“If it seems wordish, use it. No apologies necessary.”
- Erin McKean

Master lexicographer Erin McKean recently published what Boing Boinger Cory Doctorow calls a “case for a dynamic English language in which speakers are allowed to coin neologisms and new usages without grammar tightasses insisting that language is not a user-modifiable technology.”

Whenever I see “not a real word” used to stigmatize what is (usually) a perfectly cromulent word, I wonder why the writer felt the need to hang a big sign reading “I am not confident about my writing” on it. What do they imagine the penalty is for using an “unreal” word? A ticket from the Dictionary Police? The revocation (as the joke goes) of your poetic license? A public shaming by William Safire? The irony is that most of these words, without the disclaimer, would pass unnoticed by the majority of readers. (In case you noticed cromulent, that was invented in the 1990s for “The Simpsons.”) Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with “I know that’s not a real word,” hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.

- Erin McKean, “Chillax: If it works like a word, just use it”
@ Boston Globe, Aug. 3, 2008: Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.

I love Cory’s phrase “English is a user-modifiable technology” — it rings true.

“The brain’s roaring metabolism, possibly stimulated by early man’s invention of cooking, may be the main factor behind our most critical cognitive leap, new research suggests.”

About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size of other primate brains.

“This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat,” said researcher Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai.

- Robin Nixon @ LiveScience: Link.

Via Slashdot: Link.

Thought for Today:

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

- Woodrow Wilson
From an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association
Jan. 9th, 1909: Link.

Tower of Babel: The multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas.

Babel seeks multilingual and multicultural writers, editors, bloggers and translators proficient in using web tools to continue building in over 250 languages what has been recognized since 2001 by the United Nations as one of the most import social and human sciences online periodicals.

There are over 250 subdomains of towerofbabel.com ready to be configured by those who are interested in taking the language-oriented subdomains and helping to build the tower ….

Design your language’s tower however you wish but continue what has already been pioneered as an attempt to build a tower aiming for the highest egalitarian, altruistic, philanthropic and humanitarian structures.

Tower of Babel: Link.

Babel English Blog: Link.

“I’m often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite, or as a raving technophile. I’ve always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.”

“Cyberspace” as a term is sort of over. It’s over in the way that after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix “-electro” to make things cool, because everything was electrical. “Electro” was all over the early 20th century, and now it’s gone. I think “cyber” is sort of the same way. The things that aren’t cyberspace seem to comprise a smaller set than things that are.

William Gibson: Link
Interviewed by Noel Murray: August 22nd, 2007

Electro-Tank: Modern Mechanix, 1935

Wired Magazine interviews Bart Kosko, author of Noise:

Adding small amounts of electrical noise helps a nanotube antenna detect faint binary signals. And noise can help digital photographers, too – injecting a little bit of random pixel noise can allow you to see hidden details in an overexposed image.

The more you can concentrate with background noise, the more it strengthens the brain. Isaac Asimov used to set his typewriter up in stores and other loud places to work. His claim was that you get really good at writing when you’re in a crowd. You want to be energized by that background noise, rather than distracted.
[Wired: Link]

Via Boing Boing

I’m reminded of this passage from The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner:

Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence. We prefer to identify with small, easily isolable fractions of the total culture. But just as some people can handle only a restricted range of stimuli, and prefer to head for a mountain commune … or even emigrate to an undeveloped country, so some correspondingly require strong stimuli to provoke them into functioning at optimum.

An astute observation. Unfortunately, it’s a preamble to government interrogator Paul T. Freeman’s main argument — namely that smart people such as himself should run society at large.

Brunner observer, in the book’s Acknowledgement, that Shockwave Rider “derives in large part from Alvin Toffler’s stimulating study Future Shock“.

For the dark side, see information overload.

I think Mister Spock put it well when he said: “Too much of anything … even love, is not necessarily a good thing.”

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nikolai Tesla … an archetype of genius and tragedy.

Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serb family, in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in Croatia). He was baptised in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28, 1856 (Julian calendar); July 10 in the Gregorian calendar ….
[Link]

Tesla disliked Thomas Edison. Upon Edison’s death, most of the remarks made in his epitaph were kind, save those from Tesla, who said of Edison:

“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene.”

- Tesla on Edison, via Jason Bellows @ DamnInteresting.com: Link

Via Boing Boing

Kevin Berger @ Salon.com writes: “She is an intellectual and emotional storm. Her renowned public artworks are reshaping the ways we think about science. Activist, environmentalist and former rock promoter Natalie Jeremijenko turns the art world upside down.”

Jeremijenko, 39, explains that her work is “all about creating interfaces that draw people into the environment and get them to reimagine collective action.” She cracks open her laptop and displays an image of 100 polycarbonate tubes or “buoys” that she’s engineered to glow when fish swim through them in the Hudson River …. Did you know the fish were on Zoloft? All the antidepressants that New Yorkers take are flushed through their urine into sewage treatment plants, which overflow into the river …. Go to the Whitney Museum and see one of her drawings hanging on a wall by a bathroom …. It asks, “Why are the Hudson River fish and frogs on antidepressants?” Printed on it in tiny letters are actual studies that attest to the chemical drug compounds in the waterway consumed by the unsuspecting bass, sturgeon and crabs.

