地獄の上に

"漢服文といふ名を十年秘めて今こそ命くれ人の初子にえらばれしこれの名親は若草の妻だに無きをいかゞ悲しぶ無宿者天か下には妻も無し夢に見し子の生れ出でむやわれ子生ばつけむと思ひし日の本の一のよき名を人に..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:56:00 -1000

“

漢服文といふ名を十年秘めて今こそ命くれ人の初子に
えらばれしこれの名親は若草の妻だに無きをいかゞ悲しぶ
無宿者天か下には妻も無し夢に見し子の生れ出でむや
われ子生ばつけむと思ひし日の本の一のよき名を人にくれけり

I hid the name within for ten long years:
Aya, weaver Aya. Only to
Grant it to the firstborn of another.

Though chosen as the granter of the name, I have
No wife of my own. Only my
Sorrow, and what pity I earn thereby.

A man of constant sorrow, with no wife,
Nothing under heaven. Only my
Dreams of children, never to be born.

The name I thought to give my child. No better
Name in all Japan. Only
Now that name belongs to someone else.

”

- Yokose Yau (横瀬夜雨) via No-sword

ACM Ubiquity - Publish and perish: why the current publication and review model is killing research and wasting your money

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:25:36 -1000

ACM Ubiquity - Publish and perish: why the current publication and review model is killing research and wasting your money:

The current publication model, and even the notion of “publication”, are rooted in the past. If academic research was born after the Web, we would not even be talking about publications as they are today. With a printed paper model, typical of journals, one needs to have the notion of publication, which happens periodically. If the authors do some extra work or have new findings, they need to write another paper, they cannot update or extend the current one. If people want to comment or discuss on the paper, they need to do this via email and via private discussions with the authors. Of course there is the issue of how to evaluate and give credits to people, but that is a separate matter. With the Web, this is not the case, and there is no reason for the “publication” model to go on unchanged.

I remember in high school, we started a literary magazine that we published on the web. Whenever I felt like we had collected enough content from my friends, I would write some HTML for a new issue and put it on the web all at once. I was never really happy with this format, and I wanted to be able to put out new articles as they arrived. The problem was that blogs hadn’t been invented yet (nor was RSS really around, although whatever proto-dregs of Push might still have been out there somewhere), so I didn’t see how I could do it that way and expect people to keep up with when there were new items. Man, back then it wasn’t even clear if new articles should be listed at the bottom of the page (because they were new things being appended) or at the top (because the assumption was that you had seen the earlier stuff). It was a different world in many ways.

If I were to do it now though, I think I would just set up a tumblr and try to get two weeks worth of items and then have them come out per a day in a queue. On the one hand, this would have been much less creative than what we had to do back in ye olden days, but on the other hand, it might have let us focus more on the writing side and less on the exigencies of publishing.

Anyway, on the academic front, it feels like there still isn’t really such a thing as blogs. But why not? Aren’t blogs the answer to the web’s publishing problem? We do we still need to go through the process of collecting a hundred pages of writing before we can publish anything? Why do I have on my CV the words “Forthcoming 2011”? Why can’t I say “Forthcame, 2009”?

"It’s just me throwing myself at you, romance as usual, us times us, not lust but moxibustion, a..."

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:17:08 -1000

“

It’s just me throwing myself at you,
romance as usual, us times us,

not lust but moxibustion,
a substance burning close

to the body as possible
without risk of immolation.

”

- Alice Fulton - “Claustrophilia.”

Tiny Cartridge - Super creepy Pokémon hack

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:14:46 -1000

Tiny Cartridge - Super creepy Pokémon hack:

Here’s a great non-supernatural ghost story from tiny cartridge. It’s almost certainly fake, but still a good story.

Aza Raskin - An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:10:38 -1000

Aza Raskin - An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy

Interesting to see the blog-o-whatever’s reaction to this concept from Aza Raskin.

Ars Technica is down with it:

Taken together, the underlying concepts behind Tab Candy, Tree Style Tabs, and Read It Later hold the potential to revolutionize Web browsing and solve a wide range of the tab management and information overload problems that are faced by users.

Ignore the code thinks it has potential, but:

Tab management is probably something that should be handled by the OS, but as long as no OS takes care of it, this is an awesome implementation of the concept.

