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Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer.

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Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone. They belonged to anyone who heard the song.

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Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does. "Language in fact bears the same relationship to the concept of mind that legislation bears to the concept of parliament," says Jonathan Miller: "it is a competence forever bodying itself in a series of concrete performances."

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Whereas the total vocabulary of any oral language measures a few thousand words, the single language that has been written most widely, English, has a documented vocabulary of well over a million words, a corpus that grows by thousands of words a year.

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In our world of ingrained literacy, thinking and writing seem scarcely related activities. We can imagine the latter depending on the former, but surely not the other way around: everyone thinks, whether or not they write. But Havelock was right. The written word--the persistent word--was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.

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On two occasions I have been asked,--"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

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Cannot work on account of rain

The rain has done much good

The rain has done a great amount of damage

The rain is now pouring down in good earnest

Every prospect of the rain continuing

Rain much needed

Rain at times

Rainfall general

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To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy. In fact, it seemed like a familiar toy, made from tin cylinders and string. The telephone left no permanent record. *The Telephone* had no future as a newspaper name. Business people thought it unserious. Where the telegraph dealt in facts and numbers, the telephone appealed to emotions.

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It may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture--of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility.

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Thornton C. Fry, enjoyed the tension between theory and practice--the clashing cultures. "For the mathematician, an argument is either perfect in every detail or else it is wrong," he wrote in 1941. "He calls this 'rigorous thinking.' The typical engineer calls it 'hair-splitting.'

" The mathematician also tends to idealize any situation with which he is confronted. His gases are "ideal," his conductors "perfect," his surfaces "smooth." He calls this "getting down to essentials." The engineer is likely to dub it "ignoring the facts."

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It used to be supposed in Science that if everything was known about the Universe at any particular moment then we can predict what it will be through all the future.... More modern science however has come to the conclusion that when we are dealing with atoms and electrons we are quite unable to know the exact state of them; our instruments being made of atoms and electrons themselves.

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There was a difference in emphasis between Shannon and Wiener. For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same. The more inherent order exists in a sample of English text--order in the form of statistical patterns, known consciously or unconsciously to speakers of the language--the more predictability there is, and in Shannon's terms, the less information is conveyed by each subsequent letter. When the subject guesses the next letter with confidence, it is redundant, and the arrival of the letter contributes no new information. Information is surprise.

Seems very relevant to today's ChatGPT crew...

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Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.

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Some son-of-a-bitch will invent a machine to measure Spring with.

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You cannot stir things apart.

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Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as "the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board."

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Szilárd made clear that he did not wish to invoke a living demon, with, say, a brain--biology brought troubles of its own. "The very existence of a nervous system," he noted, "is dependent on continual dissipation of energy." (His friend Carl Eckart pithily rephrased this: "Thinking generates entropy.")

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Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

I remember my friend and mentor Paul Morville printing that out and posting it in a lab where we worked, the implication that my frustration with bugs generated in code (probably code I had written) were making such random chaos.

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Septimus, in Tom Stoppard's drama Arcadia. "Thousands of poems--Aristotle's own library ... How can we sleep for grief?"

"By counting our stock," Septimus replies. "You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language."

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Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

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Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes. Even in 1847, Augustus De Morgan, Babbage's friend, knew this. For any random book, he said, a library was no better than a wastepaper warehouse. "Take the library of the British Museum, for instance, valuable and useful and accessible as it is: what chance has a work of being known to be there, merely because it is there? If it be wanted, it can be asked for; but to be wanted it must be known. Nobody can rummage the library."

Too much information, and so much of it lost. An unindexed Internet site is in the same limbo as a misshelved library book. This is why the successful and powerful business enterprises of the information economy are built on filtering and searching. Even Wikipedia is a combination of the two: powerful search, mainly driven by Google, and a vast, collaborative filter, striving to gather the true facts and screen out the false ones. Searching and filtering are all that stand between this world and the Library of Babel.

One implication of my way of modeling the world is that I desperately wish people weren't so strongly attached to their opinions. For me there's a strong division between personal preferences - things we can like or dislike and it doesn't matter for anyone else - and how I wish things were in the shared space, where I am compelled to look for consensus among all the relevant players.

