Kottke quotes from Steven Levy’s Wired magazine article on the syntax and evolving language of search queries:

Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context.

Being reasonably acquainted with Wittgenstein, I found myself wondering which of his ideas came so integrally into play in solving this problem. The Wired article only links to Wittgenstein’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, which includes a survey of all his major concepts and works. Was it his distinction between sense and nonsense? His arguments against a private language? His work on the connection between seeing and saying and his example of the “duckrabbit”? Or perhaps it was something he didn’t discover but simply weighed in on, like ostensive definitions or contextualism?

The strongest candidate, though, might be his concepts of language games and family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s best-known example of a language game is the “builder’s language.” Here’s how he describes it:

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar” “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.

This is a very small kit of parts; a lexicon of just four elements, combined in a certain way. But by uttering these words in the right context, a building gets built. The meaning these words have comes from their ability to activate the builder’s assistant to do what the master builder is asking. And their family resemblance has to do with this limited language, in which these words’ meaning is defined by their context and shared by the two builders. After the workday is through, the builder might look forward to how his children “beam” at him when he arrives home, and the context is entirely different.

The Wired article continues,

As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant.

A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.

Oh, and on the headline above — just my humble attempt to confuse the hell out of Google.

Trend tracker: cinematic screenshot blogs. Here are two fine and varied examples: 1) Michael Crowe’s To e (via). 2) Justin Ouellette’s Screen Caps.

Three recent articles with online product reviews at their center:

1. Alice Twemlow’s Design Observer post on the “Poetics of Amateur Product Reviews,” which includes an introduction to writer Geoff Dyer’s concept of “imaginative criticism,” found in his wonderful jazz book But Beautiful (and used in my own article, “Pärt Notes”).

2. Nick Bilton’s data visualizations of Kindle user reviews, which he used to draw his own conclusions on Amazon’s consumer responsiveness for the New York Times’s Bits blog.

3. Virginia Heffernan’s article “The Reviewing Stand” for her column The Medium in the New York Times Magazine, which cites a review of the self-help best-seller The Secret that is simply too kooky to miss. See also: Harriet Klausner, and Justin Ouelette’s opinionated-but-hyperminimalist The Shit to Get.

Seth Godin channeling Lewis Hyde at Cool Hunting on behalf of his new book, Linchpin:

What’s a gift? If I see a Chuck Close painting in a museum, I didn’t pay for that painting, I just get the benefit of seeing it. If I see a Karl Lagerfeld outfit walking down the street, it didn’t cost me anything to see it. If someone takes the time to use a beautiful Bodoni typeface kerned properly, it doesn’t necessarily communicate the words more clearly, but there was a gift element associated with it. We need to start with this idea that there isn’t just a transaction every time—I do something, I get money, we move on—that what gifts do is they create a connection, because they’re not even. Someone gave me something, I couldn’t give them anything in return. We’re not even-steven.

Also worth noting is Godin’s innovative PR model:

We started by offering a review copy to the first three thousand people who gave a donation to the Acumen Fund, which is a charity I support. And it didn’t take very long to have more than 2,000 people do that. We raised $100,00 in about a day and a half, exceeding our goal. So those books went out yesterday. We also sent 250 people who live internationally a shorter digital version (about a fifth of the book) so that they wouldn’t have to wait for shipping. It’s already showing up on Twitter. It’s already being reviewed. Some people don’t like it, some people like it a lot. What will end up happening, my prediction is, that between 500 and 1,000 reviews of one sort or another will get posted online, which will certainly reach far more people than a review in The New York Times ever could. My principle goal is to leverage personal interactions so that this book reaches the people it needs to reach, the people who are open to hearing what it has to say.

A different take on the idea of enough from last week, this time through the eyes of Kevin Kelly:

I’m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not using technology. We’re used to be that you define yourself by what you use now. You define yourself by what you don’t use. So I’m interested in that process.

Earlier, he explains,

The technium is anything useful that a mind makes. That doesn’t even have to be a human mind. Any mind. So that includes not just the gadgets but it also includes the law, our writing. […] The greatest technology humans ever invented is humanity itself. We domesticated ourselves. We turned ourselves into part of the technium because we cannot live as a species. We cannot live without technology. We’ve invented ourselves. And it’s our greatest invention so far.

So collectively our humanity comes out of technology: humans are make tools, heat their food. But individually, we’re perhaps increasingly defined by the technologies we choose to do without.

At the DelveNYC conference a few weeks ago, I saw Joshua Porter give a great presentation called Designing for Social Traction, the slides for which are now available on Slideshare. (I was also lucky enough to win a copy of Josh’s book.)

