mathieutozer.com

Spring Poems

逝く水の
流れの底の
美しき
小石に似たる
思い出もあり

湯川秀樹

There are memories
which resemble
the beautiful pebbles
beneath the flow
of passing water

Yukawa Hideki

As in 「折々のうた」（講談社インターナショナル）pp68-69

Mathieu and Nigel in costume at the Spooky Theme Party. There were Drag Queens, Daffyd from Little Britain, Chucky, Leather Men, Plastic Surgery Victims, just to name a few. I went as a label slut and wore everything designer I had... spooky.

I took this on my phone on the Wonderland dance floor with Peter. Wonderland has become my Friday night thing really. It's a great night with fun music and a majority good bunch of people. You can be really quite silly if you want and it's ok 'cause you're 'just having fun'. If you're in Melbourne keep Friday free and come down.
Photos

Alana Stardust
Check out my sister's new site for her fashion label Alana Stardust.

I'm sticking these now. Backward Full Twisting Layouts. (2.7 MB)

Matthew and Mathieu mucking around after gym.

My new phone - the Sony Ericsson Z800i. It iSyncs with bluetooth so finally all contacts and calendars in one place. I feel.... evolved.

Actually bluetooth has some interesting applications I am discovering. Bored people in lecture halls send you random pictures, and unknown shy hopefulls in clubs send messages to you messages by sending across a contact!

It does cool 3G stuff like video calls and streaming media. I've signed up for the monthly 'Info Pack' from 3 for unlimited news and entertainment (plus more) downloads. I actually think the download speed matches or exceeds my home broadband connection.

Photos of a great meal and night at the Botanical.

Nigel at about four this morning in Coles Prahran Supermarket after Wonderland

I have reached a stage with the help of my gadgetry and thinking that has untied my information from it's physical bounds. Apart from nostalgia, I have given up the use of paper for information storage and retrieval. Digital text, within my sphere, slips about fluidly, mostly effortlessly. The only limit it has, in fact, is the amount of text I can produce and take in. After all it does not matter anymore where you write something down, or on what. Because once you have written in on a digital device, it is already everywhere, or can and will be very soon.
All set in
Glistening Digital Purity

-Mathieu in Orange Cafe, Chapel St

Addition: Gelernter predicts this (point no.6)

Mathieu and Fiona last night at the Oak Tree Ball. See the other photos.

Today I had a test photo shoot with Takeshi Miyamoto (photography), Jono Francisco (Styling), Nigel Stanislaus (Grooming) and myself (Model).

See a larger selection of shots including the shots from the previous test shoot with Craig Moodie and Nigel Stanislaus.

Today I went on a (hungover) excursion to the Australian National Archives in North Melbourne. I caught the train, and this is the station that I got off at. It's below the citylink overpass and I was impressed by the industrial nature of the location. Maybe I just spend too much time in Armadale.

(Once featured on a previous version of my website, I am re-publishing them here in case I want to review them).

Quotes I've been inspired by from books I've read.

Here are a few quotes that I have found interesting. Many are from David Gelernter's "The Aesthetics of Computing", which I have found valuable for understanding more about what a piece of software actually is. I have also just began reading his earlier book, "Mirror Worlds", which is also proving to be very interesting. Reading these books in my holidays has given me an extra spark to my studies. It has been up to me to seek out better information sources on the topics that I am interested in. His books are also forming the philosophy in which I am building this site.

The book Mirror Worlds is about what David Gelernter sees will happen in the future with software. He describes a 'software revolution' akin to the industrial revolution. He doesn't believe we have reached what we call the information age yet. He writes that that will only come when his Mirror Worlds are actualised. A good book to learn about the proper way to think about what computers and programs really are, so that you can learn how to create better software. It is also proving to change the way I think about the world.

The Quotes

"The sense of beauty is a tuning fork in the brain that hums when we stumble on something beautiful."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 1.