Release Candidate One thinks the whole thing is madness:

Tabs became popular largely because the window management on Windows XP was so horrific that browsers needed their own mini-manager to keep from clogging up the task bar. Years later, Microsoft has [fixed] the task bar and now browser makers are scrambling to keep people from clogging up their tab bars. So we have tab groups and groups of tab groups: virtual desktops and a whole pseudo-ZUI built into a browser.

For my part, I tend to see this from the perspective of someone who does an increasingly large percentage of his web browsing from an iPad. The iPad browser has a hard limit of 9 tabs. And it flushes background tabs from memory more or less immediately, so really it’s more like 9 short term bookmarks.

My browsing style varies, but I tend to start the day with Reeder (the only good RSS client on iPad at the moment, as far as I can tell) and when I see something long that I want to read later, like a story in the local paper, I send it to Instapaper. If I want to comment on a page, I open it in Safari and leave the tab around so I can check on it again later. Generally these tabs stick around for between two days and a week. If I find something I want to blog later, I’ll make a draft post in Tumblr as a reminder for when I go back to my regular computer. I also have a special folder in Instapaper for “stuff to look at on your Macbook” such as Flash videos that don’t have a fallback. For some sites, I prefer to read them in browser because they update too regularly and for those I have bookmarks on my iPad launch screen.

So, all together, I don’t really feel like I need to have groups-upon-groups of super tabs. Instapaper more or less plays that role for me. It also is a cloud service, so it stays “synced” on my phone and Macbook.

To me then this is a pretty neat demo and an interesting idea (one that the Chrome OS people should probably steal), but not something I want to rush out and use.

"The credit reporting agencies [have] been placed in a privileged position where they’re..."

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:16:21 -1000

“The credit reporting agencies [have] been placed in a privileged position where they’re allowed to collect sensitive private information — just as doctors and banks and census takers are. That privileged position means they have a heightened responsibility for maintaining privacy, not a license to use their databases for anything that can make them an extra buck or two.”

- Kevin Drum via slacktivist

Consumed - Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes ...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:08:19 -1000

Consumed - Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes

Imperfections attract, or at least that must be the guiding belief behind a new digital camera described on an e-commerce site as producing “a soft, out-of-focus feel that brings back the feeling of your old Super 8mm home movies.” A sample video made with the Digital Harinezumi backs it up: nearly three minutes of found-this-in-the-attic aesthetics. It’s just the sort of crude quality that digital camcorders elbowed aside years ago.

…

A conspicuous example is the $1.99 Hipstamatic iPhone application, which, as one review put it, filters images made with the device’s camera “to make them look as though they were taken with an unreliable plastic camera … rather than this complex mobile smart phone.” In mid-July it was the 17th-most-popular paid app in the iTunes store; drop by the Hipstamatic Flickr pool to browse more than 53,000 digital images, with pleasingly washed-out colors or other beguiling imperfections resembling those created by glitches in analog processes.

I’ve always been a fan of this aesthetic. See my Game Boy Camera gallery or, more recently, my DSi photos on Facebook. That said, I’m not sure that it works to do the encrudification in software instead of in hardware. It seems to me that ‘authenticity’ (such as it is) comes from using the hardware in such a way that it expresses itself as a part of the images. It’s not about just putting a layer of paint on top of your picture or throwing away bits for no good reason.

Kate Beaton - Loose Canon

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:14:07 -1000

Kate Beaton - Loose Canon

"Taking video games seriously is not unlike taking television seriously. It contorts the sensitive..."

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:43:22 -1000

“Taking video games seriously is not unlike taking television seriously. It contorts the sensitive mind into paroxysms of pleasure and shame not easily disambiguated. There is, thus, a constant note of apology in Bissell’s study. And why shouldn’t he be apologetic? There is something embarrassing about spending hundreds of hours playing video games. No amount of fine language and intellectualizing is going to wipe that away.”

- Morgan Meis - Art of the Game via llimllib

Hip Tanaka - Live at Cheapbeats One of Nintendo’s own puts out...

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 11:34:45 -1000

Hip Tanaka - Live at Cheapbeats

One of Nintendo’s own puts out a half-hour of awesome 8-bit beats. It just goes to show that the original chiptunes artists are still the best.

Encyclopedia Hanasiana - Nobody likes the slush pile. Let's get rid of it.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:22:00 -1000

Encyclopedia Hanasiana - Nobody likes the slush pile. Let's get rid of it.:

Jim Hanas makes a seemingly radical suggestion (lets stop having literary journals with open calls or “slush piles”) that actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Sending a piece in in the hopes of getting it published is nerve wracking, and then the odds are that no one will read it once it gets published anyway, since the only ones who buy the journal are the people waiting for their piece to get published. So, what to do?

