nerdgod.com

don’t have time to update this right now, but I’ve three posts “in my head” that I want to note before I forget them completely:

1. Aleister Crowley, despite his position as a liberal sort of beast, is actually a fair representation of your Victorian-era anglocentric, and his theories and beliefs flow from his predisposition that only the British were in any sort of position to interpret the system of the world. And that those things that seemed most powerful to the late Imperial Britain were exactly those things they didn’t understand. So while he may talk of Egyptology (very popular in the late 1800’s, as britain beats the french out of the middle east) and Hinduism and Buddhism (as Britain expands their Indian Empire), the fact is he’s not a brilliant discoverer so much as a conqueror, an appropriator of the hopes and dreams of the conquered. So, basically, Jimmy Page is a tool for the Man, not a servant of the devil! QED!
2. Azimov’s laws of robotics seem simple, well-defined, self-reinforcing, and people think about robots in the future as naturally having the Laws as first principles. The problem is that there are pre-requisites for the laws of robotics. Firstly, a robot must be able to discern “human” from “non-human” and even “robot”. While the Laws seem so simple as to be bug-free (beyond the implicit bugs discussed by Azimov himself), the software that must underlie the Laws must be, by its very definition, as complex as the rules that we, as people, apply to differentiate “human” from “other”. And as we all can attest to, people have a nearly impossible time seeing the humanity in others, so what hope can we have for the machines we ourselves design?
3. Since the Dawn of the Web, as a medium, web designers have had to do everything twice. Netscape and Mosaic. Internet Explorer and Netscape. Netscape versus Itself. Mozilla versus IE. On and On. Now that we have fairly settled standards, things seem to be easier. But the next big bugbear is “DPI”. As LCDs get more and more dense, from 96 dpi, to 120, to 300. The solution is to design for 300 dpi, then style the elements to “shrink down” at lower DPIs. The problem is that 300dpi images will be huge, and take forever to download. Eventually there will be a tiered system, where you develop all of your layouts twice. Once for the rich,w ith their 300dpi 24″ lcds, and once for those poor saps on broadband, with their 96dpi emachines. And then we’ll all start using Web Forms in XML versus XAML. You can’t win. You’ll always do it twice.