Month: June 2004

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 contact details on their lousy pages either. Grrrr.

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 great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. Thomas Huxley

If we had had more time for discussing we probably would’ve made a great many more mistakes. Leon Trotsky

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. Alfred North Whitehead

To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer. Hermann Joseph Muller

There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something! Thomas Alva Edison

Some things need to be believed to be seen. Guy Kawasaki

The physicist’s greatest tool is his wastebasket. Albert Einstein

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? Albert Einstein

Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five. Joel Hildebrand

It was, no doubt, partially because of Fourier’s very disregard for rigor that he was able to take conceptual steps which were inherently impossible to men of more critical genius. Rudoph E. Langer

A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds. Mark Twain

Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else. David Knuth

And many more ….

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 it into an impossible corner.

Let’s encourage evolution, not incite revolution I say.

That said, he does collect together many sources (outside his own spehere of Tao Physics) demonstrating that, everywhere from the way DNA communicates within the biosystem of cell structures, to the players in the globally communicating capital markets, or the society participating in the global comms village, what matters is the interconnected system nature of things rather than the “cogs” themselves. So much is emergent from this complexity / chaotic systems theory view of the whole, rather than being in any way causally related to any of the activities of particular cogs or nodes in the system.

Genes have had their ephemeral 15 minutes of fame. They alone explain very little, whatever the early hype of the success of the human genome project.

This is exactly, and I mean exactly, the same TBL / Dan Brickley point in the previous post, about characterising the arcs (connections), and merely identification of the nodes (objects / players), in the semantic web model.

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 of my interminable “nothing new under the sun” thread, whereby I keep finding evidence of no-brainers in the archaeology of knowledge management. (I’m currently reading Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge purely by coincidence).

In other words “Knowledge IS a Semantic Web”. That’s what it is, not just what someone, anyone calls it or characterises it.

Another link I unearthed today, re-reading Dan Brickley’s 2001 Semantic Web presentation (on RDF and all that), is Sir TBL’s original 1989 CERN Proposal for his “mesh” of information – the word “web” appears a couple of times, and the word semantic not at all. He coined “world-wide-web” later when first coding his ideas in 1990.

The facts that jumped out at me …. I’ve been involved in exploitation of associative information modelling since before web technology existed …. it has been amazing to see the convergence of the W3C technology with the ideas in general. The first key is “identification” (Namespaces & URI’s et al), the next is “overlapping vocabularies and meta-data conventions” and the third is relationships or more precisely “types of relationships”. The other mind-blowing point, given the “evolutionary schema frameworks” idea I’m currently working with, is this summary from Dan,

The common model:
why use ‘nodes and arcs’? :
[An associative model with identification of the nodes
and typing of the arcs.]

– arbitrarily extensible (just add more connections)
– we can decentralise control using URIs
– we can disagree about node and link types, yet still share infrastructure (syntax, databases, editors)
– URIs create a market for data merging, aggregation, annotation and filtering services

Spot on Dan. It’s the decentralised control and the “market” for services, which gives rise to “emergence” and evolution – the opportunity for change in an environment which is both nurturing and competitive.

Just updated my Pirsig Pages and links to pages of Pirsig Photos and of Montana State College, Bozeman, in order to better incorporate links to the excellent photo collection on Henry Gurr’s site and the Gary Wegner’s wonderful ZMM Route Map and Photos from his own 1978 trip.

I think I’ve just made a commitment to create a new version of the Route Map linking all our photographic and biographical resources ! My current feeble attempt remains here.

Watched a documentary on Alice Martineau (Cystic Fibrosis victim, model-musician-singer-songwriter, deceased aged 30 in 2003) last night. Someone very talented, whose work had sadly passed me by.

Anyway, the highlight for me was seeing Stevie Lange, voice coach and session singer to the stars and countless ads, in front of the camera, being interviewed about Alice, with occasional documentary clips where Stevie’s magic voice came through. I have a web-page of photos of Stevie from an earlier life. A Google on her name throws up a name-droppers dream of artists she’s coached or backed – Tears for Fears, Swing Out Sister, Robbie Williams, Sniff’n’the Tears, Manfred Mann (natch), Blue, even Limp Bizkit (!) to name a few.

Stevie now runs her own music business operation via “Let’s Talk Music”, which has a full bio / discography / artists list. Go to her page and click on her recent (1995!) track “What Would You Say” to get a taste of that rockin’ voice – 1979 again ! (And also 3 tracks from the 1979 “Night” album on that page.)

[Update – Stevie’s latest official site is stevielange.com]

Another good post by Ray Girvan. Pointing out his “boot-through-the-TV-screen moments” as evidence that the divide between scientific and artistic cultures can still be excruciatingly apparent. How can one be so happy being ignorant of the other ?