“wikipedia”

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.

Charles S. Peirce has been called by Britannica “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced.” Bertrand Russell considered him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and the greatest American thinker ever,” and Karl Popper goes all out, seeing him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.”

I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.

How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?

OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”^SOURCE

Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better (or shorter) intro than the logical reasoning pedia.

And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ^ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.

I wonder how widespread is the concept. Please leave a comment with your answer. A simple yes or no will suffice. Though if you have a strong opinion about them I’d be glad to hear it. Also interesting to hear would be how you heard about them—quality management class? invented them on your own? late night Wikipedia? serendipity?

Zipping back and forth along Kottke’s Twitter some minutes ago I finally got Twitter. And I smiled. Like I smiled when I finally got Wikipedia (or blogs or Flickr or Facebook or Google or GMail)—a smile of wonderment at the great and totally unexpected.

His observations on it are spot on—no wonder he’s the web pundit par excellence.

“I’ve always accepted my groggy mornings because they come with my glorious nights.”

anglo latin; the origin of latin america as a word; my high school wasn’t bilingual, it was English with Spanish as a second language; I always say math and language are the same ability because they’re the same thing, math is just specialized talk about numbers; but then zoology is just talk about animals…; the difference is that math is, in a farly unparalleled way, advanced through language itself (as opposed to, say, zoology, which, advances chiefly through observation); the way forward in language is through logic; logic is syntax; understanding is synthesizing and paraphrasing; {an algorithm just like flooding to create a machine that understood, as previously defined—one wouldn’t even need to define what a word is}; Wikipedia syntax highlighting!

Glorious, thought-drunken night.

Which is quite amazing, I must say. Always thought the English colony would have English at the top, by far.

Check the US Census press release where this was reported for definitions and more context.

My Wikipedia investigations of late (I want to propose a major new feature and I’m feeling out the “deep” WIkipedia) uncovered the little known fact that as a registered user you can have a personal stylesheet and javascript file—which means that with a little know-how you can have Wikipedia looking and feeling exactly how you want it—and have this look-and-feel follow you around with your account. If you use the default skin, Monobook^WP, your personal stylesheet and js file are monobook.css and monobook.js. There’s help here.

This opens the door to all sorts of customizing galore—skins, plugins, new features…—and while I still have to dig into it properly, so far I’ve found the amazing Navigation popups script, which pops up a small, smart (meaning it does interesting stuff depending on context) preview of any Wikipedia link you hover onto. Its slightly annoying until you get used to it, but once you do get it into your “work”-flow it’s very sweet—blazingly fast and with tons of handy extra options. Installing it is a snap too, just add one line to your monobook.js.

I really should know better than spending the better part of three days on a whim…

Posted in a comment by Thomas Buckner to that famous letter of Eliezer Yudkowsky to his brother Yehuda ^ELZR. No idea about its accuracy. Interestingly, I don’t care one whit.

(Used the Wikipedia trick^ELZR to translate Tuilleries^WP into Spanish—neat!)

Most people don’t even know about it but right at the bottom of the left sidebar of every pedia there’s an in other languages section that turns out to be one of Wikipedia’s pearls.

It is wonderful for translating somewhat obscure nouns that you’d rarely find in a bilingual dictionary, like

• the mathematical concepts of an upper bound (mayorante in Spanish), a set (insiemi in Italian) or a tuple (n-uplet in French);
  


• computer concepts like scrollbar (Bildlauf in German; literally, imagecourse), web browser (navigateur web in French; literally, web navigator), hyperlink (collegamento ipertestuale in Italian), real-time (Echtzeit in German), multimedia (multimedialità in Italian), and operating system (système d’exploitation in French);
  


• relatively unknown Greek gods like Cybele (Cibeles^CB in Spanish) or Priapus (Priape in French);
  


• exotic (anything really)
  
  
  • animals like the civet (Schleichkatzen in German) and the platypus (ornitorinco in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • fruits like the passion fruit (maracujá in Portuguese) and the jackfruit (yaca in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • plants like the okra (gombo in French), the  spearmint (yerbabuena in Spanish; literally, goodgrass), the mandrake (mandragora in Spanish), and the  jimson weed (higuera del infierno in Spanish; literally, infernal fig);
    
  
  
  • flowers like the fuchsia (bellebloem in Nedersaksisch^WP), the medlar (níspero in Spanish), and the saffron (azafrán) in Spanish);
    
  
  


• neologisms like meme meme (mème in French), GM food (alimento transgénico in Spanish), and the long tail (longue traîne in French, sometimes longue queue);
  


• international phrases like to be, or not to be (Sein oder Nichtsein in German) and Land of the Rising Sun (La Tierra del Sol Naciente in Spanish);
  


• digital accoutrements like inkjet printer (Tintenstrahldrucker in German), touchpad (pavé tactile in French), or flatbed scanner (escáner plano in Spanish; literally, flat scanner);
  


• drug paraphernalia/jargon like chillum (chiloom in Italian), syringe driver (Spritzenpumpe in German), rolling machine (interpercolatrice in Italian), bong (pipe à eau in French), and withdrawal syndrome (síndrome de abstinencia in Spanish);
  


• translatable acronyms like NAFTA (TLC in Spanish), NATO (OTAN in French), USSR (CCCP in Russian), or GDP (BIP in German);
  


• or simply peculiar expressions like popular science (divulgación científica in Spanish; literally, scientific divulgation), conspicuous consumption (prangende forbruk in Norwegian), prince charming (príncipe azul in Spanish; literally, blue prince), intellectual property (immaterialrätt in Swedish; literally, immaterial rights), apple of discord (Zankapfel in German), or noble savage (buen salvaje in Spanish; literally, good savage).
  

And it proves a true lifesaver for translating media nouns you would never find in any bilingual dictionary—things like the Smurfs (Pitufos in Spanish), Woody Woodpecker (El Pájaro Loco in Spanish; literally, The Crazy Bird), Pinnocchio (Pinocho in Spanish), There’s Something About Mary (Mary à tout prix in French; literally, Mary at any price), Ghostbusters (Cazafantasmas in Spanish; literally, Ghosthunters), or Baywatch (Alerte à Malibu in French; literally, Alert in Malibu).