"We believe implicitly that the scientist is one type, the artist a radically different one. In fact, the scientific and artistic personalities overlap more than they differ, and the higher we shimmy into the leafy canopy of talent, the closer the two enterprises seem. The typical first-year physics text never uses the word beauty, but it is no accident that Richard Feynman's text - the work of a great scientist and one of the century's great books - uses it all the time."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 9.

"You might experience something resembling machine beauty, even if you are no scientist or engineer, when you drive a nail into a board with one clean, graceful hammer stroke; you feel the beauty of ease and power mated, machine beauty, beautiful functioning."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 3.

"Vigorous writing is concise, a sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts"

- William Strunk, as quoted by D. Gelernter"The Aesthetics of Computing", p3.

"If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement."

- Fred Astaire, as quoted by D. Gelernter in The Aesthetics of Computing, p 3.

"... [picture a] smelly, bedraggled twelfth century French mason and his staggeringly foreign world ... And yet [he] finds Chartres Cathedral compellingly beautiful, and so do we. Could anything be more amazing?" (In response to the argument that aesthetics are socially constructed).

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", pp 18-19.

"So they go wild; a single programmer alone at his keyboard can improvise software machines of fantastic or even incomprehensible complexity. Imagine what kind of palaces people would live in if all you needed to do was draw the blueprint, hand it to a machine, and see the structure realized automatically at the cost of a few drips of electricity."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 23.

"The software's role is humble and basically passive, but it can amplify your thought - an important accomplishment."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 26.

"In the computer world, beauty is the most important thing there is, and the paradox is this; beauty inspires the best technologists and confuses or outright repels everyone else - at least to begin with."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 26.

"...technology's single most important obligation is to get out of the way. The point of machinery is to make life easier; useless features and bad design make technology a self-important nuisance instead of help."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 44.

"The geniuses in the computer field ... are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 44.

"Recursive structures, in short, are rare and usually make no sense. But software is strange material."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 53.

"Some people believe that, when they see a program running, the machine they are watching is a "computer." True, but not true enough. The computer, that impressive-looking box with the designer logo, is merely the paint, not the painting. When you say I'm watching this computer do its stuff, you are saying in effect I'm admiring not this Rembrandt but some paint smeared on canvas.” [excerpt] "The computer itself is of the utmost triviality to the workings of the infomachine [software] you are watching."

-David Gelernter, "Mirror Worlds", p39.

"If you are a software designer, at any rate, your task is hard and clear. When you're presented with a difficult problem, you seek topsight; you use whatever topsight you've achieved as your guide through the treacherous terrain of program building. It's a tall order, but the alternative is clear-cut: to drown in complexity."

-David Gelernter, "Mirror Worlds", p 53.

"...Understanding ensemble behaves is an indispensable part of being educated. And there is a further claim, rather a large and sweeping one: Students should build working models whenever they can. When you can see and feel directly, immediately how each part works and how they all come together, you've achieved something important."
-David Gelernter, "Mirror Worlds", p 100.

"Throughout human history. mankind has been a lot better at gathering data than at thinking about it.
There were annales long before there were annalistes. It's much easier to be a bureaucrat than a scientist. it's easy to organize a data-gatehring project, and you can count on a rush of neo-Victorian curatorial satisfactions your collection grows. But analyzing data requires at least a measure of topsight, and topsight is a rare commodity."
-David Gelernter, "Mirror Worlds", p 112.

"In software there is no visual result, but there is a visualizable one, if you turn on your imagination."
-David Gelernter, "Mirror Worlds", p 113.

"Software architecture is no medium for untrammeled whimsy. Is imposes ironclad discipline on the designer: The point is to solve a hard problem efficiently, not to make art. But good designers in any medium make art despite themselves; whether they work in steel or concrete or software or silicon, that's precisely how you recognize them. Some of the best art being produced today is "applied art" in exactly these these tough media - because art, after all, requires discipline. You can't push if nothing is pushing pack. The popular belief that you get art by pushing against society's assumptions and expectations used to make sense but is now quaintly obsolete, because after all, these expectations and assumptions - about content and form, - collapsed years ago. You can offend people, sure, but you can't surprise them. (Attention Connoisseurs: If you fling yourself in a screaming massive assault at a supposedly locked door that turns out, in the event, to be wide open, what you get is called "slapstick", not "Art") Technology, on the other hand, still pushes back."
-David Gelernter, "Mirror Worlds", p 114.

