General

by Chris on General

Fractal Heartbreak

The story of 6 year old Jani Schofield’s fight with schizophrenia is profoundly troubling:

A new imaginary friend named 400-the-Cat moved in. He told her to kick and hit other people. “We realized she didn’t control her imaginary friends. They controlled her,” Michael says. Many phantoms populated her mind now: two little girls named 100 Degrees and 24 Hours; 200-the-Rat; Magical 61-the-Cat; and 400.

Her father’s blog is also difficult to read.

Metafilter poster Drastic’s description of the situation as a fractal heartache is indeed apt:

The entire story’s a kind of godawful fractal heartbreak–no matter how you zoom into it, every piece contains just as much heartbreak as a wider view.

 
by Chris on General

Does our language shape the way we think?

A fascinating essay by Lera Boroditsky that explores how language shapes the way we think.

Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, “This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?” When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.

Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language.

 
by Chris on General

AJAX

All kinds of JavaScript XML goodness!

  • prototype.js – the grandaddy of AJAX javascript libraries.
  • RICO – An open source Javascript library for creating rich internet applications. Rico originated as work done in Sabre Airline Solutions and extends on the excellent prototype.js effort from the Ruby on Rails folks.
  • MochiKit – More of an overall utility library, MochiKit has some AJAXish features.
  • qooxdoo – Another Javascript toolkit with some AJAX features.
  • AFLAX – Ajax meets Flash!
  • Cpaint – Presenting application like interfaces with AJAX
  • Complex Data Types with AJAX – sometimes it isn’t as simple as the demos make it look.

    • and … AJAX is the short name for all the technologies that make things like Google Maps so slick, like dragging the map around to find the stuff you’re interested in.

    [tags]AJAX[/tags]