storyteller and shines in front of a live audience. The video quality is pixel-art at best but no matter, I promise you this hour and a half will be one of your day’s highlights (and when you watch it, don’t miss the answer to the final question posed to him: “How can an open society be secure?”).

Friedman himself’s a very interesting man—Mediterranean studies Brandeis^WP B.A., married to one of the hundred richest families in America, won every journalistic accolade there is—don’t forget to check out his pedia and this U.S. News & World Report writeup on him (listing Friedman as one of America’s best leaders).

¹ While you’re at it, give the MIT Video Index a good browse, there’s good stuff aplenty.