“whimsicist”

For a while now, I’ve been pleasantly following Very Small Array, an information design graph-blog, but this was the first time I was really enthralled by one of its designs, FRIENDS:

It’s just so stunningly elegant, isn’t it? So skillfully made to appear casual yet imbued with obvious formal beauty, charming yet minimalist—not a word or pixel unused. Labels and graph, typography and information design, come together marvelously, painstakingly.

The thing that most grabbed me, though, was that I had just started making my own similar introspective list of my friends’ attributes, in the spirit of quantified selfhood. While I’m floored by Very Small Array’s commitment (it has been doing this for almost a decade—the chart above is just one of several great graphs and metapgraphs), my brief exercise in self knowledge has already told me two unexpected things: I have a history of liking extroverts and polyglots.

I’m fascinated by meaningful compound words, the more elegant the better.

Esperanto is full of them, based on them really. Chinese writing is like that too, at times—I’m particularly impressed by things like 大小, literally “big”-”small”, used occasionally to mean “size”.

One problem that comes up is is that no matter how small the root words, compounds eventually get unwieldy, even to express simple ideas. In Esperanto, for instance, supr- is the root for “up” and you attach the -en directional root to make supren = “upwards”. Using the inverting root, mal, you get malsupren = “downwards”. So you end up having to say the clunky malsupreniri to express the simple “to go down” verb (iri = “go”).

One very elegant solution mentioned in Claude Piron’s wonderful La Bona Lingvo (“The Good Language”) is to take a different, simpler track altogether. The same idea of “going down” can be more elegantly expressed as desupri, literally “to from-top” (and the corresponding alsupri, literally “to to-top”). This, to me, is the stuff of beauty.

I recently learned 2 new Japanese words, fascinating to me because they used an entirely different conceptual track to the one I knew. You see, the Yamanote line is Tokyo’s most important train line and, remarkably, a loop. Japanese refer to trains travelling the loop clockwise as 外回り, literally "out"-"go around", and counter-clockwise as 内回り, literally "in"-"go-around". In Japan, trains, like all traffic, travels on the left and so these words make wonderfully creative, precise descriptions. (This is done, though rarely, in Western countries too, I later learned.)

The problem with these words is that they’re specific to Japan’s traffic regulations—they would confusingly mean the opposite in much of the right-driving rest of the world.

So, inspired by the Japanese track, I decided to create more universal words for clockwise and counter-clockwise, words which always confused me as a child and which aren’t particularly wieldy (in Spanish, the equivalents truly weigh you down: clockwise = “en el sentido de las manecillas del reloj, counter-clockwise = “en el sentido opuesto de las manecillas del reloj”). Fun historical note: clock hands move the way they do because that’s the way clocks’ predecessor, sundials, advance—sunwise that is (in the Northern hemisphere).

Thus I present to you rightcenter, meaning clockwise, as in “clock hands move rightcenter”, with the center to the right, in a right center way. As well as leftcenter, meaning counterclockwise, as in “screws are usually loosened leftcenter”, circling with the center to the left, in a left center way. Their derivation, I hope, is made even more obvious by the following diagram:
In Spanish, they can be translated into the much wieldier alternatives to the local counterparts: “con el centro a la derecha” and “con el centro a la izquierda”, respectively.

Now, I make no illusions that these terms are immediately or intuitively graspable—spatial direction is hard, most of us still have to consciously think about telling right from left. These words are just an alternative, fun way to label (and thus think) about the concepts of circular direction—and to think about language itself.

My answer to life, the universe, and everything:

Randomness begets persistence
Persistence begets replication
Replication begets complexity

In what is to date the biggest purchase of my life (my obscene former desktop was a gift), I just purchased the bulk of my travel for the next year or so. Check out my itinerary and start planning on visiting or bumping with me!

27 October 2008
    Mexico City MEX to Tokyo NRT (via London) for 4 months, 22 days of Japan!
20 March 2009
    Tokyo NRT to London LHR for 4 months, 29 days of Europe!
17 August 2009
    London LHR to Toronto YYZ for a month of Canada! (ticket back to Mexico to be purchased)

All the flights are with British Airways. All for $1,852, which still amazes me—BA is a great airline, flights are incredibly main-airport and nonstop (can’t stop in the US). It’s all beautifully simple, better than I dared hope. Past week has been a Kayak and travel agency blur but it was worth it.

So, so exciting!

The plan is to travel, to go places for a year or so, to live for some 2-3 months each time, in Tokyo, Barcelona/Madrid, London, and Toronto (in that order). Both Spain and Canada beckon with legal, short paths to free agency. The goal shall be to find out which city I like better as my fulcrum for the decade, but mostly to learn, to start projects, and to swallow the world.

I didn’t expect to like working remotely so much, as I’ve been doing this last couple of weeks, but I’ve loved the freedom, the flexibility, and the discipline it imposes. Most important of all, it allows for freedom of place and having been kicked out of the U.S. I might as well look around. So I’m looking for some sort of remote job, failing that savings and odd jobs would have to do, but having an unhinged fixed job would accelerate and catalyze everything.

