Monocultured

I just spend half an hour looking through internationally recognised tests of english proficiency. Obviously I ended up doing a few silly tests instead, and then I came upon this list of 100 words that are good to know if you want to annoy people (-oh, c’mon! don’t be so fastidiuos!).

The definitions of the words are somewhat unorthodox though:

impudent:
(adj.) casually rude, insolent, impertinent (The impudent young woman looked her teacher up and down and told him he was hot.)

That’s not as impudent as it is cheeky, I would say.

Yesterday found me in bed early as I was feeling rather poorly, but before falling to sleep I jotted this down:

There is always the assumption that my motives are less “valid”, more construed, more flawed, than those of others. This could be because I myself either feel that I should be aware of them, or because the fear/realisation that I might be right about such an assumption.

Bothersome, nontheless.

I’m not sure what I was thinking of, but I’m sure it’s pertinent to something or other.

And speaking of half-baked ideas and such: What I’m missing from Wikipedia is a graphical representation of relationship between ideas/people/stuff, as well as an explanation of those relationships (i.e. who claims that the cultural disposition towards the steam engine in rural england differs qualitatively from the reaction in the new world?). To illustrate badly:

This approach would create an endless regression of relationships, but my idea here is that you’d merge many persons’ approach to different relationships between subjects, at one point you would be able to merge or overlay the opinions on relationships into either groups or dominant agreements (Wikipedia currently has dominant agreements on all it’s topics, and the alternative approaches are listed under “contested entries”).

What I imagine in my head is the history and telling and constant reinterpretation of history as a three dimensional graphic interface, where you can draw your own connections between different subjects, and see general trends displayed according to chronology (first the boat was invented, then deep sea fishing), geography (the common nominator of the Norwegian and Swedish landscape would be coastlines and mountainous areas), economical (international class interests and it’s protagonists/agents and how they relate to each other) and so on and so forth.

You would be able to create relationships based on colour if you’d like (what I associate with the colour “mauve”), but obviously this might have little meaning for anyone else but you, and creates an open playingfield for griefers to sabotage (like what has happened more than once at wikipedia).

The idea outlined above is very much what the Internet is already; a series of links, or relationships between one thing and another, one page or instance on a page to another. Problem is that there’s no memory built in, no smooth way to create relationships and share them with others. The XML standard defines “relationship” between pages, and one level that is exactly what I’m after here. I just want to be able to click and drag and copy and see an even bigger transparancy of relationships. I know that Edison was en engineer, but I want to know how he related to Tesla, or how he might have related to the colour “mauve”, and I want these relationships to have a sender. I want to see who states what, and sooner or later I’ll find a few people who have the same world view as i, and whose writing of history is much like my own.

The most powerful usage of this would be to allow people to write their own history, and due to the whole thing being a mergable system, other groups would be able to challenge interpretations, without having any authority to change it.

Conspiracy nuts could create charts of how the UFOs fit into the creation of the pyramids, individuals can write their biography and illustrate their relationship to other phenomena, and Indian textile workers can drag and drop the relationships between the development of industrialisation, changes in cast system, weather patterns and land ownership.

One central standard interface, allowing creation of relationships between relationships between relationships. Yes, the Internet is already much like this, and creating a simple HTML page is easier than learning a completely new UI for clicking and dragging (if that’s the best form for this), but it’s time that the millions of alternative historical interpretations be presented in a coherent way, and connections made that are visable to all.