October 2011
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Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
I was disappointed to see that Google’s web fonts directory has done away with the quick brown fox… as the default example sentence. Instead, we get “Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack,” which somehow doesn’t measure up to the elegance of the fox. On the other hand, this did lead me to the wonderful world of pangrams, that is, sentences that...
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Where's My Goddamn Jetpack?
This is SHRDLU. Terry Winograd developed SHRDLU at MIT from 1968-70. It’s an experiment in artificial intelligence: a virtual world filled with geometric blocks, and an AI operator that you can ask about the block world or command to do things—stack the blocks, say—in natural language. The AI understands a large subset of natural language pertaining to moving the blocks around,...
Things That I Believe
While I’m up on my soapbox, I might as well tell you what I believe.
I believe that economic inequality is fair, but only up to a point. I believe that everyone makes their fortune on the shoulders of everyone else, and that, while some wealth is deserved, there is no way the richest are morally entitled to all that they own. I believe that my father, who takes home a comfortable...
As it turns out, what I’ve been calling the narrow band of the thinkable in politics has another name: the Overton window. Unfortunately, Glenn Beck wrote a novel called The Overton Window, so if you search the internet for information about this very interesting issue, and how much it sucks, you will instead get to hear a whole lot about how some paranoid radio host’s...
The View from Godless Liberal Socialist Utopia
The thinkable is a very narrow band in the spectrum of politics. Revolutions invert the thinkable, or at least shove it far into the land of the previously infrared or ultraviolet, if you follow my metaphor here. Within each little spectrum, each little bubble, everything else is so unimaginable it might as well be invisible. Sometimes, along comes something, let’s call it an insect, which...
Dizzying but invisible depth →
You just went to the Google home page. Simple, isn’t it? What just actually happened?
Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it’s not quite that simple. You’ve just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they’ll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that...
“The shortest New Yorker article ever written: On a warm summer night in 1987,...”
– Samuel Bayle.
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Street Fighter: Political Philosophy Edition
Niccolo Machiavelli (1513):
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful,...
Literary Mad Libs
Centralia, Pennsylvania has been on fire for fifty years. To be precise, the coal mine under the town is burning, making the ground unstable, occasionally spewing out toxic gases, rendering the town all but uninhabitable. And, of course, very interesting to writers:
Though the number of actual Centralians has dwindled to a handful, the place exudes an undeniable romantic appeal, particularly to...
Technological Innovation and Catalysis
If you’ll recall some elementary chemistry for a moment, the activation energy of a reaction is the energy threshold that needs to be crossed for the reaction to occur. A catalyst is an agent that doesn’t actually take part in a reaction, but whose presence lowers the activation energy, allowing the reaction to take place. Many chemical reactions aren’t feasible without...
Photographs and Truth
I miss the time when photographs were literally true.
Part one: theory
Truth is the greatest and thorniest issue in philosophy. There is not enough paper in the world to hold all the things that have been, will be, should be and will have been written about truth. It’s an issue that concerns everyone and applies to everything, including photographers and photographs. Since I am a...
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I was under the impression that I had bought an audiobook from Audible. As it turns out, I’ve apparently been paying them $15 every month for some sort of credits with which I can apparently buy more audiobooks. I don’t even like audiobooks. I like reading books. I’m not picky: I’ll take ink on paper or pixels on screen, but I’d like to read it myself, if you please....
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Seems like a fitting day to revisit Folklore.org, which, if you don’t know it, is a collection of firsthand anecdotes about life at Apple in the early eighties. Here’s a couple of stories about Steve Jobs’s legendary micromanagement. The calculator:
We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting for Steve’s reaction....
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Structured Procrastination →
The Ig Nobel prize is a parody prize, but a subtle one, honoring “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” It’s not exactly a prize for bad science: it’s more about science that’s funny, unusual or trivial in some entertaining way. Like magnetically levitating frogs or quantifying exactly how much really having to pee affects...