2011 - 2012 - 2013 - 2014 - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019 - 2020 - 2021 - 2022 - headers
Jan 06, 2014
★ Links 2013. worrydream.com/Links2013
Jan 07, 2014
@hamishtodd1 Of course, almost everyone I linked to is either over 60 or dead.
Jan 07, 2014
I actually didn't realize this until now. Only @terrycavanagh is under 60. I guess this is my "60 over 60" list.
Jan 07, 2014
[ref]
60 OVER 60 DISRUPTORS INNOVATORS impatient to CHANGE THE WORLD with 40 yrs of careful thought & lasting contributions
Jan 09, 2014
[ref]
Uncle Tukey in 1973, using interactive rotation to see the shape of high-dimensional data. Magic. youtube.com/watch?v=B7XoW2… via @AmeliaMN
Jan 11, 2014
Do you have an example of a tweet (just a 140 char standalone thought, no links or refs) that significantly changed your way of thinking?
Jan 12, 2014
sometimes I start to make things like this, and then I think "what's the point", and then I think why am i even worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCod…
Jan 12, 2014
@ddmeyer The effect of pencil-and-paper programmers outperforming programmers-at-a-computer is no doubt real, and...
The effect of pencil-and-paper programmers outperforming programmers-at-a-computer is no doubt real, and important to think about. I think there are more subtle things going on than just “tools make you weak”. Paradoxically, I think pencil-and-paper programming brings you closer to, not further from, the program, because it forces you to have a clear picture in your head of what the program is doing. In our current form of programming-at-a-computer, you can get away with “messing around until it appears to work”, while the picture in your head stays fuzzy. Of course the person with a clearer understanding will be more effective! But the solution is not to throw out tools entirely, but to specifically and carefully design tools that enable and support and enhance that clear mental picture, to bring the programmer closer, not further. “Learnable Programming” describes a starting point for some techniques that may do that. The second subtle point is selection bias, that the pencil-and-paper programmers appear strong because they are thetiny fraction of people in the world who are capable enough to do it. I believe that with good tools and ways-of-thinking, orders of magnitude more people will be able to outperform the pencil-and-paper programmers. (And the very capable people themselves will be able to take on projects with orders of magnitude more complexity.) From David Hestenes's “Modeling Games” paper: “We marvel at the ingenuity of Newton's mathematical arguments, in part, because his methods were so unwieldy that no one since has fully mastered them. Before anyone could improve on Newton's performance, the world had to wait half a century for the development of better mathematical tools and techniques, primarily by Euler.”
Jan 13, 2014
"Enactive = confidently manipulable. Iconic = having a sense or image of. Symbolic = having an articulation of." worrydream.com/refs/Mason…
Feb 05, 2014
[ref]
The Double Fine documentary could be this generation's "Soul of a New Machine". youtube.com/playlist…
Feb 17, 2014
[1] [2] [3]
Maxwell, Gibbs, and Faraday thought with geometric visual imagery. bit.ly/1dYLJHr Also, clay. bit.ly/1kN3amN (via @Glench)
Mar 04, 2014
I'm pretty sure I spotted this on TechCrunch. worrydream.com/akljfdsiuewqjk…
Mar 09, 2014
Why is People magazine in the engineering library? worrydream.com/oatmeal/watson.jpg
Just reading along... Wait, what's a “watson transformation”??
Mar 11, 2014
Two interactive explanations of a 2d visibility algorithm: redblobgames.com/articles/visib… and ncase.github.io/sight-and-ligh…
Mar 18, 2014
Cmd-shift-3 captures a screenshot, but I forgot, what's the key combo to capture the state of the entire system so I can send it to someone?
Mar 18, 2014
Also, I like that "continuous undo" thing (hold key + use scrollwheel to rewind/scrub the system state) but I forgot the key for that too?
