Category: Net Culture

Ship of Theseus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

via Ship of Theseus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’ paradox, or various variants, notably grandfather’s axe and (in the UK) Trigger’s Broom (based upon the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses) is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all its wooden parts remained the same ship.

The paradox had been discussed by more ancient philosophers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato prior to Plutarch’s writings; and more recently by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. This problem is “a model for the philosophers”; some say “it remained the same, some saying it did not remain the same”

INFP Profile

Extraverted intuition faces outward, greeting the world on behalf of Feeling.

What the observer usually sees is creativity with implied good will. Intuition spawns this type’s philosophical bent and strengthens pattern perception. It combines as auxiliary with introverted Feeling and gives rise to unusual skill in both character development and fluency with language–a sound basis for the development of literary facility.

If INTPs aspire to word mechanics, INFPs would be verbal artists.

via INFP Profile.

Emoji – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Emoji (絵文字?) is the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages.

Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means e “picture” + moji “letter”.

The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask or a group of emoji representing popular foods (ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, sushi).

The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo, au and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone), have each defined their own variants of emoji.

via Emoji – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

How the Hashtag Is Ruining the English Language (Updated)

Hashtags at their best stand in as what linguists call “paralanguage,” like shoulder shrugs and intonations.

Hashtags at their best stand in as what linguists call “paralanguage,” like shoulder shrugs and intonations.

That’s fine.

But at their most annoying, the colloquial hashtag has burst out of its use as a sorting tool and become a linguistic tumor—a tic more irritating than any banal link or lazy image meme.

The hashtag is conceptually out of bounds, being used by computer conformists without rules, sense, or intelligence, a like yknowwwww that now permeates the internet outside of the tweets it was meant to corral. It pervades Facebook, texting, Foursquare—turning into a form of “ironic metadata,” as linguist Ben Zimmer of The Visual Thesaurus labels it.

via How the Hashtag Is Ruining the English Language (Updated).

Adactio: Journal—The Language of the Web

I’m not invoking the Sapir Whorf hypothesis here, I just wanted to point out how our language can—intentionally or unintentionally—have an effect on our thinking.

When Ethan Marcotte coined the term “responsive web design” he conjured up something special. The technologies existed already: fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. But Ethan united these techniques under a single banner, and in so doing changed the way we think about web design.

I’m not invoking the Sapir Whorf hypothesis here, I just wanted to point out how our language can—intentionally or unintentionally—have an effect on our thinking.

via Adactio: Journal—The Language of the Web.