SJ’s Longest Now

TS^2 : Dual touch-screen trend-setting, and a prediction

Posted on September 24th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, chain-gang.

Gizmodo features a mind-molding video of Microsoft’s dual-touchscreen Courier tablet laptop.

“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments

The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard.  And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?

0 comments.

Codicility

Posted on July 25th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, indescribable.

For the record : I’ve found online a full set of photos of my favorite angelic work from the ^//. century – a masterfully illustrated treeware ‘pedia from a parallel dimension.  Now that I own a copy I should take proper photos, however…

Book 1,  Book 2

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on disambiguation and The Atomization of Meaning

Posted on June 25th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, metrics, wikipedia.

Disambiguate has been a somewhat obscure term for ’specify’ for ages.  And the noun form, disambiguation, has been used even more sparingly.  At some point in the last century, perhaps in the 1950s, it became a popular term in computational linguistics.   And before that it was basically only used by one person, writing about logic and semantics in the early 19th century.  All of this sprang to my mind because of the tremendous popularity of the word in and through Wikipedia.  In the encyclopedia, it is the canonical way to describe the clarification of an ambiguous term, the indication of type used to specify the context of an article title.

A bit of background.  The word disambiguation was not popular before the 50s.  It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham.  But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics?  And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?

The word’s recent history touches on Rush, Nirvana, Invictus, Larry, and Magnus… and started with a page on Naming conventions/Disambiguating.  Details after the jump.

(more…)

2 comments.

A good laugh

Posted on May 7th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized.

Simply brilliant. The world needs more media like this.  And more of those fat sign-anything markers.

0 comments.

Did someone say Яolcats?

Posted on February 10th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

No, not rollcats, but Яolcats — the glorious and gorgeous (and occasionally quite uncatty) lolcats of Russia.

Faves: March is a state of mind …

1 comment.

How I became a Wikipedian

Posted on October 8th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

I had forgotten the long essay I wrote about this transition here on my blog… or rather, on my first law school blog, when blogs.law was new and cuddly.  My transition to the current wordpress skin made it more visible, new-found visibility online made it a repeated spam target, and I rediscovered it today.  So spam has done something good for me.  Thanks, spam king!  

For those of you who missed it the first time around in early 2004, before I knew how wikipedia works or even that it was community owned and run.  Here it is again: On Multilingual Encyclopedia and Dictionary (public domain).

1 comment.

Posted on September 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international.

Daniel goes to Ethiopia.  Elana is digitizing some of her reels of footage this weekend, so expect some fantastic video from Mongolia and elsewhere soon.

0 comments.

Saving the world from destruction, 5E-44 sec at a time

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, chain-gang, indescribable, international.

I hope you’ve all seen this by now.  Thank goodness for perpetually-compounded world-saving.

0 comments.

Ike strike

Posted on September 13th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, SJ, indescribable.

Ike hit Texas hard this morning, straight over central Galveston.  They say 3m will be out of power for two weeks… including our house in Houston.

UPDATE:  Our street was lucky.  Our house is good as ever, having no enormous trees nearby.  My mother reports the only noise it made was a loud humming from the gutters at a certain windspeed (I could hear it over the phone!).

UPDATE 2: A house across the street had its roof aerated by falling trees from both adjacent properties, and the ancient oak in the open lot next to us (vacated and cleared after the last big flood) was ripped down.  Flooding wasn’t bad; only 2 ft of water in the street.  The local bayou is far from the main channel, and was a good 3 feet from flowing over when high tide passed at 4pm.  10 blocks away things were worse…  Now everyone just has to make do without power for the next fortnight.

UPDATE 3: Only 1m are still without power; we expect to do without for another week.

And this is why we went into space 40 years ago: an image of Ike from the International Space Station… with a little ’station finger’ over the lens.  Great buildings such as the Pyramids and the Wall are, despite what they say, hard to see from space.  But massive atmospherics?  You can see those from Saturn.

More below the fold.

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3 comments.

XO Wikireader : compressed joy

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international, poetic justice.

Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :

• a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates

• scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time.  A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections.  The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…

0 comments.

Country music

Posted on May 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.

OLPC is having a flag day of sorts on Tuesday — a media event at the Media Lab with attendees from many countries where we are working, and presentations from a few of the government officials responsible for country deployments. It is unfortunately not open to the public, but I will do my best to publish summaries and link to any raw materials from the events on the blog; and to pass on any comments and questions you may have for country implementers and teachers.

