February, 2006

A few months ago my family got a new van, a Windstar. It’s a pretty good car and, being a luxe edition, has many interesting gizmos. My favorite one is a sensor that starts screeching when you get too close to something in the back.

It is not its human-augmentation side what fascinates me the most, but the possibilities that such a sensor suggests. Why not go crazy and make this a gizmo that truly represents space, in all its subtleties, through sound?

I envision a somewhat thick, solid, black band that you would close around your head, completely covering your eyes and your ears; somewhat like a headband worn too low.

This gadget, the soundscape (scape for short), will simply translate space into sound. Let’s imagine the simplest case. A soundscaper standing in the center of a medium-sized, empty, white, circular room. What would that sound like? Well, as the soundscaper turns, it’d probably be a soft hum in all directions; medium-volumed to represent a medium distance; high-pitched to represent the whiteness of the walls; equal in all directions to parallel the physical reality.

If we increase the diameter of this circular room, the walls move farther away, and thus the (sound) volume will decrease; if we decrease the diameter, the walls come closer and the volume increases. If this room now had a door and it were open, the soundscaper would notice it as it turns around to “hear” the room: it would be a sudden sharp decrease in the volume.

If we now put a black square somewhere in the room close to the soundscaper, it’d sound like a squared speaker the size of the black square, emitting a somewhat loud, low-pitched noise.

Can you imagine it? Yeah, who knows if it would have a practical use (assist the blind?) and it’d probably never be advanced enough to allow you to, say, “read” a book through pure sound, but it sure’d be interesting to use it.

Of course, there’s no reason to stop at sound, maybe space can be represented through smell too (and maybe, just maybe, through taste). We always think of space as something fundamentally visual but that’s only because we’re all so visually biased. There are other possibilities.

And yet, sight is probably the best way to represent space. It’s by far the sense with the biggest bandwith. So much, in fact, that I think at least two other senses (hearing and smelling) can be merged into it. Thanks to sci-fi movies we’re all familiar now with some sort of thermal vision—in which red represents hotness, blue coldness. Hearing and smelling could be added in a similar fashion. Sound could be represented as an overlay of 3d waves expanding rapidly through space. The sound of birds chirping outside would look like a pond under a light rain, only in 3d. And smell could be represented as an overlay of little colored dots. A nubile girl passing by would leave a rainbow cloud of dots behind her.

But the soundscape still sounds the most daring, maybe because the possibility of replacing sight is as frightening as it is exciting. Just imagine, sound as light!

Update August 24, 2006: ABC News’ Humans With Amazing Senses: Blind People Who Interact With the World Like Dolphins and Bats

Update April 24, 2007: Wired’s Mixed Feelings: See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). I blogged about it here.

I’m fascinated and disgusted in equal measure with a recent Village Voice cover article: “Do you wanna kiss me?” (How New York’s women are wising up to The Game’s pickup tips). Fascinated because what it describes is such an interesting, natural, and inevitable step for men to take in relationships; disgusted because it seems to betray the all-important honesty upon which conversation relies. The rightly famous cluetrain manifesto is about the need for companies to speak with an honest, human voice; I guess we’ll soon need one for people too (but then again, what could be more positively human than artifice?). Magda, from William Gibson’s delightful Pattern Recognition, comes to mind:

And now, after reading the Voice article—let alone reading The Game, for whatever purpose—, how can you not act differently? How can you help from negging, from creating a yes-ladder or a false time constraint? (Or from recognizing them?) I now know that the style of conversation I’ve evolved over the years, mostly unconsciously, is quite neggish; doesn’t being aware of what one’s doing changes the very nature of the act? “Being natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

Perhaps Dolly is right. These techniques may be nothing but conversation cosmethics (or rather, prosthetics) and I can surely appreciate their playful side, the way they’re “the grown-up version of hair-pulling on the playground.” But I’m still wary—it’s conversation we’re talking about here and there are few things I value more.

Oh, and I’m well aware that at least some parts of the article have been fabricated, as rumored first in Gawker, and then acknowledged by the Voice and the author himself. This is a shame (not least because of the wimpy apology by the author) but the article is still interesting and worth reading; that’s why I made a verbatim copy of it in my website.

