Erik Naggum's XML rant
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I have met my match. I cede any right to claim to have ranted in the
past. This is art. http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html And he has more, see links at the bottom of the page. As much as I feel rants are cathartic and even a noble literary expression, some surpass even these frail goals. This and others elevate rants into the sublime. Here is an example or two: | Basically XML is just another way of writing S-expr or Trees or | whatever you want to call it. They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished. .. and .. I once believed that it would be very beneficial for our long-term information needs to adorn the text with as much meta-information as possible. I still believe that the world would be far better off if it had evolved standardized syntactic notations for time, location, proper names, language, etc, and that even prose text would be written in such a way that precision in these matters would not be sacrificed, but most people are so obsessively concerned with their immediate personal needs that anything that could be beneficial on a much larger scale have no chance of surviving. Look at the United States of America, with its depressingly moronic units instead of going metric, with its inability to write dates in either ascending or descending order of unit size, and with its insistence upon the 12-hour clock, clearly evidencing the importance of the short-term pain threshold and resistance to doing anyone else's bidding. And now the one-time freest nation of the world has turned dictatorship with a dangerous moron in charge, set to attack Iraq to revenge his father's loss. Those who laughed when I said that stupidity is the worst threat to mankind laugh no more; they wait with bated breath to see if the world's most powerful incoherent moron will launch the world into a world war simply because he is too fucking stupid. But what really pisses me off is the spineless American people who fails to stop this madness. Presidents have been shot and killed before. I seem to be digressing -- the focal point is that the masses, those who exert no effort to better themselves, cannot be expected to help solve any problems larger than their own, and so they must be forced by various means, such as compulsory education, spelling checkers, newspaper editors who do /not/ publish their letters to the editor, and not least by the courts that restrain the will to revenge, in order to keep a modicum of sanity in the frail structure that is human society. We are clearly not at the stage of human development where writers are willing to accept the burden of communicating to the machine what they are thinking. One has to marvel at the wide acceptance of our existing punctuation marks and the sociology of their acceptance. "Tagging" text for semantic constructs that the human mind is able to discern from context must be millennia off. .. finally .. In many ways, the current American presidency and XML have much in common. Both have clear lineages back to very intelligent people. Both demonstrate what happens when you give retards the tools of the intelligent. Some Americans obsess over gun control, to limit the number of handguns in the hands of their civilians, but support the most out-of-control nutcase in the young history of the nation and rally behind his world-threatening abuse of guns. The once noble concern over validation to curb excessive costs of too powerful a tool for the people who used it, has turned into an equally insane abuse of power in the XML world. How could such staggering idiots as have become "leaders" of the XML world and the free world come to their power? Clearly, they gain support from the masses who have no concerns but their immediate needs, no ability to look for long-term solutions and stability, no desire to think further ahead than that each individual decision they make be the best for them. Lethargy and pessimism, lack of long-term goals, apathy towards consequences, they are all symptoms of depressed people, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the world economy is now in a depression. My take on it is that it is because too much growth also rewarded people of such miniscule intellectual prowess that they turned to fraud rather than tackle the coming negative trends intelligently. Whether Enron or W3C or the GOP, everyone knows that fraud does pay in the short term and that bad money drives out good. When even the staggering morons are rewarded, the honest and intelligent must lose, and even the best character will have a problem when being honest means that he forfeits a chance to received a hundred million dollars. In both the Bush administration and the W3C standards administration, we see evidence that large groups of people did not believe that it would matter who assumed power. I am quite certain that just as Bush is supposed to be a thoroughly /likable/ person, the people who work up the most demented "standards" in the W3C lack that personality trait that is both abrasive and exhibit leadership potential. When the overall growth of something is so rapid that an idiotic decision no longer causes any immediate losses, the number of such decisions will grow without bounds until the losses materialize, such as in an economic depression. When the losses are so diffused as to not even affect the idiots behind the decisions, they can stay in power for a very long time until they are blamed for a large number of ills they had no power to predict, but that is precisely what caused them. Humbled, I am in his debt. -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Mr. Schnada favours his views on sexp, judging from the site. What must be taken into consideration is that the Usenet post copied at the link you posted says that it was posted at 03:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and considering that Mr. Naggum (judging from his site naggum.no) is from the Netherlands (Central European Time, CET, which is +1 or +2 GMT depending on whether it is Daylight Savings Time or not) that rant was probably written at four in the morning, when many rants are.
-Arlo James Barnes ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
> that rant was probably written at four in the morning, when many rants
are. Such an essay is routine for Erik. That one is what I would call restrained. :-) Marcus -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com What can On Demand Business Solutions do for you? http://link.mail2web.com/Business/SharePoint ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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From Eriks rant:
( I note in passing that the stereotypical American male longs for much larger than natural female breasts, presumably to maintain the proportion to his own size from his infancy, which has caused the stereotypical American female to feel a need for breasts that will give the next generation a demand for even more disproportionally large breasts.) It must be taken into serious consideration when working with XML. **************************** Greg Sonnenfeld “The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 2:31 PM, [hidden email] <[hidden email]> wrote: >> that rant was probably written at four in the morning, when many rants > are. > > Such an essay is routine for Erik. That one is what I would call > restrained. :-) > > Marcus > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > mail2web.com – What can On Demand Business Solutions do for you? > http://link.mail2web.com/Business/SharePoint > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
http://perpelle.wordpress.com/artikler-og-leserinnlegg/erik-naggum-in-memori
am/ http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2009/06/24/erik_naggum_rip -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://link.mail2web.com/mail2web ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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