Renaissance Grrrl

I had a friend recently comment on how some of my posts were more like "articles" than "journal entries". I began to write this response in a comment back, though as it got longer I began thinking that my other readership might be interested in it who would not have seen the comment reply.

Arguably I've been trying to keep my livejournal more article-like than diary-like, at least for the stuff mirrored from my main blog. At which I occasionally succeed. I keep a physical journal for the more introspective and personal stuff. As many of you know, my memory is horrendous, or at the very least interesting in what it decides to hold on to. For that reason, more than for posterity, is why I began keeping a journal, so that I could at some point in the future look back over my life and remember it. And that is still, to an extent, why I keep it. When I began writing it I was going to read through the previous volume and write some sort of synopsis or thoughts on the past span of my life each time I began a new volume. While still nice in theory, as i've grown the tradition has fallen to the wayside; the journal is more about introspection than retrospection.

I'm on my fourth volume now, excluding one false start. I hand made the first two volumes and if or when life settles (which is a nice way of saying never), when I'm better about not overcommitting myself to too many projects and too many hobbies, it might be nice to start doing again. Though I somehow think that it is a hobby of mine that will never be returned to like sewing, or poetry and shortstories, or jujitsu and aikido. Even in this world of dynamic media, this world of crossreferenced information, I think there will always be a place for physical writing. Once can't as easily spellcheck it, or index it for reference, or grep it for a word or phrase, and sometimes it's illegible, but it is somehow more real, more human. Once must invest something of themselves to read it. Information is uncountably infinite, but writing is not about information, or even communication, but about the art itself of commuting thought to word. Calligraphy is also a hobby I'd like to take up again in a world where there is time enough to do everything.

Though every so often I have little moments I'd like to share, hence the blog/lj. That and the log-keeping for inane things like links I found amusing or useful, website updates, latest computer hacks, etc, under the hopes that someone else will also enjoy them or perhaps be interested in the minutiae of how I live my life, the thoughts I've followed, the media I've read. The latter is more limited to lj than my main blog, since the latest incarnation of my website is intended as a portfolio piece for any webdesign jobs I apply for[1]. Though, like with my journal, whenever things get really interesting, whenever I have a lot to share is usually when I'm too busy to take time out to write them down.

[1] And for that it succeeds only passably since I've not had time to finish moving over everything I want to keep from the last incarnation of my site, and so it has "construction ahead" signs everywhere.

As I mentioned in my last post I spent much of yesterday in an extended web of internet spidering. Below are some of the paths this vaguery followed.

Geeks are renowned for their... peculiar social skills. And even within the realm of geekdom, some are considered particularly lacking. Michael Suileabhain-Wilson wrote an opinion piece discussing Five Geek Social Fallacies that lead to some of the more egregious examples of this

In a public service announcement on LiveJournal, cerebrate mentioned that "mb" is an abbreviation for millibit which sparked a discussion about whether such a thing was even possible. Which in turn caused another discussion by lederhosen on information entropy which I found surprisingly interesting. I say surprising because I frequently have little interest in higher-level (read: post-calculus, particularly logical) mathematics because they tend to be overly omphaloskeptic and offer very little of use to the non-theoretical (read: real) world. I'm not sure what it was particularly that I found so interesting about it, but it was... pleasant. If it strikes your fancy, Lederhosen also posted some followup links to Wikipedia and Shannon's seminal paper (Shannon being the one who came up with the whole idea).

One possible reason I found it interesting has to do with another post by lederhosen regarding a linguistic side of the information theory branch of mathematics. In that post he lays out an example of designing a language of semaphores which I found particularly interesting for (a) its resemblance to "designing" the phonetics of a natural language and (b) how it seems to imply an emergent linguistic component to information.

Recently there's been yet another blog meme playing tag around LiveJournal. One of the questions on it, at least as I interpreted it, was to list five songs that mean a lot to me. The question sort of stumped me and ( it took me a while to figure out exactly why. )