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Monday 15 April 2002 |
5:30ish. At Hollywood Video, looking for Amelie; apparently not out yet. I am in my Apple Store Tice’s Corner T-shirt and ill-fitting gray jeans, thoroughly disreputable, sweaty and grimy from grubbing about with taxes all night, then having to jog around trying to find an open post office with parking before the crowds come in. I ask one of the clerks putting the videos away—a pretty girl with dyed-blonde hair and disconcertingly amberish contacts—if they carry Amelie. She won’t let eye contact go even after she tells me she’s never heard of it.
Now here is what I do not understand. Why does she keep smiling and staring unnervingly at me? In the state I am in, dead tired, completely hungry, I am in no shape to confidently say anything sensible to her. I am afraid that as she swishes by she will be repulsed by my rank stench, so I keep flinching as I look through the new releases for the next two months. Not good.
Nor is this the first time this has happened to me; I will suddenly realize I am getting the eye when I am completely uncomfortable with my skin, self-conscious in the extreme. Maybe it’s that I’m more approachable then? I don’t see how that could be. How do I attract the significant once-overs when I am, if not completely prepared, at least tidy and moderately clean?
This is why I am still single. Um, that and the fact that I live at home, not that it looks like that will change soon, either.
10:31:21 PM 
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I just thought of something. What if the payload of Ted Nelson’s ZigZag structures was not just hard media data, but also live objects, like events?
Weblogs, for all their coolness, are still linear orderings of little narratives. And that narrative structure, unless carefully tended, can tend to become disjointed. Categories might help, but really, how much can they do? Chronological ordering does not necessarily guarantee a narrative ordering, an ordering that makes sense. Though the mind can make sense of it if it wants to.
Wikis go in another direction entirely. The writer (or writers) creates a document, links it to a new document which is then created. As he goes through this document, he links back and forth, creating a massively hyperlinked structure. In the process, he is generating a stream of RecentChanges.
But even this, Ted Nelson would say, would be limiting the form. We’re still thinking about one-way links, for one. Another, attributions get lost.
But it’s closer to what he wants to say. And it shows that massively hyperlinked documents have a sort of marshalled aspect to them; they are not massively hyperlinked at the beginning; they are made one element at a time, one edit at a time. So what am I saying?
Let’s say though you have a weblog. That can be construed as a series of words or sentences. And any series of words or sentences given the proper data structure support behind it, can be transcluded according to Nelson’s old Xanadu model.
So you have a stream of words ordered chronologically. Call this the chronological dimension in ZigZag space. This is no different from a text editor, huh? You type words one at a time, and that’s how the editor displays them. You save the document. If we think in terms of the ZigZag model, the document is now a rank (as in rank ordering).
Now let’s say you want to edit that work. You impose a different ordering principle, add words, switch them around, cut and paste, but you still do that one event at a time. This stream of events, if it is captured completely and properly, produces another rank. Any stream can be represented as a rank. (This set of operations on a base text might be thought of as a set of transclusions of the base document into a new document, I think.) But this rank of operations (cuts, pastes, addenda, deletions, transclusions) is done along a new dimension, say, the firstEdit dimension of ZigZag space.
If we twist our mind’s eye 180 degrees into some imaginary dimension where we could see all these objects, we might see that the original ZigZag.chronological rank looks like an OrderedCollection of words, and weaving in and out of that line of words are the events or operations that created our first new edition of that work.
Let’s give our perspective another whack along another dimension, so that when it alights it sees the first new edition as a text entire. We see the text along a new dimension, the ZigZag.firstEdition dimension. Weaving in and out of it along the firstEdit dimension are the operations that brought it into being.
So if there were some tool that could implement ZigZag properly, and allow the individual nodes within the ranks and columns to specify not only elements of our postings, but operations on those postings, and then allow a reader to realign along those dimensions and then onto story dimensions, ZigZagged weblogs suddenly become much more useful to what I have in mind.
Of course this is all dreamer talk, and not doer talk. Having finished my taxes scant hours ago, I am in no mood to go chasing this any further than speculatively. Plus I may have misunderstood Nelson entirely.
10:12:29 PM
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MCL Now Insanely Cheap. Digitool dropped the price of MCL from $345 to $95. If you're a student, you can get it for... [lemonodor]
This is what I get for not checking up on lemonodor often enough. I’ve often wondered about working with Macintosh Common Lisp; it seems like a perfect tool to do development of applications that can sit on the desktop and have real power behind them. But the pricing schemes—when I was a student, didn’t this price seem to be as high as the thousands?—always put me off. Now though, hm. But the last time I used Lisp seriously was in school. Hm.
