Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive

I just came across a peculiar dictionary, the Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. It is a dictionary of words of Indian (and other) origin that would have been used by the English in India. It is a dictionary of the Raj and traderoutes that is full of surprises. It is a work of its time, published just at the end of the 19th century. The title, “Hobson-Johnson” is an example of the colloquial terms covered:

HOBSON-JOBSON , s. A native festal excitement; a tamƒÅsha (see TUMASHA); but especially the Moharram ceremonies. This phrase may be taken as a typical one of the most highly assimilated class of Anglo-Indian argot, and we have ventured to borrow from it a concise alternative title for this Glossary. It is peculiar to the British soldier and his surroundings, with whom it probably originated, and with whom it is by no means obsolete, as we once supposed. My friend Major John Trotter tells me that he has repeatedly heard it used by British soldiers in the Punjab; and has heard it also from a regimental Moonshee. It is in fact an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram — “YƒÅ Hasan! YƒÅ Hosain!’

Alas they don’t have the word “dylok” – supposed to be an Indian-East-African version of “dialogue” – used for variety shows and drama.
Update: I just discovered that this is “back-ended” by The ARTFL Project.

Lanier: Digital Maoism

Edge has an essay by VR visionary Jaron Lanier called Digital Maoism about how wikis and other forms of social networking are just replacing one elite with a collective.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

Thanks to Mark for pointing this out.

Mandala Browser

My colleague StÈfan Sinclair has recently set up a site for the Mandala: Rich Prospect Browser text visualization project that he leads. The current prototype was programmed in Flash, but he is reimplementing it in Java. It is one of the more original ideas for visualization that I have seen in a while and builds on Stan Ruecker’s ideas for rich prospect browsing where you can see some representation of the whole of your evidence (the prospect) while manipulating the details. StÈfan has also been working with ideas of direct manipulation of that whole. In Mandala you create dimensions based on criteria (author = X, Y, or Z) that act as attractors.

Dieselpoint Search and Navigation

Dieselpoint has Search & Navigation Software and services for large-scale document management. They have a good SWF demo of how their technology can be integrated into a portal, see Portal Demo. They claim to have an innovative way of “using the attributes of a data set to build menus that allow a user to browse in an intelligent way.” (See Faceted Navigation – Guided Navigation) It looks like they license their Java code for others to integrate into other products too.

Zip

So today I cancelled my subscription to Zip, the Canadian equivalent to NetFix. I liked the idea, but it didn’t work for me. Some of the reasons are:

  • You don’t get the DVDs you want in a timely fashion. At best you chose something and it comes a week later, but most of the time I would have forgotten why I listed something by the time it came, if at all. In other words you can’t scratch a desire.
  • All the stuff you really want to watch never seems to come. You have to have this long list and stuff comes based on availability which seems random. With a video store at least what you find on the shelf you can see that evening.
  • I had the 4 DVD service, but they didn’t seem to send me more than three at a time. I suspect they don’t have enough copies to handle the traffic.
  • The stuff that comes never seems to be the stuff I want to watch tonight. That’s the problem of depending on availability – you get what they have on hand not what you feel like any particular night. So I would go out and rent a video while letting the Zip DVDs lie around unwatched.
  • It’s not worth the money unless you watch the DVDs when they come in and send them back pronto.
  • I began to get notices that DVDs I put on my list were not available at all. Why is this? Do they list things they don’t have and then buy them (or not) when someone asks for them? Or do they not replace damaged copies?

To be fair, I’ve seem some hard-to-get movies through Zip that were terrific like Ali Zoua: Prince of the Streets (2000) – one of the most moving movies I’ve seen for while. It’s about and acted by glue-sniffing street kids in Casablanca and felt more authentic than anything else of its kind. Zip is also good for TV series. Once they send you the first episode in a series you get the others in sequence. (What would be more annoying that get the first DVD of the second season of the Wire and then not getting the second DVD for a month?)

Anyway, I’m back to renting while I wait for the ability to buy/rent online directly.

Prize Budget for Boys

Prize Budget for Boys is an arts collective “convened in Toronto in 2001” that has been creating interactive arts games. Pac-Mondrian
, for example, is a Pac-Man like game where you eat through a Mondrian work to the tune of boogie woogie jazz. (See the New York Times article, Arts > Art & Design > Chomp if You Like Art” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/arts/design/27mond.html?ex=1261890000&en=bc65f21f79d37d0a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>Chomp if You Like Art by Sarah Boxer (Dec. 27, 2004.)
Calderoids combines Asteroids with Calder like mobiles.
Continue reading Prize Budget for Boys

Most Influential Gamers?

MTV News has a nice story about the Most Influential Gamers? (June 21, 2006) by Stephen Totilo. The news story assembles 10 influential gamers for debate like U Michigan prof Peter Ludlow who was kicked off the The Sims Online for running a newspaper in the game. Another is Patrick Wildenbord who found the sex-game buried in Grant Theft Auto: San Andreas which causes a fuss.

Are top gamers becoming the sport stars of the net?

Thanks to Jean-Guy for this.

Perron: Cognition of Gameplay Emotions

A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions is a paper that Bernard Perron gave at DIGRA 2005. He adapts discussions of how viewers respond emotionally to cinema to understanding the emotions of playing computer games (specifically story-based ones.) I think he gets it right.

But inasmuch as you can make your avatar act, you have to make him take action. If not, there will be no game. Otherwise, as Iíve often stressed with regards survival horror games, it is certainly not the avatar that is meant to be scared or have emotions, but rather the gamer [19]. The avatar, incidentally, generally stays expressionless, whatever the situation. We saw that emotions depend on the gamerís appraisal of a given game situation. This individual appraisal will consequently produce subjective emotional reactions.

In many ways the mission style of certain games provides the overall motivation (you are just following orders) and it is in the achievement of the assigned task and overcoming the problems that the emotions of playing lie. Few games are sufficiently open ended that you can choose the general attitude to take to playing/living in the game-world. It would be much harder to program a game that was so open ended. By choosing the play a mission you suspend your choice of life goals in order to take pleasure in the goals set by the game. What does this say about levels of (free) will?