Telescopictext

Wow, the <a href="http://www.telescopictext.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.telescopictext.org/</a> website is a very slick tool to create your own.<p>I created an example one here (made a few typos that I couldn't figure out how to fix):<p><a href="http://www.telescopictext.org/text/AYeELHzYgVV8b" rel="nofollow">http://www.telescopictext.org/text/AYeELHzYgVV8b</a>

I see some deeper meaning in this - in that it is an explicit way to show how communication can be parsed down so simply. Many writers/communicators want to extrapolate every thought into word tombs - when they can very often be summated in something as small as "I made tea." Beautiful execution, here, on getting me (and hopefully others) to think about writing/communicating more simplistically - and then actually doing it.<p>Otherwise stated, "This makes me want to communicate more simply."

The fully expanded text is:<p>Yawning, and smearing my eyes with my fingers, I walked bleary eyed into the kitchen and filled the kettle with fresh water from the tap, checking with my hands to make sure it was cold enough (The best tea comes from the coldest water). I glanced outside for a minute at the city mist. I could almost taste the grey. I plugged the kettle in and switched it on. As the kettle began to hiss, I looked for biscuits. Anything above loose crumbs would do. Thankfully I found some fusty digestives. For some reason, biscuits are always nicer when they've gone a bit dry and stale. I took the milk out of the fridge and poured some into a cup that I'd left out from having used earlier. The kettle began grumbling fiercely so I took it from the cord, threw a teabag into my cup and poured boiling water onto it. I watched brown swirls rise up through the muted white of milky water. A few minutes passed. I removed and squeezed the teabag, then flicked it into the bin. I picked up my mug and left the kitchen with a nice, hot cup of strong tea.

It might be nice to read news articles this way. Start with the headline and expand the parts that interest you the most. I can imagine it being difficult to write that way, though.

This would be a great way to supplement dense text for comprehension purposes and for learning new vocabulary. Learning moments are different for different people, this makes it one-size-fits-all.

<a href="http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/matter/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/matter/index.html</a><p>a choose-your-own-adventure kind of like this, released a week or two ago by Andrew Plotkin.

Nice, it's like having a slider to go from Raymond Carver to David Foster Wallace.

To make your own, go here: <a href="http://www.telescopictext.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.telescopictext.org</a>

This is great. All too often I've posted some rant, knowing it must be very concise to get the point across to soundbite readers, yet wanting to provide details to address obvious criticisms, yet having to somehow find a balance between minimal meme transfer vs. encyclopedic thoroughness overwhelming the basic meme. Hope this can be turned into a blogging/commenting tool.

Based on one of the comments below I couldn't help but wonder: Would trying to program an "ever-expanding" text like this yield any new ideas in NLP?

I never thought expanding something would be so fun. Brings a new meaning to story telling if you do it right. :)

I hope some one writes a javascript library that takes a suitable formatted text and has an expandTo(length) function so that the same info can fit into various screen sizes without having a scrollbar.

A reverse tl;dr. I've got an urge to try formatting my resume like this.

It would be nice if there was an "expand all" option, rather than forcing excess clicking to get to the end of the line.

It looks a good replacement for certain hyperlinks, if we can save/load the hidden text from the database.

Why the upper restriction in "Password must be between 6 to 20 characters" on telescopictext.org?

If you want to un-expand the text, hold the alt key. Very cool.

I saw something like this described many years ago (possibly by Ted Nelson, who coined the term 'hypertext'). The concept was like a volume control for text where cranking the volume control varied the amount of detail from one line summary through to a multi page article.<p>I've always really liked the idea but writing coherent content could be fiendishly difficult (the simple approach is just to provide a number of versions and cycle through them).

I wish 99% of all articles I read worked this way.

<a href="http://www.telescopictext.org/text/fCvNOyBqKSJAh" rel="nofollow">http://www.telescopictext.org/text/fCvNOyBqKSJAh</a><p>My "telescopic" thoughts on making this an interview question. When completely expanded, it does not have a grammatical flow in some parts because I couldn't edit text once created and I did not want to start from scratch.

This could be a very nice way of formatting a long description, such as the description of your software or startup.<p>Think about it: instead of greeting your visitor with a wall of text, you could have something like "XYZ is going to boost your productivity". The user would only need to expand that's interesting to him.

Yawning, and smearing my eyes with my fingers, I walked bleary eyed into the kitchen and filled the kettle with fresh water from the tap, checking with my hands to make sure it was cold enough (The best tea comes from the coldest water). I glanced outside for a minute at the city mist. I could almost taste the grey. I plugged the kettle in and switched it on. As the kettle began to hiss, I looked for biscuits. Anything above loose crumbs would do. Thankfully I found some fusty digestives. For some reason, biscuits are always nicer when they've gone a bit dry and stale. I took the milk out of the fridge and poured some into a cup that I'd left out from having used earlier. The kettle began grumbling fiercely so I took it from the cord, threw a teabag into my cup and poured boiling water onto it. I watched brown swirls rise up through the muted white of milky water. A few minutes passed. I removed and squeezed the teabag, then flicked it into the bin. I picked up my mug and left the kitchen with a nice, hot cup of strong tea.

This is the difference between my speech and my typing, my presentations and my speaker notes, and so on. Anyone know how to learn to do this as you go along, not preparing?

For a minute there I thought I'd be able to paste in some text and automagically get a TL;DR. Pretty neat nonetheless.

Now someone should make a tool that expands from specification to actual code like this. How would that work?

This is how cliff's notes should work.

Doesn't work on iOS Safari.<p>Nuts; that's my primary personal content creation platform now.

Type in console to cheat:<p><pre><code> $('._b').click()</code></pre>

Top tip: never put the milk in first! :-)

The text does not collapse back...

What the fuck is the point of this?!

This is why I hate reading novels. And the fact they forced me to read several of them in high school when my English was rather poor.