It's frustrating to me. A lot of people seem to be, "this is what I want, so this is the way it should be". My take is more... "based on what people want, this is the way it should be, and so that's what I want." 14 years ago I made "Conway Ice", seeing what happened if you plotted Conway's Game of Life in 3D... each generation is plotted one level higher than the previous. Turns out it makes cool, plant-like structures!

click to run But I didn't port this from Java Processing to P5.js until now (not sure if P5 was doing 3D when I started.) I had to rewrite the 2D engine, but that's easy enough these days. (Getting around to making the the port inspired by Andy Wallace's Pac-Tracer that also uses 3D, in this case to chart Pac-Man ghost's sophisticated movement behaviors.)

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Christianity neither is nor ever was a part of the Common Law.

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Religion & Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

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The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.

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RIP Norm MacDonald

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I'm pretty sure, I'm not a doctor -- but I'm pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That's not a loss. That's a draw.

It's funny what sticks you from childhood, little mental snippets that lie dormant 'til they randomly remerge, unbidden. In this case, I thought of the official comics adaption of Raiders of the Lost Ark. That link is a good review but you can find the whole thing online.

In this case, it was this panel of Marion's naked back as she changed into a dress Belloq has given her: I must have been in second grade. Sometimes I think about how difficult it was to get pictures of undressed people back then (especially relative to today where you have to remind Google not to show you naked boobies) From National Geographics to Art Books, I think I knew the location of every bare nipple in my parents' library.

Anyway, that lovely curve of back scandalized me and has stuck with me... of course that slinky dress in other panels might have helped: And this shot of the Ark being filed away in a giant warehouse stuck with me more than the movie version:

BONUS: I grew up with people telling me I looked like this guy: I guess in high school I sort of inadvertently leaned into the look with an unfortunate hat, and also the glasses. The trouble is no one remembered the characters name (Major Toht) so it was always "that Nazi guy from Indiana Jones, you know, the "We are not... heh heh... thirsty" guy who gets the medallion burned into his palm..."

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I like to think that the house I grew up in dreams about me sometimes, too.

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Sequin pillow magic.

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Play Chess and Lose Weight! Albeit at the grandmaster level. I had no idea it was so gruelling!

I never got deeply into chess - probably because I wasn't naturally great at it once I learned the moves, and too full of myself to struggle with getting better. I think I had a handheld game of it that I could beat, and an Atari 800XL program that I couldn't. I remember by friend Beau was terrific at it.

I wonder what percentage of people who grew up in the USA know all the chess moves? Hot Take: "W" should be pronounced "Wubble-Doo" so it's starts with the letter that it is

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Hotter Take: "W" should be pronounced "Wub" so it's no longer the only multisyllabic letter. http://thekidshouldseethis.com/ This seems like a beautiful concept for a website....

Forever will not be solved with algebra but with geometry, not with ideas but with things. Even an infinity symbol can be traversed by a single line drawn right. Even the scratchiest record can't skip forever, even the moldiest peach can only decay for so long. Eventually, there is an end to discord, a return to either harmony or silence. After the end credits, there is still the clatter of film against reel, of a machine waiting to be turned off. There is still the need for agency, for someone to help bring everything to a satisfying finale before the lights can come back on.

I worry this passage is more evocative than sensible, or internally consistent, but I kind of love it.

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Cross-cultural studies of parenting along with the promise, or threat, that in kids come across fine with a bunch of different styles applied, there's no one right way to do it.

The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

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I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment."

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5 Tragic Reasons Why the World's Largest Theme Park Stands Abandoned in Ohio. Dear old Geauga Lake park-- when I left Cleveland it always felt like Cedar Point's little cousin, I had no idea it had had such a radical expansion and merge with Sea World. So sad, in any guise that place was fun, and now when I see the aerial footage of where it stood... same kind of deal as the ghost malls in the area.