Haciendo mandados, me toco platicar hoy con una señora que dirige un cibercafe mientras los dos haciamos fila. Le pregunte sobre su negocio y dos cosas me llamaron mucho la atencion. La primera es que un cibercafe gasta mas, mucho mas, en luz que en el internet mismo. Mientras que esta señora pagaba 650 pesos por internet al mes, la luz le salia de 2,600 a 3,000 pesos—casi 5 veces mas. Asi que lo que uno paga es mas bien la electricidad, no el internet. En vez de cibercafes deberian pues llamarlos electrocafes.

La otra cosa que me intereso fue que los cibercafes locales se aliaron para fijar el precio minimo por una hora de internet (12 pesos, si mal no recuerdo). Que, segun eso, a menos no les sale. Lo que no alcanzo a entender es porque necesitan imponer un precio minimo. Si alguien lo da a ese precio y no le sale, pues alla su problema si quiere regalar su dinero, no? Me recuerda una platica con un taxista que me decia que si no estuvieran restringidas las licencias para taxis, habria tanta competencia que ya para nadie saldria. Sera?

Bueno, hubo una cosa mas, una meta-cosa, que tambien me llamo la atencion en la platica: cuanto puede enseñarte una conversacion casual sobre esferas tan distantes a las tuyas.

If you’ve decided to browse with Firefox,^[1] why not learn to do it gracefully? It’ll make you happier and more efficient.

Before we begin, be sure to have the latest Firefox. As of 28/Feb/2006, the current version is 1.5.0.1 and what follows will assume you have that version or a higher one. You get Firefox from GetFirefox.com.

With that you’re ready. Here is my guide (for non-techies) to using Firefox with flair:

You’ll have to excuse me but the meme just bit me. This blonde joke is wonderful.

Everything2 is a strange, addictive website that’s been around for almost 8 years now and still feels as disorientingly original as when I first found it. It describes itself as “an online community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database of information, insight and humor,” but I just chanced upon a better description: Everything2 is sort of a Wittypedia. No, really. You want something witty about Michael Spivak? About double penetration? About this quote, this poem, or this phrase? About lust? About Ghost in the Shell? About whores? About sex games? About beautiful, cry-worthy things? About language? About orgasms? About flaunting your sexuality? About menstruation? About growing old? You now know were to find it.

I’m proud to announce that, right now, this blog is the #2 result if you search for “very arousing” in MSN Search—beating such famed contenders as ”The most beautiful tits I’ve ever seen…”, ”Medical Fetish Pictures”, and ”Scent of an uncircumcised penis”. This only goes to show how far behind is Microsoft when it comes to search, but whatever, I’m proud.

Here’s a screenshot, for posterity.

...es el titulo de una cancion de Miguel Gallardo. La cancion es buena pero a mi lo que me encanta es el titulo. Es mi eleccion para ristra de 5 palabras mas romantica (y cachonda) de la lengua Española. En Frances, mi delfin es aquel inovidable (y fatalmente ironico) Je veux baiser votre âne! de Vince Cassel a Monica Bellucci en Irréversible (al que ella responde, sonriendo y tambien con 5 palabras, Tu es un tel romantique!)

Aunque ahora que lo pienso, siendo el campo de juego ristras (y no solo frases), preferiria: lima, axila, cadera, media-mañana y pupila.

En que cosas divago… supongo que yo tambien ando en busca de una amitié amoureuse.

Jorge Wagensberg tiene un libro delgado y delicioso (119 paginas) que me fascina. Se llama Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? y consiste de alrededor de quinientos aforismos sobre la incertidumbre (y su definición de incertidumbre es una de las muchas joyas de este libro). Para mi, que tanto me gustan las definiciones y La Forma, este libro es un manjar. Vaya, le sale tan bien eso de hilvanar aforismos que hasta pareciera que se ha inventado un nuevo género literario.

Pienso transcribir el libro entero e irlo subiendo, poco a poco, en este post. Iba a empezar hoy con 20 frases pero me avorace y ya casi me echo medio libro.

Actualización 27/Octubre/2006: ¡Termine por fin de transcribir el libro!

The other day I had a weird idea for a reputation market (that’s right, a reputation market!) and ever since, I’ve been exploring how value is created and expressed in a capitalist society. My investigations have led me, of course, to that quintessential example of wealth-creation, the scam. Nothing that I’ve read on the subject (not even the Million Dollar homepage :) has impressed me more than this long, old, but fascinating article: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?