“As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I’m not going to use them up.”
— Samuel Delany, in an interview in The Paris Review.
Use them up
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Author Archives: Hal
Patience is a virtue
“Able Fox Five to Able Fox. I got a target but ya gotta be patient.”
The Oberkassel puppy
From my friend David D Levine comes a pointer to this post about a poignant burial site — which includes the oldest record we have of a domesticated dog. The skeleton of a puppy, from 14,000 years ago. Plus a woman in her twenties, and a man in his forties. Buried “with honour and ceremony.”
But there’s no question the dog was domesticated. It was nursed “through three bouts of distemper when it was four to five months old.”
More at this 2018 paper.
Like, but not comment
Dave Winer writes: “If I see something on Micro.blog that I would Like on another system, I don’t comment, I just do nothing, not because I’m bashful or overly quiet, rather because this is a language, and a comment has different meaning from a Like.”
This is another example where science fiction fanzines had this situation decades before online venues. (Not a surprise — many online customs clearly have precursors.) In this instance, there’s an acronym. RAEBNC. Read And Enjoyed But No Comment.
I’ve said before among my circle on Facebook that the FB Like fulfills much of the function of RAEBNC. Twitter is somewhat different, because of velocity. Instagram, because of the implicit aesthetic assessment.
But both Like and RAEBNC are doing that same thing — I read it, I agree with it, and no more communication at this time, Captain. (snappy salute)
“People come back to places that send them away.”
Dave Winer wrote that, back in 2005. “People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.”
I did, Dave.
Alert users might have noticed I make my posts linkeriffic. One of the things I’ve missed on Twitter and Facebook is the ability to link more than once, maybe twice. Because links are a form of footnoting, to me. Even Ted Nelson might appreciate that. And I want to reach beyond Wikipedia entries, and go to people’s own sites, if possible.
AuthaGraph
And then there’s the AuthaGraph projection.
As you can see, they’re claiming it can be folded into a sphere, but I have to squint really hard at the end result to see it. Russia, for example, looks distorted to me.
This entry is here mostly because I want to reduce my reliance on Google to find it.
(Ah. I was right. The way I found Justin Haruaki Kunimune, who came up with the Danseiji IV projection, was I was googling term “AuthaGraph,” and found his post, Secrets of the AuthaGraph Revealed!)
Discouraging
“It’s discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty, and how few by deceit.”
Noël Coward
Blithe Spirit
(This is partly a test to see if copy/paste works with formatting intact)
It’s alive!
Well, after a fashion.
Archive.org appears to have a successful snapshot of this site from 2019-09-01. I’ve yet to hit a dead link, after some superficial testing.
Between that and my Dreamwidth archive, that makes a fairly full backlog of content.
The wacky world of map projections
I was just watching a program on HGTV where the designer was oh-so-proud of putting a map on the wall of an office they had provided for someone who was known to like maps. And in my mind I was hearing a John Cleese voice going, “Madam, what is this? Mercator projection? Are you completely deranged?!”
But I’m weird.
I like maps. Always have. I know (as most map geeks know) that Mercator has more and more distortion the farther away you get from the equator. I stood up and applauded when I saw the West Wing episode about maps. I’m the kind of guy who might say, “I was using Dymaxion before it was cool.”
In that spirit, I want to show you something:
Those pale blue discs are called Tissot’s Indicatrix (sometimes Indicatrices when people aren’t fussy about their plurals). They start as circles. If they get bigger, you’re seeing distortion of size; if they look stretched, distortion of area. If they look like equal sized dots, there’s no distortion at all; the more they get away from that, the more distortion you’re seeing.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the great advantage of the Danseiji IV projection, by Justin Haruaki Kunimune.
Here it is again, in a more traditional political map:
Yes, the oceans are a bit odd, but in a white-on-white color scheme, you can just trim the map to a rectangular frame, and it’ll look just fine. In the classic Greenland vs Africa comparison, note how Greenland is much smaller. Since Greenland is 830,000 sq mi and Africa is 11,730,000, you’d expect that.
Like I said… I’m weird.
(And before I go, here’s a physical version, just because I think it’s purty:)
(And for a fascinating approach, check out this page using the photographs of a room, chopped up in the views of many map projections, although the Danseiji IV is the very last one.)
And then the bears came
I had heard about the efforts of a bunch of libertarians to move to Grafton, NH, and run it on libertarian principles. I never heard how it worked out, though.
Not too well, as it turns out.
If nothing else, they’ve given a great addition to storytelling. Every story sounds better with, “And then the bears came.” As a schtick, I’ve already used it once, and I think it works.