whitelisted

Via Vox (which is always a good place to visit for some mansplaining—though not in a patronising way), we’re presented with a rather interesting compromise between using browser extensions that filter out advertisers and subjecting oneself to the harsh glare of rabid sponsorship—all the distractions and the hardly-know-ye touts and catchpenny tactics going on in the marginalia.
Reading and study can become easily fraught with inktraps blotting out the flow of white-spaces. Advertising is the mainstay of the low- and no-cost internet, however, and cutting off this source of income entirely either erects serious barriers to entry for up-start enterprises, or—and possibly worse since it’s becoming less obvious what people and robots are compensated, marketers turn to native-content to praise and promote. Though not a perfect solution, the article’s author discovered a work-around that does not block but rather masks the ads behind a page that contains only the text. Readers experience less befuddlement and the word from our sponsors, though muted, is not expunged—maybe like the fears that networks had over fast-forwarding past the commercials. As I said, it’s not an ideal fix but maybe a provisional one, being that the billboard is such a narrow one, and with some established web haunts withholding some select services to visitors with filter software, maybe it is a step in the right direction.

fú lù shòu

For many countries following the Lunar Calendar, today marks the beginning of a week-long celebration that will usher in what in the Chinese tradition call the Year of the Fire-Monkey. Annually the zodiac processes through one of twelve animal houses, which are coupled with one of five elemental signs, making (with other epicycles in play as well) a grand tour of sixty years. A fire monkey sounds as if it will be an incendiary and mischievous time and indeed when last we saw this combination in 1956-1957 there was the troubles in the Suez which became the sunset moment for the British Empire, Morocco and Tunisia secede from France, Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba and the Saarland is reunited with West German, but these tumultuous events are the high-profile ones which don’t traffic in undoing and like all interesting times don’t bear repeating if we’re circumspect. The year also bodes innovation, reinvention and rejuvenation in its chaos that can be tamed. What do you think your fortune holds?

lexus-nexus

The other day I was reading over one those build-your-vocabulary lists of words that merit immediate inclusion into common-parlance, and while I did sort of like the idea behind the nomonym (for something which tastes like something else—chicken’s the standard impression, I suppose) I was not so pleased with the rest of the nominees. While they all might be perfectly cromulent terms, they were kind of dark (reflections of anti-social behaviour or hyper-social conditioning) and not surpassingly clever or up-building, I certainly appreciated how the entry directed me to an analysis of the mechanisms behind neologism—that human need to expand our sanctioned lexicon with an annual supplement reaching to a thousand more words to augment the dated and unfashionable. Though whom among English-speakers holds the top-spot as greatest word-smith is subject to much debate, the devices that each of us employ when it comes to invention is rather better known. The most inspired—but probably also the least likely for adoption, are fashioned like nomonym and its class as portmanteaux, overlapping and fusing two separate meanings, from a French type of luggage that opens into equally-sized, separate compartments.

weary giants of flesh and steel

Writing for Quartz magazine Gideon Lichfield presents an interesting long look back at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s charter statement—the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace—which was proclaimed two decades ago this week.

Fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos (amid the conflicts in Chechnya, the implication of First Lady Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater real estate scandal, and various other –gates enough to sour the most hopeful souls) and responding to a palpable, puritanical tension over the efforts of the US government to censor objectionable language with the same prudish quiver that applies to inter-state trafficking and cinema-goers, John Perry Barlow drafted his vision for a free and unfettered world-wide web. Analysing each article, one finds through the lens of 1996 both the naïve and the far-sighted expressed in rather poetic conceits and rousing construction that evokes other lofty mission-statements. I especially find the arguments for self-regulation and emergent governance forming organically, as mediated through quid pro quo and the prisoner’s dilemma, and manifest in the economics of gigs and journeymen. What do you think? Has the perceived draining of internet liberties come from outside menaces and frightened tyrants of industry or is its architecture a victim of its own success?

zut alors ou le oignon

Many francophiles and language purists are very upset with the universal arbiter, Academie Francaise, and the plan to enforce some institutional changes in spelling first proposed back in 1990.
More than two thousand minor changes to the orthography of French (including dropping the i from onion, reducing the ranks of hyphenated- words and vowels that take the little chapeau, the circumflex) have incite vocal dissatisfaction and downright militant opposition. The Academie (the national body which also assigns gender to newly discovered exoplanets and quantum particles) assures the public that both old and new spellings will be considered correct but I wonder what sort of diglossia will result. In Britain in the seventeen hundreds the circumflex-o was shorthand for -ough for economy’s sake and thus had thô for though and (confusingly) brôt for brought. Is getting rid of the ê possibly some concession to lazy typists and web-navigators?