4 ms·

Slightly off topic but: I actually did bail out when I saw the math warning. I had enough of math and infinities in college and just am not curious right now. S

Slightly off topic but: I actually did bail out when I saw the math warning. I had enough of math and infinities in college and just am not curious right now. Still, I think it's very interesting how he tailored his blog post to two audiences: first a general tech/designer audience, and then a second math-oriented audience. Makes me thing how maybe in the future we can have dynamic content like a Wikipedia article about a computer science topic that gets more specific the more programatically/academically inclined the audience is. (As to how you could identify this, one example is adsense, but users might be able to fill in or identify their interests themselves) You can't really make something that fits everyone's purpose perfectly, but it would be a first good step.

ronyeh 12y ago
One crazy idea for implementing this would be for everyone to set a flag in their browser that indicates how academically inclined the user is. NERD=0,1,2...9 Then wikipedia paragraphs can just be labeled with the minimum NERD value as a CSS style. The browser can hide paragraphs that exceed your NERD level. If you set NERD=9, you'll see the super dense/academic wikipedia articles.
- noonespecial 12y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree so long as I can hold ctrl and spin my mouse wheel to increase my Nerd-Zoom.
gumby 12y ago
> Makes me thing how maybe in the future we can have dynamic content like a Wikipedia article about a computer science topic that gets more specific the more programatically/academically inclined the audience is. We already have a mechanism for this, which is simply to get increasingly nerdly as you go and let the reader bail out (or skip to the next section) as desired. Newspaper articles are an extreme form of this, with the first paragraph a high level summary and then decreasingly relevant paragraphs with the explicit design objective that the editor / page layer-outer [1] can cut the article pretty much at any paragraph break. So the reader reads until their interest is sated and then stops. Academic articles are (in principle) the extreme opposite of this, with a summary up front and then a largely coherent mass following. [0] is the "d" in nerdly (or gnurdly) an MITism? The Mac's spell corrector doesn't like it. [1] I have forgotten the word for this archaic job. This person did layout after the articles had been typeset.
- xrayspec 12y ago
  > the word for this archaic job. This person did layout after the articles had been typeset. pasteup
- egypturnash 12y ago
  [1] pasteup? man I got trained in how to paste stuff up with wax and whatnot in college and deliberately forgot it within seconds because desktop publishing was so obviously obsoleting that.

ronyeh 12y ago

One crazy idea for implementing this would be for everyone to set a flag in their browser that indicates how academically inclined the user is. NERD=0,1,2...9 Then wikipedia paragraphs can just be labeled with the minimum NERD value as a CSS style. The browser can hide paragraphs that exceed your NERD level. If you set NERD=9, you'll see the super dense/academic wikipedia articles.

noonespecial 12y ago
I wholeheartedly agree so long as I can hold ctrl and spin my mouse wheel to increase my Nerd-Zoom.

gumby 12y ago

> Makes me thing how maybe in the future we can have dynamic content like a Wikipedia article about a computer science topic that gets more specific the more programatically/academically inclined the audience is. We already have a mechanism for this, which is simply to get increasingly nerdly as you go and let the reader bail out (or skip to the next section) as desired. Newspaper articles are an extreme form of this, with the first paragraph a high level summary and then decreasingly relevant paragraphs with the explicit design objective that the editor / page layer-outer [1] can cut the article pretty much at any paragraph break. So the reader reads until their interest is sated and then stops. Academic articles are (in principle) the extreme opposite of this, with a summary up front and then a largely coherent mass following. [0] is the "d" in nerdly (or gnurdly) an MITism? The Mac's spell corrector doesn't like it. [1] I have forgotten the word for this archaic job. This person did layout after the articles had been typeset.

xrayspec 12y ago
> the word for this archaic job. This person did layout after the articles had been typeset. pasteup
egypturnash 12y ago
[1] pasteup? man I got trained in how to paste stuff up with wax and whatnot in college and deliberately forgot it within seconds because desktop publishing was so obviously obsoleting that.