A few fun things from Josh’s talk:

1) The article Eager Sellers Stony Buyers by John T. Gourville, which explains that buyers tend to overvalue the products they currently use by a factor of three and sellers tend to overvalue the things they make by a factor of three, leading to a 9x differential between the two.

2) The case of Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s #1 ranked reviewer until 24 October 2008, when she dropped to #445 because Amazon shifted its algorithm to rank reviewers by helpfulness (quality) not proflicacy (quantity). There’s also some question as to whether Klausner was even writing her own reviews. Josh explains.

3) The teaching of Peter Kollock, particularly his famous Stanford lecture, which says that people contribute online for four reasons: reputation, reciprocity, doing good work, and for attachment/need of a group.

4) The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are nine conditions for flow, which starts with having clear goals and concludes with finding a balance between skills and challenges. If something’s too easy we get bored. If it’s too difficult, we feel anxious. Flow happens when the skills of a user and the challenges of a task meet in an ever-evolving middle ground.

An audio interview [iTunes] with Sherry Turkle, who directs the Initiative on Technology and the Self at MIT about her book Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.

The book, a collection of essays edited by Turkle, includes an essay by Susan Yee about her visit to the Le Corbusier archive in Paris on the day the master architect’s materials were being digitized. Here’s how Turkle describes Yee’s visit in an essay called “Inner Objects” [PDF]:

Yee began her relationship to Le Corbusier through the physicality of his drawings. The master’s original blueprints, sketches, and plans were brought to her in long metal boxes. Le Corbusier’s handwritten notes in the margins of his sketches, the traces of his fingerprints, the smudges, the dirt—Yee was thrilled by all of these. One morning, Yee has all of this in her hands, but by the afternoon, she has only digital materials to work with. Yee experiences a loss of connection to Le Corbusier: “It made the drawings feel anonymous,” she says. More important, Yee says that the digitized archives made her feel anonymous. When working in the physical archive, Yee was on a kind of pilgrimage. She did not pause in her work, so completely was she immersed in the touch and feel of Le Corbusier’s artifacts. But once the material was on the screen, there was a disconnect. Yee found herself switching screens, moving from the Le Corbusier materials to check her email back at MIT. More than a resource, the digitized archive becomes a state of mind.

NYT profiles the new “entertainment shopping” site Swoopo, in which bidders spend $0.60/bid on to snag deals on bikes, watches, small electronics, and other impulse buys. They report:

This month, a new 40-inch Samsung TV, which normally sells for $1,500, sold for $67.92, and a white LG refrigerator with a price tag of $1,498 went for a cool $77.90.

But there’s an enormous catch:

[Critics say the site preys] on human foibles, like the tendency of people to overlook the small increments of money they spend to pursue alluring discounts. These critics also say that players face long odds in Swoopo’s auctions, where they must compete against people in the United States, Britain and Germany. And they say that Swoopo is making a nice profit on each item when all the bidding fees are tallied. Competing bidders spent a cumulative $2,337 in their losing effort to buy the $1,498 refrigerator, for example.

Absolutely incredible. Price and psychology, dangerously interlinked. The unemployed 27-year-old piping draftsman who’s profiled in the piece confesses that occasionally he’s spent more winning an item than it would’ve cost to buy in a store.

First, SVA’s D-Crit program website updated its design and has new essays, new faculty, much news, and some great upcoming events.

Second, Print Magazine has redesigned their website, which will now feature an editors’ blog, a new blog called Obsessions, an Image of the Day, more multimedia, and a shop.

And last but certainly not least, a little site called Design Observer is now The Design Observer Group, expanding its offerings to include Change Observer, which is about the intersection of design and social innovation, as well as Places, the legendary journal about design, urbanism, and the public realm. Design Observer will now be known as Observatory, and a multimedia channel— featuring an archive Debbie Millman’s Design Matters along with Andrew Sloat’s ongoing We the Constitution series—has also been added to the site.

So basically it looks like I’ve got a lot more reading to do now. Congrats to all and good luck with the new sites.

John Hockenberry’s excellent essay on the current state of industrial design for Metropolis Magazine, written earlier this year, takes its title from George W.S. Trow’s hypnotic and prescient 1980 meditation for the New Yorker entitled “Within the Context of No Context,” which later became a book by the same title. A sample:

In the New History, nothing was judged—only counted. The power of judging was then subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be easily measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.

See also: SEO. And possibly, by extension: 41 Shades of Blue. More on Trow and his essay here.