February 2009
Time Slider →
Etherpad is an online text editor that saves every keystroke — so far, so good. But it also allows you to play them back, giving you a birds-eye view of how a document came to be. This is how Paul Graham wrote Startups in 13 Sentences. Watching someone else write is interesting enough, but I can imagine playing back the evolution of one of your own pieces of writing is absolutely...
“In a world where it’s becoming easier and easier to reshare information in other...”
– Michael Nielsen: Writing to be taken out of context. (Do read it in context. And think: is this a good development? No. No, it’s not.)
Finding the lost city →
Sometimes I think it’s sad that I was born into an age when there be no dragons on the maps, no white spots to fill in. I’m very much a fan of the romantic notion of a few sturdy explorers braving the unknown to satisfy their own curiosity and desire for adventure; I have a comfortable illusion that I would be one of them if I were only born a hundred years earlier. Of course, I...
Pissy Fans →
Some fans do have a tendency to forget that the creative folks they love are not simply black boxes, who produce desired product at regular intervals. They’re actually real people who do other things than just what the fans want them to do, because humans from time to time want to do the things they want to do, not the things other people want them to do. Yes, some fans don’t like that, but you...
Proto-World and the Language Organ →
Mark Rosenfelder challenges both the idea of a language organ and a single origin for language. He has written a number of great articles debunking linguistic quackery that I like to link to ocassionally, and seems like a very reasonable fellow overall, so if you’re interested in this sort of thing, I suggest reading and evaluating it before writing it off.
The Day the Muzak Died →
Muzak, the company, filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. The company has an impressive record of pseudoscientific marketing, from “Stimulus Progression” — the idea that workers would become happier and more productive if Muzak’s special special selections of songs played at fifteen minute intervals on/off in the background — to today’s “sensory...
Language, religion, origins, &c
Interesting fact I learned today: Muslims consider the Arabic Koran to have been transmitted directly from God in Arabic. Only the Arabic Koran is really the Koran. This is, I think, unique among world religions. Hence the tradition of naming direct translations “The Meaning of the Koran” or calling them interpretations, because only the original is the god-given message. The rest, it...
“Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims.
98 Pages →
There is something liberating about sketching. Of course, there is a sense that you are might be ‘practicing,’ but the truth is that you are actually ‘freeing up space,’ — sort of like moving stuff from the dining room table to the garage. Welcome to my workbench.
A sketchbook by Craig Frazier. (via.)
“In the sixties I was spending a lot of time in Europe, and I was in Europe in...”
– Stephen Shore.
I got a package from Amazon today: it contained Shore’s wonderful Uncommon Places, plus On the Road by Kerouac — I felt the two kind of fit. (Together with my 25mm/1.4 this is the last photo-related purchase of mine for a while, I sense. I’m broke.) If I can get...
TumblrStats →
This is great. Much, much better than the rudimentary ruby script I made last year that someone later turned into a website. I’m happy to see that only an estimated 5 percent of my content is reblogs (but beware: I don’t know what the estimate is based on, so it could easily be wrong). I’m not as happy to see that there was a month when I posted a hyperactive eight times a day on...
The Gay Science →
I’ve been on a Big Ideas kick lately. Nietzsche — I think I’ve learned how to spell his name correctly without looking it up, finally — had many of those, some right, some wrong. I haven’t really read much by Nietzsche, but I realized that some of his work, such as The Gay Science (also translated “The Joyous Science”, to remind us all what gay used to...
Theothanatology →
Short story by Daniel Cubias.
Again, God was ruled out of order, but this time he refused to be quiet.
“Don’t give me that shit!” he bellowed. “We all know this is personal. You are all jealous that I’ve created such a smooth machine while most of yours sputter along in the void. You just want some halfwit God who will kowtow to you.”
Before God could be ushered out for his unruly behavior,...
Darwin.
Today, February 12, 2009, it’s exactly 200 years since Charles Darwin was born. In November it’ll be a hundred and fifty since On the Origin of Species was published. That’s worth noting, I think.
“Spinoza saw that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, “I want to...”
– Philip K. Dick. (via but does it float, a blog that for some stupid reason does not see fit to cite the authors of its quotes. Edit: apparently, PKD is one of the tags at the bottom of the post. That’s no proper cite. Thx, Alejandro.)
This is, I think, the most concise and poetic description...
“More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it...”
– Paul Graham: Keep Your Identity Small. (via Trivium)
Game of Life text and image generator generator →
Tom Robinson created a dot matrix printer in Conway’s Game of Life and used it to print the reddit alien. This is so cool that it’s worth dealing with the super-annoying “dock” thing on the site just to see. Alternatively, just go directly to the video on Vimeo.
Alice and Bob →
I knew there was a love story behind those two, always sending secret notes to each other.
“He produced his remarkable output in four hours a day — he found it too...”
– Description of the mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey, who produced a number of important contributions to math, philosophy and economics before his death (at 26!), quoted here.
37 Signals and whoever else is arguing for working less, but more productively during that time, this is your...
Nüshu, the syllabic script used exclusively by... →
Traditionally, Chinese women weren’t allowed to learn the written language. Solution: invent a new, secret script. Nüshu has over a thousand characters, and some of them look like italic versions of Chinese letters. Nüshu, unlike Chinese, is fully syllabic: the characters represent syllables as spoken, unlike Chinese, which is logosyllabic. (Also, I would guess, not as insanely hard to...
The $20 Theory of the Universe →
Forget the other bills. The single won’t get you much more than a stiff nod and, these days, the fin is de rigueur. A tenner is a nice thought, but it’s also a message that you’re a Wal-Mart shopper, too cheap for the real deal. A twenty, placed in the right hand at the right moment, makes things happen. It gets you past the rope, beyond the door, into the secret files. The...
"†I'm serious.†"
Ideas I get just before going to bed, specimen 2 (part 1):
Village Voice interviews the man behind Hipster Runoff, the blog. The interview contains the highest density of quote marks around things which aren’t quotations I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of that hysterical article about hipsters as a dead end of western civilization, heralds of the apocalypse and more, which was a load of...
dalas verdugo's Guide to New York City →
Fun. (via)
----> intention of comment
.o thine head
/|\
/ \
(proper response to underappreciated sarcasm)
Water is blue ... because water is blue →
One of the most appealing aspects of the ocean is the colour of the water, ranging from a greyish green to deep blue. But wait a minute: When I pour water in a glass, it is a clear, transparent liquid. So, what is the cause of the blue colour of the sea? Is it the reflection of the blue sky, perhaps? The answer is simple, and perhaps surprising: Water is blue, because water is blue.
Technical...
The Circular Ruins →
My favorite Borges story at the moment; it’s like a riff on the whole man/butterfly thing that Zhuang Zi had going.