August 29, 2005
3D alphabet
Yes, it’s a 3D alphabet. Or, perhaps it’s what our alphabet would look like if we lived in a 4D world.
It’s also available as a font. (Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.) [Technorati tags: fonts alphabet]
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August 28, 2005
What’s happened to the Week in Review?
When I was young, I used to be able to make up for a week’s newspaper avoidance by reading the NY Times Week in Review on Sunday. There I would find, well, the week in review.
Now what’s in it?
Page 1:
Two thirds of the page are devoted to an article on statistics vs. intuition in baseball. The other article is an interesting one on our worries about distributing better weapons to the Iraqis.
Page 2:
Occupying the the top third is a piece on the Pat Robertson embarrassment, presented comic-strip style. The middle is an article with accompanying infographic that tries to make clear how much data is going over the wires. About 7 column inches are devoted to virginity, keying off the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin. There are also three editorial cartoons.
Page 3:
Two thirds of the page are spent on Timothy Treadwell, subject of the just-released Herzog movie, Grizzly Man, who was eaten by bears in 2003.
There’s also a selection of answers to moral and normative questions, centering women-men relations, on Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s web site.
Page 4:
The major article is on the safety of lighter cars. Interesting, but not exactly news. But that’s ok, because page 4 is the “Ideas & Trends” page, as opposed to pages 1-3 which are the “Infographics & Movie Plugs” pages.
There’s also an article on the political leanings of law professors at the top law schools. Answer: They’re Democrats.
Page 5:
The page contains a single article. It’s on Sudoku, a sort of numeric crossword. The article is by Puzzles Editor Will Shortz who has been publishing books of Sudokus. At least the author blurb at the bottom notes the conflict of interest.
That’s it for The Week in Review. The rest consists of editorials, letters and op-eds.
Read it end to end and you won’t know what went on this week. You will, however, be better prepared to watch baseball and go to the movies. [Tags: nytimes media]
August 27, 2005
Organized knowledge no more
Mortimer Adler was the person behind the Great Books, the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Propaedia, and other attempts to synthesize all knowledge. In 1986, he wrote A Guidebook to Learning about how to organize knowledge. After surveying a couple of thousand years of attempts to organize knowledge, he ends Section Three with these words:
If any light can be thrown on the problem of how to organize knowledge in the twentieth century—how to order and relate its parts of branches—it must come from philosophy; and it must do so in a manner that accords to some extent with the cultural pluralism and intellectual heterodoxy of the present age. (p. 104)
The easy slam is right, but too easy: We don’t need old white men to tell us how knowledge is organized. We can find whatever we need by searching and folksonomies. Yeah yeah, it’s true. But there still is value in having thoughtful people point out the inner relationships of knowledge. Some of the most important questions are exactly about this — is religion really a branch of psychology? is science really a branch of faith? is psychology a branch of chemistry? — and it’s important to have learned people in the discussion.
But why think of this as a question about how knowledge is organized? Adler thinks of the organization of knowledge as a map, but does that metaphor hold any more? Why think knowledge has to fit together? Why think it’s a thing or a landscape? Why think it has to have an overview?
Now that we we don’t have to organize the physical containers of knowledge, putting books on bookshelves, the term “organization” doesn’t really apply. Findability counts. So do arguments about how to understand our world — e.g., is thought really just neuroscience? But neither of these require the organization of knowledge.
And if times we do need a map of knowledge, either to help us understand our world or to help us find information, we should assume that it’s a map without a geography to which it refers. [Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous MortimerAdler taxonomy]
Bush’s world
“What is important is that Iraqis are now addressing these issues through debate and discussion, not at the barrel of a gun.”
QAIM – Two Sunni Arab tribes, one loyal to al Qaeda and the other to the government, clashed near Qaim in western Iraq on Friday and Saturday, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens, local clerics and hospital officials said.
KIRKUK – An Iraqi army officer was assassinated by gunmen near his home in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, police said.
MOSUL – U.S forces killed two insurgents in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday including Abu Khallad, a Saudi national, who was believed to be a major facilitator of foreign fighters and suicide bombers to Iraq, the U.S military said.