So let’s drop the pretense and kill the slush pile. Manuscripts considered by solicitation only. (As most of them are now anyway, let’s be honest.) How will writers and editors find each other then? Simple. Writers will put their work out—on blogs or in writing communities or wherever—and editors will find it.

He makes a strong argument that this could work.

For my part, I think it would make sense to pay for a monthly “list of important papers in your sub-discipline of philosophy.” I try looking at Reddit’s philosophy section sometimes, but basically it’s just not readable. The wisdom of the crowds doesn’t work when you’re looking for wisdom instead of distraction. On the other hand, I’ve never picked up an issue of Philosophy East-West and not been filled with the urge to add another 40 pages to my endlessly growing reading list. So, to me the future would be a well-curated blog behind a paywall that points to people’s articles which are hosted on the personal or university homepages of their authors. The articles themselves would be available to anyone for free, so if you find it on Google Scholar, you don’t have to be part of the existing university structure to get the privilege of reading it for less than $40 (which is seriously how much the average JSTOR article goes for by itself).

I don’t know if this is what’s really going to happen in the future, but it’s a direction I’d like to see things moving in.

Dragon Quest IX is like Anna Karenina for Japanese people I...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:10:00 -1000

Dragon Quest IX is like Anna Karenina for Japanese people

I once had a theory that RPGs work on the same principle as 19th century mega-novels. With something like Anna Karenina or Moby Dick you keep reading for two reasons: you like the process of wading in the incredibly detailed prose and you want to see the next plot development. The actual plots of those books are pretty simple if you boil them down (“woman has affair”; “man hates whale”), but the fun is to have to spend 1,000 pages getting to the end. This is why it was funny when Woody Allen said, “I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” As you read, the next plot point is always just out of reach around the next chapter, and so you want to keep moving ahead just a little bit so you can make that tiny next bit of progress.

For an RPG, the dual motivations are battles and plot, and functionally the same principles apply as in a mega-novel. You can play one of these games for 20, 40, or even 100 hours depending on how deep into it you get, and all along the way, the primary motivation is going to be desire to see what happens next but the fun part is getting there through a series of battles.

In his blog, Jeremy Parish reflects on the difference between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy:

DQIX is refreshing in its directness. It skips all of that angst and contrived mystery by kicking off the entire quest with tour through a day in the hero’s life. You see the accident that robs him of his powers and his unfortunate fall from the Observatory, and there’s no hand-wringing about it. The story picks up shortly thereafter and you simply get about the business of trying to return to the heavens, which you accomplish by doing nice things for people and generally making the world a better place. It’s earnest, and it’s pleasantly free of pretense. The story has its twists, but the straightforward presentation of the tale gives real purpose to the hero’s actions — a reason to do good deeds — and makes the ultimate resolution to the story (which involves the hero’s nature) much more potent.

Without having played a Final Fantasy game, I think that sounds about right. I’m twenty-something hours into Dragon Quest IX (my first DraQue), which means I’m maybe at the halfway point? I know I’ve collected four magical MacGuffins out of maybe seven or so. The story is broken up into different vignettes as you wander from town to town.

From what I can tell, the basic of the plot has someone die in almost every town you visit, and then you have to find a way to settle the affairs of their soul so they can go to heaven. For example, in one town a girl was weak and sickly her whole life. Then her parents died. She knew she was on the edge of dying too when she got a magical fruit and wished for her only friend—a doll that looked just like her—to be real. She then dies and the doll takes her place in the town. But the doll doesn’t understand what she’s supposed to do as a real person and can’t relate to anyone, and her life is pretty miserable, so in the end you have to help her return to being just a doll. It’s pretty sad but very well presented.

For its part, the battle system of DQIX is very basic (just like EarthBound, heh [but unlike Mother 3]), but it serves its purpose. The battles are really quick and addictive. (I suspect the quickness is in part a function of the basicness of the menus and whatnot.) In the early stages you gain levels very quickly, so it’s easy to gauge your own progress. You feel like you’re stronger after only a small number of battles. Plus, there’s no real penalty for death, you just have to go back to the last save point, but everything you did remains done and you keep your experience points. All that you lose is half of your petty cash on hand. Because you can engage in the battles without using your full concentration, it’s fun to just grind up some loot and levels while you listen to a podcast or something else. Then when the podcast is over and your linguistic processing centers become free, you can go to the part of the game where the story advances and get your next hit of plot, which will have you jonesing to play again later.

