“serendipity”

Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:

Hadn’t been so taken by painting since Klimt or Schiele. I love these self-portraits. The solid colors, the roughness, the sloppy daubs, the rawness, the sexuality, the odd angles, the sharp, geometrical lines, the intimacy, the posing, the light.

Just that, an emotion. Often sudden, arbitrary, and against our (as opposed to our gene’s) best interest. Not a revelation nor the distillation of reason nor its conclusion—whence this fancy that reason leads somewhere? “Gut feeling” is, you guessed it, nothing but a feeling. Just as we have unique emotions about concrete things—say, lust—, we have unique emotions about abstract ideas and statements—say, certainty. Emotions, concrete or abstract, are enzymes, catalysts: they shortcircuit dillydallying, they trigger action. Ruminating all day without acting makes as little evolutionary sense as ogling all day without fucking. Hence lust, hence certainty.

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.

A wonderfully clever contraption by David Seah: The Procrastinators clock. For those who set their clocks ahead to stand on their toes only to become habituated after a while, a randomly ahead clock. Web & desktop versions available.

Ah, clocks were an early obsession of mine (see for instance this color clock), earlier than calendars…

Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)

Our trusted old friend very, I just found out, comes straight from the Latin VERus, truth! It’s the same root that gives us VERitable, VERacity, VERism, VERdict, (“truth-speaking”), or the Spanish VERdad. Every single very you’ve gushed has been a truly in disguise. When you say, say, “Damn Ivonne, you’re very hot!”, what you’re really saying across millennia to Yvonne is that she’s truly hot. Which she is. Now aren’t you glad you read this blog religiously?

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:

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.

Who would have thought the new Mathematica would introduce one of the coolest interface design innovations in recent years: automatic inteface building?

You should browse this nice showcase of examples but to really grok the idea you’ve got to watch the Author and Deploy an Application in 60 Seconds screencast.

That above is a screenshot of the presentation: the code above generates the application below. Isn’t it beautiful?

Wolfram Research calls it the day documents and applications merged and they’ve got a point. This makes creating an application as automated and straightforward as creating a graph, and similar ease is being introduced for embedding these tiny apps in documents (“Documents are, quite simply, talking things”).

It’s no panacea but it do makes simple things easy, difficult things possible. In Rails jargon, you could call this a very elegant scaffolding functionality, a victory of convention over configuration (:“At its core it means that what you do (especially if you’ve done it a lot) should carry a lot more weight than having to configure (and reconfigure) things over and over”).

A math experiment was carried out recently when Alex Smith —an Electronic and Computer Engineering undergraduate with “a background in mathematics and esoteric programming languages”— proved that the Turing machine below is in fact universal, making it the simplest universal Turing machine possible. In other words, the cute graph below are the instructions for an abstract symbol-manipulating machine that can in principle do anything your computer (or any other computer for that matter) can do.

Stephen Wolfram, who made the conjecture and offered a $25k reward for proving it, reports:

Now, ain’t this just breathtaking?