Some of the country representatives will be in town for the rest of the week, for a project and learning workshop; stay tuned for points of interest for the community that come up. I am particularly looking forward to finalizing details of the educational blog project underway in Uruguay, with help from Greg Smith and Tarun Pondicherry, and the WebJournal project that Robson Mendonca will be working on this summer in Brazil with Juliano Bittencourt.

If you have projects you’d like to see pursued more actively, or data you would like to see from countries and schools, leave a comment here…

0 comments.

Story Jam New York – Storytelling for all

Posted on March 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, fly-by-wire, international.

Please come to the first US storytelling jam, at UNICEF HQ in Manhattan, this Fri-Sun.  We begin Friday night at 6 with introductions and drinks, and continue through an intense schedule Saturday (10-10) and Sunday (10-6), wrapping up in the late afternoon.  I hope to see all of you New Yorkers there, and folks from the region; there are a handful of us coming up from Boston in the afternoon if anyone from these parts wants to travel together.

Topics will include storytelling itself, storyboarding of great ideas, how to run a storyboarding session with children, thoughts on interviews by and of children, how to learn to interview others, capturing personal stories for the OurStories project, and code and designwork needed to improve the above.

0 comments.

browsing while cogitating, youtube edition

Posted on February 23rd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, indescribable, poetic justice.

Chinese philosophers debated for centuries whether one discovers the nature of the universe by investigating oneself or by investigating the outer world. I don’t have a dog in that fight (I might say both grant equal power of discovery when approached properly), but I do like poring through random selections to get a feel for an expansive whole (yes, I want a Special:Random for the universe).

Sometimes I do that reflexively while thinking, practiving a little Langerfulness. So it was that I found myself tonight seven pages into the discussion threads for the YouTube video “Why Chuck [Norris] endorsed Mike [Huckabee] – Episode One [of Five]“, where I ran across the following exchange between BuckDresser and jtm04d; those of you who know my favorite tests of familiarity with good scientific method may appreciate it… (more…)

2 comments.

Posted on December 24th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international.

My friend Zdenek is creating a local gallery of knowledge and photographs of documents and buildings from his hometown of Češnovice. The result is a lovely collection of local history that any city would be proud to have.

It’s funny to think that none of my hometowns have something similarly simple and to the point. Perhaps they do, and I just don’t know about it?.Perhaps this is easier to do comprehensively, with a passion, for a small town. Of course I would settle with this sort of history for any of the blocks or neighborhoods I’ve lived in, but they tend not to have the same cohesive history as a town fending for itself against the vagaries of war and time.

At any rate, enjoy. I particularly like the photos of Hluboka and of this building — with what seems to be yellow steel sculpted girders on the outside. I wonder : are they structural?

Off to Berlin in a few days for the Sea of Chaos. I’ll try to document the trip properly.

0 comments.

kaltura. video remixed, for all

Posted on December 9th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, metrics.

Kaltura.com does a dozen things right in one place; unusual for a modern creator/social-networking site, they focus heavily on creation.  Most unusually, they do all of this with video, the black sheep of the collaborative family : small clips, visualized; smooth remix process, with interface on the client and reasonably response time on the server without redrawing a whole screen; the best memes of history and authorship transparency realized with large-font rounded-corners elegance.

Now who is using it ? where are the transclusions for mediawiki instances?   I can’t wait to see the beta site develop.

0 comments.

WikiJunior update

Posted on October 26th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, chain-gang.

Wikijunior has been quietly developing a number of great books since its founding, and has branched out into many languages.
It needs more editors and commentators; unlike most of the rest of wikidom, its editors are a bit separate from its audience, and its audience is often not active online.

0 comments.

Thamesis overwhelms; the future

Posted on October 14th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, indescribable.

The cast behind the lavishly told story of Thamesis — a social and political intrigue set in a world of vivid colors and sound — are more fascinating than the cast within the story itself… they remind me of the early thirteen‘ers, and of Great Big Pants (before I even knew of Worldwide Pants Incorporated).

I can’t get enough. I want the crew responsible for character and clothing design, those responsible for sociology and scientific resarch, and those charged with spicing up the interwoven threads outside the flash but within the site (the brand incubation, the public relations crew, those who loaned outfits and music), in more than living color.

0 comments.

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