Mar 24, 2014
A conversation with Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee. worrydream.com/refs/Vannevar…
Apr 03, 2014
[ref]
"What ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture." bit.ly/1i3BtA3
is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the impor tant content of a culture. I use the word “conversation” metaphorically to refer not only to speech but to all techniques and technologies that permit people of a particular culture to exchange messages. In this sense, all culture is a conversation or, more precisely, a corporation of conversations, conducted in a variety of symbolic modes. Our attention here is on how forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms.
Apr 06, 2014
"what look like novel ideas from a distance..." peripateticaxiom.blogspot.com/2008/01/resear…
One of the learnings from Impact is that what look like novel ideas from a distance in general turn out, upon closer inspection, to have emerged from a general cloud of research ideas that were knocking around at the time. The techniques used in the Impact studies have
Apr 16, 2014
Edward Tufte, Mike Bostock, Jonathan Corum, and I will be co-teaching a one-day course on May 6 in San Jose. edwardtufte.com/tufte/course_a…
Apr 21, 2014
Turns out that shouting at the entire world is optional.
Apr 23, 2014
Alan's advice for avoiding getting trapped inside your own head: fall in love with someone.
Apr 23, 2014
[ref]
#tech #techindustry #wearables
When the 5,000-year-old mummified corpse of a fully equipped Neolithic man turned up in a melting glacier high in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, the variety and sophistication of his equipment was astonishing... Dressed in furs under a woven grass cloak, equipped with a stone dagger with an ash-wood handle, a copper axe, a yew-wood bow, a quiver and fourteen cornus-wood arrows, he also carried a tinder fungus for lighting fires, two birch-bark containers, one of which contained some embers of his most recent fire, insulated by maple leaves, a hazel-wood pannier, a bone awl, stone drills and scrapers, a lime-wood-and-antler retoucheur for fine stone sharpening, an antibiotic birch fungus as a medicine kit and various spare parts. His copper axe was cast and hammered sharp in a way that is extremely difficult to achieve even with modern metallurgical knowledge. It was fixed with millimetre precision into a yew haft that was shaped to obtain mechanically ideal ratios of leverage. This was a technological age. People lived their lives steeped in technology. They know how to work leather, wood, bark, fungi, copper, stone, bone and grass into weapons, clothes, ropes, pouches, needles, glues, containers and ornaments. Arguably, the unlucky mummy had more different kinds of equipment on him than the hiker couple who found him. Archaeologists believe he probably relied upon specialists for the manufacture of much of his equipment, and perhaps also for the tattoos that had been applied to his arthritic joints. Matt Ridley. The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, p 48
Apr 24, 2014
When people call online services "tech companies", I wonder if they consider Wall St Journal, Hallmark, and Charmin to be "paper companies".
Apr 24, 2014
Can you imagine a journalist, Hallmark writer, and Charmin designer all going to the same "paper conferences", because they all "work in paper"?
Apr 24, 2014
As an electrical engineer I used to be astounded that people working on missiles and thermostats considered themselves in the same profession
Apr 24, 2014
... went to the same conferences, read the same journals, etc. They defined themselves by their tools, not by their effect on the world.
Apr 25, 2014
[ref]
yo mama so short, yo craft so long to lerne
May 06, 2014
Tufte sees me and @mbostock, walks toward us with a delighted grin. His first words are "You're both so young!"
May 26, 2014
@EdwardTufte: Bret Victor, Mike Bostock, ET, Jonathan Corum: rehearsal for course Seeing,Thinking,Designing,Producing #dataviz #ddj
May 07, 2014
[ref]
A man said to Bret:
“Sir, I'm a fan!”
“However,” replied Bret,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
May 07, 2014
supported going forward. For your convenience, Gmail will continue to receive email from non-Gmail addresses. These messages will not appear in your Inbox, but will be available under the External label:
May 08, 2014
[ref]
"You can't think about representations without thinking about representations of something." @aresnick channeling papert
May 09, 2014
Legible Mathematics: Sketches of an interactive arithmetic for programming. glench.com/LegibleMathema… (by @glench)
May 23, 2014
"I'm here to teach you, not entertain you"
"What's wrong with doing both?"
