The Longest Now

I’m trying to track down physical creature cards, a logic puzzle that started w/ the Elementary Science Study project (in Newton!) & was riffed on for decades.  The visual and mathematical puzzles became quite involved; including combinations of shading, geometry, topology, number theory, and more.  Creatures were also creatively named: Mokes, Snorpes, Gligs, Wibbles, Shlooms, Bleeps, Quarks, Trugs, Zyzzes, Mellinarks…

If you run across these somewhere, please reach out and get in touch.  I would like to reprint some of the professionally done sequences, and perhaps expand on the idea.

Example (via Amber Case).

Discussion:

https://twitter.com/metasj/status/1584695567846109184

Stanislaw Lem‘s Cyberiad is a miracle of 20th century literature, and of translation. I want to preserve parts of two stories here in as many languages as I can find.  Sources wanted for both, if you have a copy in your language:

• The poems of Trurl’s Electronic Bard, with their exquisite compact wordplay.
• ^{(to come!)} The story How the World Was Saved — where everything beginning with a single letter is destroyed. Douglas Hofstadter’s paean to translation, Le Ton Beau de Marot, touches on the challenges with translating this story.  

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Footprints in a self-similar river. The occasional passing act of will that remains and is amplified downstream, so that at some future moment, perhaps fording at another spot altogether, you discover a print announcing to you alone that you have been there before.

A decade ago, I once spent too long creating a stylesheet for a tiny “how-to” template: the numbers in boxes laying out a three-step process, whether to switch fonts, bold, padding, background and border colors. Making the css just right to work on screens of all sizes.

It looked something like this.  >>

In fact, almost exactly like that.  Some things worked, some didn’t.  I tried to add padding to the left of the roman numerals, tried to remove the pixel of whitespace above the bordered boxes, without success.  Should the roman numerals be left-aligned but the boxed text centered?  Since then, scores of similar templates have copied and remixed it, changing text and context but not style.  The color palette I settled on, almost content with it, shows up on hundreds of pages. It would now take a script and many hours to find and tweak each instance of the design.

I run across one myself every few months, and experience river-shock: the sense of seeing something simple you did once that has a quiet, pervasive mark that cannot be undone.  This is quite different from the sense of pride or dismay that comes from seeing the expected result of a major endeavor: a book in someone’s hands, a clinic building in use or in disrepair, a student now teaching others.

Another memory: One week I set about compiling a collection for a museum, a complete series of parts, diagrams and XO laptops: a few boxes full.  I had sent background context by mail, but at the last minute took a fine-tipped sharpie and attached clarifying notes to post-its on each cluster.

Years later, visiting the museum with a friend, I ran across the display as part of a history of computing; the electronics beautifully preserved as I had hoped, as I saw with pride.  And – river shock – a handful of my post-its, with small diagrams and 8pt-font notes to the curator, exactly where I had placed them.  Anyone with access to the materials could have chosen one of each and put them in a box; my handwriting made it seem like my own workdesk, enclosed in perspex and on display.

On occasion a visitor will find one of the historical texts I’ve preserved against linkrot and plagiarism, like the acquiantance checking up on the man trapped in Charles de Gaulle airport, or a friend running across their favorite college essay or spellpoem, and I have a shadow of that frisson.  A passing fancy, created to be found anonymously by others, appearing at least once more in the endless river of daily life.

January is gray, and this now is the Ur-Jan, but today for a change was bright.  Thanks to the snain, red lettering, h’rissa and light.

And to you, dear Reader, for truth, presence, and ideas catalysed in telling – rarities that should be commonplaces. And for this box of potential thoughts about thoughts I will think Thursday.

I still have so many things to ask: what you know of supersimultaneity, quantified serendipity, if you feel a cool thrill in the small of your back when a crux or potentiality approaches, foreshadowing and afterimages. Sometimes I wake with the certainty I must pursue such things with all who might answer, before my pulse cools and I file it away as dream residue for review. Next time.

Today drew out instead improvements in preservation and propagation: idiogenics, cryogenic Seed Vaults and Culture Vaults, a vicariant Greenland. Advances in meme propagation as a critical piece of biological development, including RNA and human speech, but countless other innovations besides. Revisited a recurring dream of a summer camp (memezoo!) for animals who have learned to communicate with humans, to demonstrate relevant universalities.  These prodigies & their humans could spend time with the most precocious of their own species, sharing their newfound memetics, solving puzzles together, creating cross-species pidgins and developing contextual slang, to see what emerges // a place where Batyr and Kosik could have met, and Kanzi could build language bridges with more than just his step-sister.

And what is Earth herself but a planet methodically coated by a memetic zoo?  Once we have a more balanced sense of non-human memetics, we may be able to see our own more clearly, in both historical and current context.

Then Tech Sølidarity met in a converted warehouse, 150 people totally focused on the moment, technologists listening and thinking for over an hour. At most a handful of computers out, checking data or taking notes for the room. But the same narrow cross-section as before, 80% men, 90% white.

We agended aligning national efforts towards: visualizing data for local politics, streamlining calls to city pols; visualizing gerrymandering & voter disempowerment; securing voting machines; coordinating and sustaining responses to alt-facts (like the Guardian’s dangerously wrong WhatsApp bashing); listing things tech design decisions have broken & proposing fixes; devising mottos for technologists (Protect the Vulnerable?); building toolkits for curators and reviewers to ward off vandals and trolls.  And finally, looking for interfaith groups holding similar gatherings of religious leaders, with which we might cross-pollinate.

I worked with the group gathering voting-machine tech & policy wonks who could provide checklists and advice that we could adopt and share with city councils and mayors. We glissed an arpeggio of steps from procurement & policy to auditing & security, which could each be adopted by someone. Only pranksters whispered about blockchain, but agreed we needed a tacky sign to raise whenever the word came up. Next time.

They too agreed not to wait too long before the next, and to endeavour|fail|evolve rather than simply passing on the meme.