Posts by Tim

California, strapped by an insane budget crisis, is issuing IOUs to its employees and creditors, and will soon likely be willing to accept these IOUs as payment for taxes and other state obligations. Nothing like a little extra-constitutional currency creation to spice up the economic picture of the U.S.A!

The Economist’s Free Exchange offers this take on the consequences:

The highly uncertain long-term value of the IOUs may make anyone reluctant to accept them, preventing them from rising to de facto currency status. On the other hand, if enough people and institutions begin accepting them, Gresham’s law may apply. Consumers may be anxious to hold on to dollars and spend their funny money wherever they can, until circulation is dominated by the IOUs.

But then, of course, economies that do business with California would have a demand for the IOUs, and other states

If you want people to know what awesomely supercool books you are reading, you can use the internet to tell them.

Ezra Klein, “Can the Internet Be Your New Bookshelf?”:

This is one of those spots where I imagine social networking really will save us. Back when I was using Facebook more, I was a big fan of Visual Bookshelf, which let you display what you were reading and, when you finished, let you rate and review the books. As a matter of signaling, it’s quite a bit more efficient. Your friends don’t have to catch you in a literary moment on the Metro. And being able to browse the collections of all my friends was a delight, and offered occasional surprises that helped me known them better: former football teammates who were now reading John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, and libertarian friends who listed “The Grapes of Wrath” as one of their favorite books of all time.

I also found that displaying the contents of my bedside table helped counteract my tendency to get distracted 90 pages in and start something else. Now that the books were hanging out on my profile, I felt more pressure to finish them. Somehow, simply leaving books around my room didn’t carry the same silent reproach. In fact, I sort of miss that pressure. Which is why I’ve added a little Amazon widget that does much the same thing to the right sidebar. Technology!

James Wolcott laments the loss of personalized conspicuous consumption that goes with putting down a paperback and picking up a Kindle:

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it

When you use mobile-optimized webpages for a while, inevitably you’re going to find a few that you like better than their desktop counterparts. They’re trimmed-down sure, but they give you quick access to what you really want, perfect for a quick peek to see whether you’ve gotten a new email, a file has uploaded, or if the weather’s going to change before you go outside.

For these sort of things, you don’t need to fire up your whole browser, update your extensions, and parse through all of your old auto-saved tabs just to see something that probably isn’t going to be there anyways. All you need is a little web-connected widget that tells you the same thing.

Do you know how to make a widget? Neither do I. But I do know how to use an application called Fluid for the Mac to make single-site-browsers (or SSBs) to do one thing, do it very well, and otherwise get out of the way.

At its basic level, Fluid creates an OS X application using Webkit (the guts of Safari) for individual webpages. I use this for Gmail, for example. Gmail runs on my Mac with its own icon, in a window without any toolbars or other clutter, that I can start without opening my browser, and that won’t crash if (or when) my browser does. It even displays dock badges – which means when I’ve got a new email, I can look at the dock see a little number on the application’s icon. Which, by the way, I was able to pick myself – Fluid will convert almost any image into an OS X icon.

That’s nice enough. But you can also tell Fluid to identify itself to web pages using other engines besides Safari’s. A Fluid-built SSB can show itself in multiple versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, or — and this is the kicker – MobileSafari, the web browser used for the iPhone.

Weirdly, you can’t select this when you first create your app. All you pick is the URL and your program icon (which defaults to the web favicon). But all you have to do, once you’ve created your browser, is to click on the program name, then “User Agent,” to run the site as a mobile browser once you restart.

Why is this important? Well, after you create the application, you have a few more options. One that I’ve never used is to embed your SSB into the Desktop. This is nice presumably because you can close all of the other apps and just show the one you use most frequently. But I keep files and folders on my desktop, so it’s never worked.

The other, which I like a lot, is to convert the SSB into what’s called a “MenuExtra SSB.” The name makes it sound like you’re going to get extra menus or something, but in fact, you get a good deal less. This option runs your SSB not out of your dock, but your menu bar, up there with always-accessible apps like “Airport,” “Clock,” and “Volume.”

If you pick MenuExtra SSB with an ordinary web engine, it’s a little weird – when you click the app’s menu bar icon, you get either a huge browser window or a little window where you need to scroll around to see everything. It’s jarring. But with MobileSafari, it’s perfect. You’ve got a little iPhone-sized window where you can fire up a mobile site – then quickly close it by clicking the same button.

Why would you want to do this? I use the mobile SSBs for Facebook (especially when I just want to check a message or number and not get lost in the labyrinth), Gmail (when I want to check email without having to log in to chat, or waiting forever for the application to start, or worrying about clearing spam, etc.), Google Translate (perfect for a quick lookup), Google Reader (sometimes, since I mostly use NetNewsWire), Pandora (which is currently wonderful), Google Chat (when I want to log into chat but not email – it’s complicated), and Dropbox. If you don’t like any of the rich client Twitter applications, it’s great for Twitter, too. (I use, and like, Tweetie.)

