This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun#

This paragraph introduces the idea of the essay...#

The artist's rejoinder to the question implied in the title above is absolute and consistent through the ages: critics are good for nothing. Swift long ago summed up the artist's case: "Critics are the drones of the learned world, who devour the honey, and will not work themselves." Other great artists have filled out the indictment: critics are ignorant; they corrupt public taste, attack and destroy genius; they are failed artists or they would not be critics; they belong (said Swift again) with the whores and the politicians. The only writer I have come across who had a good word for critics was Josh Billings. He was a humorist and may have been ironic: "To be a good critic," he said, "demands more brains and judgment than most men possess." A modest claim, but it leaves untouched the artist's grievance: What need for critics at all? [pg. 64]

In discussion the idea that the best, and essential, critics must be artists themselves, Jacques writes the following,#

Since artists and critics are a feature of our unexampled pluralism, the notion of an ideal critic, one who is not only certified perfectly balanced mentally, but also capable of judging art exclusively as art, is a mistaken ideal. It springs from that other mistaken notion, the autonomy of art, and its twin belief in something called the aesthetic experience. This last term is a t best a prideful synonym for the alert perception of art; for what is felt and perceived in art is not really separable from preexisting mental and emotional attachments. The intake does not cause a distilled state of mind cut off from the rest. As the pleasures art affords differ from the sensual while relying on the senses, they likewise partake of all other pleasures-intellectual, affectional, and spiritual. In short, the phrase "pure art" does not correspond to any reality. [pg. 69-70]

A complaint of Jacques is that the English language is being destroyed by misuse.#

As a result, the language of criticism sounds identical with the prose of the advertisers of fashions: vague images create the illusion of moving among luxurious things. The word metaphor itself typifies the vacancy of mind. It has been so debased as to qualify even what does not exist. Thus in a review of a singer whose upper register had faded we read: "She turned this to her advantage, using it as a metaphor for the uneasy yearnings of the Mahler songs."

Now, metaphor implies a comparison among four terms. If one says "the ship plows the sea," the meaning is that just as the plow in its forward motion divides the soil, so the ship moves and divides the sea. Without four terms, no metaphor. Hence there is no discoverable meaning in praising a sculptor for "his way with three-dimensional metaphors" or in saying that in literature the mention of food "serves up many metaphors.." We may wonder why critics, who are certainly educated people of uncommon ability, have adopted this reverse English, which destroys integrity and beauty at one stroke. They cannot all be simply perverse. Rather they have succumbed to certain widespread social attitudes. They have, on the one hand, aped what everybody now does with language, and, on the other, they have yielded to what everybody thinks criticism is. [pg 70-71]

What does Jacques think art really IS?#

I prefer to say that art is an extension of life. Art uses the physical materials of ordinary experience-words, pigment, sound, wood, stone or anything else-and puts them otgether in such a way that the sensations they set off arouse our memories of living, add to them, and thereby extend our life. [...]

If this is true, we can understand why criticism cannot capture the being and ultimate meaning of art, why there can be no consensus about art, artists, and works of art. For no agreement is conceivable about Being and the ultimate meaning of life. Art and life are kindred kaleidoscopes, shifting even as we look at them; they do impose a uniform pattern on all minds but may be "taken" in a myriad ways. In re-forming our view of experience through order and clarity, art brings out novelties and ambiguities no one suspected: it is a second life and extraordinary one. That common words, and patches of oil on canvas, and vibrating strings are able to do this is a mystery, and though we "cannot hope to know what art is," we know that it somehow captures and holds up to our gaze the mystery of existence. [pg. 74]

Netslaves 2.0: Tales of Surviving the Great Tech Gold Rush, by Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin, is the worst book I've read in a long time. Basically the whole idea is to point the finger at stupid people from the dot com bubble and embrace their ideals and mannerisms by throwing in every buzzword imaginable. I'm offended my Computers & Society teacher assigned it.#

A reader wrote in with a request,#

So...I went to your "About Me" page and was disappointed not to find scantily clad pics of you or at least juicy details like your favorite underwear brands and colors. Now that you know what visitors to that page are looking for I hope you'll oblige us...

