Jorn’s Fractal Thicket

Jorn’s Fractal Thicket. Originating in 1993. Made several references to this as an intersting alternative to simple hierarchies, and was led back to it from Jorn’s Knowledge Representation Timeline. Reification, complexity, fractality, physical fundamentals at incredibly fine-grained scale, whilst realities of everyday life very broad brush. Still avoids “chaos” ? Evocative of Seth’s idea of fundamental identity vs real expressivity as conjugate variables in the quantum sense. Jorn’s motivations may be too subversively political for most people, but his core ideas about knowledge are right on the mark [Quote – depoliticised] The weak point [of established thinking in western organisations] is their need to rationalise their acts by sophistries. The radical proposal is to [create a knowledge model] that can unflinchingly put the lie to their rationalisations. [Unquote]. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to agree – the conspiracy is a natural outcome of the rationalisation, not a motive in itself.

Skilled Incompetence Par Excellence

Skilled Incompetence Par Excellence. Cringley’s latest is actually a review of the inevitability of P2P, but he uses the story of BP (Anglo-Persian Oil) vs Mellon (Gulf Oil) as an example of how the official encumbent (BP) managed to spin out (and presumably rationally justify it business-wise) failing to find oil in Kuwait for 22 years as a metaphor for what will happen if P2P channel is taken over by “big-media” companies [Check out Bertelsmann]. [Quote] Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where, for more than 3,000 years, oil has seeped all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder. [Unquote] [See rationalisation thread].