"Good art consists almost by definition of inspiration squeezed into an external framework that (in some ways) confines and limits it - but in return allows us to find our way around inside it, to follow and comprehend it."
-David Gelernter, "Mirror Worlds", p 120.

"The Algol world, was a society, say, that knew about stools in the form of wood crates but had not yet invented the table, so you ate your dinner sitting on a stool and cradling a plate (evidently plates had also been invented) in your lap. Simula introduces the revolutionary and profoundly convenient idea of the table, and points out (this is the amazing part) that tables had been latent in society all along. Just stack up a couple of crates and there you are. Reaching a new and deeper understanding of what you already have and thereby achieving something for essentially nothing is the greatest of virtuoso technology accomplishes."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 55.

"A books appearance can be adjusted only within narrow boundaries - you can change the cover, vary the dimensions and type fond and layout but chances are, you will still wind up with a stack of pages bound at the edge. The world inside ac computer, on the other hand, has no intrinsic appearance. Electronic information is stored in terms of voltage levels, which, strictly speaking, looks like nothing."

- David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 57, on explaining why computer designers use the traditional, physical analogies of 'file' and 'document' within a computer to stop from drowning in the sea of possibilities of giving the computer interface a usable design, which could really be anything. This design challenge is one of the most difficult that we have ever faced.

"You can almost hear the 'computer boxes are - computer boxes' crowd: 'twenty seconds?? So you wait twenty seconds. Big deal. "Elegance" is important because it saves you twenty seconds?" Yes, elegance is important because it saves you twenty seconds - repeatedly. The difference between software that leaves you in peace and software that constantly takes little nips out of your thought processes - twenty seconds here, twenty there - is the difference between a pleasantly productive environment and an irritatingly unproductive one. The seconds add up, and the sheer fact of interruption is more important still." p. 75-76.

"Today, you keep the items that make up your personal data world on your own computer. But it might be better to store them in a cyberstructure that way you could get at them from any Net-connected computer anywhere. No such strategy was considered when the electronic desktop was invented, because cyberstructures weren't a realistic possibility back then." p86.

"When two separate programs (or people) communicate, information passes through space. Then a program stores data in a file (or a person saves a notebook in a desk drawer), the intention is to pass information through time -to send information not from here Peoria but from here to next Tuesday."

p91

"In the search for simplicity and power, symmetry is one of the best tools available;..." p100

"It's widely agreed that services like phones, TV, and internet access will be unified in the future; there's nothing new in that prediction. But merely to make the prediction begs the important questions: Will these services be integrated? How? How will users negotiate the new communications landscape? Will 90 percent of them make do with 2 percent of the system's power, because they can't figure out how to get the rest to work? Will the communications landscape become a slapdash, complex pastiche along the lines of today's computing landscape? 'Unclarity and confusion' is what you get, recall Ted Nelson saying, when you are faced with 'too many separate, unrelated things to know and understand.' Do we stand a chance of achieving power and simplicity and integration? p106.

"When people discuss the beauty or ugliness of computers and software, they refer almost always to the design of the interface or the internal structure of a program or machine. But computers aren't merely powerful information-transforming devices; they are objects, too - graceless, lumpy objects."