I can't really provide scantily clad pictures because then you'd know something special about me that I intend to keep secret.#

As far as underwear goes I stick with Abercrombie and Fitch boxers because I'm super lazy about that sort of thing and can just throw them in with an old purchase. But being lazy in that regard makes me never go shopping for anything - particularly underwear. I think I need a wife to nag me and make sure I treat myself right.#

Favourite colours, white & blue. And not just because I'm a Mac geek. The purity of a snowscape is amazing and the crystal clear blue of the sky or the ocean or incredible. The two colours remind me most of nature. Additionally, they are a nice constrast to each other so you get this delightful visual effect.#

Impossible.#

Jessica posts notes from last night's meeting without Dave.#

Aslam wants to be in on the secrets of the Blogger Cabal.#

Ed Cone says, "Real bloggers read blogs." I do do that and often post comments too. Sometimes others' blogs provoke/inspire my own posts, in which case I reference them. So, as far as I can tell, I should be a "real blogger."

As I've become familiar with the blogosphere, however, I've come to suspect that there's a secret resource that real bloggers have access to, which is necessary to qualify as one: Time. Forget the Enrons and the WorldComs and the Halliburtons, these blogger elites seem to have found a way to stuff their time coffers by depleting the meagre reserves of ordinary bloggers like me. I don't want to be ordinary anymore, which is why I so wanted to go to the recent BloggerCon and learn from the heavyweights how to maximize the accumulation of blogging time but, alas, like money, one also needs time to make time.

When you love something you find the time. And when you have a passion for something it shows.

Via Kevin is Adam's Kissing Booth - a weekly aggregation of dating advice from bloggers.#

Also via Kevin is a link to Jeff Jarvis and his checklist of milestones until the time when we wont have to explain "blog" anymore.#

: When a country singer sings about one. Inevitable.

: When The Daily Show mentions blogs. Check.

: When Jay Leno makes a joke about blogs. Waiting.

Cutest: "BOOYAH I AM TEH ROXOR!"#

Jim Behrle keeps his up to date crush list on his blog. So funny.#

Richard Tallent predicts the future of software development.#

I was surprised by this:

More languages. Regular expressions, VB.NET, SQL, CSS, XHTML, and XPath all have their own core competancies, and I predict that in ten years, good programmers will need to be proficient in more languages for their daily work, not fewer.

Richard Tallent posts some thoughts about how IDEs could be evolved to make software developers more productive.#

Give me a Code Babblefish.

[...]

Microsoft.NET made some great strides in this area. Unlike with other managed platforms like Java, I'm not tied to one language. I can write in any number of nearly-equivalent languages, with syntax being the biggest difference. This being the case, I should be able to change language views like I change fonts. I should be able to flip between seeing the same code as VB.NET, C#, JavaScript.NET, J#, C++, or MSIL with the click of a button, like changing the formatting or zoom level in Excel.

[...]

Mix-n-Match: Language Agnosticism.

Every language has its own merits, features, and central uses. VB.NET has optional method parameters, a great feature in my book, but C# doesn't. C#, on the other hand, has the fancy C-heritage "?" evaluator that makes VB.NET's IIf function pale by comparison, and will soon have other nifty features that will make VB weenies like me either drool or think about switching. When code cannot be reasonably viewed in the programmer's preferred languages due to differing features, it should be displayed inline with the other code.

Why not just use great language with all your favourite features to start with?

First-class status for markup.

[...]

I would love to see an IDE that would not only allow me to mix traditional programming languages, but also move seamlessly between code and markup. Why should we have to choose between moving XHTML to another file or having to place it (escaped) in a mess of StringBuilder calls, or, worse, some goofy XML-writing API like HtmlWriter. Instead, the editor should let us just define the "stdout" of the moment (a StringBuilder, a Stream, etc.) and just stick our markup straight in the editor (with appropriate wrapping, indentation, Intellisense, and color-coding) and let the IDE figure out the rest in the background.

Like in DrScheme? Here Too.

Hyperlink me.

There should be some reasonable way to hyperlink methods, classes, and objects straight to either the code implementing them (if I have it) or to the documentation for it. I'm not talking about context-sensitive help or Intellisense, but rather a new way of navigating around my code, not unlike using a web browser.

In Scheme & Lisp, it is convention to put your documentation a string underneath your function's definition.

Raymond Chen writes about why Daylight Savings Time is nonintuitive in relation to time function on Windows.#

Why don't the time zone conversion functions use the time zone appropriate for the time of year?

One reason is that it means that FileTimeToLocalFileTime and LocalFileTimeToFileTime would no longer be inverses of each other. If you had a local time during the "limbo hour" during the cutover from standard time to daylight time, it would have no corresponding UTC time because there was no such thing as 2:30am local time. (The clock jumped from 2am to 3am.) Similarly, a local time of 2:30am during the cutover from daylight time back to standard time would have two corresponding UTC times.