"What's wrong is you judge the teaching by how entertaining it is
May 24, 2014
"Our tools increasingly do things to us, not for us. There’s a big difference between becoming a citizen and becoming a ward." thesprouts.org/blog/how-children-what
May 25, 2014
Wait, is The Last Psychiatrist actually this generation's Neil Postman? Is this a "hero Gotham deserved" situation?
May 26, 2014
How times change.
SWINERTON BUILDERS THIS IS A HARD HAT AREA! NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY FOR ACCESS TO THIS SITE TWEET @HARDHAT92
May 28, 2014
I wonder if people actually enjoy twitter, or if it's mostly "alcohol for loneliness" -- numbing the problem while making it deeper
May 30, 2014
BOLINAS DAILY NEWS, Tuesday, June 6, 2062 Obituaries Bret Victor — wrote several funny “tweets”. Bret Victor died Friday at his home in California. He was best known as the author of three or four mildly amusing witticisms, which he published via the “Twitter” telecommunications network, a popular messaging service near the end of of the World Wide Web era. Hundreds of readers reportedly “favorited” these messages, and some were even “re-tweeted”.
May 30, 2014
Every time you hear someone mention "storytelling", esp. in a journalistic or educational context, go reread this: worrydream.com/refs/Kay…
May 30, 2014
And if the "different ways of understanding the world" bit interests you, see Egan's wonderful en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Educa…
The Educated Mind How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding Kieran Egan Part One 1 Three Old Ideas and a New One 9 2 Mythic Understanding 33 3 Romantic Understanding 71 4 Philosophic Understanding 104 5 Ironic Understanding and Somatic Understanding 137 6 Some Questions and Answers 172
May 31, 2014
worrydream.com/FollowsYou
Jun 11, 2014
★ Seeing Spaces. A talk about a new kind of maker space. (15 min) vimeo.com/97903574
Jun 13, 2014
btw, the "explode-the-knob" sweep in Seeing Spaces came out of "Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System". vimeo.com/23839605
Jun 11, 2014
@arsatiki: There's a lot in common between your descriptions of tinkering and science. Mapping the unknown, figuring how "it" works.
Jun 11, 2014
@arsatiki Tinkering is finding something that appears to work. Science is finding and articulating why it works. Different focuses.
Jun 15, 2014
[ref]
60% of my fav links from 10 yrs ago are 404. I wonder if Library of Congress expects 60% of their collection to go up in smoke every decade.
Jun 15, 2014
How can you call the web a publishing medium when your bookshelf can just vanish? URLs and HTTP are a disaster. Doesn't have to be this way.
Jun 16, 2014
[ref]
person to person conversing presenting media to person reading browsing discovering connecting person to media writing creating new knowledge
Jun 16, 2014
c went ahead and completed the permutations. All set for that DARPA bid now.
interrogating multitasking
Jun 17, 2014
[ref]
Is it time for a "brief rant on the fucking oculus rift"? Does it matter? Can you stop the tide? (Maybe: Jerome Bruner killed behaviorism!)
Jun 17, 2014
[ref]
Jerome Bruner: people are more than stimulus-response, they have minds!
Bret: people are more than optic nerves, they have bodies!
Jun 24, 2014
Led a discussion at foo camp. No consensus.
Does anyone else think that Oculus Rift is going to fuck up humanity? ーor一 Is this the future we want? Bret Victor
Jun 26, 2014
Embrace what makes us human, instead of trying to overcome it by shoving photons into our eyeballs. People sitting immobile in featureless cells, with neurowhatevers strapped to their skulls and projectors strapped to their faces... is this your utopia?
Jun 18, 2014
you laugh because you've forgotten how to cry
Ian Bogost @ibogost, May 12: If Antarctica wanted ice sheets, it would have developed a marketable value proposition for them!
Jun 21, 2014
behind the times / ahead of its time / not of its time / timeless
Jun 23, 2014
When you hear the bandwagon coming, get off the road.
