Psybertron Asks

Thanks to Matt Bartlett, who commented on my previous post, for this pearl from Edmund Burke.

Now got through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Gottlieb’s book – by far the bulk. The remainder up to 1650 is packed into relatively few pages – as many others have mentioned (see note below). Gottlieb is very defensive of his Greek heros, and to be fair, I’ve learned a lot – makes a change [...]

This 12th International Conference at the Huntsville University, Alabama has an interesting range of subjects, and a Peircean theme based in the HUA Computer Sciences department. eg This year’s invited speakers will beJeff Heflin, USA (the semantic web)John Sowa, USA (conceptual graphs)Rudolf Wille, Germany (formal concept analysis and concept graphs)Frithjof Dau, Germany (existential graphs)Kelly Parker, [...]

Interesting new site in the area of Cognitive Science – picked-up from Google.Groups.AI forum. Not much content yet, but shows promise. FN4 is the social barrier to acceptance of robots in the human environment, coined by Wired’s Bruce Sterling – begs the question what FN’s 1, 2 & 3 are, but one can guess – [...]

Mark Richardson’s latest article (and last for a while) in the Toronto Star, tells of his plan to follow the ZMM route on his motorcycle. Blogged earlier. He also gives a plug to Henry Gurr’s site, where he will be posting photos of the trip as he goes. Good luck Mark.

Still making my way through Gottlieb’s book (see previous blog). Not much new since Democritus and Socrates I reckon – call me dismissive – but I still see the last 2500 years as the “post socratic blind-alley of western civilisation” thanks to Plato and particularly Aristotle, with help from the Romans and Christianity. Easy to [...]

Met one Alex Lennon last night (in the Pickerell, where else). He has his own personal www.embeddedsoftware.co.uk website and works for Organix in Cambridge. He spotted I was reading Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason – a History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance” [QUOTE] Already a classic in its first year of [...]

A ZMM site I’ve not noticed before. Will add to Pirsig Pages.

Antidote to Death by PowerPoint ? Thanks to Anol’s Soul Soup for this one. Sociable Media offer antidotes to the corporate toxin that is PowerPoint. Know what they mean. Though don’t blame the tools, it’s not all bad news for PowerPoint.

Talking of anniversaries, how did I overlook that Wednesday this week was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday – the day to celebrate (!) James Joyce’s Ulysses’ central character Leopold Bloom. Thanks to Frizzy Logic for the reminder. I finished it here. Learned a lesson here. I’d started here.

This year is 30 years since Robert Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published. To mark the event …. Fritz Schabmuller and Gregor Schleicher are doing the ZMM route (on Harley’s) to raise money for charities (Medicin sans Frontieres & The White Ring). They leave Ingolstadt on 1st July then starting in [...]

The Demystification of Management Systems Science. Seems an apt title. Spookily I just came across this PhD course material presented at Helsinki University of Technology, in a cross-search hit on Pirsig, the day after coming back from a meeting / conference at the HUT in Espoo. An interesting paper by David Hawk at the New [...]

Been reading his “What is Life” (1944) and “Mind and Matter” (1958), together with his own autobiographical sketches. Marvellous stuff. These physicists who first came into contact with quantum physics, were clearly all deeply affected by the strange view of “reality” it presented and how this related to human scale everyday reality. Einstein famously struggled [...]

Sohail Inayatullah – Paper written in 2001, not long after 9/11 (during Afghanistan but before Iraq) by Sohail Inayatullah editor of New Renaissance. Wonderfully optimistic view of “emergent” and “transcendent” world order likely to arise from common ground amongst creative intellectuals in both the west and muslim / non-west. That shared common ground being a [...]

I get lots of my post ideas from cross-search-hits – people looking for subjects not really covered by my site, but with some words in common as far as Google’s indexing is concerned. Well this site “Strip Mining for Whimsy” blogged it’s own cross-hit. As I do, Joshua has spotted a hit with an item [...]

Following on from the Frizzy Logic link in the previous post but one about metaphor, I browsed queen-B’s links to all sorts of interesting linguisitic blogs and resources – via Language Hat en-route naturally. She has an excellent FrizzyLinks page. World Wide Words site by Michael Quinion on the actual and apochryphal etymologies of English [...]

What am I doing wrong ? I have MS VM 3810, Firewall and Virus Scanning as well as Anti-Spyware from McAfee and Lavasoft, all updated today. All seem to detect and clean out CoolWebSearch, but nothing stops it re-appearing only minutes later and hijacking my browser. The fu**ing ba**ards. Of course, the cowards don’t put [...]

Frizzy Logic & Metaphor – Frizzy Logic is a blog I came across on a common search hit. This is one of many interesting articles spotted ….. no time to read right now …. Includes a review of MITECS – the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences. Looks interesting.

Graham Horton’s Quotations Page. Quotations pages are a bit of a cliche, there are so many of them (and what would we do without Einstein), but this one I thought had so many applicable to novelty and discovery, scientific or otherwise, that I had to link. Herewith a sample, of those most apt … Every [...]

I’ve just finished reading Fitjof Capra’s “Hidden Connections” – it’s just a bit too earnest on the “eco-warrior” front. Too anti-global-business and anti-global-capital-markets, too doom and gloom for me. Call me a wimp, but for me “revolution” is an unfortunate consequence when someone’s misguided command and control management or government model omits “evolution” or backs [...]

I took delight in discovering some time ago that the “semantic web” was coined by Michel Foucault (“Les Mots Et Les Choses” 1966, aka “The Order of Things” to distinguish it from Quine’s “Word and Object”) many years before Tim Berners-Lee came along. Not that I have anything against Sir TBL – it’s just part [...]