I am not sure if this idea has a potential to develop into something more profound, but I'll set it up here, as a reminder for future musings.

Today blog-related visualities.

1. Score Bard's periodic table of the blogs.

Author's own explanations:

"This is my blogroll. It's not meant to be authoritative or representative. It's just a color-coded list of the blogs I like. [...] Now, I change it according to my whims. There are no rules.

Via Language Log

2. Paul Goyette's Chicago blogmap

Chicago blogs ployed on the subway map. The idea, as I understood, was borrowed from "the incredibly spiffy" D.C. metro blog map.

3. HitMaps' geographical map of blog visitors

The map shows individual visits, clustered within a given distance. The location of visit is based on the IP address of the computer used.

HitMaps

Here is a world map for Mathemagenic blog, where I found this feature.

... cemeteries grow larger the number of defendants is smaller
yet the defense continues it will continue to the end
and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City
we look in the face of hunger of fire face of death
worst of all -- the face of betrayal
and only our dreams have not been humiliated.

Zbigniew Herbert. Report from the besieged city. Poland, 1985.

I created a new category for this blog: "Visual". I am going to keep here links to interesting way of representing information in a visual form. If you have links to share, please share. :-)

1. Tom Van Vleck's Memory Box

A personal history represented as a shelf with lots of stuff on it. You can click on each item and read a story behind it. An intelligent and creative way to organize your junk. :-)

I've been interested in how in songs conversational intonations of a language interplay with melodies. Marked this topic "for further research"... Recently I came across an article that makes an interesting, even though not too much related to my initial interest point:

new research from the University of California, San Diego has found a strong link between speaking a tone language - such as Mandarin - and having perfect pitch ("The ability to identify a note on the musical scale without a single reference point" - M.I.), the ability once thought to be the rare province of super-talented musicians.

The first large-scale, direct-test study to be conducted on perfect pitch, led by psychology professor Diana Deutsch of UC San Diego, has found that native tone language speakers are almost nine times more likely to have the ability.

Read the whole article for more details.

where is my money?

I am subscribed to a humor mailing list. They send me funny stories which happened to somebody -- ten stories per day. Today somebody told a story, how they went to the opposition demonstration in Kiev. They had 6 year old daughter with them. Along the way, there was police, and people decorated them with orange ribbons¹ that said "Police is with its people" or something like this. Police guys didn't look too happy, but did not protest either. 6 year old girl asks her Mom: Can I put a ribbon on dyadya? (not sure what the English equivalent of this form of addressing is, literally it means "uncle", this is the way kids often address adults they don't know) Mom explains: "well, look, this is police... Now they are all in orange ribbons, but the next moment, they can.. SHOOT!". The kid runs to the police and asks seriously: "Dyadya, you won't kill my Mom?"

Why Ukrainians think this is funny I am not sure, but I wanted to share this.

Wonder has nothing to do with knowledge. It is a first response to the intuitive, the intuitive being the odyssey, or the record of the odyssey, of our making through untold billions of years of making...

Wonder is the same feeling that the astronauts must have felt when they saw the earth at a great distance... Somehow all of the things on it, even the great achievements like, let us say, Paris, a great achievement, or London, all disappeared and became circumstantial works. But the Toccata and the Fugue did not disappear, because it was the most unmeasurable and therefore the closest to that which cannot disappear. The more deeply something is engaged in the unmeasurable, the more deeply it has this lasting value. So you cannot deny the Toccata and the Fugue. You cannot deny the great works of art because they are born out of the unmeasurable.

I think what you felt was just Wonder, not knowledge or knowing. You felt that knowledge was not as important as your sense of Wonder, which was a greater feeling without reservation, without obligation, without accounting for yourself. Wonder is the closest intouchness with your intuitive. From Wonder must come realization, because in your making you have gone through every law of nature. It is part of you. In the intuitive are recorded all of the great steps of the making in which momentous decisions were made. Your intuition is your most exacting sense, it is your most reliable sense. It is the most personal sense that a singularity has, and intuition, not knowledge, must be considered your greatest gift. Knowledge is valuable because knowing can come from it, and knowing can give you intouchness with your intuition. Knowledge can be imparted, but knowing can never be imparted because it is very singular, very impure. It has to do with you. The life of knowing is very real, but it is personal.

In everything that nature makes, nature records how it was made. In the rock is the record of how the rock was made. In man is the record of how man was made. When we are conscious of this, we have a sense of the laws of the universe. Some can reconstruct the laws of the universe from knowing just one blade of grass. Others have to learn many, many things before they can sense what is necessary to discover that Order which is the universe. We must learn to honor the mind of one within whom lodges the spirit. It doesn't lodge in the brain, which is simply a mechanism. So the mind is different from the brain. The mind is the seat of the intuitive and the brain is an instrument which you get potluck from nature; that is why each one is a singularity. If it is a good instrument; it brings out the spirit within you.

Louis I. Kahn, Between Silence and Light, John Lobell (Shambala, Boulder, 1977)

In his work as an architect, Kahn searched for beginnings: the origin of joy and wonder, of intelligence, and intuition. He sought the basic principles of being, which he called Silence and Light

I am an old woman. This means I lost a lot of important people in my life. I did, I don't want to recite the martirolog.