9:36:40 PM
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Hm, there’s an interesting point. For conservatives, should the states’-rightsism issue be paramount, or the laissez-faire attitude? Something to ponder.
I mean, for this case, it seems obvious that Microsoft has done we the developers and consumers wrong; however, stupid remedies should not prevail—forcing a company to support software it has no expertise in? Duh. Opposed to this is the opening up of the APIs remedy, which would make me happy. I have a copy of Outlook Express with a broken database and 860 MB (!) of mail in a strange format with lots of nulls covering several months of Squeak Smalltalk mailing list archives that chokes almost any word processor or text editor I try it on.
So the government should apply some remedy, and some remedy better than what the Feds have done. Should we allow fifty states to pester companies? The principles of laissez-faire and states’ rights would tend to argue yes no matter how you look at it. Public interest would seem to demand that those cases be consolidated, and get the companies and the constituents back into business. Could there ever be a situation where the two principles conflict? Can’t think of one. But then I am a Mac and Unix person, and am somewhat biased.
9:29:45 PM
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By way of Rat’s Nest: the Ethical Philosophy Selector.
I sort of guessed that I would get the Christians and Aristotle. I answered one question specifically against Kant. I am surprised Epicurus and Plato ended up so low, and Nietzsche so high. Though I have been idly flipping through Twilight of the Idols.
Aquinas 100, Aristotle 78, Augustine 77.
Ockham 71, Spinoza 65, Mill 58.
Kant 47, Bentham 46, Plato 46.
Epicureans 40, Nietzsche 35, Stoics 35, Cynics 34.
Noddings 34, Hume 32, Prescriptivism 29.
Rand 21, Sartre 20, Hobbes 3.
7:38:00 AM
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Boy, About.com has really shrunk their site. Most of my old links get redirected to more general topics. How much VC money can you burn? Get in touch with me after I win the Big Game ($300 mil and counting)....
3:38:23 AM
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$110,000 1976 Toyota?
Take a look at above auction, this is no joke BTW. This is a demonstration of the inherent risk of extreme customization: Your idea of mega-cool may not be anyone else's. I love the quote, "well over $100,000.00 invested". "invested"? As in a "return on an investment" as opposed to "spent" AKA "pissed away"? Too funny. [By way of Arcade@Home]
I just don’t get it.
3:23:22 AM
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Going through some changed links. It’s a cool OmniWeb feature if you only have a few bookmarks, but if you accidentally hit Check All Bookmarks when you had imported all your bookmarks since 1993, you’re likely to get bunchfuls of bad and updated links. I’ve been trimming for weeks, and I am now down to 120 or so, which may include some automatically checked links, a very nice feature. My big remaining quibble with OmniWeb is selection behavior (why can’t I select whole blocks of TABLEd text? When that happens, and I can print selections, I will give it my wholehearted recommendation. Have I mentioned that I bought OmniWeb?)—I don’t count stylesheets/ECMAscript compliance because they’ve been making steady progress, and if that is all you rely on to make your website cool, well, screw you.
I’d forgotten that Dan Hood worked for some publication catering to WTC. He’s out of work and his publisher has not optioned his next Liam Rhenford book, which pisses me off mightily.
Greg Costikyan apparently lives near the site, in Battery Park, but he’s alright. The dead link that showed up was just a move to a new server after an archival loss, recovered by webarchive. Whew! I still have his article on game as artistic medium in paper, the Interactive Fantasy issue. He has a new wireless game company, Unplugged Games. Must investigate.
Freeverse Software seems to have a new graphical MUD game——called Arcane Arena. Downloading it as I type.
Hm. Haven’t played Terminus in a while. I never really got into it because it never accepted my USB keyboard keystrokes. Never even installed it on my TiBook.
Forgot about Great Books Webring. Did I ever go through these?
Hm, Geraldine R Dodge. The Poetry Festival should be this fall, shouldn’t it?
I really ought to renew my ACM and IEEE professional memberships, at least if I want access to those e-libraries.
3:19:44 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Richard Allan Baruz.
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This is a personal weblog; that is, it is in no way affiliated nor connected with the company for which I work, nor the clients to whom I am contracted.
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All Your Links Are Belong To Us! If you came by way of a search engine and did not find exactly what you were looking for, try the
People who may think me ungrateful rather than incompetent Smart people I ought to read more Those who have cared to comment Well-connected Can’t help myself
Self-linked... creepy, or crappy?
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