The graphics of the game are, uh, unique. Tycho of Penny-Arcade writes:

It makes me feel bad that I want it to look better sometimes, but I do; it makes me feel like I have a prickly heart and that I’m not truly capable of love. Key NPCs are surprisingly great - easy on the eye, legitimately evocative. The menagerie is also a treat, with beasts that visibly delight in their own evil nature. But your characters, being lathed out of chunks in the hero factory, don’t always rise to the level. This is the third piece of Nintendo DS hardware I’ve purchased, and I’ve had as much fun on this system as I’ve had on any other, but when I see my character’s clubby, pointy non-hands in this game I purse my lips. Those inhuman stumps may be my only complaint. The 3DS really can’t come soon enough.

I would say that the look grows on you. I think it was Nick Rumas at Phantom Leap who said that we were fortunate with the DS to get a system that has its own style of doing 3D that’s different from any other system. You can tell that Phantom Hourglass is a DS game and not from any other system because of the way the 3D is, and the same applies to Dragon Quest IX. At the same time though and in a way that’s different from other games on the system, DQIX has a style that is strongly suggestive of the NES. Between its very simple menus and the repetition of character “sprites” (models) from town to town, the game feels like a throwback to an early time, but in a good way. Perhaps the earlier time it is throwing back to is 19th century Russia?

Deborah Solomon interviews Ex-President Vincente Fox

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:34:00 -1000

Deborah Solomon interviews Ex-President Vincente Fox:

What do you think Mexicans have contributed to American culture?

Oh, starting with Mexican food! The jalapeños and the tacos and the rest. I think they have contributed family values. And then we have our culture. When you were killing Indian Apaches there, we had built Mayan cities, the pyramids, Mexico City.

Vincente Fox is too kind. I would have said, “Starting alphabetically? Arizona….”

Cynic - The Paradox of Adversity

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:32:00 -1000

Cynic - The Paradox of Adversity:

A good guest post over at Ta-Nahesi Coates’ blog:

Listen to the fabulously successful discuss their lives, and you’re almost certain to hear them attribute their eventual successes to the challenges that they first faced and overcame. Hardscrabble childhoods, menial jobs, discrimination, disabilities, doubt - these are the cliches of American autobiography. And few would trade away their triumphs in exchange for an easier path through life.

But take a look at their children. They don’t pick out failing schools for them to attend or arrange for them to spend their summers in difficult, dangerous, low-paying work. So if adversity paved the way to their own success, why don’t they replicate that adversity to give their offspring a similar advantage?

This reminds me of the furor over the “Wise Latina” comment of Sotomayor. If you read her actual speech, the point wasn’t that all Latinas/os are smarter than all Gringos. It’s that certain kinds of experience can be enriching if you can make it through them. I think that there’s a strong epistemological argument to be made for the importance of diversity of all kinds: sexual, racial, religious, and class based. Says Sotomayor:

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give.

Ross Douthat has also been writing a fair amount lately about the lack of diversity among elites:

This [the disadvantaging of lower class whites relative to other whites] was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

…

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

Anyway, moral of the story #1: most of the time you don’t want to come up hard, because coming up hard is hard. But if you can come up hard, it will give you a perspective that is valuable in life. Therefore, we should try to structure society so as to promote the viewpoints of those in a position to have learned the hard way.

Moral of the story #2: If you alienate certain segments of the population—even segments that are otherwise well off—it creates paranoia and conspiracy mindedness, so avoid doing so.

I recognize that there is a tension between #1 and #2, but I think it is possible to thread the needle.

NYTimes - Above the Crowds, but Not Above Lawbreaking A...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:41:51 -1000

NYTimes - Above the Crowds, but Not Above Lawbreaking

A young man pushed several buttons on an outdoor intercom, and after the piercing sound of the lock release, he vanished, like an experienced thief, into the cool shadow of the building’s lobby. A few minutes later, he stepped onto the roof and gazed down at Moscow.

From 14 floors up, the metal roofs of the city center shade into green islands of parks and then the grayish factory chimneys of the suburbs. Birds scream, and from below comes the muffled sound of traffic. He sat down at the edge of the roof and nodded at the vista.

…

Something larger than life draws them, said Anna V. Tikhomirova, a psychologist who has researched Russia’s teen subcultures.

