On The Outside
Published 20 years, 3 months pastEvery now and again, I stumble across a weblog post that makes me feel the way I expect random visitors feel about my CSS posts. I hit one recently titled “No Information Lost Here!” which says, in part:
Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the past 6 years knows that quantum gravity in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space has unitary time evolution. Blackholes may form and evaporate in interior, but the overall evolution is unitary and is holographically dual to the evolution in a gauge theory on the boundary.
Um, yeah. I mean, who didn’t know that? Sheesh!
It’s always fun to come across someone who clearly is expert in a field I know nothing about (although, in a parallel universe where I stuck with my original college plans, I’d understand it) and who is clearly writing for other people in the same field. It reminds me that much of what I write here is effectively gibberish to 99.9995% of the planet, even though that probably isn’t the case for most of my visitors. It’s good to hit a weblog where I am, for lack of a better term, an outsider. It helps preserve perspective.
Even more fun in this case, however, was to note the end of the URL for the post titled “No Information Lost Here!”: 000404.html.
Comments (14)
Whoa. Yea, I completely understood him /*looks up and away */
I think I will stick with the basic Marketing Jargon I got my degree in :)
Check out his comments in a day or 2. I wonder if they’ll get the references… :)
I got a popup message when I went to the site saying that I needed to download about 6 math fonts in order to view the site correctly. Definitely special interest!
I think Jacques Distler even might follow this weblog, since he is interested in markup and related things as well. (He is currently the only example of a valid use case for XHTML.)
However, this joke has been made before. ;-)
Wow…I suddenly feel better…or even proud…that only 5-10% of what I read on meyerweb is effectively gibberish to me. ;-)
Anne wrote:
I’m not a regular reader, I confess (so many weblogs, so little time …), but I’ve always enjoyed Eric’s site whenever I visit. What little I know about CSS, I learned from him.
Shane wrote:
That’s nothing compared to the dunning popup you get when you visit my site in IE.
(And the Math fonts are a free download. Whaddya complaining about? :-)
Same thing happened to me a few days ago. I hit a site with an interview of someone who is apparently very bright. I was right with him till he started using the word tautology in several concurrent sentences. Unfortunately tautology was the only word I was familiar with. After that my head just popped off.
That paragraph hurt my head, a lot.
*Digs out his copy of ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’*
God bless Bill Bryson.
I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about it? Any average person who’s spent the last 30 years of their life studying quantum physics and learning about anti-de Sitter space, Einstein’s theory of relativity, string-theory, the effects of a black hole’s gravity on the time-space continuum and various other mysteries of the universe, should be able to understand that completely; and I mean, seriously, who hasn’t? :-)
The popup is a Mozilla dialog box. The site isn’t popping it up using javascript or anything. It uses MathML and in order for moz to display math on the page, it needs the fonts with the square root images and stuff.
Well, I did the math. If there are 6 billion people on the planet, then 0.0005 percent leaves us with 30’000 people.
As much as I feel being blessed being a member of such an exclusive club, I hope there are much more webdesigners on the planet who kinda do understand what you’re saying here or in your books. Or would understand if they read it.
I might not understand everything in the Musings site (my Univercity life starts in a month, heh), but it’s like the best example of a non-designer having a well-written page, well done there. As for meyerweb? It’s funny to think that almost a year ago I didn’t even know how to write a table in HTML but after some very big steps there is nothing (except some rare CSS2 syntax here and there) that I cannot understand. I should add that css/edge was pretty helpful in making my webpage too :)
restiffbard: I think it’s rather amusing that there was so much tautology about tautology, m’self. ::grin::
And yeah, I too find CSS far easier to comprehend than quantum physics.
Hang on… you honestly didn’t know that?
Some people. :)