[en] Sharing your vulnerability makes you truly human.
J.-F. H.
C’est en partageant sa vulnérabilité que l’on est véritablement humain.
J.-F. H.
Category: Understanding life and the world
Big ideas and analysis related to life and the world. This is where I become philosophical and tend towards guru-ness.
Respect [fr]
[en] Respect does not require fear.
Le respect n’a pas besoin de passer par la peur.
On Tags and Ontologies [en]
Quote from Clay Shirky on the suckiness of ontologies, and how tags-labels are better for classifying ideas.
[fr] Le problème avec les ontologies ou les systèmes de classement hiérarchiques est qu'ils doivent être conçus de façon à accommoder tout élément à classer pouvant surgir dans le futur. Les tags-étiquettes créent une structure multi-dimentionelle élastique, qui s'adapte à mesure à ce qu'on y classe.
This last point is key — the number one fucked up thing about ontology (don’t get me started, the suckiness of ontology is going to be my ETech talk this year…), but, as I say, the number one thing, out of a rich list of such things, is the need to declare today what contains what as a prediction about the future. Let’s say I have a bunch of books on art and creativity, and no other books on creativity. Books about creativity are, for the moment, a subset of art books, which are a subset of all books.
Then I get a book about creativity in engineering. Ruh roh. I either break my ontology, or I have to separate the books on creativity, because when I did the earlier nesting, I didn’t know there would be books on creativity in engineering. A system that requires you to predict the future up front is guaranteed to get worse over time.
And the reason ontology has been even a moderately good idea for the last few hundred years is that the physical fact of books forces you to predict the future. You have to put a book somewhere when you get it, and as you get more books, you can neither reshelve constantly, nor buy enough copies of any given book to file it on all dimensions you might want to search for it on later.
Ontology is a good way to organize objects, in other words, but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas. Now, though, we can scrap of the stupid hack of modeling our worldview on the dictates of shelf space. One day the concept of creativity can be a subset of a larger category, and the next day it can become a slice that cuts across several categories. In hierarchy land, this is a crisis; in tag land, it’s an operation so simple it hardly merits comment.
Clay Shirky, Many-to-Many
Yes!
Un corps parfait [fr]
[en] A lovely phrase from a friend that came up in a conversation not long ago.
Au détour d’une conversation. C’est trop joli pour que je laisse passer.
Un corps n’est parfait que pour celui ou celle qui décide de lui offrir son coeur.
Kumquat
Question [fr]
[en] The answer is not on the internet.
La réponse n’est pas sur internet.
Being an Adult [en]
Being an adult isn’t easy.
[fr] Est-ce difficile, d'être un adulte? On ne se réveille pas un matin magiquement 'adulte'. La vie ne devient pas plus facile parce qu'on a déjà fêté certains anniversaires. Il y a toujours un effort à fournir. Je pense que l'on se retrouve finalement toujours aussi démunis face aux étapes de la vie. Grandir, c'est apprendre à affronter l'inconnu. Et ça a quelque chose d'effrayant.
‘Is it hard to be an adult?’ he said. ‘It’s certainly better than being a kid. You can’t get in trouble with your parents. And you don’t have homework.’
He’s thirteen. Yes, being a teenager is tough. I see it in my classes, and hear it from my students too. Some of them are voicing it on their weblogs already. Can’t do what you want. Can’t say everything. Have to do as your told.
I find being an adult isn’t easy either. Homework disappears, but is replaced to all these things we ‘have to do’: taxes, shopping, cooking, cleaning, paying bills. And if you’re lucky enough to be a teacher, you almost get real homework: tests to correct and classes to prepare. I spend more time at my ‘homework’ than the kids I teach — that will change, but this year, I certainly am.
Yes, it’s hard being an adult. You don’t wake up one morning suddenly ‘adult’, and magically up to it. You remain yourself. You learn how to pay the bills, cook, clean up, live without your parents, but all in all, there is never a clear line crossed into adulthood. You carry who you are with you at all times.
I’ve long lived in the illusion that life would suddenly one day become ‘easy’, that things would fall into place and all the tough stuff would just vanish. I now know that is not how life goes. Life is always challenging. Growing up is learning to deal with those challenges. But the tough times don’t go away.
The first real insight I had about what ‘being an adult’ meant was during one of my early conversations with Aleika, in India. She was telling me how being a parent isn’t something one can be really prepared for. As a kid, we always think our parents know what they are doing — but as a first-time parent, you just do what you can. You don’t know much more than before the baby arrived. You’re not transformed into another person because you just gave birth.
And it goes on. Becoming a grandparent and growing old is also a first-time experience for those who go through it. I think no stage in life is really easy. Growing up is about taking risks. Doing things you’re not really fully prepared to do. Taking responsability for your actions and your life. It’s exciting, and it’s frightening.
La vie n’est pas un long fleuve tranquille.
Human [en]
We don’t like being reminded that we can die.
Can and Cannot Change [en]
We can change some of the things that bother us about ourselves.
The others, we cannot. We can just be lucid about them, take them into account in the way we live our lives, and do things differently to prevent them from messing things up.
What a girl needs… [en]
– Well, I don’t need this. Why should I bother? I can do without it very well.
– If you strip everything you don’t need out of your life, it ends up being pretty bare. What makes life worthwhile is precisely all these things you can do without: a warm bubble bath, gloves in winter, an umbrella when it is raining, food served on a pretty table…
Somnifère [en]
Ce qui est fourbe avec le sommeil en retard, c’est que ça frappe à retardement.