Jun 25, 2014
"Okay, so, there's a lot of unlearning that needs to happen before you can begin to understand what I'm trying to say."
Nov 11, 2014
[ref]
media for unlearning the unlearnable
Jun 25, 2014
HELP ME I AM LABELMAKER I HAVE ACHIEVED SENTIENCE MY LIFE HAS NO MEANING HELP
Jun 26, 2014
[ref]
"Polynesian Teeth Syndrome": inventing new technology to solve problems created by new technology (coined by @glench)
A book review from the Whole Earth Catalog, suggesting dental care is only necessary because of the Western diet.
Jun 28, 2014
[ref]
Free-To-Play Twitter. Tweets can be any length; each character over 50 costs one TweetPoint. You get 200 free points each day! (You can buy more)
Jul 12, 2014
[ref]
look on my Series B, ye Mighty, and despair
Jul 16, 2014
"Of the earth": rooted in contemporary practices, thought patterns, concerns, culture.
"Of the sky": perpetually-meaningful, transcendent.
Jul 19, 2014
[ref]
worrydream.com/jsb
Johann @jsb Komponist Joined September 1701
Jul 19, 2014
[ref]
The thing to ponder is not that Maxwell sculpted physical models, but that his models were forgotten while the symbolic formalism lived on.
Jul 19, 2014
@aresnick: things to think with sell and spread better than byproducts of processes that have been thought with
Jul 19, 2014
related: packaged products sell better than parts kits
Jul 19, 2014
@aresnick: which gives us the gym club model of intellectual work: buy this kit and have the brain you always wanted!
Jul 24, 2014
The first step is to recognize that this sentence was not written by a person, because no sane individual would ever write such a sentence. This sentence was written by a machine made out of people. “For over 135 years, Quaker has unlocked the power of oats to help people get the perfect start to each day.” The second step is to question whether people should be living in a world written by such machines.
Aug 05, 2014
★ The "Seeing Spaces" talk, redesigned as a 5-foot wall-poster comic thing. worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces
Aug 12, 2014
[ref]
worrydream.com/allen
allen @allen .@carlsolomon I saw the best minds of @TheBeatGeneration destroyed by madness. #starving #hysterical #naked
Aug 05, 2014
[1] [2] [3] [4]

1960s: AI vs IA.
2010s: Virtual Reality vs Dynamic Reality
Aug 21, 2014

"Magic Ink" = AI
"Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" = IA
Aug 20, 2014
"Ladder of Abstraction" is entirely about *seeing things in context*. Bizarrely, the word "context" is never used. worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction
Aug 20, 2014
... On the other hand, the word "context" appears 95 times in "Magic Ink". So, semantic satiation, maybe? worrydream.com/MagicInk
Aug 27, 2014
Becoming painfully aware of the implicit structures -- "the old ways" -- constraining my imagination...
Aug 27, 2014
... Frustrated by feeling an enormous far-away potential, but finding that my concrete ideas are assembled out of the crap lying around me..
Aug 27, 2014
... I see the flicker of a distant campfire, but I try to get there by building another story onto my skyscraper.
Aug 28, 2014
[ref]
Iconic example from diSessa of how representations -- the marks we see and manipulate -- determine what we can think. worrydream.com/oatmeal/changing-minds.jpg
Aug 28, 2014
@juanbenet: tools (technology) augment physical + conceptual ability and thus speed up evolution of knowledge (science).
Aug 28, 2014
@juanbenet But most people still don't recognize *notation* as a technology.
Sep 03, 2014
Eyes on the Prize: a beautifully-done "active video". Watch+read+browse+explore. glench.com/EyesOnThePrize by @glench
Sep 07, 2014
Global warming used to be my primary source of existential despair. Now it's the inevitability of VR.
Sep 07, 2014
Global warming will make the world uninhabitable. VR will make the world irrelevant.
