You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary An Essay by James Somers jsomers.net As if a word were no more than coordinatesAnother mind as alive as yoursA soft and fitful lusterPathosAn affection for words Webster's Dictionary, 1913 Edition languagewriting
A brief foray into vectorial semantics An Article by James Somers jsomers.net One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”: Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. mathmeaningwordsnotetakingsearchchance
Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor An Essay by James Somers www.theatlantic.com Should we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft? Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic—for being so preventable—brand of public sin. Bob [the driving instructor] oozes concern; he wants to infect the state of New Jersey with good driving habits. He respects his public role, the fact that the minute he's done with these kids they head straight for their parents' car keys and out onto the roads we share. When I asked him what he likes to do outside of work, he laughed: "This is my life." His reward is the pleasure of depth itself. craftworkethics
Learning to See An Article by Oliver Reichenstein ia.net Seeing and feeling Your only language is vision
Seeing and feeling Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse—once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can’t expect to sell what you can’t explain. This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed. For one who can see seeingdesignux