Psybertron Asks

Interesting post from Sam Norton. A thoughtful Christian positioning on recent “blasphemy furies”. Amongst other things I was taken by this quote from Rene Girard. “The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been [...]

Perhaps I should explain, why I’ve hardly posted recently. I’ve barely had time to read anything except news stories for about two weeks. I’ve been active off-line and face-to-face in Cambridge with a group of people keen to make some real-world progress taking a discussion forum onto a new level, corresponding, preparing for, participating and [...]

The Rev Sam Norton, fellow MoQer and Blogger has had his views on the unsustainablity of international food trading taken up by The Grauniad and The Beeb, not to mention Murdochvision.

In the same vein as sacramental Peyote and Funghi being used in enlightenment circles, here we have Amazonian herbal “Hoasca Tea”, containing DMT, being consumed in a ceremonial context notice. The story is the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it’s use in response to an attempted federal ban.

Latest news on Google in China is about some bureaucratic hiccup, but the censorship story hits the headlines again … Google, together with other major technology firms, has [] come under fire in the US for helping China censor the internet. Earlier this month, members of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus said four US firms [...]

Bio pic of Burt Munro, Kiwi who set the world speed record at Bonneville on his US “Indian” motorcycle. A film which, the lead Anthony Hopkins says, “is the best he’s ever made”. Looks interesting to Pirsig / Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fans, on the evidence of the trailers, and not just [...]

Also from Mark Federman, a piece on research he is doing on organisational effectiveness. The point that interested me, apart from the general parallel with my agenda, and my earlier dissertation is his focus on Chris Argyris “espoused theories” concept – ie the idea that they are different to actual “theories in use”. Something I’ve [...]

A series organised by “General Creative” apparently (broken link ?) [via Mark Federman]. Two interesting editions mentioned … “Mythdemeanour – relationship between myths, the social construction of our world, and love.” “Argument – the ways we used to know things, and what the electronic future may hold for us …. tactile reasoning by choreography.” Some [...]

Global Province – Picked-up on a search cross-hit. A dense site, full of stuff – interesting ideas if not uniformly high quality. Worth a browse, to work out its value.

This BBC report on American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Missouri. The AAAS president, Gilbert Omenn, says “It’s time to recognise that science and religion should never be pitted against each other.” Hear hear. “The intelligent design movement belittles evolution [and] it makes God a designer – an engineer.” said George [...]

Try this. [via Rivets] And one of so many other goodies from Rivets, endless fun.

Nature.com article reports on Dutch research in Science [via Anecdote] For [] simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for [] more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science. At least when making some complicated decisions … the [...]

Just a holding post for a thought that struck me yesterday …. At a meeting yesterday discussing XML Languages best suited to modelling semantics, there was given some description of different flavours of OWL (Web Ontology Language ). In general with OWL(Full) and OWL(DL) it is possible to make ontologically impossible assertions – the infamously [...]

This article from yesterday’s UK Daily Telegraph (Thursday 16th Feb) “Boot Camp Tactics Won’t Win the Battle” is an interview with Management Consultant / Guru, John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting. It’s right from my own manifesto, summarised in the header – things go wrong when management mistakes itself for a science. … so much management [...]

I need to get this topic at the right level, following the Blackmore vs Midgley outing of yesterday. Before memes, let’s get the garbage out of the way …. It was set up as Blackmore vs Midgley, a combative argument – I have (on this very blog) agreed with both Midgley and Blackmore – I [...]

Brief interview on BBC’s Today programme with Sue Blackmore asked to explain memes (pro), and Mary Midgley asked to respond (con). As usual the disagreement is really just the words “only” and “just”. Of course conscious minds are not “just” copying machines, you do indeed have to understand the context of people’s experience and hearing [...]

I referred to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) a couple of times before, as not being rocket-science, motherhood even, but simple and practical methods for personal productivity nonetheless. I see he has a blog, and links to several subtle contributions, on identifying and achieving important work. This is his link to Paul Graham’s essay [...]

I see this story about US Government staff editing (positively and negatively) biographies of various political figures that appear in Wikipedia. A sign of its success I guess. What is interesting is that when some of the editing was considered to be politically motivated, a Congress spokesperson said “I presume that if they did not [...]

“Farming Today” story about two different committees of expert advice on crop spraying regulations disagreeing about a safe margin. When I first heard the 5m margin legislated around the public access edges of farmers’ fields, I kind of assumed it was some statistical tolerance for spraying accuracy, and airborne drift and the like from crop [...]

Interesting that the UK police turned a blind eye (initially at least) to the protesters in the Danish cartoon “furies”, where those availing themselves of free speech had extremely explicit organised incitement to hatred, fear and murder (a million miles from any “technical” concept of blasphemy too, or religious disrespect or intolerance). The initial turning [...]

Just published an update to my Pirsig Timeline. Some significant edits to facts concerning associated people, and some re-organisation & re-wording of notes, references and acknowledgements.