January 2010
59 posts
“Oh, jab me with your needle a hundred times
And a hundred times I will bless...”
– Jules Verne. A personal hero.
Love is Like a Bottle of Gin, The Magnetic...
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'french people thinking about the rest of the...
In French, some country names are masculine (represented in green) and some are feminine (represented in purple).
Is this assignment random? Not exactly. It’s usually rather case-by-case.
And of course, that got me thinking about how these countries got their names.
L’Argentine comes from Latin argentinus, meaning ‘silver.’ Argentinus is masculine, but concepts (and...
This is called ‘Good Morning with Nick...
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“Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve...”
– Thomas Sydenham (1624 - 1689). A relatively long life, considering.
“Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is ...”
– William James, The Stream of Consciousness (1892).
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“There’s one thing I want to say, so I’ll be brave:
You were what I...”
– Stars, Your Ex-Lover is Dead, or, The Song I am Listening to on Repeat for a While.
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'categorical perception,' or, 'the importance of...
Did you know that the sound we call /b/ or /k/ actually represents a whole range of sounds?
A whole variety of acoustic waves are heard as /b/. If you increase voice onset time slightly, in steps, at one point, it crosses a ‘boundary’ where it becomes /p./
The sound /k/ may be produced in a variety of ways, all identical to the speaker. But if you voice it slightly, more and more,...
someday.
Someday, someone (a group not excluding myself) needs to write a program that can transform a document from past tense to present, or vice versa.
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pairs: the ascent of money & diamond age.
Non-fiction and science fiction.
The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is science fiction in the best sense. Like Lovecraft or H.G. Wells is science fiction.
It’s about society after nanotechnology, when items are created by assembling items from a feed. One’s wealth is one’s bandwidth of atoms.
Anyone who’s ever read Neal Stephenson knows that...
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shitty poetry day: some haiku.
ONE:
School doesn’t teach me I learn from the real wor-uld Fuck mom where’s my bong.
TWO:
I’m so lost right now My couch used to be right here Nanny moves my shit.
THREE:
I don’t get the point Of having relationships. Please close the door, mom.
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shitty poetry day, this time in iambic pentameter.
Why is it so goddamn cold today.
I just want to wear a t-shirt, dude.
I just don’t want to get out of my bed.
I should go hang out or something, man.
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shitty poetry day.
apparently, august 18th is shitty poetry day, but i can’t wait till then. and besides, isn’t there some difference between ‘bad’ and ‘shitty’?
when i wake up i can’t remember my dreams
and when i’m asleep i can’t remember my real life
which is nice because that way you can’t
be so ashamed of what you have done.
i am the noam chomsky...
Numbers →
savingpaper:
GDP of Haiti: $8.5 billion.
Goldman Sachs bonus pool: $20 billion.
(via azspot)
“The difference between stupid and intellgient people- and this is true whether...”
– Constable Moore from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
“Consider how contemporary discussions of Aquinas’s classical list of the...”
– Joel Best, Social Problems.
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'digital books,' or, 'things people get really...
I got a Kindle for Christmas.
It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t even want one. It was a present.
And, like a lot of people, I was iffy about the whole idea. You’ve probably heard things like:
> I like holding something in my hand.
> I don’t like reading on screens.
> I just like books.
I do like my Kindle. I read more on it. I can search within books, even...
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“It is a veritable Babel, in which some thirty or more tongues are...”
– Wayne Chatfield-Taylor, Chicago, 1927.
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pairs: 'eating animals' and 'survivor.'
I usually like to read more than one book at a time. But reading more than one book at a time can be tricky. Ideally, I like my books to be:
Different enough from one another that I can enjoy them separately.
Similar enough that the reading of one supplements the reading of the other.
It’s like matching a wine to a steak. (You can decide which book is the wine and which is the steak). ...
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'the ancient wizards,' or, 'how we talk to the...
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave”
Kubric didn’t predict much correctly about the year 2001. But he got one thing right: computers would not always do what we told them to.
A guy just yelled “FUCK,” smacked his Dell laptop, and stormed out of Deering library.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
How many times has your computer...
“When it is raining put a circumflex above all vowels to prêvênt thêm frôm...”
– fake AP stylebook.
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Free download: Among the Mountains
Click the image to download, or get the story here.
This is a short story I wrote. I’m releasing it under the Creative Commons license, which means that it’s free, just don’t resell it.
I hope you’ll enjoy this. Please feel free to email me to tell me what you liked and what you did not like. nick [dot] j [dot] merrill [at] gmail [dot] com
Among the Mountains by...
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among the mountains.
My first short story release is scheduled to go up here at midnight, so you all can read it throughout the weekend. You’ll be able to access it anytime via the “writing” link to your left.
Hope you all enjoy it.
what do you want me to talk about? →
(you can also access this via ‘interact’ in the sidebar).
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is eliza a satire of therepists?
In 1966, MIT linguist Joseph Weizenbaum invented ELIZA, a program that used keyword searching to respond to to human input in a predictable way. The program included rules like this:
user: ‘I am X’
ELIZA: ‘How long have you been X?’
Essentially, Weizenbaum suggested that a computer could use simple rules to respond to queries in such a way that a human would find the...
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the illustrations of matthew lyons. yum. →
personal favorite:
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problems, inc.
Problems become problems when we decide they’re problems. What modern Americans would call ‘sexism’ was a common practice for most of human history. It still is in many parts of the world.
What Americans would today call ‘child abuse’ is what medieval Europeans would call ‘proper parenting.’
And cultures don’t always agree what does and does not...
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“At Nuance, whose headquarters are outside Boston, speech engineers try to...”
– John Seabrook, Hello, Hal, The New Yorker.
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english -> mandarin
babelfish translates “odyssey” to “risk travel” in mandarin, since, I’d imagine, mandarin doesn’t have the cultural tie in to homer’s novel that english has. not a bad approximation of the concept, though.
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Pairs: Eternal Sunshine & Norwegian Wood
these are stories about:
the memories we can’t forget, the memories we’d rather forget, the memories we hope we never forget, the memories we hate ourselves for forgetting, the way memories slip away from us, slowly, when we’re not looking,
the way memories can never really be erased, but the way they disappear like the moon in the daytime, hidden in front of everyone,...