“surprises”

I’ll be the first to acknowledge its silliness but who cares, I’m just wowed. I finally downloaded the entire 50GB 6-seasons 127-episode Gilmore Girls^WP series. Frankly, when I begun this I was not (yet) a gilmore-zealot, my point in downloading it was rather to test the limits of my current technology—and, of course, to smugly marvel at how much these limits have receded. I remember when 5mb made for a humongous download. It was something akin to those news one often hears about some university or other breaking some telecommunication’s limit or other (Gazillion Number of Terabytes Per Second Achieved at Gung Ho University). I was merely exploring the digital frontier of the amateurishly possible.

But that was then. I only just watched the first season (~20 hours) with my sisters and loved it. I’m a fan. The “intricate, extremely fast-paced dialogue, with numerous modern pop culture references, along with many other references to politics and high culture.”^WP was the initial hook for me but the more I immersed myself into the series the more I was surprised. The show is really girly, really, really different to me, to my everyday experience, to what I’ve lived. And yet I really like it. I think I would be one happy girl (or daughter or mom)—and it’s starting to rub off on me. I’m starting to talk fast and witty (that was a joke), empathy has gone thru the roof, I understand so much more why my mother acts like she does sometimes, Rory has rekindled my geek, bookworm, naive-I-want-to-learn-everything pride, and last night I caught myself speaking like Lorelai. It’s a shame isn’t it? Life’s so short and we’re so fixed in our roles.

And this train of thought has led me to ponder just to what extent we (as in we) are social constructions. It’s a cliche that Shakespeare invented the modern introspecting human and I recently read some lines

that, bizarre though they felt at the moment, are looking truer with every minute. I wonder, to the chagrin of some feminists I know, up to what extent is gender a social construction?

You can laugh (and I do), but I feel much more feminine and talkative since I watched GGs, and years of Friends have deeply influenced who I am and how I want to live, and I just read about this guy who thinks that Seinfield has simply made him a funnier person. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, one part of the holding power of TV in particular, and fiction in general, is that it allows us some degree of flexibility in choosing what constructions we want our selves to be molded with. Granted, usually we simply reinforce our worn ways, but at times, like this one, there are nice surprises.

My grandfather, Luis, is going to be 84 tomorrow (today, actually) and the whole family is hectic preparing him a humongous birthday. We, my sisters and I, are in charge of the digital accouterments and since I’d been wanting to create a photo mosaic for a while, I decided to give it a try today. What ensued baffled me.

I googled photo mosaic and went to the very first result, a 2004 engadget tutorial. The tutorial was very clear and to the point, and I donwloaded the freeware featured in it: AndreaMosaic. The thing was simple, unpretentious and surprisingly intuitive. Some minutes later I was off churning mosaics away and trying the different configurations.

It still took me the better part of the day to finish (with zam distractions) and get the thing 1.27×140m printed but, come on, I even feel ashamed of how little work I actually did. I’m going to be the one with the most impressive, flashy thing in the party and all the time I’ll just be thinking how disproportionate was my effort to the result.

Think about it for a second, a clueless guy in the middle of Mexico is able to churn out in a couple of hours (for something like 50 bucks) a graphical confection that would have floored anyone 50 years ago, that would have been nigh priceless a 100 years ago, and that would have gotten him burned at the stake earlier than that.

I’m unsettled and, frankly, the fact that it isn’t unsettling to anyone else is all the more disturbing to me (because that only hints at how fast this thing I did has already become obsolete). We’re smack in the middle of an art singularity of sorts.

Wow. Just wow. A pretty weird way to begin the day.

Even longevity. In the 18th century, every year, we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the 19th century, we added a few weeks, every year, to human life expectancy—so this is double exponential growth. We’re now adding about 150 days, every year, to human life expectancy,

and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.

The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century, Ray Kurzweil

That’s your run-of-the-mill —even white-bread (blue liquid… how intriguing)— kind of paragraph, ne? I thought so too but then there was that word,

and it casts the whole scene into a wholly different light, doesn’t it? It wasn’t evident at first but that’s not the omniscient narrator speaking—it’s our lovingly perverted BDSM geek protagonist, Manny, painting the world with his colors.

And that’s what I mean when I say Accelerando is dense: it is chock-full of such all-important words. Since they are generally very technical or speculative, and since Stross has the habit of studding them like raisins into any given sentence, you’ll be tempted to just skip over them. Don’t.

The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.

You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”

I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.

What a wonderful surprise! Reading about Google’s Marissa Mayer —I have this obsession in which I obsess for days about certain people— I found out she got a BS in Symbolic Systems in Stanford. That’s right, there is such a thing! I’m shaking with excitement. I’m reading the career description online but my eyes just keep pushing ahead. It’s a weird mixture of “artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and symbolic logic.” Even “human-computer interaction” is thrown into the mix. I mean, a degree with symbol in its title! Could you possibly ask for more?

All the more reason to visit Stanford this May 13!

Being childfree myself —well, I’m somewhat young to claim that title for myself but that’s the lifestyle I want to live and I’ve already considered sterilization— it was a nice surprise to find The rise of the ‘childfree’ in Reddit’s¹ homepage today. It was interesting to find out about Mariah, a Swedish girl who was sterilized at age 25; to read somewhere mainstream (The BBC) how much of a taboo the subject is; and to discover that there are actually groups lobbying for equality for people without children² (Kidding Aside is the name of one!). That said, the article itself is quite irregular, too short, and too focused on women (though I may as well be reflecting my own biases).

And I don’t quite agree with most of the reasons put forth in the article (specially not with “I can’t believe the amount of waste that children produce.”). My personal reason for shunning child-rearing is that it is usually a cop-out to the existence question. It’s an usually unthinking way to give meaning to your life, to feel like you’ve “done something”, to achieve transcendence. I respect if you consciously want your children to give meaning to your life and you want them to be your life’s achievement —me, I’d like to explore different answers. (That said, life span is so long these days that one may try to juggle several answers that were of yore mutually exclusive.)

² That’s one group of neurons I never thought would fire…

This is fantastic: a cool website that specializes in selling royalty-free stock photos, iStockPhoto, has created a new way to search through their whole catalog: by arrangement. They call it ColorSpace, and is wonderfully simple, yet powerful. It consists of a 3×3 grid of squares. You change the color of each square to indicate what you want in that area: green, if you want it clear; red, if you want it occupied; grey, if it’s the same to you.

It works. If, for instance, you search for “flower” with this colorspace, , you get:

Or if you search for “sky” with this colorspace, , you get:

The star here is not only the algorithm but the clever, information-design interface.

Overall, it’s a very impressive site, its web developers really do care about it, and that’s always refreshing. The weirdest thing is that they’ve convinced me that selling royalty-free stock photos on the web makes perfect sense…