If you mouse over the comic over at XKCD website, you get this comment:
‘Fucking ineffable’ sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase
 | What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive. No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death: The underwater toxic event. |
Jacques Derrida developed a similar idea about the 9/11 attacks. See Philosophy in a Time of Terror
Tom Junod is an American journalist. He’s also the author of the excellent piece : “The Falling Man” (which is also the name of a great novel by Don DeLillo)
| But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological. |
Or how Ludwig Wittgenstein helped to improve Google.
First spotted via Kottke.
| It fits neatly on shop sale signs and in headlines but the word ‘Xmas’ has a tendency to get people riled. Some complain it takes the Christ out of Christmas, others assume it is a form of lazy shorthand. Style guides at the Times, the Guardian and this website are among those which rule out its use, where possible. But should this particular four-letter word be causing so much offence? Researchers say it is a mistake to think of Xmas as a modern invention born on the High Street. Christian credentials And far from being an irreligious abbreviation, it appears to have impeccably Christian credentials. The ‘X’ is thought to represent the Greek letter ‘Chi’ - the first letter of the Greek word for Christ, Christos. Bill Purdue, an Open University historian and author of The Making of the Modern Christmas is among those who support this view. “I suppose to us it will always look like an abbreviation, but it would first seem to be an abbreviation used by clerics with a good knowledge of ancient languages,” he said. |
See Tumblr’s “xmas” hash tag.
The illustration (by Grandville) appears in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: “These bits of wood were covered on every square with papers pasted on them, and on these papers were written all words in their language… but without any order… The pupils… took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty six fixed round the edge of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed…” (more in Janet Zweig’s paper Ars Combinatoria. Mystical Systems, Procedural Art, and the Computer, Art Journal, fall issue, 1997 (PDF).
| This movement of analytic abstraction in the circulation of arbitrary signs is quite parallel to that within which money is constituted. Money replaces things by their signs, not only within a society but from one culture to another, or from one economic organization to another. That is why the alphabet is commercial, a trader. It must be understood within the monetary moment of economic rationality. The critical description of money is the faithful reflection of the discourse on writing. In both cases an anonymous supplement is substituted for the thing. Just as the concept retains only the comparable element of diverse things, just as money gives the “common measure” to incommensurable objetcs in order to constitute them into merchandise, so alphabetic writing transcribes heterogeneous signifieds within a system of arbitrary and common signifiers: the living languages. It thus opens an aggression against the life that it makes circulate. If “the sign has led to the neglect of the thing signified,” as Emile says speaking of money, then the forgetfulness of things is greatest in the usage of those perfectly abstract and arbitrary signs that are money and phonetic writing. |
| Money then serves as a measure which makes things commensurable and so reduces them to equality. If there were no exchange there would be no association, and there can be no exchange without equality, and no equality without commensurability. Though therefore it is impossible for things so different to become commensurable in the strict sense,our demand furnishes a sufficiently accurate common measure for practical purposes. [15] There must therefore be some one standard, and this accepted by agreement (which is why it is called nomisma, customary currency); for such a standard makes all things commensurable, since all things can be measured by money. |
“Belshazzar’s Feast is a painting by Rembrandt van Rijn created in about 1635. The source for the painting is the story of Belshazzar and the writing on the wall in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. […] According to Daniel 5:1-31, King Belshazzar of Babylon takes sacred golden and silver vesselsfrom the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar. Using these holy items, the King and his court praise ‘the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone’. Immediately, the disembodied fingers of a human hand appear and write on the wall of the royal palace the words “MENE”, “MENE”, “TEKEL”, “PARSIN” (or “UPHARSIN” in a slightly different interpretation of the word).” (Wikipedia)
