The Zen of Language

I am a lover of Zen, though my notion of Zen is quite specific to a certain perspective, as most peoples' interpretations of that word seem to be. To me, Zen is about a conceptual purity and simplicity but also a high level of appropriateness or correctness for a context. I have thought quite a lot about what this means for design but I am not ready to share that now. 

In any case, recently I have been exposed to another kind of Zen in a vaguely unexpected environment. During my masters here in korea, one of the fundamental things I am learning is the value of a Zen like approach to language. In this case, english, from my professor, who speaks english as a second language. What I mean by this Zen is a kind of ideal use of language to describe exactly what is meant, despite arbitrary complexity and the possibility of various interpretations of words. I think this kind of english is favoured in Korea, because of the way people learn english, as a kind of exact science, and also, favoured at my university, KAIST, because of the kind of publications expected here. Personally, my english is still far from Zen-like, and I think, though I am learning to improve it to participate here, it is probably never going to be as exact as many academics here make it. I believe this because I think native english speakers simply do not tend to treat words with such subtlety of application. Some poets and authors seem to be able to do it, however, most seem to use words like the USA uses oil.

I have never really liked reading, because I am slow at it and distracted easily, however, all my life I have enjoyed learning and acquiring knowledge, especially on mass. I have, on many occasions complained that books are aggravating because they act as a jail for knowledge, hiding it among numerous useless pages of imprecise words. Zen language is thus when every word counts and contributes fully to the meaning, not only of the sentence but to the whole work.

This view of Zen seems to act as a good framing example of what I think the general concept of Zen implies. What do you think? (I am sure my notion of Zen is not in accordance with more formal definitions, let me know if you have a more informed perspective)

Also, does anyone have suggestions about how to become able to write with Zen language? 

The images are a little bit random, just three shots of a lotus farm in Chungdu in SiChuan China. It seems that lotuses are often depicted in relation to Zen. 

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

Living in Context

Recently while shopping at the local KAIST convenience store I noticed the clerk was getting exercise by power walking around the small store.

The KAIST Convenient Store with woman running too fast to be photographed

I think the prospect of making our living spaces and working spaces share strange unexpected values is pretty interesting. I should also add that recently in my Ubiquitous Hacking summer class we did a little thinking about combined multimode spaces for living and working. My prototype was based on the prospect of incorporating emptiness to reduce functional specificity. A little like the discussion of bathrooms I noted last time I was travelling in Korea, this concept is also highly motivated by the seeming emptiness and functional agnosticism of many traditional Korean destinations.

A simple room for work and living biased on the lack of objects to create flexibility

Language for Computers not People

A post about the UNIX programer who killed his wife drove me to consider the notion of syntax heavy languages being used to avoid the large problems associated with the semantic web. I am not really sure what this would entail but I guess it is really something like the kind of pattern language issue that I was thinking about for my graduate project at RMIT.

What makes what we say and think so hard to understand (for computers at least) apart from what we use to say it?

Is it possible to make design decisions for a language at this point and have a substantial enough effect on syntax and parsing to achieve the goal of natively supporting direct communication with computers? 

Just on the matters of designed language, in Korea they use a really really awesome alphabet called Hangul. It is highly optimised for both high speed reading and pure graphical logic. It uses simple letters that build things like syllables that become visually compressed into a character without reducing the identify-ability of the individual letters. The system was designed rather recently, 1443, with the intention of creating a better system for dealing with complex sound based languages.