I never had to learn how to deal with you
Since I was brought up alone
Often I feel so happy about it
Since I had a happy childhood
Never having to learn how to deal with you
When you took my toys.

My girlfriend now has difficult time
Thinking about you
Sometimes I envy her.

I have to say that Butoh has been my fate, and it has really changed my life. I still don't understand what it is or why or how, but I am obsessed with it and it's images, and I am still searching for the answers. (C)M.Terence McKay 1996 ”In butoh-dance we do not work with the western dualistic perception, the brightness is not seperated from the darkness. The body is a part of the alter ego, that involves all aspects of life. Life and death is thereby connected, like the attractive and the repulsive, the cruel and the beauty. It can be very difficult in dance to work with these bodily oppositions, to embrase the female and the male at the same time, but it hardens up the body and disciplines the mind”, emphasizes Anita Saij.

A famous essay of sir Isaiah Berlin that classificated all thinkers into "foxs" and "hedgehogs".

Ersin agreed to join the "Uncontrolled Vocabularies" enterprise as a contributor to this blog. Or so I hope. :-)

The RSA commissioned MORI’s Social Research Institute to carry out an international programme of research aimed at gaining an understanding of the perceptions of British values and characteristics in order to help the RSA develop a set of criteria for the Great Britons '04 Awards'.

New research characterises ‘Britishness’

Part three from our popular sequel "How to Lie with Maps" (part 1, part 2).

There are lots of posts with last election result maps in the Blogostan, but I like this one the best: Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of University of Michigan, "Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results". It has, I think, all other kinds of maps I have seen and some I haven't. I named this post "how to tell truth", because all these maps in a sense tell truth, these are just different truths.

There is a well-established classification of bloggers into “thinkers” and “linkers" categories. The first group posts mostly their own ideas and analysis, with some links through here and there, which serve either as a source of inspiration, or illustrations, or else. The "linkers" don't provide much of original content, but present lots of links, which may by itself be of great interest, with perhaps short comments.

Today I came across a word "fisking". I had to search for its meaning, and as turned out it designates a special genre of blogging.

This is the song that is closest in quality to what I used to listen on my parents taperecorder. Unders communuist censorshis this was the easiert way to say what you wanted. Tapes could be reproduced easily and safely. To compare, "Erica beret chetyre kopii", said Galich. Typewrires could only multiply 1-to-4.

There is a discussion about Orwell's "1984" and its meaning. Strangely, when I read the end of the novel:

Helen had an entry about Salam Pax, famous Baghdad Blogger, an author of "Where is Raed?" blog, who reported from Baghdad before, during and after the war. His blog was then published as a book. Reading Amazon reviews for his book, I found Ihath, an Iraqi woman living in Canada. I read today in her blog that there was the international premiere of Baghdad Blogger -- "a series of videos" shot by Salam -- during The Vancouver International Film Festival. Ihath's impressions:

I think, Jason took up MD citizenship before Sep. 11, 2001, but he was too nice then, so I don't remember him. These were fun days, when Johnson Chong and his gang terrorized the place (at nights). After 9/11, Jason and me occupied the opposite sides of the barricades. This is to say, we disagreed most of the time. This was when I understood how important it is to have a good opponent. When you know that your arguments will be carefully read and mercilessly debunked, it makes you think harder, check your facts and not to post statements you can't support. Now keep in mind that you have to do all this under stress, discussing emotionally charged problems, and you will see that any technical discussion after this is a piece of cake. I improved my qualification as a "pathological arguer" tremendously, and I hope, I served Jason well too. In any case, his attacks became too dangerous, and our anti-American team delegated him to moderate MD. This way he had to be nice with us.

Last weekend I read in the news that there was an accident on Balakovo nuclear power station. Balakovo is the city in Saratov region, about 170 km from Saratov, the city where I lived and where my parents still live. Of course, Chernobyl immediately came to my mind. You can blame the communist government as much as you wish, but at least there was some order back then. Organized evacuations, free medical assistance, all that. Happen Chernobyl now, when the country is in chaos -- God knows what it would look like. And God (at least in Russia) is unemployed. My soul was in chaos too.

Thomas Paul is our wonderful Sheriff on JavaRanch, book reviewer, blogger, father of two kids... The adjective "wonderful" belongs to all these nouns, by the way. Including "kids".

A hint: warm congratulations are accepted in his mail box: tom at javaranch dot com. :)

There can never be enough of Geoffrey K. Pullum.

Regular readers will be able to name my least favorite book in the world: it is Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, a horrid little compendium of unmotivated prejudices (don't use ongoing), arbitrary stipulations (don't begin a sentence with however), and fatuous advice ("Be clear"), ridiculously out of date in its positions on appropriate choices among grammatical variants, deeply suspect in its style advice and grotesquely wrong in most of the grammatical advice it gives. URL

The title of this post is from his another entry: They are a prophet

If I can be of some help disseminating this news, I will. :)

On November 2, my fellow Oregonians defended our sacred institute of marriage. From each other... At least our numbers are the worst in the country -- 57% vs. 43%. This gives some hope.