“web”

Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.

I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:

He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)

But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.

...it can only give you answers.

He died quite a few years before Google (or the Internet, for that matter) started, but I’m sure Picasso would have said that. And I think there would have been some truth in it.

Yesterday I spent most of my day just trying to find out why my local web-apps had crashed horribly ever since I upgraded to Rails 1.1. It was all a complex dance between Google, my web-apps, and all sort of forums. I painstakingly build my web-apps one-step at a time, several times, just trying to find out exactly what step was causing the problem.

And finally the question emerged: ¿Is there a known problem between RMagick, a ruby image-manipulation library that I use, and Rails 1.1? The answer from Google was nigh immediate: Rails 1.1 requires Ruby 1.84, which in turn kills RMagick. I’ll simply have to do without it until a fix is posted.

It is not the results that drive us, but the query.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of a search engine is not that it provides with immediate answers, but that this immediacy allows us to pose far more questions.

This preponderance of questions over answers is what makes me believe there might be some future in clustering techniques (Marissa Mayer to the contrary): when it works best, clustering works by hinting at good questions.

A question machine

Do we need a question-machine? What is a question-machine? Is that the question to ask? Is the name of god a question? Where can I buy the Whole Earth Review? Is the universe recursive? What is this “fly on the wall” syndrome? When did I first hear the song There Was An Old Woman? What might Sergio Rivas be doing this very moment? Where is that story we wrote together? Was it any good? What is a question? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis true? How is Ray Kurzweil like? Is it true that “the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use?” Is the universe discrete or continuous? Will they come when you do call for them? Will we ever achieve post-symbolic communication? Is symbolic systems a career for me? What does a “reality conversation” look like? Will there be a singularity? Are we becoming a Gaia? Is there an I? Is everything a prosthesis? Is everything an interface? Will interface design be the art form of the twenty first century? Will I be any good as a web-app craftsman? Will sex ever be free? What are the classic walks of the world? What is meaning? Will I ever find out? Is copyright fair? Are there better solutions? Is it wrong for me to download music illegally? When will this post be lost forever? Why are there so few women in scientific careers? How can Orson Scott Card be so smart and yet so frighteningly conservative? Is abortion the cause for a drop in U.S. crime rates? Was the pill the cause of the sudden increase in U.S. crime rates? Is technology the answer? Will they really build a robotic team that can compete and defeat the world soccer champions by 2050? Is it too late for Esperanto? Will an A.I. ever read these very words? Will anyone? How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? Will I die? Will I really be rich by 30? How was Borges like? Did AMLO know about Bejarano and Ponce? Which is the best candidate in this presidential elections? Will Caja Negra work? Will I work at Google? Should I’ve taken that Etsy offer? Would I be happier in New York? Am I scared? Am I too easy on myself? Is it wrong that I don’t finish what I start? Is this good or bad procrastination? Will I ever meet annzah? Am I foolish to believe, deep down inside me, that in my life “everything happens for the best”? How should I love her? What’s char doing right now? Is she happy? Did she find out the title of the song of that ad? What is the equivalent of a word-processor for reading? How can you improve reading? How can you automate understanding? As in, say, how can you automate or speed up the process of understanding a legal document? With diagrams? Is Doug Engelbart’s idea of a parts-of-speech highlighter any good? Is speed-reading real? If it is, why is it so marginal? Will Jef Raskin’s Archy ever pan out?

Today, in what I’m sure is an increasingly common occurrence to everyone, I was uncertain on a subtle language question and I googled it. The interesting thing was that I didn’t do that to get somewhere, to find any particular webpage, I only cared about the result numbers.

You see, I wasn’t sure whether you wrote “that’s a clever move of their part” or “that’s a clever move on their part.” Prepositions are one of the nastiest, most irrational things in every language. In Spanish you would use the equivalent of “of” in the equivalent expression and I’m guessing that’s what led me astray.

The worst thing is that dictionaries are no help at all in this regard, they just throw at you an impossibly long chain of usage cases. Enter Google. All it took to answer my question was a quick google for ”on their part” and one for ”of their part” (quotes included!). The first query had 2,820,000 results, the second 146,000. The winner was clear, my question was settled.

But it was unnerving. The web has swallowed our language with all its subtleties—it ought to make for one heck of a primeval soup. Don’t you get this feeling every so often that Google is this close to being able to do true translation? This close to understanding? This close to speaking? Do you think it’s not hearing us right now?

