Posts tagged metaphor

when we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief”, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find a prey at distance. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.

via https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality–432e96dd4d1a

There’s something more to say about the work that lies ahead, if it’s seriously the case that we are in territory where archdruids and zine writers and collapse bloggers and mythtellers are the ones who still have maps that seem to make sense. I notice that there is a part of me that would like not to be serious, that would like it to be secretly a bluff, a puffing of the ego, when I say that it feels like there’s a new responsibility landing on the ragtag of thinkers and tinkers and storytellers at the edges, one edge of which I have been part of over these last years. And for sure, this is only one map I’ve been sketching, others will have their own that may or may not overlap. But the way it looks from here tonight, the people who are meant to know how the world works are out of map, shown to be lost in a way that has not been seen in my lifetime, not in countries like these.

via https://medium.com/redrawing-the-maps/when-the-maps-run-out–8cc5f5f4f5e

Pretty much every metaphor designer is inspired by Metaphors We Live By (1980), by the Berkeley linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon. It’s the classic look at how metaphors structure the way we think and talk, and once you’ve read it, you can’t help but agree that, at a conceptual level, life is a journey, and arguments are wars (you take sides, there can be only one winner, evidence is a weapon). However, for the practical metaphor designer, psycholinguistic research turns out to be much more useful than philosophical commentary, because it studies how people actually encounter and process new metaphors.

http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/how-to-design-a-metaphor/

The basic unit of meaning in Escher is the reflex. A reflex is a named black-box computational device, which interfaces with other objects in the linguistic environment through a set of named valves. Metaphorically, the valves can be viewed as labeled communication pipes coming out of the black-box.

http://www.maymounkov.org/memex/abstract

Anyone who has tried to edit code on the iPad through a traditional textview knows that it doesn’t work well. Editing source code character by character is a concept wedded to the keyboard and it is inappropriate for the iPad, a device with no keyboard. Lisping abandons this model and allows you to edit your code via the parse tree. Rather than manipulating ranges of characters Lisping focusses on selecting, creating and moving syntax elements, a task ideally suited to the iPad’s touchscreen interface, and also - more than a little bit fun.

http://slidetocode.com/2012/04/05/lisping-released/