'Why is Sonic a blue hedgehog? He could just as easily be a phallus racing through a nightmarish hellscape of infinite Tuscany.' #noshow13

from a collection of artifact toys my mom brought me,
some i recognize from my childhood, but some i don't, like this... From Jason Hartley's "The Advanced Genius Theory":

Once you have achieved the Advanced state of mind, something amazing happens: you start to like everything. Not only will you appreciate Advanced Artists' most challenging works, but you'll also experience with an open mind the parts of pop culture that otherwise might have tormented you, such as "We Built This City," movies based on TV show, TV shows based on movies, radio commercials featuring two people pretending to have a casual conversation about a product, and Fox News.

What's more, though you will like everything, you won't necessarily lose the ability to discern between levels of quality. You can still have "good taste". It's just that the question becomes how much you like a work of art rather than whether you like it. This is by far superior to traditional good taste, which is predicated on what one rejects. The Advanced accept everything, including everything the Overt enjoy-acid jazz, abstract expressionism, French New Wave, NPR--but they won't ruin your party by insisting on playing music no one's ever heard of. So not only will Advancement give you back your favorite artists, help you enjoy the things you've always hated, and put you in touch with your true self, it will get you invited to more parties.

This book is one of the most enjoyable quick reads I've had this year. Hartley has a theory of Advancement (that he claims is 15 years in the making) arguing that great artists who appear to just lose it in their latter years may just be going Advanced... a form of genius that often looks a bit like selling out, and that stands in contrast to "Overt", art that's a bit too aware of what it's trying to do.

It's sometimes tough, though... one example given is this experiment with rap by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys:

The book doesn't really argue that this is a good song, just that Wilson was at least on the right side of history at a time when many old rockers wouldn't consider rap actual music.

If nothing else, I'm all for the unironic enjoyment of things.

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See the happy moron, He doesn't give a damn. I wish I were a moron, My God! Perhaps I am!

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What's funnier than a miffed boyfriend? A boyfriend that says that he's 'miffed'.

So, one thing Lake George has is nature!

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Things I learned about this weekend: "Nose Grease", a convenient lubricant at hand for carpenters and people with chapped lips and what not.

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Things I learned about this weekend: I observed again how a star-filled, low-light-pollution sky really looks like a sky dome arched above.

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Things I learned about this weekend: if there's no such thing as a "Jacksi-One" (Pepsi One and Jack) maybe there oughta be. (Why no love for Pepsi products as mixers in general?)

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http://is.gd/fbWGN This spoof video and that Chappelle Show w/ Wayne Brady had that "shushing while strangling" thing- where's that from?

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/13/charlie-brooker-google-instant -- Google's War on our attention spans.

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Technically, my job wouldn't be impossible without jQuery and Firebug, but man, it's pretty close!

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If I ever saw an amputee being hanged, I would just start yelling out letters.

In June of 2001 I started posting a series of photos of T-shirts I had gotten rid of. I apolgetically explained doing that back then. And I'm doing it again-- Amber helped me weed out my wardrobe, getting rid of about half of it, at least shirt-wise.

Here are the shirts I thought I might sort of miss, arranged roughly in descending order of coolness. Most of these shirts are technically irreplaceable, but that's the way the entropy bounces.

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You know what, browsers? If you can only give me a readonly FTP view, no upload, forget it; don't try to grab ftp://

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http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1920944 - dark but funny, stormtroopers say "The Deathstar: never forget"

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huh, things are afoot in Boston sports radio, like I mentioned with the iPod/FM thing. ESPN's AM affiliate is gone... preferred their "Mike + Mike" to the WEEI political bozos.

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Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/21/AR2009082101778.html -5 Myths About Health Care Around the World Huh, last night I had the jumpiness I had a few week ago, still kind of lingering this morning.

I wonder if I was just over-caffeinated? Or sometimes there's that weird psychosomatic thing if you're a bit muscle-shaky from exercise, if you exhibit some of the physical signs of being nervous and jittery, there's some feedback that actually makes you nervous and jittery...

Or maybe it's tied in with the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the financial industry. As of this writing the Dow was looking surprisingly resilient, but who knows what the season will bring. (Just another thing to be all angsty and anxious about, for no good reason.)

I also just realized that one of my favorite essayists, master-of-the-footnote David Foster Wallace took his own life at the age of 46.

Oy.