Another reason is that the laws regarding daylight savings time are in constant flux. For example, if the year in the example above was 1977 instead of 2000, the conversion would have been correct because the United States was running on year-round Daylight Savings Time due to the energy crisis. Of course, this information isn't encoded anywhere in the TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION structure. Similarly, during World War 2, the United States went on DST all year round. And between 1945 and 1966, the DST rules varied from region to region.

Jason Salavon has pictures of every Playboy Centerfold ever. It's very amazing.#

The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.

Richard updates on a post.#

For the record, about an hour after posting it, I went for a nap and woke up having second thoughs about the post. Not second thoughts about the opinion, but second thoughts about how well it applied to the subject at hand. d was talking about girls, not women, whereas I was talking about women, which led to mixing theories on my part. I'm less sure now that the reason behind girls (that is, adolescent or prepubescent females) being unhappy is the same reason women (any female above, say, the age of 18) are unhappy.

Richard has Simpons quotes and thoughtful commentary on an article on how political slogan t-shirts discourage dissent rather than encourage it.#

In commercial branding, the purpose is to attract, to seduce, to convert. C'mon over and try me is Coke's message. But in political messaging, the point seems to be to rebuff, even to intimidate the unconverted. I'm a case in point. After 9/11 we put a bumper sticker on our car: "United against Terrorism." It isn't there to invite discussion. It's there to shame terrorist apologists.

To return to my feminist eavesdropee -- take her (probable) "A Woman's Right to Choose" T-shirt. It announces for abortion rights, but is not an invitation to debate the issue. Rather it subliminally warns pro-lifers not to waste time in an approach. This pre-selection shortcut effectively narrows the wearer's field of relations to viewpoint clones. How can she choose relationships on individual merits, if she can't get past T-shirt identity?

Richard is totally predictable by Pinder, who provides a template for Richard's posts.#

Via Copyfight is an awesome patent from Clive Thompson.#

There's a profile in the current issue of Scientific American of Joe Armstrong, a 70-year-old who decided to build a device you could use for kicking yourself in the butt. And hey -- this being the Age of Copyright, Joe wasn't content merely to build one o' these babies. Nope: He also patented it. Thus we have the magnificent spectacle of the drones at the US Patent and Trademarks Office officially stamping and approving patent number 6,293,874, which is for a "User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user's buttocks". I urge all good citizens to drop whatever they're doing and immediately check out this patent, which reads something like a co-operative project between Leonardo da Vinci and the Marx Brothers: [...]

Sophia Yen in the New York Times on What Teenagers Need.#

Adolescents are being ignored, and the consequences will be dire for this country. We send young people off to war to die, but we won't help them with after-school tutoring, job training and college tuition.

Adolescents are still children. They need our help and guidance to mature into the productive and positive adults they can be. As we spend $87 billion and dozens of young people's lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, let us spend at least a few million dollars on the young men and women at home.

jshell writes about Jon Udell's recent report on the Knowledge Navigator.#

The Concept Video

jshell:

Some of the Knowledge Navigator's concepts started showing up in the Newton, primarily the intelligent communication. You could scribble a note, such as "Dinner with Joan," tap an icon, and it would examine the text and make an entry in your calendar in the evening with a link to Joan's contact information (asking you to find the correct Joan if there was more than one match). By my understanding, the Newton treated everything as one big "soup" of data, always available for finding and linking. Palm Desktop on the Mac (a rebranded version of Claris' Organizer) had similar intelligence built in (again - if memory serves me correctly). And I've seen programs for the Palm OS and for Microsoft Outlook that could do similar things. But the effect was never as cool as it was on The Newton. It was really meant to be a personal assistant, something you could put data into and pull back out of regardless of where it went. I don't know how well third party Newton applications played with "The Soup" but I hope that it was a pervasive concept.

Jon:

Presence, attention management, and multimodal communication are woven into the piece in ways that we can clearly imagine if not yet achieve. "Contact Jill," says Prof. Bradford at one point. Moments later the computer announces that Jill is available, and brings her onscreen. While they collaboratively create some data visualizations, other calls are held in the background and then announced when the call ends. I feel as if we ought to be further down this road than we are. A universal canvas on which we can blend data from different sources is going to require clever data preparation and serious transformation magic. The obstacles that keep data and voice/video networks apart seem more political and economic than technical.

Apple's vision, in any case, was and is spot on. I wonder how much closer to reality it will be in another fifteen years.

