Videos

This kind of video (rebus rap) is almost a genre already and it’ll just keep getting better.

This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.

Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.

As part of our music startup, I’ve been listening to all sorts of music and music apps all day long. I’ve stumbled on some great apps, some great music, and some interesting parallels. Like these 2 wonderful songs about scorned women, very similar to me and yet coming from drastically different cultures:

World Builder is a stunningly beautiful video.

A few years ago, I learned from Jaron Lanier about a beautiful dream he calls post-symbolic communication. It’s a dream that has stayed with me since, a powerful, subtle idea. It’s the dream that in the near future we’ll be able to talk not only through words and our voice, but through anything we can dream of. Instead of describing something with words, we would build it, as naturally as we now shrug or wag our finger. It’s about how gods might talk.

”Just” through incremental improvements, from 2 years ago.

This is such a great animated explanation of the credit crisis—a success in using new media in the service of clarity. It almost makes me angry of all the sweet hours I spent in the Economist, Answers, Wikipedia wrangling with finance jargon.

I hunger for nonfiction because I love learning and because I long to expand my life, my experiences, my thought—all of them so sadly limited. One particular obsession of mine lately is to find truly great nonfiction in languages other than English. It’s not that there’s a lack of it in English (quite the opposite) but rather a nagging suspicion of Western (American-European) parochialism, of missing out on great works and different perspectives I can’t even imagine.

Perhaps it’s a matter of nonfiction not being as readily exportable and thus translated to other languages. Perhaps there’s just not a English market for translated nonfiction. Perhaps English just sucks into it most modern nonfiction writers, whatever their native language. Perhaps whoever wants to be widely read these days chooses to write only in English. Perhaps nonfiction in other languages is ”remade” rather than “subtitled” into English. Perhaps I need to be introduced to it by a native speaker. Perhaps nonfiction as we now conceive it is a very modern meta-genre. Perhaps nonfiction is a Western thing. Perhaps nonfiction needs a massive community of hundreds of millions of wealthy, educated speakers to foster the few who will read it, let alone write it. Perhaps I’m so drenched in the Anglosphere that I only get it’s version of who’s relevant. Perhaps just as Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arab, or French had their golden nonfiction age, this is English’s. Perhaps.

But I’m still looking. And so, dear Interwebs, please help me out, what examples do you know of truly great nonfiction in languages other than English?

• Economics —think Daniel Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, PJ O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich;
• History —think Peter Watson’s Modern Mind and Ideas, Mitchel Waldrop’s The Dream Machine;
• Philosophy —think Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves;
• Reference —think Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Diccionario Maria Moliner;
• Biology —think Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, cognitive science (think Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs);
• Neuroscience —think Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence;
• The Singularity —think Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, Hans Moravec’s Mind Children;
• Computer science —think David Hillis’s Pattern in the Stone, Charles Petzold’s Code, Peter Norville’s Ambient Findability, Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect;
• Philosophy/language/cognitive & computer science —think Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher and Bach;
• Aphorisms —think Jorge Wagensberg’s Si la naturaleza es la respuesta…;
• Essays —think Alfred N. Whitehead’s Aims of Education, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Fernando Savater’s A Decir Verdad;
• Information Design —think, of course, of Edward Tufte’s masterful works;
• Comics —think Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics,  The 9/11 Report: a graphic adaptation, Rius’s works;
• Artificial Intelligence —think Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind;
• Interface design —think Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things;
• Design —think Cristopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form;
• Journalism —think John Battelle’s The Search;
• Business —think anything by Peter Drucker;
• Medicine —think Atul Gawande;
• Language —think Claude Piron’s La Bona Lingvo, George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by, Giles Fauconnier’s The Way We Think;
• Selfhelp —think Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion Emocional, Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, Harry Browne’s _How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World;
• Finance —think The Essays of Warren Buffet;
• Sociology —think Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Guillermo Oliveto’s El Futuro Ya Llegó;
• Psychology —think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog, Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self;
• Biography —think Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Sam Walton’s Made in America;
• Mathematics —think Michael Spivak’s Calculus, Tobias Dantzig’s Number;
• Education —John Holt’s How Children Fail, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry’s La Tragedia Educativa, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine;
• Programming —think The Pragmatic Programmer, The Little Schemer;
• Technology —think Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control;
• Periodicals —think The Economist, The New York Times;
• Video —think TedTalks, Helvetica, David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth;
• Animation —think The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Trusted Computing, The Machine;
• And other wonderful, unclassifiable stuff —think James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, El Retorno del Cangrejo Parte IV, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Evolving Self.

• the book is less than 200 years old. One extra point if also less than a 100 years old. A further extra point if also less than 50 :).
• from a non-Western language (like Japanese!),
• third culture-ish,
• NOT yet translated into English.

TEDTalks haven’t been as inspiring lately but they’re still pretty good. Joseph Pine’s was mostly modern marketing thinking and occasional over-guruing, but it’s still well-delivered and worth watching for these 2 nuggets:

Just watched Obama’s start speech. It was long. At parts founding-father-ish, stodgy, bombastic, God-alluding, and over-collectivistic. Talk about modern immigration was absent (or was I looking for it too hard?). The remarkable thing, though, was how good it was. Great even, at parts. Astoundingly evenhanded.