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Video of the Moment

--from the "good golly did that actually exist or did I make it up?" department... (more specifically from TVTropes' I am Not Making This Up file--) Could you imagine given the task about making a cartoon about Rubiks Cubes?

I'm trying not to resent the neurons I have dedicated to that "Hello, my name is RUB-ik" ending.

BTW, the TVTropes random item feature is kind of a nice way of getting measured doses of that great site.

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Greenspan Shrugged

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Thoughts you immediately regret having: "gee, maybe the Great Depression wasn't that bad -- I mean, 75% of folks were still employed--"

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After Y2K, I'm kind of done worrying about this stuff. Hell, for other reasons I've already moved into the ol' family brownstone, what more?

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a decade late, but... spice girls... "zigazig ah"... is that like, a euphemism for sex? or sex noises? stupid ipod. I gave blood this morning (at 8am, after a surprise night of late night socializing when my upstairs neighbors had a shindig for their former housemate who was visiting from Italy) so I'm extra self-righteous today! Also tired.

Random note: separated at birth, yesterday's image of Nasruddin and the Sultan from Aladdin?

Stupid folk-traditions, ripping off Disney like that.

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Game of the Moment
Scong is toast-modern [sic] game. "Be the Ball." No really... be the ball. Surprisingly disconcerting. (By the same guy who organized last weekend's game fest.)

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Potentially Mildly Offensive Quote of the Moment

[Enemy looms, roars, gets exploded by gunfire]
"Oh man, that was scary. Good thing I had my reflexes up.... I'm a Level 8 Polack."

At the risk of over-explaining, it's a vague reference to online RPGs where you establish the get to upgrade your character's abilities (like reflexes) and achieve various levels of your character's type. Also funny because "polack" sounds a little bit like "warlock". The haiku frolics in the sidebar comments have raised a point I find interesting, is "growl" one syllable or two? I guess it varies by dialect, though Miller claims that it's lacking the requisite vowel (but I think back to "a e i o u, and sometimes y and w"... I learned it "sometimes y" but I have heard that "and w" thrown in there since.) Still, for me, "growl" is a perfect rhyme for "towel" and, appropriately enough, "vowel". Though I guess those words might all be, say, 1 1/2 syllables.

Of course than I start thinking about parts of the country where "fire" is one syllable and then I need to go lie down for a bit.

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Image Toy of the Moment

--FoSO sent a link to this official seal generator. The UI isn't super dynamic but it's still cool. (Hint: the "Emblem" caption is a link taking you to a browser, rather than making you pick from a text list.)

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Passage of the Moment

Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust. [...] Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero.

Just in time for next week's trip to Seattle!

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column of the Moment
We have no more troops to send to Iraq. We have, or had, the army to win any war, but (mercifully?) we are no great shakes at being an occupying force.

Thank goodness it has struck such a blow against terrorism, huh?

As the Post paraphrased the Marine Corps chief of intelligence for Iraq: "al-Qaeda has become the province's most significant political force." In other words, the prediction some began making a year ago—that Anbar would become a new and enduring sanctuary for al-Qaida—has come true.

Of course, until and unless there's a major terrorist incident in the USA, it's difficult to absolutely criticize our ham-fisted Middle East policy, but on the other hand, until there's a clearer demonstration of how Iraq ties into that, and how removing Saddam unambiguosly helped, it's hard to know that it's worth the expense.

Of course, no new taxes to support the war, that might start people counting the cost in other ways as well...

Political Snarks of the Moment

--Bush requesting Condoleeza Rice if they can get a bathroom break, close-up, zoom-in. Also, this joke via ErinMaru: "What is Bush's position on Roe vs. Wade?" "Either...he doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans." HA!

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Quote of the Moment

That means all of us when you remember an adage a guru once told me: "Every piece of computer software, no matter how small, involves at least a team of two -- me, and me six months from now when I have to fix it." Conway puts it differently "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

Fellow coding geeks might want to check out the book's author's Ten Essential Development Practices.