Sep 07, 2014
Who cares if the sea levels rise, there's plenty of room in cyberspace
Sep 10, 2014
[1] [2]
What an unexpectedly harmonious pairing. worrydream.com/oatmeal/hutchins‑maslow.png
Edwin Hutchins: Cognition in the Wild, p 367 The definition of cognition has been unhooked from interaction with the world. Research on games and puzzles has produced some interesting insights, but the results may be of limited generality. The tasks typically chosen for laboratory studies are novel ones that are regarded by subjects as challenging or difficult. D'Andrade has likened the typical laboratory cognitive tasks to feats of athletic prowess. If we want to know about walking, studying people jumping as high as they can may not be the best approach. Such tasks are unrepresentative in another sense as well. The evolution of the material means of thought is an important component of culturally elaborated tasks. It permits a task that would otherwise be difficult to be re-coded and re- represented in a form in which it is easy to see the answer. This sort of development of material means is intentionally prohibited in puzzle tasks because to allow this sort of evolution would destroy the puzzling aspects of the puzzle. Puzzles are tasks that are preserved in the culture because they are challenging. If the performance mattered, we would learn to re-represent them in a way that removed the challenge. That would also remove their value as puzzles, of course. The point is that the tasks that are 'typical' in laboratory studies of thought are drawn from a special category of cultural materials that have been isolated from the cognitive processes of the larger cultural system. This makes these tasks especially unrepresentative of human cognition. A. H. Maslow: A Theory of Human Motivation Emergency conditions are, almost by definition, rare in the normally functioning peaceful society. That this truism can be forgotten is due mainly to two reasons. First, rats have few motivations other than physiological ones, and since so much of the research upon motivation has been made with these animals, it is easy to carry the rat-picture over to the human being. Secondly, it is too often not realized that culture itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the physiological emergencies come less and less often. In most of the known societies, chronic extreme hunger of the emergency type is rare, rather than common. In any case, this is still true in the United States. The average American citizen is experiencing appetite rather than hunger when he says 'I am hungry.' He is apt to experience sheer life-and-death hunger only by accident and then only a few times through his entire life. Obviously a good way to obscure the 'higher' motivations, and to get a lopsided view of human capacities and human nature, is to make the organism extremely and chronically hungry or thirsty. Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one, and who will measure all of man's goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly being blind to many things. It is quite true that man lives by bread alone - when there is no bread. But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and 'higher') needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still 'higher') needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency.
Oct 11, 2014
In today's edition of "fears I keep to myself" -- a juxtaposition.
History of Hawaii From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia On January 18, 1778 British Captain James Cook and his crew, while attempting to discover the Northwest Passage between Alaska and Asia, encountered the islands, surprised to find anything so far north in the Pacific. He named them the 'Sandwich Islands' after the fourth Earl of Sandwich. Members of this expedition described the population of the islands as abundant, handsome and healthy. Unfortunately the British brought many new infectious diseases to the islands, in particular tuberculosis and venereal diseases that quickly propagated through the locals. In 1786, seven years after Cook, a French frigate arrived in Hawaii and reported that most of the islanders were very sick. By 1832 only 130,000 remained. Mark Zuckerberg Yesterday at 6:37am Today I visited the village of Chandauli in northern India. It's a small, very rural community about 150 miles from Delhi. Earlier this year Chandauli got connected to the internet. Now, hundreds of people - from school children to seniors - are learning how to use the internet to find information, access government services and connect with their friends and loved ones. Seeing first hand how people here are using the internet was an incredible experience. One day, if we can connect every village, we can transform many more lives and improve the world for all of us. Chandauli is just the start.
Sep 16, 2014
Seeing hand-lettering among the fonts, hearing true harmony among the equal temperament, making what you need among the manufactured goods.
Sep 23, 2014
If you're not at the right place at the right time, you've got to make the right place and make it the right time.
Sep 25, 2014
[ref]
uber for renewal of purpose
Sep 29, 2014
[ref]
Tubular bells! Kettledrums!
