names
A renaming of the already named
A crumpled drawing
Names vs. The Nothing
My name
Take your names with you
No Smoking
Port furniture
All the miscellaneous fittings and fixtures on wharves and piers and elsewhere in nautical neighborhoods are known by the charming term port furniture.
On the Winds
An Article by Justin E. H. SmithOn the Situations and Names of the Winds is the title of a fragment of a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, most likely written by a later author of the Peripatetic school. The two-page work identifies and briefly describes the names not just of the four anemoi, but gives a wind-name to each of the twelve points of the so-called “wind-rose”, slightly less poetically the “compass rose”, which is the figure seen on classical nautical charts and maps that shows the cardinal points as well as points intermediate.
...In both agricultural and maritime settings, the names of the winds were at once practical and phenomenologically basic: to step outside and to feel them was to know how things were in the most basic sense, to “know which way the wind is blowing”, as we still vestigially say, and to find the language to speak of it.
...If I were ever permitted to teach a course on the philosophy of wind, I would begin with the questions: How did the winds lose their names? And what does it mean for us to live in a world of nameless winds? I step outside and I feel a gust. “That’s wind,” I think to myself, and I have nothing more to add beyond that. I don’t know the winds.
The Genius of Apple's Name
An Article by Shawn WangIt's easy to have strong opinions about stuff only developers see since user validation is just asking people like yourself. It's much harder to name something consumer facing. Here are some useful rules I gleaned from Apple:
- Two syllables max
- Familiar English word - literal 5 year olds can spell and pronounce it right
- Starts with A - useful for alphabetical sort. Amazon did this too
- Name leads to easy logo/swag/branding ideas
- Evoke aspirational qualities - knowledge, health, nature
Picking better names for variables, functions, and projects
An Article by Tom MacWright- Avoid weasel words
- Follow patterns religiously
- Don’t cheap out on characters
- Call things the same thing
- Don’t name internal projects
- When things change, change their names
Into the system of flight
It seems this transformation, from physical object to vector of data, is a general and oft-repeated process in the history of technology, where new inventions begin in an early experimental phase in which they are treated and behave as singular individual things, but then evolve into vectors in a diffuse and regimented system as the technology advances and becomes standardized.
In the early history of aviation, airplanes were just airplanes, and each time a plane landed or crashed was a singular event. Today, I am told by airline-industry insiders, if you are a billionaire interested in starting your own airline, it is far easier to procure leases for actual physical airplanes, than it is to obtain approval for a new flight route. Making the individual thing fly is not a problem; inserting it into the system of flight, getting its data relayed to the ATC towers and to flightaware.com, is.