There is, still, the possibility that there will be no place for me like Silicon Valley. If that’s so, then I’ll try to get a tourist visa again within a year and give de facto (ilegal) free agency another shot. I doubt, though, that they’ll grant me a visa, but there are many other, safe, if somewhat expensive means, to get inside. And once inside de facto free agency is not far fetched at all. I’m heartened by the sanctuary San Francisco itself always was for me (as opposed to the dastard federal gov’t).

But that’s just one possibility. Just having done that scenario planning comforts me and sets me free. The world beckons and Japan has always been, after America, the country I’m hungriest for. I’ve always wanted to try the sink or swim approach to learning a language! It’ll take me a month or two to get there, but just you wait Tokyo!

Where, but the web, would you find someone like Oliver Steele? This ain’t no metaphor. That name was a link. I’m not talking about Oliver Steele the person, I haven’t met him (though I apparently am 1-degree of separation from him; weird, that). I’m not talking about the sweating, walking, pinchable, space-and-time-and-flesh-bound avatar, I’m talking about his online persona. And either I’ve gotten crazy enough or technology has advanced enough that I’m ready to treat Oliver Steele —the link, his blog, words, diagrams, code, and further media— as a person by its own merits.

And, boy, is he an interesting guy:

• My no TV. It is, too, one of my most valuable possessions.
  
• Functional JS is a sweet, sweet library, with one of the best documentations I’ve ever seen. Stuff like this is what makes the interwebs the best place on earth. And no, I don’t mean that as a metaphor either.
  
• Addition fractions. Y’know how fractions deal with multiplication? They need not be!
  
  
• Interactive regular expressions. Live regex! Nothing like interaction to make easy and fun once chores.
  
• Why are far things small? and other really hard questions from Steele’s kids.
  
• Visualizing basic algebra.
  
  
• Fluently: a construction kit for chainable methods. Finally, a word for the programming style I’ve been hinting at: Fluent interfaces!
  
• Learning about constraint diagrams
  
  
• A metaphor of computer’s history.
  
• The true advantages of Macs. I agree.
  
• The metaphor of the rock.
  
  
• Aargh!. How to spell it? It’s genius’s mark to have this much fun with such a trivial question.
  
  

Rented a bike the other day and rode around San Francisco for the first time. I was as happy as can be. Very physical, dog-like, movement-for-the-sake-of-movement fun. Fell in love with this beautiful city all over again, the place makes much more sense on a bike, distances feel right: pretty much everything is just a couple of minutes away.

But, you know me, as soon as I jumped on the bike I started thinking of ways to make it better. My main beef is in the context of sidewalks: bikes take too much space and are too hard to control at very slow, almost stop, speeds. Also, riding hills is too hard.

So, here a proposal to address these concerns. A bike for the city, for sidewalks, for standing:

What d’you think?

Updates 10/June/2008:

Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.

But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.

The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.

After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.

What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.

I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.

Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?

OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?

But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.

The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.

Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.

Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%

In this sense: In the physical world, perhaps one of the biggest, most basic hurdles to overcome for any creature (above plant) is navigating space. Whatever you may want (eat, talk, watch, mate..) you have to be there first. That’s the tyranny of space, a tyranny that lingers despite telecommunications easing it to a degree we can’t really imagine now.

But technology has uncovered a new hurdle, even more basic in some ways, that we hadn’t even glimpsed some decades ago (you don’t much care about space when you live in a pen). The new hurdle is interface—a device’s how, its ways of interaction, what you have to wrestle with to get things done through it. Whatever you may want to do through technology (moving, watching, writing, browsing, talking, killing,...) you have to overcome the interface first. The need is more acutely felt the more plastic and dynamic the technology. The web ranks right up there. The information superhighway delivered its promise of abolishing space but the freedom has shifted the load from our legs to our brains, from space to interface. The challenge is no longer motive, it’s cognitive.

Consider malls. Besides modern comforts and breathtaking opulence, the single main thing they have going for them, their reason for being, is that they get stuff closer. They ease space. That’s also why similar stores cluster together, closeness is so valuable for customers that they force owners to set shop right next to the competition. Big box stores are the climax of contiguity.

A very similar thing happens in the web under interface constraints. Beyond critical-mass, Amazon, eBay, and the myriad vertical marketplaces (etsy is a good one) thrive because there’s a nontrivial number of interface details you have to tiresomely learn, divine, or settle if you go somewhere else. And these details are particularly painful in shopping because the whole process is staggeringly complex: it involves a lot of searching, browsing, foraging, comparing, digesting, authenticating, etc.

But in other areas the reality of the tyranny of interface is just as real. Wikipedia, we’ve now come to realize, is useful chiefly because it provides a single unified interface to knowledge. The blog is one of the most significant web innovations in recent years and at bottom it’s just a genre for the efficient exploitation of interface, uniforming it, streamlining it, adapting content interfaces to the new realities of the web, kind of what convenience stores did for space and cars. Heck, even search engines, interface-saving devices in a way (the search engine is the modern steam engine, directories are human-powered transport), have nontrivial interfaces all their own, as I’ve attested recently trying out torrent engines (mininova, torrentSpy, and isoHunt are my favorites).

You could have once said that downloading was the web’s equivalent of moving but broadband quickly made that friction negligible. In our current web, figuring out interface is the new moving. Interface is the new space.