I’m always on the lookout for linguistic niceties and abominations, and this summary is too wonderful not to pass along. I can’t find a way to link directly to the 24 Jun entry at Beyond the Beyond, an RFID (etc.)-watch blog, so I’m reproducing the text here, with bits of emphasis added:

Web Semantics Watch VIII: RFID Jargon
Posted: 24 Jun 2006 04:44:44 -0600
Next-generation RFID tools expand the market

This InfoWorld article by James R. Borck is well worth a read for the techie contingent in RFID middle-management, but I find it chiefly remarkable for the startling beauty of its jargon. The RFID biz has plenty of rough patches ahead on its road to commercial ubitopia, but its geeks are shedding the initial hype and ballyhoo and generating a kind of poetry.

A few choice semantic nuggets from the article (and I grant Mr. Borck every credit here):

“newfound event stream”
“a flood of streaming data at high burst rates”
“an events management subengine winnows nuance from noise” (((Gosh-wow! This formulation isn’t just Flarf poetry, it *describes the very nature* of Flarf poetry.)))
“minimize the barrage before it hits the corporate network”
“a consortium of standards bodies and supply-chain interests”
“abstracts the internal machinations of relational databases”
“Time-based and delta change criteria”
“post-mortem latency”
“details on location, state, causality, and time reference”
“applications can rake supercharged events across complex rule sets”
“Stream Processing Engine”
“latencies too great to withstand the real-time surge”
“in-memory pattern matching and native temporal services”
“inevitable glitches, collisions, and partial reads”
“application sophistication will rise”
“insight into tomorrow’s highly distributed, real-time networks”
“delivers excellent distributed fail-over”
“an excellent next-step advance into building smart readers”
“support for the range of legacy and modern devices”
“a variety of interrogator interfaces”
(((And last but not least, these gnomic words of wisdom)))
“If you’re planning to deploy RFID today, prepare to face device compatibility issues, buggy software and firmware, global numbering standards that still need to be ironed out, and security threats in need of redress.”

• How to redirect a web page, the smart way
  (tags: geekery webstuff)
• Secret Ingredients: Spices, Flavorings, Produce
  (tags: food)

• The Fantastic in Art and Fiction
  (Cornell collection, images and texts)
  (tags: metastuff)

…at least for a while, but I jes’ can’t resist this bit from the third Khmer example (another 0:20)

…but it occurred to me that the second Khmer sample is not entirely unlike the Barry Sisters with pitch raised a minor third (only 0:14, so it’s not really painful –it’s from Ketzele Baroiges for anybody keeping score, also known as Dem Ganef’s Yikhes).

Liz Berg posts five charming bits of Cambodian pop on WFMU’ Beware of the Blog

In Siem Reap, Cambodia, I terrorized a few teenage girls working in a music store with my silly questions about old film stars, what’s on the radio, what’s underground, rock music, hip-hop, dance music, rap, and traditional tunes. They giggled at me nonstop as I tried to ask if this CD was better than that one, and made them repeat an artist’s name about 30 times so I could at least get a phonetic spelling down. I scored tons of great old film tunes, and took home a CD full of MP3s that the clerks recommended, so that I could really know what the Cambodian kids were into.

Two fragments (each about 0:20) to give you the idea.

• The Center for Land Use Interpretation
  (see especially the “database of unusual and exemplary sites” for the US)
  (tags: geospatial)

I mentioned BLDGBLOG a few days ago, pointing to a quotation from Mike Davis, and today’s entry on BLDGBLOG quotes John McPhee (another of my read-everything-he-writes authors) and includes an aerial image of the monster copper mine at Bingham Canyon UT. There’s a pointer to The Center for Land Use Interpretation, and their Land Use Database will eat a few hours of your day.

Co-incidentally, I happened (thanks to Beyond the Beyond) upon a provocative new piece in Edge by Jaron Lanier: DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. A few snippets, to tantalize:

…My point here is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical entities, but just to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the expectations we hold for individual human intellects.

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots…

…it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation…

…It’s safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong…

… The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential…

…The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.

Quite a lot to chew on, and simultaneously I’m rereading Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem and reliving my own mid-1960s perceptions of How Things Are, and listening to Lila Downs’ La Cantina (see a video of La Cumbia del Mole, from her Web site… and there’s this too). A heady brew on a rainy Sunday morning.

you just gotta try this challenge from Sven Godtvisken, on Language Log.

…read this from Stephen Downes. It distills a lot of my raggedy thoughts on ‘teaching’ into a potent draught. Many memorable bits, but I wish I’d said this one:

I gave up arguing during my abortive PhD, when I realized that there was no point to argumentation. I have since then tried to live what I believe, and when people would ask, to explain why I believed it. This allowed me a certain detachment, because it didn’t matter whether they agreed with me, what mattered is that my explanation was true and honest and forthright.