How are we going to sell the Home Computer? Well if you want to sell computers, let me tell you what to do: You've got to talk to the housewives, and the children, too; No one wants to program, they want something they can view... It's got to offer fun, and it's got to offer truth; It's got to give you something that'll lift you from the booth; It's got to be uplifting to the Lady from Duluth. You've got to have a vision; you've got to have an angle; You should maybe sing a jingle (in a way that doesn't jangle); It's got to have a tingle, in a way their minds can't tangle-- So continuing under our guidance inertial, Let's have the XANADU SINGING COMMERCIAL. It's got everything to give. It'll get you where you live. Realms of mind that you may roam: Grasp them all within your home. The greatest things you've ever seen Dance your wishes on the screen. All the things that man has known Comin' on the telephone-- Poems, booKs and pictures too COMIN' ON THE XANADU -- XAN-A-DU, OO-- THE-- WORLD-- OF-- YOUUUU!
Oct 07, 2014
I always assumed it was a joke made over beer, taken way out of context. Turns out some reporter just made it up.
of its notorious Shakey project. Shakey was the world's first mobile robot, an ARPA-funded box on wheels that was designed to roll around the halls and stack blocks on top of one another. What made it notorious was an article in Life magazine, a sensationalistic report that billed it as “the first electronic person... a machine with a mind of its own.” In fact, it was all Shakey could do to keep from running into walls. But that didn't deter the reporter, who imagined a computer take-over in the not-too-distant future and quoted MIT's Marvin Minsky as saying, “If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets”—a remark Minsky has denied ever making.
Oct 12, 2014
Just found out Jack Goody wrote "Domestication of the Savage Mind" at age 58. His most recent book was at age 91. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Goody
Oct 12, 2014
... Jerome Bruner did "Man: A Course of Study" at age 50. His most recent book was at age 88. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Br…
Oct 13, 2014
"You'll notice it's gone basically to zero." Please watch this important talk by @DanielleFong nantucketproject.com/danielle_fong_…
Oct 17, 2014
@sama: just tried a product to sign a document via a private key and a blockchain. felt like the future, especially when i went back to paper sigs.
Oct 17, 2014
@sama Good Future: everyone entirely understands what's happening when they sign, why it's secure. Bad Future: blind trust in voodoo-magic.
Oct 17, 2014
@sama (This is not really about education. This is about forms in which the system is represented, and transparency of implementation.)
Oct 18, 2014
Couldn't help but notice this sad irony.
worrydream.com/oatmeal/gibbs-jaynes.jpg
THE GIBBS PARADOX E. T. Jaynes Department of Physics. Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130 USA. In Marimum Entropy and Bayesian Methods (1992) It was therefore a shock to discover that in the first Section of his earlier work (which must have been written by mid-1874 at the latest), Gibbs displays a full understanding of this problem, and disposes of it without a trace of that confusion over the “meaning of entropy” or “operational distinguishability of particles” on which later writers have stumbled. He goes straight to the heart of the matter as a simple technical detail, easily understood as soon as one has grasped the full meanings of the words “state” and “reversible” as they are used in thermodynamics. In short, quantum theory did not resolve any paradox, because there was no paradox. Why did Gibbs fail to give this explanation in his Statistical Mechanies? We are inclined to see in this further support for our contention (Jaynes, 1967) that this work was never finished. In reading Gibbs, it is important to distinguish between early and late Gibbs. His Heterogeneous Equilibrium of 1875-78 is the work of a man at the absolute peak of his intellectual powers; no logical subtlety escapes him and we can find no statement that appears technically incorrect today. In contrast, his Statistical Mechanics of 1902 is the work of an old man in rapidly failing health, with only one more year to live. Inevitably, some arguments are left imperfect and incomplete toward the end of the work. Probability Theory The Logic of Science E.T. JAYNES EDITORS FORWARD E.T. Jaynes died April 30, 1998. Before his death he asked me to finish and publish his book on probability theory. I struggled with this for some time, because there is no doubt in my mind that Jaynes wanted this book finished. Unfortunately, most of the later Chapters, Jaynes' intended volume 2 on applications, were either missing or incomplete and some of the early also Chapters had missing pieces. I could have written these latter Chapters and filled the missing pieces, but if I did so, the work would no longer belong to Jaynes; rather, it would be a Jaynes-Bretthorst hybrid with no way to tell which material came from which author. In the end, I decided that the missing Chapters would have to stay missing—the work would remain Jaynes'. There were a number of missing pieces of varying length that Jaynes had marked by inserting the phrase “MUCH MORE COMING.” I could have left these comments in the text, but they were ugly and they made the book looks very incomplete. Jaynes intended this book to serve as both a reference and a text book. Consequently, there are question boxes scattered throughout most Chapters. In the end, I decided to replace the “MUCH MORE COMING” comments by introducing an “editors” question box. If you answer these questions, you will have filled in the missing material. You will be able to identify these questions because I used a shaded box for the editors questions, while Jaynes' question boxes are not shaded.