KIRKUK – A roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol near Kirkuk’s University wounded six soldiers, five of them seriously, police captain Salam Zangana said.
FireAnt and LookLeap
I ended up spending a fair amount of time with Josh Kinberg at foo camp. His FireANT — at the attractive URL http://www.AntiSnotTV.net/— aggregates and plays video feeds quite nicely. It looks highly useful, even in beta.
Glenn Fleishman has started using LookLeap instead of TinyUrl (one of my favorites) because he finds it “a little more transparent” because LookLeap lets you look up the shortened urls to see where they take you. In fact, simply adding “/look” to LookLeap’s short url takes you to a page that tells you where you’re going. Plus, the domains are human-readable.
For example, here are some versions of the Wikipedia page on “Abbreviation”
Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation
TinyUrl: http://tinyurl.com/c3eq3
LookLeap: http://lookleap.com/en.wikipedia.org/a2
LookLeap info page about the LookLeap Url: http://lookleap.com/en.wikipedia.org/a2/look
Note: With either LookLeap or TinyUrl, the links you create will only work so long as the LookLeap and TinyUrl sites remain up and working. [Tags: fireant lookleap tinyurl GlennFleishman utilities aggregators video]
No tit for American imperialist’s tat
In a move that David Isenberg characterizes as turning the other cheek, Hugo Chavez has responded to Pat “Crazy Ass” Robertson’s call for his assassination by offering to sell gasoline and heating fuel at bargain prices to poor communities in the U.S.
Oddly (?), this story is not being widely picked up. There are only eight hits on Google News for chavez robertson “poor communities”, although two of them are Bloomberg and Fox. [Technorati tags: venezuela PatRobertson]
Sorting is hard
According to a front page story by Kirk Johnson in the NY Times, the Denver airport is giving up on its dream of automatically sorting and mangling, um, managing luggage.
Why the front page? Apparently because the story illuminates some important themes. Even before Johnson gets to the appealing Rube Goldberg elements of the system, he points to a more difficult and more significant problem: Complex, centrally managed systems don’t work so well:
Back then, the big-brained mainframe doing it all from command central was the model of high tech. Today the very idea of it sounds like a cold-war-era relic, engineers say. Decentralization and mobile computing technology have taken over just about everything, allowing airlines, warehouse operators and shippers like FedEx to learn with just a few clicks the whereabouts of an item in motion, a feature that was supposed to be a chief strength of the baggage system.
…
Workers with hand-held scanners, checking baggage bar codes at every juncture of transit, will give managers far better information and control than could have been imagined when the automated system was designed, officials at United said.
The article also emphasizes the economics: The airline industry is no longer interested in “frills” like returning your luggage to you quickly.
Then there’s the hubris angle:
Professor de Neufville said the builders had imagined that their creation would work well even at the busiest boundaries of its capacity. That left no room for the errors and inefficiencies that are inevitable in a complex enterprise.
Apparently, the programmed baggage carts couldn’t handle sharp corners.
That aside, the Denver system was a total success.
[Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
August 26, 2005
Lazy, dumb programmers that are nothing of the sort
Philipp Lenssen explains why programmers should be lazy and dumb, although of course he doesn’t mean either of those terms in the way we usually do.
Metadata vs. data
From Dwight Macdonald‘s 1952 review of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books series:
Thus the true reason for his set of Great Books becomes apparent. Its aim is hieratic rather than practical — not to make the books accessible to the public (which they mostly already were) but to fix the canon of the Sacred Texts by printing them in a special edition. Simply issuing a list would have been enough if practicality were the only consideration, but a list can easily be revised, and it lacks the totemistic force of a five-foot, hundredpound array of books.
…In its massiveness, its technological elaboration, its fetish of The Great, and its attempt to treat systematically and with scientific precision materials for which the method is inappropriate, Dr. Adler’s set of books is a typical expression of the religion of culture that appeals to the American academic mentality.
[Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous MortimerAdler culture DwightMacdonald]
Bug on the outside
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