of a word given by a friend to me today:

Ultracrepidate ul-tre-krep’i-date, v (Latin, from ultra, beyond, and crepida, sandal)

To criticize beyond sphere of one’s knowledge. This very interesting-sounding and useful word for a common practice has a very interesting etymology. In a Roman story, a cobbler criticised the sandals in a painting by the painter Apelles, and then complained about further parts of the work, to which Apelles is said to have replied, “Ne sutor ultra crepidam”, or, roughly, “The cobbler must not go beyond the sandal”. As true today as it was then.

And with that, back to the wireframes for this cobbler.

» Forthright’s Favo[u]rite Words

“and the answer is none. None more black.”

» BBC News: Blacker is the new black
[via cameron’s overstated]

Just finished watching Colin Powell address the United Nations on the Iraq crisis while working. I couldn’t help but wander off into thinking about two things.

1. It’s someone’s job to do those powerpoint slides.
   Someone, somewhere was slaving away, with people leaning over their shoulder maybe saying: “no… can you make it more… more… ominous. Yeah… that’s great“. Who does that? What’s their creative process? Seriously! There was an incidental/title slide which had “IRAQ” in a perspectivised, embossed sans serif – something tombstone-like, maybe Geoffrey Lee’s “Impact”. It looked like the kind of highly-stylised graphic you’d see as an ‘over-shoulder’ on CNN or Fox News. It looked so incongruous in the context of the UN and yet so “broadcast ready”. I wonder if, sensibly perhaps considering their job, this was in the designer’s mind.

2. The guy over Colin Powell’s left shoulder.
   I couldn’t take my eyes off him. With his instantaneous-translation earpiece on the side of his head, he looked the spitting image of LoBot from Empire Strikes Back.

   

Back later.

My first snowball fight at work in about 6 years… BBC Bombadiers Vs. TheUpMyStreet.com Irregulars.

—-
UPDATE: more pictures of Londoners confused by snow from the BBC News.

A couple of quotes from a longer piece at the Long Now Foundation website:

“He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with “That’s not my department.” I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those “not-my-department” problems. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, “I’ve been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me…” This worked best if you were careful not to expect it.”

and

“The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such “punctuated equilibrium,” so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our “discoveries” were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. “Hey, we got it right!” he said. “Not bad for amateurs.”

In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress. “

» Longnow.org: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

Trying to redesign my site. Trying to do the right things, but in the 2-3 years since I did this design, the web got really complicated. I still get HTML. I understand my content caught up in presentation, just like I like my jokes told by a funny person rather than written down in logic statements expressed in esperanto.

I could build the design I want to do in a couple of hours in HTML. If I did I get the feeling that I would be banished from the village in rags and never spoken of again. I also get the feeling that once I left the village I’d find a whole wide world full of uncomplicated places; free of the perpetual, byzantine betterment of the blogosphere.

I’ll try and give all this new fangled stuff another go though.

Sigh.

What does a DIV do again? Ugh.

Danny’s post about the Jhai Foundation finally pushed me into completing my paypal registration. Go and read what Danny has to say about their work, and hopefully you’ll be like-minded. If not, then go read what Quinn has to say. Reminded of the Neil Gershenfeld Vs The Doorsofperception Audience ding-dong of last November.

Pulling my finger out with regard to paypal meant I could give Patrick Farley some money too, which might mean we get Part Four of “The Spiders” sometime soon. Fingers crossed.

According to my iPod.

“Storytelling”: Belle & Sebastian: Storytelling
“There Goes The Fear”: Doves: The Last Broadcast
“Ghost Ship In A Storm”: Jim O’Rourke: Eureka
“A Minha Menina”: The Bees: Sunshine hit me
“Somebody Stole My Thunder”: Georgie Fame: Blow Up A-Go-Go!
“Casino Royale”: Herb Alpert: A&M Classics Volume 1
“Therefore I Am”: Jim O’Rourke: Insignificance
“Wide Open Space”: Mansun: Attack of the Grey Lantern
“Get What You Give”: New Radicals
“Here comes your man”: Teenage Fanclub: I Need Direction EP
“What Am I Doing Hanging Round”: Monkees
“Corona (theme from ‘jackass’)”: Minutemen
“Keep Fishin'”: Weezer: Maladroit
“Son of Three”: The Breeders: Title TK
“A Life Less Ordinary”: Ash: Intergalactic Sonic 7’s
“Two Months Off”: Underworld 2002: A Hundred Days Off
“You Were Right”: Badly Drawn Boy
“Am I Wry?”: Mew
“Coming In From The Cold”: Hate: The Delgados
“Outtathaway!”: The Vines: Highly Evolved

That wasn’t in the least bit interesting was it. Not even to me. I’ve got to the semi-annual point where I can’t stand any of my own music.

Also it seems I’ve gotten to the point where I’m shouting at my iPod/iTunes just like one does in disbelief at all the end of year charts and lists that music television and print media compile. I’m sure I listened to other stuff than that more! What was I thinking? Why so much anthemic psuedo-prog guitar rock? Where’s all the beats?

Anyway. I need to discover some new music. What were your iPod autogenerated top 20’s? Trackback to your list or comments below.

Right. Back to wireframing.

Hope anyone reading this has a very lovely Festivus, does well in the feats of strength, and has a great new year. 2002 was a wierd and wild ride, thanks for dropping by for some of it!