When the buoys light up, you can feed the fish food treated with chelating agents to help cleanse the PCBs from their blood, planted there from decades of General Electric dumping waste into the river. The fish food, in fact, will not be much different from the energy bars we’re always eating on hiking trails. “The idea that we eat the same stuff is a visceral demonstration that we live in the same system,” Jeremijenko says. “Eating together is the most intimate form of kinship. By scripting a work where we share the same kind of food with fish, I’m scripting our interrelationship with them.”

[Salon.com: Link]

Thanks, EB.

See also Natalie Jeremijenko: DARPA of Dissent

Cory Doctorow posts his thoughts about O’Reilly Press and Web 2.0:

Trademarks are intended to protect consumers by ensuring that goods and services aren’t misleadingly labeled. A trademark holder, say, “Coke,” gets the right to sue companies that use the word “Coke” in their products and services in a way that would lead the public to believe that Coke was behind them.

But trademarks aren’t “property” — they aren’t words owned by companies. They’re the ability to use the courts to protect a company’s customers. That’s a pretty good idea: the public deserves to be protected from misleading marketing.

The question is whether using “Web 2.0″ in a conference name is misleading: will the average person who hears about a Web 2.0 event assume that it must be put on by O’Reilly, or will she assume that it’s just an event about the Web 2.0 technology and business-practices that O’Reilly defined?

O’Reilly has an amazing, wonderful gift for popularizing hard ideas and for explaining abstruse technology in catchy ways. “Web 2.0″ is only one of O’Reilly’s many accomplishments, which started with the publication of the first user documentation for Unix, and has continued through many iterations of excellent, world-changing ideas and memes.

The downside of creating amazing, industry-shaking ideas is that they become embedded in the popular consciousness. While the digerati know that O’Reilly originated Web 2.0, the idea is so infectious that it’s just become part of the fabric of the industry. One of the things that makes O’Reilly’s ideas so great is that they go on to be part of the infrastructure, invisible and huge and powerful.

But that means that O’Reilly’s ideas are also not uniquely associated with O’Reilly.
[Link]

I like O’Reilly Press books — I like them a lot. When learning a new technical discipline, one of the first things I do is buy whatever O’Reilly has published on the subject. And when I’m asked what books I recommend on programming, web design, and so on, I always reply: In a Nutshell? O’Reilly Press.

Knowledge and Propaganda
by Joseph Goebbels

As an idea develops into a worldview, the goal is the state. The knowledge does not remain the property of a certain group, but fights for power. It is not just the fantasy of a few people among the people, rather it becomes the idea of the rulers, the circles that have power. The view does not only preach, but it is carried out in practice. Then the idea becomes the worldview of the state. The worldview has become a government organism when it seizes power and can influence life not only in theory, but in practical everyday life.

Now we must consider who is the carrier, the transmitter, the guardian of such ideas. An idea always lives in individuals. It seeks an individual to transmit its great intellectual force. It becomes alive in a brain, and seeks escape through the mouth. The idea is preached by individuals, individuals who will never be satisfied to have the knowledge remain theirs alone. You know that from experience. When one knows something one does not keep it hidden like a buried treasure, rather one seeks to tell others. One looks for people who should know it. One feels that everyone else should know too, for one feels alone when no one else knows. For example, if I see a beautiful painting in an art gallery, I have the need to tell others. I meet a good friend and say to him: “I have found a wonderful picture. I have to show it to you.” The same is true of ideas. If an idea lives in an individual, he has the urge to tell others. There is some mysterious force in us that drives us to tell others. The greater and simpler the idea is, the more it relates to daily life, the more one has the desire to tell everyone about it.

(more…)

Speech by Bruce Sterling @ O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference, March 2006:

At the moment, we’re eagerly debating the proper terminology for a future internet of things. This is a rather literary, language-centric speech tonight – as tech gigs go, anyway. Very wordy. If you want to talk Web 2.0, you can at least say, you know: “FlickR, ” “Wikipedia.” You might even meet Jimmy Wales or Caterina Fake, who are not futurists, but actual working web technologists. Web 2.0 is kind of a loose grab-bag of concepts, but Jimmy Wales isn’t a loose grab-bag, Jimmy Wales physically exists. In the case of an Internet of Things or ubiquitous computation, the top guru in the field, Marc Weiser of Xerox PARC, has been dead for several years now. In the Internet of Things debate, people are still trying to find the loose verbal grab-bag just to put the concepts into. So I would argue that this work is basically a literary endeavour. When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today’s verbal descriptions. This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology.

A good example of freezing the language too early is, I think, Artificial Intelligence. We very early got into the lasting bad habit of referring to computers as “thinking machines.” I suspect this verbal metaphor seriously harmed technical development. Even the word “computing” sounds too much like human mathematical thinking. We might have made a much better language choice if we had called computers something like the French called them, ordinateurs, “ordinators.”

Link