“They probably haven’t grown up yet,” she said. “They still have a demand for a fairy tale romance, and the vista of the twilit city meets their requirements perfectly. When a young man is standing on the edge of a roof, he feels he is more important, experienced and older. He is asserting himself.”

I would say they are hobo of the vertical, rather than horizontal.

"Let us assume that the conscious mind, with all of its ambiguities and mysteries and abyssal sense..."

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:26:16 -1000

“Let us assume that the conscious mind, with all of its ambiguities and mysteries and abyssal sense of identity, is nothing but the illusory and superficial epiphenomenon of some hidden, unitary, primordial, and amoral material impulse towards survival. Very well, then, but why would it have to hide this fact? Surely it would have no need to deceive itself so elaborately, or to conceal its own genetic interests from itself, unless it already possessed some kind of moral sensitivity to the shame of selfishness. What, then, is that moral self that is there “before” the Darwinian self, whose conscience must be appeased, needing to believe that it is moved by altruism or disinterested love?”

- David Bentley Hart - In Self-Defense via, as ever, Ross Douthat

"In other words, this is a new incarnation of the military-industrial complex in the making. The old..."

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:26:06 -1000

“In other words, this is a new incarnation of the military-industrial complex in the making. The old complex—the aerospace and shipbuilding corporations that emerged or thrived after World War II—was probably necessary, too. But, as students of that complex know, it has a downside—and the downside in this new intelligence-IT complex could be fatal.”

- Slate - The most frightening thing about our unfathomably complex intelligence bureaucracy. (Based on the must-read [by which I mean, “I must get around to reading”] WaPo series “Top Secret America”.)

Star-Advertiser - Hawaii supports regulating violent video game sales

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:25:00 -1000

Star-Advertiser - Hawaii supports regulating violent video game sales:

Finishing off the videogame theme for tonight:

Hawaii has joined a growing list of states supporting a contested California law to ban the sale of violent video games to minors.

The other day, the topic was Analects 2.3 (“Lead the people with rules… and they will avoid punishments but be without shame,” &c.) and the importance of non–law-based social regulation. In the comments, Corey quoted A Man for All Seasons:

“What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? … And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

I think a case like this one is a good place to clarify my feelings about law. Roger Ames often remarks that the meaning of Analects 2.3 is that law is a last resort. Law is what we do when the other options on the table have failed.

So, if we look at the case of selling violent videogames to children, the question we need to have before we create a law is “Have non-legal remedies already failed or will they predictably fail?” I think the answer here is “No.” While it is true that the game industry has a completely unhealthy obsession with violence (among other means of corrupting the youth), that doesn’t mean that the law in question will help resolve the issue. Notice that the law only restricts the sale of games to minors, it does not prohibit the creation or distribution of games. However, in practice most major retailers already have a voluntary policy in place of restricting the sale of games rated MA and above. So, adding the proposed law would add more regulation without having much impact on the actual practices of retailers.

The danger here is that the law is being treated as a means of symbolic communication. “We think violent games are bad, so here’s something, even though it won’t change anything.” This is supposedly a conservative sentiment. However, the truly conservative thing to do is to be wary of the unnecessary wielding of the governmental power. We do not know what future laws today’s law will be taken as the precedent for. Games appear to be a new form of communication (“speech” in legal terms), so any new restriction on them needs to be motivated by something like the proverbial man shouting fire in a theater, least we open the door to restriction of the freedom of speech. In this case, however, we do not observe any empirical linkage between the popularity of violent games over the years 1970–2010 and the level of violent crime during those same years. Videogame usage has skyrocketed, but violent crime has mostly been going down since the end of the crack boom. Absent some more overt connection between games and social harms, the use of the law as a tool of symbolic chastisement is a dangerously frivolous way of expressing our disapproval of games. The sage does not speak unless he expects his words to be thereby realized.

Continuing the chiptune theme, here’s Toys of Vega rocking out...

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:12:21 -1000

Continuing the chiptune theme, here’s Toys of Vega rocking out Jakarta’s Plaza Indonesia mall via tinycartridge.

Linus Åkesson, inventor of the chipophone This guy is a really...

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:49:00 -1000

Linus Åkesson, inventor of the chipophone

This guy is a really great pianist. It would be interesting to see videogame music played in concert by someone like him to see if it’s possible for 8-bit music to become more emotional when the subtle differences in human timing (as opposed to pre-programmed timing) are introduced.

Via Nintendo Life