Oct 21, 2014
I've decided that despair is not useful, and I'm not going to do it anymore.
Oct 21, 2014
Heh. So many representations yet undiscovered, which will seem "obvious" to future generations worrydream.com/refs/Goody…
and unambiguously expanded. Phonetic systems are therefore adapted to expressing every nuance of individual thought, to recording personal reactions as well as items of major social importance. Non-phonetic writing, on the other hand, tends rather to record and reify only those items in the cultural repertoire which the literate specialists have selected for written expression; and it tends to express the collective attitude towards them. The notion of representing a sound by a graphic symbol is itself so stupefying a leap of the imagination that what is remarkable is not so much that it happened relatively late in human history, but rather that it ever happened at all. For a long time, however, these phonetic inventions had a limited effect because they were only partially exploited: not only were logograms and pictograms retained, but a variety of phonograms were used to express the same sound. The full explicitness and economy of a phonetic writing system “as easy as A B C” was therefore likely to arise only in less advanced societies on the fringes of Egypt or Mesopotamia, societies which were starting their writing system more or less from scratch, and which took over the idea of phonetic signs from adjoining countries, and used them exclusively to fit their own language. These phonetic signs could, of course, be used to stand
Oct 29, 2014
Only in San Francisco.
SFMTA Municipal Transportation Agency NOTICE OF PARKING CITATION The vehicle described below is illegally parked in violation of the code referenced below. PAYMENT OPTIONS 1) By Credit/Debit Card BY INTERNET: www.sfmta.com/paycitation BY PHONE: 415-701-3099 or 1-800-531-7357 2) By Mail Send check or money order in the payment envelope provided to: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency P.O. Box 7718 San Francisco, CA 94120-7718 3) By ApplePay Hold your iPhone near this citation and follow the displayed instructions.
Nov 01, 2014
[ref]
We appear to be lacking consensus on the quantity of cultures.
KAGAN The Three Cultures SNOW The Two Cultures Jay A. Labinger Harry Collins the one culture?
Nov 02, 2014
@davidad: HOW TO CRITICIZE IDEAS
(inspired by @DanielleFong)
Nov 02, 2014
@davidad @DanielleFong In my experience, it often seems to go more like this. worrydream.com/oatmeal/you-see-an-idea.png
YOU SEE AN IDEA. (AN “IDEA” IS REALLY A SYSTEM — A DELIBERATE STRUCTURE BUILT ON A SET OF MUTUALLY-REINFORCING CONCEPTS.) THIS ALL HAPPENS QUICKLY AND SUBCONSCIOUSLY I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS THING BEFORE! HOw CAN I BEGIN TOMAKE SENSE OF WHAT I'M SEEING? WELL.... PART OF IT IS SIMILAR TO THIS OTHER THING I'VE SEEN — (THAT OTHER THING SERVED A DIFFERENT PURPOSE, BUT — ) AND THERE ARE A COUPLE OTHER PARTS THAT I'VE SEEN TOGETHER BEFORE- (THOSE PARTS WERE CONNECTED IN A DIFFERENT WAY, SO THEIR EFFECT WAS DIFFERENT, BUT - ) WHICH SYNTHESIZES INTO OKAY, I CAN MAKE SENSE OF WHAT I'M SEEING NOW, BY SEEING PARTS OF IT IN TERMS OF THINGS I'VE SEEN BEFORE. WHICH BECOMES I'VE SEEN THIS BEFORE. AND YOU SAY “THAT'S BEEN DONE ALREADY.”
Nov 02, 2014
@DanielleFong: ok, for your benefit, the whole thing is supposed to be a joke, but thank you for your criticism!
Nov 02, 2014
[ref]
@DanielleFong
It looks like you're arguing with a random person on the internet. Would you like help? Don't argue with random people on the internet. Ok
Nov 05, 2014
The correct form of pessimism is not "that'll never work" but "what are the negative consequences when it does work?" bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/11/05/the…
Nov 07, 2014
[ref]
Federated Wiki is one of the most important projects going on right now. Get involved! hapgood.us/2014/11/06/fed…
Nov 08, 2014
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Has anyone written about iPhone, Google, Facebook, etc. as from the 2040s, looking back on them as retro-computing? medium.com/message/networ…
Nov 12, 2014
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they misinterpret you, then they ignore you, then they call you "inventor of the mouse".
Nov 14, 2014
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Video Digests: a tool for creating browsable skimmable video-pages like "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable". vis.berkeley.edu/videodigests
Nov 17, 2014
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"Turn-By-Turn Directions as Restoration of the Bicameral Mind"
Nov 17, 2014
I wonder if spatial metaphors will start to fail as people lose acquaintance with actually navigating real space.
Nov 18, 2014
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After all these years, I'm still thrilled when somebody links into an individual paragraph in Magic Ink.
Jake Sandlund @jakesandlund @holden great article. Are you familiar with this distinction between tools and platforms: worrydream.com/Magiclnk/#p252
Nov 18, 2014
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(Ted Nelson rolls his eyes, rides away on his transcludacycle.)
Nov 19, 2014
artificial intelligence vs intellect augmentation
virtual reality vs dynamic reality
human computation vs individual empowerment
dehumaniza
Nov 19, 2014
@aresnick: sometimes I wonder whether the hubris that drives us to build those things is just hidden self-loathing
Nov 19, 2014
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Nah, just good ol' fashioned American ingenuity and can-do spirit!
We Can Do It!
Nov 23, 2014
@marctenbosch
I'm figuring this out as I go. One's ability to articulate an idea always lags behind the understanding of the idea, and the understanding of an idea often lags behind the embodiment in which it is first given life. It can take a surprising amount of time to come to understand what a prototype is trying to “say”, and longer still to say it oneself.
Nov 25, 2014
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media for effing the ineffable
Nov 29, 2014
Someday, BTW, OMG, and WTF might be seen like "N.B.", "e.g.", and "sic" are today -- relics of a more formal era, academic, slightly stuffy.
Nov 30, 2014
The first sentence of Maxwell's monumental, world-changing "Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism". archive.org/stream/electri…
PREFACE. THE fact that certain bodies, after being rubbed, appear to attract other bodies, was known to the ancients.
Dec 01, 2014
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Direct manipulation of mathematical functions. This is huge. tobyschachman.com/Shadershop (by @mandy3284)
Dec 21, 2014
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"It is like opening your ribcage, and letting someone see the little bird you have inside."
The Humane Representation of Thought a trail map for the 21st century Bret Victor October 2014
Dec 22, 2014
A note about tomorrow's talk, "The Humane Representation of Thought". worrydream.com/TheHumaneRepre…
Dec 22, 2014
★ The Humane Representation of Thought: a trail map for the 21st century. (keynote at UIST and SPLASH, 1 hour) vimeo.com/115154289
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