Today I had decided I was finally taking Caja Negra—a political web app of mine—online after so many failed attempts (I’m so sleep deprived now that I get dizzy, really dizzy, just looking at the screen). At first I thought it was a problem with Rake and so I started by reading it’s online documentation. It proved a dead end but it turns out Rake is a pretty interesting thing (and so are Rails migrations).

I decided to read some more on the Login Engine itself, and I read, much belatedly, that it is bloated and hard to modify. That has been precisely my experience—and yet, it was very useful to me and after some friendly fisticuffs we learned to get along. Many thanks to James Adam for it.

I finally decided to start the deployment all over again, from scratch, carefully checking the tiniest step. It all narrowed down to a simple command, “rake engine_migrate ENGINE=login”, that just wouldn’t run. I found some people with the same problem but no working solution.

So I kept reading and trying all sorts of different versions of the command once in a while, like a kid magician who just can’t pronounce the incantation correctly.

Along the way, I finally found out why my blog was dead a couple of days ago. It turns out TextDrive rolled out the new version of Rails (1.1) but it was incompatible with Typo and so they rolled it back. They now advise people to freeze (new word for me) your Typo to Rails 1.0 or update to the new, compatible version of the blogging engine. Even DHH apologized in the name of the core team for all the trouble the upgrade caused. TextDrive’s Justin French, on the other hand, was as diplomatic as usual when someone expressed the caring hope that people get notified about what they should do:

That crankiness is actually one of the reasons I enjoy TextDrive. Masochism, they call it.

Anyway, I was definitely getting nearer. I was now sure that what I needed was to freeze my web-app to Rails 1.1. Blessed yerejm gave some instructions for how to do just that here. But the simple conjuration, “rake rails:freeze:edge REVISION=4091”, wasn’t working. I stared hopelessly at the screen for some 20 minutes, thinking about what could be the problem. Then it hit me, probably out of some small passage that I must have read in the realms of documentation I skimmed today, that last colon should probably be an underscore for me. And it all worked.

Will we (or rather, will our avatars) wear words when fully-immersive, massively multiplayer, 3d computer environments really start to take off?

Will it look like Matrix green code view? Will future fashionistas argue endlessly about the merits of serif vs. sans-serif? Bembo vs. Helvetica? Bodoni vs. Garamond? Will a future girl flaunting her sexuality wear a top bikini made of nothing but two rings out of the word “perky” barely concealing her nipples¹? Will you wrap yourself in lyrics? In short stories? In emo text? Will I wear Borges’s while you wear Charlie Stross’s? While she wears Melville’s? Will you wear your favorite quotes as bracelets? As necklaces? As belts? Will HarperCollins be the new Gap?

Before you nonchalantly dismiss this idle rumination as the work of a feverishly formist mind, I ask you to pause for a moment and look around at today’s ubiquituous (and perpetually crammed) IM nick-names and personal messages, email and forum signatures, “witty” t-shirts, and the like.

Yay! I just got my invitation code to Google Analytics. What little I’ve been able to see is pretty amazing (mmm… make that very amazing), all the more so considering that it is free (it has always baffled me to no end that I’ve to pay more for stats than for hosting my website itself).

5 million pageviews? Per month? Per… day? That scale is one of the many things about Google that make geeks’s mouths (mine included) water. (I think it’s important to point out that StatCounter, my previous web stats provider, charged me $19 a month for 10,000 pageviews.)

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…

Have you ever chanced upon someone’s blog only to suddenly fall in love and realize here was someone so similar to yourself (only dazzingly more brilliant) with whom you’re bound to cross paths sooner or later? I have. Today. Twice. Here and here.

Damn! Damn! Damn! I just lost two hours trying to recover a photo in Flickr. It wasn’t that important but it just pains me everytime I lose something great for not saving it. Baka!

Even so, my vagrant vagaries brought me something mind-blowingly useful: Flickr leech Tired of paging? Search Flickr in 200-photo chunks.

And I’m happy I found grace (Parental advisory: beautiful nudity ahead)

If you’ve decided to browse with Firefox,^[1] why not learn to do it gracefully? It’ll make you happier and more efficient.

Before we begin, be sure to have the latest Firefox. As of 28/Feb/2006, the current version is 1.5.0.1 and what follows will assume you have that version or a higher one. You get Firefox from GetFirefox.com.

With that you’re ready. Here is my guide (for non-techies) to using Firefox with flair: