Month: September 2003

We’re in Porto Heli

On holiday, sailing in Greece.

Met John Flynn and son David. John works for EMIL (ex EEEL) ExxonMobil in New Malden UK. A long term customer of mine at Foster Wheeler, Reading, UK, down at Esso Fawley. He regularly works with Richard Carroll, someone I employed during my 22 years at FW. Small world.

Also met Hillary and Darren from Epsom (both under 30 !). Sylvia may have persuaded Darren to come to Reading FC to see some real football (England v Lichenstein, who ? tonight). A very lovely couple. I got them and others into a conversation about Northrop’s Meeting of East and West, (which I’m reading by the pool when I get the chance), and Pirsig’s ZMM, and all things human and linguistic about what really matters – poiitics, religion, metaphors dead and alive, metonyms, weak and strong homonyms, aphorisms, euphemisms, rhyming slang, etymology, philosophy, the lot.

Oh yeah, and Alan Pardew resigned as manager of Reading FC this very day.

Good reviews from NIBBS

Good reviews from NIBBS – Myths We Live By by Mary Midgley [Guardian / John Turney]
Natural-Born Cybogs by Andy Clark [Metpsychology / Neil Levy]
Quest: The essence of humanity by Charles Pasternak [New Scientist / Brian Fagan] [Quote] Even plants have quests – for the sunlight that fuels their growth. Humans, of course, have enhanced searching ability …[Unquote] Or, as Peter Gabriel put it, “The forest fight for sunlight takes root in every tree.” [See dysteleology post earlier]
Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti and Carol Stewart
Nature via Nurture by Philip Gerrans [F2 Network / Matt Ridley]

Ontologies and Tools

Some great posts recently from Seb, on semantic web ontologies and on tools to link different feeds and forms of information with a consistent metaphor. Particularly liked …
[Semantic Web Ontologies][W3C Philosophy ?][Streams, Pools, Mountains & Lakes metaphor]

Intrigued by Seb’s eclectic list of “dead” people, which includes Abraham Maslow, as well as Curt Cobain and Bertrand Russell. The Maslow link is a good one. Three related issues here for me ….

(1) Maslow / Pirsig parallel worldviews.
(2) Evolutionary psychological aspect of “ontologies”.
(3) My lack of tools to experiment with these modelling ideas.

Philosophy of Technology Reading List

Philosophy of Technology Reading List – From the UIUC (Uni Illinois at Urbana) – eight years old, but interesting nevertheless. (Marx, Wiener, Heidegger, Baudrillard, Herrigel, Pirsig, Buckie-Fuller, Foucault, Penrose, Theroux, to name a few)