Tag: culture

zurich boredom

i experienced the meaningless zurich life this weekend when i walked around in the city for a bit. everyone is so full of themselves and thinks they have seen it all when they are provincial idiots at best.

Rich languages

i got interested in the question which language was generally considered to be the richest in the world.

maybe it is sanskrit:

Sanskrit is the richest language in the world. There are often double or triple meanings in 1 word, so it is a very difficult language to learn, but a very expressive one.

or maybe it is english:

The Oxford English Dictionary has 615K words. 200k are in common use. Compare this to German, which has a total vocabulary of 185K words, and French, with fewer than 100K. There is no doubt that English has the most varied vocabulary in the world, but most use a very small portion of it to express themselves.

i have found myself in trouble discussing some concepts in my native language when i could explain them much better in english 🙂

gregorLinks 1.0

i just discovered a bunch of submissions in my blog queue that had been sitting there for a year. guess it’s time i start to blog them (3/28):

a very smart graphics guy
john c. hart has some pretty interesting papers online, such as on ray tracing on mass market GPUs.

promoting the third culture
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. edge.org.

nomenclature
peter saint-andre maintains a guide to the nomenclature of philosophy

Quoting & metadata

ralph levien talks about quoting netiquette.

It is considered good etiquette not to quote email without permission. However, these days, emails are often part of a broader discussion spanning blogs, web fora, and so on. It’s increasingly easy to run afoul of this etiquette rule. Thus, I propose the 2-character string “+ as a shorthand indicating that permission to quote, with attribution, is granted. Permission is also granted to integrate the email into any copylefted documentation (most copylefts do not require attribution).

“+ is a nice idea until we figure out how to attach rdf metadata to arbitrary text fragments. semantic web here we come. raph is right, quoting is increasingly a problem.

A less than clued-in person recently accused me of wanting to spam a mailing list when the intent was to use affero to provide users a possibility to give back by donating to select charities. that person was in possession of the whole trail of discussion, and only used that conclusion to discredit me. a generalized quoting system would allow anyone to trace these tidbits back to the source, and decide for themselves.

fighting barney


i had an awesome night at the eff fund raising party. the dna lounge is a nice club for sure, and hearing it firsthand from wil wheaton how he hates shatner was triple A. turns out he knows about our little software project, and he loves it. the celebrity match with barney was a trip. add in some awesome ladies, fine music, and you get an awesome evening, which ended in some apartment in north beach, sf. the next morning we literally stumbled across friends of ours who had crashed at the same apartment! that incident reminded me that i should really check out some of the schmoozing sites. i will admit it i’m beginning to like that schmoozing thingie, i’m becoming a social whore. 🙂

Whole spectrum

i’m continually amazed at the lifestyles that coexist side-by-side in this country. on my flight back from san diego, i was subjected to products like this one:

and the stewardess sang a southwest airlines song? What the fuck is up with that? then, only a couple hours later, i crashed at johns party. i was introduced to that kid from k10k.net, michael. the evening’s festivities ended at some guys place where i slept in the guest house, and went on to see margaret cho. she is the most anti p.c. person i have ever seen. i laughed so hard it hurt.

Technologies of coordination and cooperation

the community meme is quickly taking hold. i met 2 friends yesterday who want to do the same things in the music space, what a coincidence.

the key issue in the coming weeks / months will be striking a balance between centralization and decentralization.

i talked to some social scientist recently, and he confirmed what i had assumed all along. communities are the next big thing. duh. on a different note i want to have the autolink stuff working decently. manually entering links cannot be the answer.. maybe if it scours my past articles and my link db for hints..

Al-Jazeera

For the first time, there is a tv station (al-Jazeera) that is not giving in to pressure from governments around the arabic world to censor its content. for the first time, arabic people can get real news, without the usual all-distorting propaganda. this will change the region for good, its things like that that are crucial in the fight against stupid fundamentalists. let the people have their own opinion, and foster economic growth.

communicating with the arab world

communications between the arab and the western world are primarily hampered by diverse cultural understandings of language.

First is the role of the Arabic language itself as an artistic form. As an early scholar noted, the “magical sounds of the words” combined with the images, have a powerful effect on the psychology of the Arab.(42) Hitti perhaps summed it up best when he stated,

Hardly any language seems capable of exercising over the minds of its users such irresistible influence as Arabic . . The rhythm, the rhyme, the music produce on them the effect of what they call ‘lawful magic’ (sihr halal).(43)

The melodious sounds of the phonetic combinations and plays on words in the recitation of Arabic prose and poetry has been likened to music.(44) Indeed, as one Arab colleague once remarked, recitation of the Koran may be the Western equivalent of classical music. Because of their talent with words, poets throughout Arab history have been held in high esteem. As Chenje noted, “there had been hardly any scholar of consequence in Arab-Muslim society who did not try his hand at poetry.”(45) With the stress always on style in Arabic, eloquence and effectiveness were equated.(46)

The power of the Arabic language for Arabs is also derived from its religious association through the Prophet Mohammed and the Koran. For the believer, the majesty of the language of the Koran is considered a miracle from God for the Muslim prophet was illiterate and unschooled. “It was the Koran — the Revealed Book — that was conceived to represent the highest linguistic achievement of the Arabic language.(47) The Koran was not only revealed in Arabic, but Arabic is the language used in prayer by Muslims throughout the world.