Sylloge: Most Recent

In The Center of the World (which is not really that good) there was an exchange which went more or less like this: she asks "Isn't it lonely sitting in front of your computer all day?" and he does a quick shrug and laugh-like plosive noise and with slight disbelief he says "No, of course not. Everyone is connected. It's like the center of the world."

your post about old terms for wood reminded me of another interesting etymological story, and i thought you'd be interested. english 'timber' comes from the old german word for building material. the 'tim' part came from proto-indo-european's 'dem-', which meant house, as in 'house of hapsburg'. so the germanic reflex took the word in the direction of the physical material of houses. other languages like greek and latin also used the form, but they took it other places. latin 'domus' (house) gives us modern 'domicile', 'dominion', 'domestic', 'madam' (master of a house), 'madonna', etc. the greek form 'demos' (people, land) gives us 'democracy', and 'despot' (formerly demspot, or house-master), among others. i for one am pretty impressed with the fact that such diverse words sprung from the same source.

I imagine a great diagram showing the field of wood-meaning constraining its descendents while they each pull in new directions, their connections reaching throughout an n-th generation language like English. It is all wood.

(Bonus: question that occured to me nearly five years ago: each person by (biological) necessity (up to this point anyway) has two parents. Parents are people too, and so it goes: 2, 4, 8, 16 ... But that implies I have 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 ancestors 100 generations back. Wtf? Answer later ...)

Charged with teaching someone a little bit of music theory, I have been trying to come up with a good way to diagramatically impart the construction of chords from the tones in a given key and represent chord scales in a key-neutral way. Here the twelve circles are chromatic with the filled circles indicating the diatonic tones. The dashed-outlined circle at the top is the tonic and a major seventh chord is shown.

I was once told that being on the cusp between the first house (war) and the twelfth (peace) is a special thing. Astrology is silly beyond silly. And yet, when they are yahoo'ed into my face, it is sometimes hard to avoid. And when the two signs line up, I can't help but listen (somewhat annoyed with myself):

A extra table (more like a stand than a table, with a mere 10" x 10" top) which needed to not be in the way was placed outside the door of myour apartment. (It was a place to rest one's parcels while one opened the door.) One day, the purchase of some blue flowers and the finding of a tiny blue vase neatly coincided and a single small flower was placed in the miniature blue vase and placed on the table outside in the hall.

Since then the flower has slowly wilted and though the stem holds firm, the top has twisted to face the floor and the petals have incurled. It has been that way for several days, but I still like the way it looks. And this afternoon, someone else in the building added to myour table: leaving dyed blue feathers of the same hue as the flower and the vase strewn around them.

My new favorite optical illusion (via milov). Focus on the black dot while moving towards/away from the monitor.

5K a luci rosse
Paginate di foto, filmatini per tutti i gusti, banner eloquenti, links piccanti e tanto altro ancora, condensati in 5k

Le gagnant toutes catégories est un faux site porno : toutes les photos «chaudes» sont en fait des images grossièrement dessinées. (French)

Den pornografiska hemsidan PixxxelChix vann en klar seger i tävlingen The 5K Contest som går ut på att skapa en funktionell hemsida som inte får vara större än 5 kilobyte. (Swedish)

Λονδίνο: Ο δικτυακός τόπος PixxxelChix, νικητής του φετινού διαγωνισμού για το σχεδιασμό δικτυακών τόπων που δεν ξεπερνούν σε μέγεθος τα 5K, αποδεικνύει έμπρακτα ότι στο Internet ισχύει πράγματι ο κανόνας «Tο λιγότερο είναι περισσότερο», τουλάχιστον για τους χρήστες που δεν διαθέτουν γρήγορες συνδέσεις. (Greek)

Verdens mindste pornoside er blevet kåret som Super Grand Prize vinder i en dyst om at lave hjemmesider med en størrelse på under 5 Kbytes. (Danish)

Vjerojatno najmanji pornografski web dobitnik je Super Grand Prize za funkcionalne web stranice ne veće od 5 kB. (Croatian)

Jährigen werden sicherheitshalber gleich auf eine Disney-Seite geschickt, die anderen können zwischen Bilder der Kategorien Celebrities, Interracial und Bondage wählen, wobei es aber immer nur eines gibt, oder sich sogar einen Film ansehen. Rekonstruktionsleistungen aus der grob gepixelten Abstraktion sind allerdings vonnöten. (German)

Сайт PixxxelChix обошел более 1000 претендентов, которые также мечтали стать победителем и получить Супер Гран-при. (Russian)

I have to love the URL notsorry.com (personal site of a Vancouverite who also happens to have been sole employee and prime shareholder of It's Okay Software Inc.)

Saturday, May 12

I like to hear myself talk, but even beyond that, IM conversations can get such a nice cadence (but the transcripts rarely display it).

sylloge: I went for a run around the lake.
sylloge: Geese tried to bite me.
sylloge: There was a silhouetted couple, his arm around her, ankle on knee leg cross silently smoking a joint and looking at the city reflected in the lake
sylloge: and then on the way out of the park, the smell of flowers was actually overwhelming -- I mean, I didn't like it, it was too much
sylloge: and then, 10 seconds later: it was perfect

- - - - -

sylloge: a haggard woman, looked beaten and defeated, talked to a cop with a big tattoo across a table in blenz earlier
sylloge: i imagined that he was helping her get out, just get the fuck out
sylloge: it looked like that
sylloge: and i thought about the lives that are thrown away
sylloge: and can people be so fuckng irresponsible and petty and stupid and cruel
sylloge: and scared and hurt and stupid
sylloge: and helpful and innocent and earnest
sylloge: and wise and loving and kind
sylloge: I can't have a bad life.