The last one has truly been a lifesaver. I have a 50GB Dropbox account and an older computer that I sometimes use that only has an 80GB hard drive. Syncing the entire account would kill that HD – all of my clever symbolic-link ruses to try to get Dropbox to sync to an external drive have only create giant cache files full of pain. But I don’t even want to have everything synced to my old computer – I just want to be able to access it sometimes. Dropbox in the menu bar lets me stay always logged-in, and quickly navigate to the file I need, download it or read it, and get on with whatever else I need to do.

So that’s it. Fluid is terrific – it creates stable and powerful but lightweight web clients that just work on almost any site you can think of. You can also use the MobileSafari capability to create slick sidetabs in any regular SSB… but I think that’s enough functionality for now.

PS: All of this stuff I have learned elsewhere – if you want fancy pictures or a more explicit walkthrough, google “Fluid MenuExtra” or look at the Fluid site. I’m really just trying to sell you on the idea of it – webapps without walls.

Virginia Heffernan says that internet romances “are not romances between people at all. They

Britta Gustafson, “Learning to see wooden poles“:

When I

I had never heard of this disorder before:

In hyperlexia, a child spontaneously and precociously masters single-word reading. It can be viewed as a superability, that is, word recognition ability far above expected levels… Hyperlexic children are often fascinated by letters and numbers. They are extremely good at decoding language and thus often become very early readers. Some hyperlexic children learn to spell long words (such as elephant) before they are two and learn to read whole sentences before they turn three. An fMRI study of a single child showed that hyperlexia may be the neurological opposite of dyslexia.[2]

Often, hyperlexic children will have a precocious ability to read but will learn to speak only by rote and heavy repetition, and may also have difficulty learning the rules of language from examples or from trial and error, which may result in social problems… Their language may develop using echolalia, often repeating words and sentences. Often, the child has a large vocabulary and can identify many objects and pictures, but cannot put their language skills to good use. Spontaneous language is lacking and their pragmatic speech is delayed. Hyperlexic children often struggle with Who? What? Where? Why? and How? questions… Social skills often lag tremendously. Hyperlexic children often have far less interest in playing with other children than do their peers.

The thing is, this absolutely and precisely describes me in childhood, especially before the age of 5 or 6. (This is also the typical age when hyperlexic children begin to learn how to interact with others.) It also describes my son – which is how my wife found the description and forwarded it to me.

You walk around your entire life with these stories, these tics, and the entire time, your quirks are really symptoms. It’s a little strange.

So I’m sitting here, working on making a plain-vanilla hypertext version of New Liberal Arts so folks can read it on their phones, Kindles, whatever, and cleaning up all the extra cruft to make it work — you can just cut-and-paste from the PDF, it’ll be easy, Robin says, forgetting that it’s set in opposing faces that sometimes get out of order, that the all-cap fonts turn into gibberish, and that there’s a freaking secret message in the thing —

And, maybe just naturally, or maybe as a function of what I’m doing, I am totally blown away – again – by Diana Kimball’s “Coding and Decoding” and Rachel Leow’s “Translation.”

Seriously. Just check them out. They’re so elegant and complimentary – Rachel’s is about a kind of patient mastery and deep connection to other human beings past and present, Diana’s about ambient awareness of linguistic symbols that we discover but whose deciphering is always going to be incomplete. Originally, I was going to write a separate NLA entry for “Languages” – when I first read these two, months ago, I realized that I had nothing I wanted to add.

I don’t have a lot of criteria for friendship, but the one characteristic I think is invariant is a love of and care for language. If you don’t take pleasure or find intellectual satisfaction in how words are strung together – maybe even especially written words – then you and I are quickly going to run out of things to say to or do with each other.

So that said, I think a good index of both your wordnerdery and the likelihood of the two of us becoming and remaining fast friends is your excitement in reading about the new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which will be published – in two glorious volumes! – this fall:

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is the culmination of 44 years of painstaking work by scholars at the University of Glasgow.

It not only groups words with similar meanings but does so in chronological order according to their history – with the oldest first and most recent last. According to its publisher, the OED, it’s the largest thesaurus in the world and the first historical thesaurus in any language.

With 800,000 meanings, 600,000 words and more than 230,000 categories and sub categories, it’s twice as big as Roget’s version.

And if that doesn’t have him turning in his grave, it also contains almost every word in English from Old English to the present day, or 2003 to be precise – the cut-off date for the new dictionary.

Selected early reviews of New Liberal Arts:

Kevin Kelly, “Innovative Publishing Model“:

It really doesn’t matter what’s in the book. The model is brilliant, if you have an audience. The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible… As it happens, the PDF reveals that the content is pretty thin. But it did not have to be. Their premise is great (the new literacies), and their biz model innovative. We can hope they try again. I am impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book.

The readers at Book Cover Archive: “This may be the only use of Century Gothic I’ll ever appreciate,” “friggin sold out! love that quarter binding…”

Court Merrigan, “Tiny Snarkmarket