“tips”

I doubt someone would find this too useful but I smiled today when I found about the guess YubNub command. You feed it text, it gulps the language it’s in. A great way to showcase YubNub’s open-ended fun, courtesy of Xerox research. It would have been a godsend when I was dealing with Imagery’s multilingual rush (Oh, how GMail angered me then! Smart enough to correctly spellcheck anything I gave her, yet coyly keeping the language name to herself!). Hope I need it again soon.

For all of you that aren’t on the YubNub wagon yet, you can play with it here—but it won’t be even half as much fun ;).

And since we already seem to be on a language landslide, some months ago I found out playing with Google Translate that when you translate a website from Chinese to English (which is currently beta), you can hover on a sentence to get the original Chinese fragment in a quick popup. Mighty cool. All the more impressive a feature coming from a website. (Now let’s only hope they plan to add it to the other language pairs too…)

Final language tidbit: translate “Hello, how are you?” to Spanish with Google. Your immediate response is “¿Hola, cómo eres?,” sucking the life out of even the hardiest machine-translation enthusiast.

(...and a teriyaki New Year!)

Last night’s dinner, courtesy of Nippon-do (Miguel Ángel no. 224 Tel: 36-41-29-69) —in my opinion, Guadalajara’s best kept oriental secret. They even cooked it all at 10PM so we would eat it hot!

He just can. Many have said it before and I too had glimpsed at it from time to time at his Dilbert blog, but I just read (via 2centsworth) The Little Robot That Could post—a thought experiment against the idea of freewill—and have to say it again: he’s funny, he gets the message across, he’s unassumingly challenging, he’s imaginative, he risks, he’s enticingly (yet humbly) pretentious, he delivers, he’s faithful^ELZR, he conveys, he makes you think—he can write.

Of late (and not a minute too late, some will say), I’ve been studying tact. Here are two nice anecdotes I’ve stumbled on.

Do you know more?

Techguru Esther Dyson^{WP, EDGE} (who, I just learned, is Freeman Dyson^WP’s daughter) on freedom under communist Russia (and why it was, bizarrely, like bestiality), online smut, intellectual property (long live intellectual process!), failure, and changing the world in a 1996 interview with Virginia Postrel for Reason mag.

I’ve been staring at this strip all day, pasted it on my wall, read all the strips from its parent webcomic (xkcd) —and still it dazzles me. It has got to be among the best I’ve ever read. Quirky, sexy, naive, upbeat—makes me happy every time.

Oh boy, I really love this strip. I’m going to be pasting it everywhere… :)

Dreams comes close after it; Pong, Donald Knuth, M.C. Hammer Slide, Words that end in gry, and Moral Relativity are also keepers; and both Escher Bracelet and Sudoku are almost single-panel-ly perfect in their simplicity.

Firefox 2.0 is out. Frankly, not many things of direct consequence have changed and the best of those that have should have been included a long time ago (tab closing undo, session resuming, and tab arrows)... but there’s integrated spell check (!) and that and a painless installation (most all your extensions will follow you along painlessly) make this a must.

Update 28/Oct/2006: FF2’s find-as-you-type now searches inside textareas too! I used to copypaste back and forth between Vim and a textarea just to jump to particular text spot. Ahh… the joy!

You could think of money as a bundle of alternatives, options—and you wouldn’t be wrong. (With these five bucks I could buy this week’s Economist, or get an Oreo Blizzard, or go watch El Laberinto del Fauno, or give something to eat to a street kid, or gift Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!^AM to Sergio, or save for my old age, or pay one more month of the gym, or pay someone to do my dry-cleaning and lie on the grass instead.)

You could think of life as a bundle of options—and you wouldn’t be wrong. (With these one more hour of life, I could read part III of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom^AM, or talk to Chemito in Monterrey, or to Sergio in Ciudad Juarez, or write that email for Adolfo, or go to the gym, or flirt with that girl, or masturbate, or work at Domburi, or write my next post, or think through why I believe the government is only legitimized force, or go lie on the grass instead.)

Thus, you could think of money as life—and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Options are our universally valued currency.

Now, of course money isn’t always life. There are some options that we think of as life that may be impossible to get in exchange for money. (I may spend all my money trying to revive my grandmother and, in all likelihood, never be able to do it.) And there are some options that we think of as economical that may be impossible to get in exchange for life. (I may spend my life trying to buy a space station and, in all likelihood, never be able to afford it.)

But there’s still undoubtedly a huge overlap between them that most people are uncomfortable to acknowledge—the most they’re usually willing to concede is the common wisdom that «you need some minimal amount of money to live», which translated yields the tautological «you need some minimal amount of options to have options». The difficulty, seems to me, is that by life we mean both «options» and «taking options». What is the point of always striving for money (options) if you’re not going to live with it (take them!)? Under this light, common wisdom translates to «to be able to take options you need to have a minimal amount of options.» Which is still fairly obvious, but far more wisdomous.