Dialog of the Moment

isnoop writes:
TheChirurgeon: "So, what would you do if you were rich?"
Me: "You mean when I'm rich?"
TheChirurgeon: "Yeah."
Me: "Well, I would probably pay a big dude to follow my roommate around, and every time he got some ice cream, the big dude would slap it out of his hands onto the ground. Then he would be like 'You don't get any ice cream, scumbag'."

Note: This roommate and I aren't enemies, but he was there, and we constantly mess with each other.

ANAmal: "Wouldn't he eventually just stop eating ice cream?"
Roommate: "Yeah, I would probably stop."
Me: "Yeah, and then I would have the big dude hide, so that when you went to get ice cream, and you thought you were safe, he'd jump out, and then knock it out of your hands."
Roommate: "Yeah, but-"
Me: "And then I'd pay another big dude to follow you around in an ice cream truck, and constanlty offer out free ice cream."
Roommate: "So... much... hate."

Worth clicking through.

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Map of the Moment
This is a nifty map/poll of the USA, showing states sized relative to how many electoral votes they're worth. I wish the news wasn't looking so Bush-postive though. Man, I had a feeling Kerry isn't the right guy...I hope against hope that the debates manage to turn it aroud.

Sick Joke of the Moment

"What has two legs, and bleeds profusely?"
"What?"
"Half a cat."

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Games of the Moment
People who know I'm such a classic game geek may think this kind of weird, but after skimming through these Atari 2600 game reviews, I'm astounded at how many Atari games were released that I never ever heard of. I had what was a pretty big collection of games for the time, actually really big by normal kids standards (though I didn't get them 'til everyone else was moved onto NES, and my collection pales compared to the serious collectors') and so I guess to tend to forget that there was this whole world of games beyond the carts me and my friends managed to get a hold of.

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Posters of the Moment

--Not the best interface for browsing but still cool, MagicGallery.com has tons of posters advertising old time magicians.

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Observation of the Moment
Speaking of "eww": dangnabbit, I hate it when you sneeze and a droplet flies onto a tv screen or monitor and you see those giant R-G-B pixels reminding you of how disgusting you are. :-) of the Moment
Some people think they have found the first 'Net smiley, with more details from the inventor here. (though others are convinced that this is a reinvention, that they were around before on various BBSs.) And even those may have been predated by Emoticons on the PLATO System which were even cooler. On that system, you can overwrite characters (like on a typewriter, you can hit "backspace" and put a character over the last one) and some of the results (like these two here) are cute...to the right is what you'd type, and to the left is the result. That link had even more interesting ones...

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Quote of the Moment

But even the thought of a Billy Joel 9/11 opera justifies raising our nation's bad-art threat level to CONDITION ORANGE.

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Link of the Moment
Frank Jump is the force behind Fading Ad Campaign, photos of the advertisements you would sometimes see on the sides of old buildings. Just realized now that the artist with HIV, and that might influence the subject matter...also, that (now defunct) Word.com helped put him on the 'Net. Quote of the Moment

I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are.

...this is the kind of attitude I'm very nervous about now. We need to hold ourselves more accountable.

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Links of the Moment
I saw someone on TV from Jane's Information Group talking with the anchor and pointing out that they sort of were pointing to this ahead of time. Even though it's not clear if they offered enough specific detail to have prevented it, someone pointed out it's odd we haven't heard more about that.

Tom Burt, who claims to be a bit of a regular reader from the UK (wow, didn't know I had regular readers who wouldn't've already known me) made a reasonable Libertarian-ish argument against what I was saying about crypto and civil rights yesterday. He pointed me to this article on foreign policy that made some level of sense. (On the other hand, I think a generous foreign aid policy makes us allies that we really need...)

Here Zimran Ahmed, a Packistani, gives some details on the Middle East view of American foreign policy. For a certian perspective, we're the sponsors of state terrorism.

I find this Time magazine survey disturbing...we're so ready for war. We need to spend a LOT more time in diplomacy before we go marching off. Our European allies aren't as hawkish as we are right now.

Two pieces from UKs The Guardian, John Sawers thought that this one on how Americans can't see why others don't see them as the good guys was right on. They also had this piece on information about bin Laden's group gleaned from the US embassy bombing trial.

Finally, some people swear they saw the devil's face in the smoke at the WTC, before the collapse.