Tag: Citations

You and Technology [en]

[fr] Tout ce qui existait déjà dans le monde avant notre naissance est simplement normal; les innovations techniques faites entre ce moment-là et jusqu'à nos trente ans sont incroyablement excitantes et créatives, et avec un peu de chance on pourra faire carrière avec; tout ce qui est inventé après nos trente ans est contre-nature et sonne le glas de la civilisation telle que nous la connaissons, jusqu'à ce que ça ait été là une dizaine d'années, quand ça devient graduellement OK, en fin de compte. (Paraphrasé d'après Douglas Adams.)

A lot of truth in what Douglas Adams says here:

  1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
  2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
  3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Douglas Adams

How old are you?

Thanks to Kevin for pointing me there.

La chanson, bande-son de nos vies [fr]

Une citation de Jean-Jacques Goldman.

[en] Jean-Jacques Goldman: songs are the soundtracks of our lives.

Récemment, je disais à  un journaliste que la chanson
n’était pas forcément ce qu’on appelle un art majeur, un art qui
termine dans des musées, qui est fait pour la pérennité, pour la
postérité, mais que par contre, c’était un outil de l’immédiat,
qu’aucun autre art ne pouvait remplacer. Je disais que moi j’étais un
peu, enfin, que nous étions un peu comme le papier peint des gens,
c’est-à -dire on était la bande-son de leur existence. On met pas du
papier-peint dans des musées, et nous, c’est pareil. Peut-être que
cette musique ne restera pas, peu importe, mais je sais que les gens
se rencontrent, se regardent, se touchent, font l’amour, font des
enfants, se marient, sur ces musiques-là . Moi, personnellement, ça me
suffit (rires).

Jean-Jacques Goldman, 24.04.1998(interview radiophonique)

Vulnérable [fr]

[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.

Sans commentaire [fr]

Une réaction à  une interview.

[en] A reader's reaction to an interview of me published on Emarrakech.

Bonjour,

En lisant le e-marrakech, je trouve l’article sur ce que vous essayiez de faire gober aux gens. Vous ne faîtes pas la différence entre ce que c’est un blog et le business. Encore une suissesse qui s’intéresse au franc-suisse. Il n’y a que l’argent qui compte et votre coeur c’est aussi du franc-suisse.

Eric

C’est en réaction à  cette interview de moi publiée sur Emarrakech.

Dar Williams [en]

I stumbled upon Dar Williams’ music by chance online. I recently bought her last CD. Here is a little story about it.

[fr] Dar Williams est une artiste que j'ai découverte en piratant de la musique. Je viens d'acheter son CD, et voici une petite anecdote à  ce sujet. (Eh oui, il y a des gens qui finissent par acheter plus de CDs à  cause de ces vilains mp3 qui trainent en ligne.)

This is a story of how pirating music made me discover an artist and buy a CD. It happens to me quite regularly — I’m one of those people who end up spending more money on CDs because they “steal” music and end up liking it.

Many months ago, I was crawling around P2P networks downloading songs, and amongst other artists, I was trying to grab anything I could find from Joan Baez. Joan Baez sung my childhood soundtrack, and I’ve been listening to her on and off for over 20 years. Most of what I used to listen to was on LP or tape and stayed at my parents’. I bought a “Best of” a few years ago, but I wanted to hear some of those songs I used to love when I was little. (Note that, as a first side effect of finding Joan Baez songs online, I started listening to her more again, and that made me start completing my CD collection of her albums.)

Anyway, in the bunch of things I downloaded at that time, there was a song called You’re Aging Well, that she was singing in duet with Dar Williams, the composer of the song (though I didn’t know it at that time). I quickly started liking the song, and in particular Dar Williams’ voice. Around that time (weeks, months?) I realized I owned a CD which contained another track sung by Dar Williams: What Do You Hear in These Sounds.

You’re Aging Well, in particular, grew on me. I added Dar Williams to my wishlist, and when my Dad offered me stuff from Amazon for Christmas, I put The Beauty of The Rain in my shopping basket.

The CD arrived two days ago, along with lots of books (mainly Isaac Asimov — I’m going on a robot binge just now). Well, no regrets, the album is exactly what I expected, and I like it a lot.

While I was listening to it for the first time, I took out the booklet and had a look at it. Beneath the lyrics for each song, Dar Williams has added a comment about it. I like that. Two comments in particular stood out for me.

Have you ever read the book, ‘The Dance of Anger’ by Harriet Lerner? It’s great!

No kidding, The Dance of Anger was the book Dar Williams’ CD was sitting upon when I opened up my box from Amazon. Aleika had recommended it to me, and I had included it in my One-Time Order From Amazon With Dad’s Credit Card. How neat is that?

