“surprises”

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?

What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.

A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.

As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.

In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.

Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?

As if there weren’t enough books to read—let alone buy—already, here are six unread ones that have particularly caught my fancy. Just reading about them has been fascinating.

Beautiful? Thoughtful? Well-composed? Ratatouille did much to made me remember how much I’ve always enjoyed food, but Kandinsky in the Kitchen, the abovequoted review of the New York restaurant WD-50 floored me. I had never read food described with such words before, nor had I seen dishes more beautiful than most paintings, nor had I been so enthralled with so original a combination of ingredients (how about a dish made of cured hamachi, lemon leather, cilantro sorbet and paprika ?).

Another great review of the restaurant by The Gourmet Pig, made me realize the restaurant is part of a much wider movement: molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. Apparently they can now compress watermelon to give it the texture of raw tuna.

The pursuit of beauty and meaning will never end, will it?

I first saw David Elsewhere in Kinky’s Sister Twisted video:

It used to be the only option to streetmap Guadalajara^WP was to use local mapmaker Guia Roji’s crappy—and I mean crappy—interface. Google, Yahoo, and the like had the nice satellite imagery but that isn’t nearly as useful to give directions. Street names are a whole lot more useful than trees to find your way around.

Englishman Gwyn once stepped in to teach a local (or was a local teaching an English man?) about MapQuest, which has a better interface than Guia Roji but still isn’t draggable.

But that’s all in the past. An unknown while ago Google Maps updated its database and now includes pretty, draggable street maps of Guadalajara (and a lot of other Mexican cities). This is major people.

Unfortunately, while you can search for businesses (in a so-so fashion, there isn’t yet much online info for Google to mine) you can’t yet search for particular addresses. This shouldn’t be much of a problem, Google Maps is the poster child of the new web for a reason—ah, the beauty of true interactivity!

Another unfortunately: the street map is oddly not yet available trough a Blackberry.

Statetris, a geographical tetris where states are the blocks. Besides Europe there are versions of Africa and several countries. Even more than its originality or its addictability (no surprise here, this is tetris after all), the most intriguing thing about it is how educational it is. One day with this in elementary school and kids would never get Malta’s position out of their heads. I know I can’t.