“little things”

As you may have noticed, I’m unhealthily and impolitely obsessed with quotes. They easily make for my most popular category and were it not for my negligent restraint every single post of this blog could have its very own quote. Though I doubt anyone actually reads them :(, I love crafting them, specially when I go over the top and quote paragraphs upon paragraphs: I trim that detail, highlight that phrase, color that other, and in general try to make the fragment clear and inviting. Today I’m pleased to announce you that the genre has finally coalesced into what I think I’ll call quote collages. (And in a feat of retcon, there are already 7 quote collages on the blog.)

The first and best example of it was today’s Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese post. A quote collage consists of a big, juicy text extract, color-highlighted and clipped to the point of near-paraphrasing. A Flickr photo is prepended for visual spice.

Do you like them? Do you find the colors useful or annoying? Do you simply skim away and roll your eyes at the sight of (yet) another text monolith?

And while we’re on it, two points (..) inside a quote indicates text was omitted. It’s an elegant OED convention that degrades gracefully (if you don’t know what it means most of the time it’s harmless).

This is from Douglas Crockford’s Survey of Javascript (never program JS without your Crockford!). I thought it quirky at first, surprisingly helpful later. (Emphases added.)

Short-circuit logical operators are a well-known, simple idiom in several languages, but they can sometimes be confusing to read, specially when nested. What I want to point out here is that next time you have to go through code that uses them, try reading them as guard or default, as the case may be. You’ll grok^EE them immediately, trust me.

Isn’t it striking, the power of names?

Por diversos avatares del destino tuve hoy que imprimir incontables resmas^RAE a doble cara y me sorprendio mucho que fuera una extraña odisea. Desesperado acudi a la red y lo unico que encontre digno de destacarse es este articulo de HP España confuso, rollero, y comercialoide (“Impresión a doble cara en Microsoft Word 2000, por los árboles, por su espalda, por su dinero”). Para colmo, ni un pinche diagramilla perdido. Despues de muchas iteraciones y mucha hoja perdida, le haye el feeling a esto, asi que aqui va, por todo aquel que venga:

Now that I think of it, I’d seen similar contraptions before but this one is particularly elegant and interesting: you throw it in the air and it changes color! Pure witchcraft. And the forms—the forms!—are beautiful in that uniquely arresting way that only mathematics can give. It’s our generation’s geodesic dome^WP.

I remember one high school philosophy class where our fantastic teacher (James Kurtz) had nothing prepared but a smooth, solid piece of metal he had found inside his car engine. The assignment for the one-hour class was to write an essay on what we could infer from the alien civilization that created the artifact if we suddenly found it on its own on a faraway planet, with no cues whatsoever of its purpose. It was jolly good fun with a pretty nondescript ferrous blob, so I wonder what I’d have said had he brought this color-changing whatchamacallit.

To begin with, I guess it’s fair to assume such civilization had to know its math pat. Perhaps several alien PhDs went into the theory of this ball and its theoretical inspiration even carries the name of some great alien topologist^WP, à la Poincaré sphere^WP. I’d be willing to bet that they have computers, there’s no way they could have built this without CAD^WP. And the material itself, plastic, and the way it’s shaped, is nothing trivial—it shows some deep knowledge of chemistry, materials science^WP, and manufacturing techniques.

And had I known that the whole thing was available for the alien equivalent of one dollar in the alien equivalent of a flea-market, and that it had no application than to be amusing, well, I’d have gasped!

At any rate, don’t (don’t!) let my babbling discourage you, go buy one!

I found this curious typographical layout in Ambient Findability and since then I’ve been trying to imitate it wherever I’ve been able to get away with it.

I know it seems like nothing special but I’ve come to find it strikingly elegant—specially when compared with what it might have looked had it been done in today’s more prevalent dummy bulletpoints. The laziness that such bulletpoints encourage would have probably led us to this:

Had we been lucky, there would be labels to each bulleted paragraph but they would still be obscured within the text and the typejunk bulletpoints:

And that’s why I like this layout so much: it lets you do without meaningless bulletpoints and it forces you, as a writer, to create a meaningful headline for each paragraph that greatly enhances reading speed and comprehension. I don’t know if it has a name yet but meaningful bulletpoints sounds good to me.

“Y mi mente ha parido nostalgia por no verte ya… Hasta en sueños he creído tenerte devorándome, y he mojado mis sábanas blancas recordándote”. Extraña esta cancion de Lalo Rodriguez, Ven devórame otra vez. Es tan burda que es chida in a campy sort of way. De cualquier forma, es destacable por el solo hecho de ser una canción inmensamente popular (hasta yo la conozco) que menciona (aunque algo eufemísticamente) la masturbación y los “sueños húmedos”.

I just noticed today that AT&T has a redesigned logo. I like the change —especially the sort of shadow inside the sphere— but of course there are those who disagree.

The review itself is long and, though interesting at times, overall not that good, but there was a quiet, demure paragraph in it that kept me laughing the whole (did I say it was long?) review. Today I reread the paragraph in my notes and I’ve had a smile in my face ever since. This one’s a keeper:

Click to see full-size.

Isn’t the “simply have a bit of human contact” part surprising?