The Longest Now

I’m trying to track down physical creature cards, a logic puzzle that started w/ the Elementary Science Study project (in Newton!) & was riffed on for decades.  The visual and mathematical puzzles became quite involved; including combinations of shading, geometry, topology, number theory, and more.  Creatures were also creatively named: Mokes, Snorpes, Gligs, Wibbles, Shlooms, Bleeps, Quarks, Trugs, Zyzzes, Mellinarks…

If you run across these somewhere, please reach out and get in touch.  I would like to reprint some of the professionally done sequences, and perhaps expand on the idea.

Example (via Amber Case).

Discussion:

I'm trying to track down physical creature cards, a logic puzzle that started w/ the Elementary Science Study project (in Newton!) & was riffed on for decades.

Here are some early examples: pic.twitter.com/6SeyVnmVUP

— Sam Klein📚 (@metasj) October 24, 2022

And a second catalog of tales, with fewer interconnections : Valène’s incomplete catalog of 179 stories from the Fifty-First chapter of Life, A User’s Manual, a life-work of Perec, poetic puzzlemaker and one of the great writers of the 20th century, lovingly translated into English by the meticulous David Bellos :

1   The Coronation at Covadonga of Alkhamah's victor, Don Pelage

2   The Russian singer and Schönberg living in Holland as exiles

3   The deaf cat on the top floor with one blue & one yellow eye

4   Barrels of sand being filled by order of the fumbling cretin

5   The miserly old woman marking all her expenses in a notebook

6   The puzzlemaker's backgammon game giving him his bad tempers
(more…)

A lovely combined review of four different biographies, helping to highlight the topography of each.

Here is a gallery of great pope memes celebrating the awesomeness emanating from Catholicism’s new Pope.

After a Pope who sometimes made one despair that global religious leaders could inspire perspective, this is a daily source of happiness.

Life does not seem to have a monopoly on the attention of the gifted.

A brief commemoration, from a community in mourning.

Jorn Barger, Mortimer Adler, Patrick Gunkel, Vince, Misha Herscu, Popova: what do all of these people have in common?  Exploring the densely textured space of possible ideas,  the mereology of existence, learning to see implied, hidden, missing, combinatorial spaces.

Ideonomy is a dream of structuring that work; embraced by Gunkel in lists and charts and drawings, never fully realized.  Modern tools and languages bring us closer to being able to explore such spaces computationally and comprehensively, to come up with questions about idea space and experiments that can resolve their answer: not in the naively space-filling method of the Library of Babel, but in the equivalent populated entirely by meaningful and informative works.

96 days of altered consciousness and recovering from a psychotic break. Told with humor and self-awareness, in an epic 18-part tale.

Let’s say that every time I see a yellow car, you actually see what I would call a green dragon, and we’ve just adapted to different driving styles… Now let’s assume we both see an object descended from the Model-T, and not the offspring of a bat fucking an iguana in a wood stove.* Except now I’m secretly attaching the symbol of car to dragon.

* I say natural selection demands that if you did this enough times, something would survive, and I bet that something would be a dragon. If there are any crazy people reading this right now, you have your mission.

Announced on reddit. Updates to come, including in a public lecture by Larry Lessig on February 19.

Aaron took his life yesterday. I am still finding it hard to believe.

His ongoing court case overshadows his death, so let me get that out of the way: 
He was living through a two-year federal case which had only become more nightmarish since last year.  (JSTOR stated it did not want a trial, and has steadily been releasing the PD articles in question and more for free public use; yet the prosecution, continuing its outrageous abuse of discretion, declined to settle and tripled their felony charges to cover up to 35 years in prison.)

Friends and family were helping him plan a campaign to spread the word about the unreasonableness and inequity of the trial. Its uncertainty was intensely stressful, even for those of us who lived only the tiniest fraction of it.  As Lessig notes, the prosecutors – Stephen P. Heymann (and at times Scott L. Garland), working in Carmen M. Ortiz‘s Cybercrime unit – should be taking a long hard look in the mirror and asking themselves what they are doing with their lives.

Aaron was a dear friend, and one of the most decent men I have known.  The only times I have seen him truly angry was in response to some social wrong; and he actively looked for ways to find and eliminate injustice. He always considered how to act morally – even when this meant being at odds with local social norms – and regularly paused at forks in his life to think about how to live so as to benefit society.

He kindled ideas from those nearby, and freely passed on his own.  Made mistakes often and tried to learn from them, usually publicly. His transparency was a useful meterstick for me. Ages ago, when we first met, I remember him brainstorming ideas about community and wiki design with Zvi and me; about learning and unlearning, society and ideals, civics and collaboration.  Once his curiosity was piqued about a subject he would pursue it until he could write about and explain it.  

I spent last night with mutual friends who live now in his old apartment, in a room that was once his; remembering the many great projects he started and inspired – especially the little gems, the personal quirks and insights, the inspiring ideas that became single-purpose services, or calls to arms. (We never did start a dog-walking service for data, but the idea abides.) Rereading some of his writings, I remember the many opportunities missed for synthesis, reframing, and clarity – about how life works, and how to live it.

Everyone has idealized dreams — what would you do with an unlimited wish? — about long-term projects worth devoting one’s life to, to transform the world. Dreams cherished but rarely attempted.  Aaron was the only person I felt completely comfortable sharing mine with.  We had a little game: a couple times a year we would meet in a nameless cafe, and he would ask for ‘rabbinical’ advice on moral quandaries, and I would ask for ‘professional’ advice on realizing societal dreams. I don’t know that he needed my advice, but I always looked forward to his. There was usually at least one book suggestion from his endless reading list that answered an open question of mine. And no matter how grandiose the dream, he would understand, clarify, laugh, counterpoint, help tune mental models, and remind me to get to it. And we never had quite enough time.

I miss him very, very, very much.   Part of my own future has gone missing too.

Somewhere, celestials are being taught to tune the cosmos.

In Memoriam:
Quinn. TBL. Grimm. Cory. Larry (^2). Cyrus Farivar.

The court case.
Alex Stamos (on the wrongness of the case).
New York Times (front page).
The Guardian (front page + 4 more articles)
The WSJ.

In his own words:
How to work.
How we stopped SOPA.
On feeling low and key limes.

From the Boston Wikipedia Meetup on August 18, 2009, by Sage Ross:

Via W.Hu. This intermediate intermediate background radiation acoustic peak cosmological guide is not for beginners, but won’t let you actually calculate anything. So relax relax and enjoy!

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

The Chilean national architectural exhibit, showcasing the country’s work at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Designed by my brother:

One small step for an editor…

Huge props to the team working on this and the underlying parsoid. It’s still in Alpha, so it’s only on the English Wikipedia this week. And you have to turn it on via user prefs; and it wants good feedback, but it makes the old heart-cockles sing.

This rambling illustrated reflection on Serafini, with translations of some of the writings in the Decodex and posted from across the street from Luigi’s house, is a perfect example of why I love 5¢ense. (Throw in some of the monomania of Kane X. Faucher and you’d have a dangerous decoding machine for all of mod society.)

Listen and enjoy.

* Here written S.L., but no less superterrestrial

Together we will move in ways that none could move alone.

You will be remembered.