If you think that content and presentation are so easily separable, think about how you talk. Or read a verbatim transcript of a speech or monologue you found interesting. Or read a poem out loud that you have never read out loud before.

And, speaking of matter and its compositions: I have long loved that the greek word "hyle" which was used for "matter" had the meaning "wood"; the idea of greek philosophers talking about "form and wood" always cracks me up. But I found out in the paragraph below that the latin word "materia" also had the meaning "wood" or "timber" in latin. Which maybe means that we'd sound funny to Romans because of the way we talked about "wood". Woodism. Woodie. Holy reverso mirrors.

[The s]tarting point [of the first part of the book reviewed] is the introduction of the terms matter and material by recurring to their etymological origin, namely the ancient Greek and the Latin words for wood, hyle and materia. Both terms refer not only to a certain kind of "matter" or "stuff", but have also connotations that are rooted in artisan practices. It was the ancient Ionian natural philosophy that isolated both notions in a "pure" form by distinguishing between matter, the philosophical term for the substrate of the sensible and resisting world, and the various materials, the characteristic properties of which are the cause of this particular material world that surrounds us. However, wood is also in a second sense unique. It can be regarded under a multitude of aspects: Organic tissue with the capability of self-reproduction; malleable substrate that patiently endures the shaping forces of the carver; natural philosophers’ favorite archetype of matter ...

From HYLE: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1999) Book Review: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. 1998. Éloge du Mixte. Matériaux nouveaux et philosophie ancienne. Google cache link (it was there just a little while ago ..)

See? Like that. You take a word and start giving it other uses and then, next thing you know, fundamental understandings shift ...

Wednesday, May 9

All terribly early-1990s: I had never really been here or there when it comes to an opinion on the patenting of genetic information, but then I have never really thought about the idea of patenting animal forms. Tonight I heard the phrase which described the category of invention under which Harvard/Dupont's OncoMouse (tangetially related headline with swell picture: MOUSE with ELEPHANT DISEASE) was considered to patentable in the US: "composition of matter". The OncoMouse is not, in the eyes of the law, a living thing, but merely an arrangement of bits of matter. Never mind the ethics, this is metaphysically repugnant to me.

I overheard this while sort-of listening to an Ideas episode entitled We, the Animals on in the background while I worked. (I caught the second episode, which is too bad because I missed some interesting stuff: I have been a fan of Irene Pepperburg and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh since I wrote a paper on animal language back in college). — radio documentary fans, don't forget that you can catch Ideas broadcast realtime (9:05pm eastern during the week; link on this page) and browse their audio archives for streaming or download.

There exists a non-actual blues song which has as its central theme the number of days that I have worn the same T-shirt since "my baby went away" (2; though I also wore it the last day she was here).

One week left to apply for the 2001 Metafilter Scholarship (are there any students who read this?).

Ryan Schram wrote in a long time ago to tell me about Aristotle's recently found dialogues, which is good. Apparently, lots of things were found in Vesuvian libraries: New Tech Reads Ancient Roman Texts (see also, also via Ryan, this MetaFilter thread).

Between, if I recall, the 11th and 12th grades, I spent a summer working as a union labourer on a construction site. The job was digging, using a jackhammer and carrying things. Once, with another fellow, I had to carry this beam that was 12 or 14 inches square and maybe 12 feet long. It was so heavy, and I had to strain so much to keep my end on my shoulder, that my nose started bleeding. A little blood vessle burst because of the pressure.

Monday, May 7

... are feeling much better. (Don't those corneal topography maps look like they are staring right at you, angrily? The colours indicate the degree to which a given bit of the cornea sticks out. My right eye is worse according to this map, though the vision in my left —occulus sinister!— is far worse from the inside). I have another opportunity to spend some time in the company of a learned opthamologist later in the week, but the recovery is proceeding apace.

Wednesday, May 2

A few days ago I remembered this part of nomo zilla, Jamie Zawinski's piece about leaving Netscape:

This points to one of the reasons I really like living in Vancouver, as opposed to, say, San Francisco: Vancouver is a city that can be, and that ought to be, made successful. San Francisco has been successful for about 100 years. San Francisco isn't going anyplace — it is pretty much fully realized and as successful as it is going to be, at least as far out as I can see (and it is tremendously sucessful: a wonderful place to be, full of interesting people, etc. — if anything, it is now too successful and rich and expensive and exclusive)

But I want to be able (at my convenience) to make a difference, to shape things. Vancouver is changing radically, as it has been for the last 20 years, and it is mostly getting better. And I really like that I feel like I can be a part of that creation, that making-better. There is enormous potential; an agent of actualization is a pleasing thing to be.

Tuesday, May 1

I got nominated for a Chrysler Design Award which is more than a little ridiculous (past winners include Bruce Mau, Tibor Kalman, Matthew Carter, Zuzana Licko & Rudy Vanderlans, Frank Gehry, and on and on). A polite letter thanking them and letting them know that I won't be submitting is in the works. (Maybe if the nomination comes again in 10 or 20 years ...). Even though I am pretty sure it was just a friend pulling a string, it felt good (at least it got through their nominations committee). Maybe I will be a designer after all, my own special kind of designer. I can invent a new kind. Inventingnewkindsdesign.

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