Via Boing Boing is The Butterfly Alphabet.#

Armand sez, "Smithsonian naturalist and photographer Kjell Sandved one day found a butterfly with a silvery, gleaming letter 'F' woven into the tapestry of its wings. Having found one letter of the alphabet, he wondered whether there might be others butterflies flying around with letters on their wings. Could he find them all? He took the challenge but little did he know that it would take him 24 years."

Lance Arthur posts another episode of Hairy Palms and by the end I was laughing out loud and groaning with every turn of the scenario.#

Here's where I tell you why I never go to gay bars:

[...]

4. I am a loser.

I don't add the last bit to make you feel sorry for me or make you feel like punching me hard in the gut, I say it because gay bars make me feel that I am a loser. I'm not the extroverted happy-go-lucky gadfly making friends left and right and flirting with the bartender and dancing with my shirt off and laughing at my own jokes which are actually funny. I am the guy hugging the corner of the bar afraid to move and averting my eyes before that guy sees me looking at him and rolls his eyes, "as if."

I am learning that most of this garbage I carry with me is "myth," not "truth." Myth is the stuff you (I) create to make it easier for your(my)self to fail, and it's designed to make you (me) fail. It allows you (me) to go into any situation and avoid rejection because you've (I've) already rejected your(my)self. "I am unworthy. I am stupid. I am ugly. I am too shy to talk to you. I cannot approach anyone." Blah blah blah.

Truth is the stuff about you that's real—that you aren't ugly or stupid or awkward, that you can carry on a conversation, that you're no better or worse than any other guy there, you're just you. That comes from, you know, living. Taking chances, accepting what happens, moving on. So you can either accept the myths and build them into a semblance of truth, or reject the myths and, you know, live for a change.

Thanks, that'll be $130 please. See you next week.

Gordon Weakliem responds to a conversation Dave Winer and I had.#

There was a post on makeoutcity about bundling scripting languages with platforms. Dave Winer used Lisp as an example: If vendors had bundled a scripting language, that would have wiped out Lisp. I don't think so. Every copy of MS-DOS came with a BASIC, every Unix out there had a C compiler. So that might have killed the business of BASIC or C vendors. So what about scripting? Every Unix had sed and awk and whatever shell scripting languages, but when Perl came along, it pretty much killed those options. Now, probably every Linux distro ships with Perl and Python and maybe Ruby. That would kill the vendors trying to sell Perl, Python, and Ruby interpreters, but Lisp? Nah. Now if Bill Gates had been a Lisp hacker, maybe Microsoft would be the only Lisp vendor today. No that's something to ponder.

I think it has to do with whether or not the "platform" is controlled a single vendor and if the bundle language has weaknesses that other products can overcome. So, Apple released Applescript which was basically all you could want from a core scripting language (but you'd have to built the extra Frontier application level stuff on top of it) versus Microsoft sending out MS-BASIC which could not compete in anyway with C/C++. Then on UNIX, there was a culture of cooperation and diversity, plus there was no real single vendor who could make sure something was on every semester. Mer?

Joel Spolsky endorses a great idea.#

It's hard to believe that here it is, what, 2002? No, I think it's 2003, and when you want to send a really big file or a folder full of little files to someone, you generally wind up messing around with ftp servers and whatnot.

Well, no longer. "A token is like a shortcut or alias that you can send via e-mail or instant message. With just one click you can create a token, and no matter how large the files you want to send are, the token representing them will be very small—just a few KB. Anyone you send a token to can then download the free Creo Token Redeemer software, and with one click redeem the token and download the files. It works for anything—a single file, an entire folder, a huge movie."

Dan Sugalski continues on the Forth beat.#

Parrot Forth

Or, "Fifth", I suppose, since it's not quite Forth. As I said earlier, I'm working on Parrot's Forth implementation. It was originally written by Jeff Goff, and the core (what I consider most of the tough bits) is done and has been working for ages, just nobody noticed. The plan (subject to change if it doesn't pan out) is to use Parrot as the core engine for the language the big Work App uses. (The current engine is old and has a number of issues, not the least of which is a really primitive syntax and a simple integrated ISAM database with limits that we're hitting every week or three)

Tony Pierce just had a birthday and he said the funniestest thing.#

thank you to elliot smith for putting a knife into his heart about a mile away from here, killing himself, thus taking some of the spotlight away from the anniversary of my birth. i have a bizarre relationship with public attention, so i thank you for diverting some of it away with that knife

Mark Pilgrim has a preview of Panther... awesome.#