"Is it frivolous to suggest that computer housings themselves should be well designed? Maybe, but I don't understand how anyone who cares a damn about the quality of his surroundings could be happy with the status quo." p 108

"And they all look the same; their sheer sameness ought to make us suspicious." p 107

"When computer designers get drunk and go crazy, they dream up such wild colors as pale dove grey and intermediate eggshell, and then pass out from the sheer creative exertion. p 108-109

"And when people pass up plastic furniture and shell out good money for wood, they do it for a reason. The color of wood creates warmth. The irregularity of the grain makes the eye happy. Sum it all up and for some people, wood is still an irrelevant frivolity for others ambiance is important, and subtly affects the way they work and think." p111

"Great technology is beautiful technology. If we care about technology excellence, we a re foolish not to train our young scientists and engineers in aesthetics, elegance, and beauty." p117

"Some people are born with and some without an acute sense of beauty, but anyone's beauty sense can be improved by training. The best training is the study of art - art being the freest pursuit of truth and beauty for their own sakes that humans are capable of." p 118

"An educated person used to learn something about art and music and literature and science and mathematics as a matter of course. Technical people knew at least a little about art, non technical ones at least a bit about science and mathematics." p 120-121

"When you contemplate the evils of technology, my advice is to think liquor. Liquor is old technology, granted; but those of us without special training are no more likely to be capable of producing a fifth whiskey (or the bottle to put it in), given the raw materials, than we are a Stealth Bomber. Liquor technology is old but not trivial.
Liquor brings out the worst in us. TV does too, and so do computers. Used wisely, on the other hand, liquor produces a modicum of pleasure and makes life somewhat better, and the same holds for computers and TV. In any case, it is absurd to describe liquor itself (or any other technology) as inherently good or evil; those attributes pertain to human beings only. And to hate technology is in the end to hate humanity, to hate yourself, because technology is what human beings do. They make liquor. They build computers. Technology is the bird's nest, beaver's dam, ant's hill - creatures do what they can to make their lives more comfortable." p 122.

(About a 1938 yellow plastic Emerson radio)
"Merely sitting in silence, however, it radiates such intense vibrant energy it could knock a person over. It is such an extraordinary aesthetic achievement: the layers of science, technology, an d art that interact like the lines of an irresistible allegro fugue to bring this object about, the brilliant culture that created this thing and used it all speak compellingly from the small upright plastic box." p123.

(When talking about electromagnetic radiation and humans use of it)
"After all, we can see stars, which is amazing when you think about it. Your retina is a radio receiver pretend to the high-frequency band we call visible light, and is capable of picking up stations that are many light-years away. Those are powerful stations, of course; not many local stations are fusion-powered. ... Electromagnetic waves are an impressive energy-shipping mechanism." p 126

- all from David Gelernter, "The Aesthetics of Computing", p 23.

When drilling Characters (in the red book) try using these techniques:

2. If there is a compound word like 历史, write 历 then
3. 史 straight after, rather than doing all of one and then
   the other. This will help you learn the characters with
   the words rather than on their own.
4. Don't use Biro. Anything but Biro.
5. Use the browser window to hide the english and/or
   pinyin to study the words. Enlarge the text on the screen
   so you can learn to write the characters properly.
6. Say the word outloud (mumble it - whatever, people
   will think you're crazy though!) each time you
   write the character.
7. Drill half a line (row), then use a ruler or a bit
   of paper, anything to cover the already written characters,
   and move the ruler across to cover each one you write.
   You'll find that you might have been looking at the
   previous character to write the next - covering it up
   makes you go only by what's in your head!
8. If there's a character that forms a compound from
   a different lesson and it's not repeated, note the combination
   at the top of the drilling page, complete with pinyin.
9. Write the pintin for each character in the margin
   of the page, for quick reference.
10. Drilling characters is someting you can do when you're
    not fully alert - it's not rocket science! So leave
    it till later on (at night?) when you're about to go
    to bed or something.
11. Stroke order stroke order stroke order stroke order
    stroke order stroke order stroke order stroke order
    stroke order!!!
12. If you have the time, test yourself with a different
13. drill sheet the next day, and then the next week.
14. If you're crazy (and interested) type the pinyin into
    full form characters and try writing that as well. (听
15. -> 聽!)
16. Don't do a whole 20 characters at once. Aim for about
    10 per day. Do the rest the next day after revising
    the previous ones.
17. Give yourself little tests. Cover the pinyin and write
    the characters, and vice-versa, mark the ones you can't
    do, and drill them another 10 - 20 times. You should
    get it then.