“scifi”

Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)

Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows End^{WP, AM}.

Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!

Remember that wacky koan^ELZR about reading processors (“what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) and how it led to the idea of a text spacer (illustrated at length in this example)?

Well, I just found out about Live Ink by Walker Reading Technologies (via KurzweilAI.net’s newsletter, though it was slashdotted earlier) and realized people have been toying with the idea for over a decade now. Live Ink is clumsy marketese for what they also elegantly and precisely describe as visual-syntactic text formatting and these guys have not only coded it and are now marketing it, but they have already done some interesting homework, carrying on a year-long experiment where it allegedly improved reading proficiency. They offer a 30-day trial program implementing the technology called ClipRead (screencast) and though the interface is positively abysmal (why, god, why, must bad interfaces happen to good people?), it’s still very much worth downloading to play with.

Here below is a (fitting) paragraph from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando for comparison.

Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards—a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for – or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.

Charles Stross, Accelerando

I like how they limited the spacing to linebreaks and indents; it’s a good starting constraint—it simplifies the task enormously and the results are still quite good. Highlighting the verb is also a clever touch—the nuance with the biggest syntactic payoff. Overall, while the simple flaws do stand out (because we’re such effortlessly gifted syntactic parsers), what surprises me is how decently it works, how the formatted text feels more accessible than the monolithic paragraph. At several points—interestingly, at some of the most usefully formatted parts—the algorithm at work seems oddly straightforward: nestedly indent and linebreak prepositions. Ahh… I’m itching to write some regex hack… Probably will write one in a couple of days, together with some handcrafted spacing of the above paragraph, just to see what we’re aiming at.

According to VentureBeat, meanwhile, the company is poised to taking the world any minute now. I doubt it. But they have given spacing (visual-syntactic text formatting) a broad hearing and there’s now a flurry of attention on it and, probably, on the broader idea of reading processors. There are bound to be some intriguing reinterpretations and extrapolations in the coming months.

...and yet you’ve gotta grant it to this stop-motion action-figure video: it’s pure comic genius. (2.3 million views!; 1,814 comments; 15,417 favorites; 6,648 ratings)

Being the neophilic¹ I usually am, I don’t usually get scared with technology but I admit to getting the shivers when viewing System One’s screencast. The webapp seems to be something very similar to 37Signals’ Backpack—a web 2.0 CMS^WP that is—only at the enterprise level, and on first blush I almost dismissed it as a staid attempt to bring consumer-level webapps to the office (and, come on, what kind of name is System One?).

It may still be just that, but here’s the idea that blew my mind: search-as-you-write. Not search-as-you-type, which is also called incremental search, and is when you are presented results for a query as you type it; no, it’s, search-as-you-write: automatic, real-time search as you’re writing a non-query—a post, a comment, your thesis, a love letter. You really have to see the screencast to get the feel of it but just think about the momentous, qualitative jump this represents—automatic, ubiquitous polling of the hive-mind. Talk about erosion of the self.

Yes, it’s only a natural progression, but still—let me be nebulously apprehensive today for a change.

My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.

• Susan Stepney’s Homepage. Swim around her factoids or her myriad book reviews—sci-fi and non-fiction being the two categories. And boy does she read good nonfiction. Check her rated non-fiction index for a good glimpse of it and notice how her book reviews tend to grow organically into full-fledged bibliographies [example].

• Luis Pabon’s Entropía blog (in Spanish). If you can only read one thing from him, let it be El hombre que hablaba al reves (The man who spoke the wrong way round)—it’s positively brilliant. Positively.

  There’s also a letter to his future self; oblique strategies; an elegant fable: El pez que se bebió el océano (The fish who drank the ocean); obscure calendar erudition: La abreviatura de los miércoles (Wednesday’s abbreviation); original music; a scanning of a (terrifying) dictation from a Spain under Franco: Libertad Dictada (Dictated Freedom); a reflection sparked by GTD^WP: Conocerse a sí mismo (Knowing Oneself); an absolutely amateur, yet interesting, physics experiment: Acústica de fluidos; and a beautiful, infinite poem. Even his profile is writing of the highest order.

  He has infodesign talent to spare, as he showed with his proposal in my calendar challenge, and he can sometimes use it for most amusing purposes. Like these two graphs here, perfectly illustrating why sometimes to go forward it’s better to get some distance first:

  
  

  Most intriguing is when he combines this graphic inclination with his (prodigious) verbosity to create amazing, longwinded plays with the ridiculous (think of that famous bathroom-tissue-distribution-units passage from Snow Crash^WP). There’s for instance the Messiah Project, his compendium of priorization strategies, and his “simple graphical and mathematical model for the analysis and assessment of situations according to a person’s capacity, responsibility, and will.”

  “Luis… estás como un cencerro!!!” says a legendary comment. Correctly.

One of my rules for not overflowing this blog with quote posts (admittedly not a very succesful enterprise) is that a quote must bounce on my head on its own for some days, a week or two. Here’s an odd winner.

(Oh and btw, if you care for my unfiltered quotestream check out my Google Notebook. The app is still frustratingly primitive—all the more disappointing coming from Google, beta label notwithstanding—but the notebook’s already several hundred quotes strong.)

As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures¹. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.

My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.

The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li Zhensheng^WP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News Soldier^AM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:

I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.

The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond Age^AM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.

So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.

Just started reading Neal Stephenson^WP’s Diamond Age^{WP, AM}—trembling with excitement. The 500-page, 1995 cyberpunk novel is baroquely immersive in that hip, queer way that only Stephenson can deliver. It has many, many rarefied words too, some of them beautiful («alamodality», «runcible», «velleity1»), some pedantic («cineritious», «hederated», «callypigious»), and some unfathomable (what the hell is «eutactic»?). Of the latter class was «machine-phase»; at first unconsciously ignored (I tend to do that with common-word alloys), it eventually emerged into consciousness and was diligently googled (since unfound on any dictionary I know of)—it is now most definitely a member of the beautiful words class:

In the post-scarcity society of Cory Doctorow’s fun Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom (which you can read for free), money has been replaced by whuffie^WP: a reputation-based currency, an ubiquitous measure of how much other people like you. Now, of course, PageRank^WP comes immediately to mind, no? (And here’s a good post linking both.) But the main difference till now was that whuffie was instantly viewable by anyone (through brain implants!) and PageRank is just a behind-the-scenes measure (though of course tremendously important).

No more. I installed Firefox Extension Search Status in a flight of fancy but it has become second nature to me to look down and right at the status bar icon where PageRank (and Alexa^WP Traffic) is displayed. We are social animals after all.