The chorus of this came into my head while I was being rolfed! It drives me crazy when people say that depression is the best source of art. This song was my determination to transform my new happiness into new ideas and even better art.

I personally feel vers strongly against the idea that suffering is necessary for creativity. I’m glad to hear an artist feel that way, too. Thanks, Dar!

Citations du jour [fr]

Cela fait quelques jours que je voulais partager avec vous un e-mail et un commentaire qui m’ont laissée songeuse.

[en] Inbox and comment fun. An e-mail asking if I'm interesting in taking some pretty weird photos, and a comment on my skyblog which is so much what one would expect there that it looks like a spoof.

De temps en temps, on reçoit des commentaires ou des e-mails amusants. En voici deux récents qui m’ont laissée songeuse.

Tout d’abord, dans mes e-mails:

Spécial, non?

Ensuite, un commentaire sur mon skyblog, tellement caricatural que je me demande si c’est pas un faux:

il est tt pouris ton skyblog j pref grv tro le mien ke le tien toi c mm pa un skyblog aller salut . j me casse j reste pa ici c tt pouri

Sur ce, je vous souhaite une bonne journée!

Maturité d'un journal intime [fr]

Une citation de Jennifer, dont l’anonymat s’est petit à  petit effrité, et qui vit un mélange grandissant entre “le monde de son journal” et “le monde qu’elle raconte dans son journal”.

[en] Jennifer has been keeping an intimate diary online since she was 15. Her online and offline worlds have increasingly collided, and she is now facing the fact that she does not feel free to write on the internet as she used to be. It's really fascinating to read her going through this.

Jennifer a commencé à  écrire son journal intime sur internet lorsqu’elle avait 15 ans. Elle nous a tout livré, sans retenue. Maintenant, entre les années qui passent pour elle et la quantité d’écrits qui s’accumule, son rapport à  son journal change. Je dis depuis longtemps à  qui veut l’entendre qu’un journal intime sur internet n’est pas une entreprise viable, à  terme. Tôt ou tard, les cloisons que l’on a érigées entre son “soi en-ligne” et son “soi hors-ligne” deviennent poreuses. D’inconnus, les lecteurs deviennent connus, et on peut se retrouver à  vouloir parler d’eux.

Lire les réflexions de Jennifer à  ce sujet, et suivre son évolution, c’est assez passionnant.

[…] la principale raison à  ce «bloquage» est surtout que j’ai de plus en plus de mal à  m’«étaler», intimement et émotionnellement parlant, sur internet. Même si je recommencais un blog un jour, sans donner l’adresse à  personne, je crois que je pourrais plus me livrer complètement. Je trouve ça assez malsain pour être honnête. Presque sale. Je préfère garder l’intimité de notre couple. Si je veux lui dire des mots doux, je préfère les lui dire rien qu’à  lui. Quand on dévoile son cÅ“ur, on met à  disposition notre partie la plus sensible. Faire ça sur internet, à  l’accès de tous, et donner donc par la même occasion à  tous ces inconnus (ou pas… Facile d’être découvert) le moyen frapper où ça fait le plus mal, je crois ne plus en être capable.

Jennifer, 11 février 2005

Lire la suite du billet de Jennifer.

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!

Sans le savoir [fr]

Jolie citation. On devient adulte sans le savoir.

[en] A citation I like. We become adults without being aware of it.

Comment les élèves voient-ils le futur ? Ils imaginent un autre monde, là -bas, derrière le mois de septembre prochain. Derrière cette porte fermée à  clef. Un autre univers, radicalement différent de celui-ci. Un monde peuplé d’adultes. On devient adulte, Amélie, sans le savoir. Parfois, parce que l’on devient parents. Parfois, au moment où l’on perd ses parents. Parfois, jamais.

L’avenir, Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu d’enseignement

Savitri III [en]

At every moment we make an unalterable decision. When I wrote to you in the beginning, I made one.

At every moment we make an unalterable decision. When I wrote to you in the beginning, I made one. I made another when I invited you to Tirupet. After you had been and gone, when I gave you that string of answers to your questions, then again I made a decision. I have not altered it. The psychological basis of my behaviour did not come in the way of this. Only I did not get the response I wanted. Had I got it, I would have come anywhere with you, done anythng for you. Every girl, the instant she is born, comes prepared to leave her mother and her father.

You might perhaps say that you too expected a response and that you did not get it. How can I give an answer to this? To tell you the truth, one ought to be able to arrive at these decisions without resorting to the language of appeal and response.

Now, after writing all this, I feel embarrassed. If reading this causes you any sorrow then forget me for all time.