Month: July 2004

Apparently Dave Snowden has left IBM and taken Cynefin with him. [via Dave Gurteen]

I collected a lot of fractal art links over a year ago, and in fact played around with some cheap tools myself, but these are really excellent images – Blatte’s Fractals – you can download them as backgrounds if you want. [via Rivets] (Some great coluration variants on the “infinitely fascinating” Mandlebrot set, but some other magic styles too.)
Loved this one for example :

Look out for Phoenix, Crescent-II & Tropical Beach.

One of Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) on the end of the world (again)

Another of Ernst Mayr (of Pirsig interest)

Just read most of the Mayr interview. Interesting. A bit of a sales pitch for Biology as a distinct subject (motivated by some round of budgeting somewhere I’ll wager). His point that biology is not just molecular biology, and molecules are not just physics, and physics are not just …. etc is the usual stuff. All biology is just molecular biology of course if all you are going to do is analyse it, but it is not just a synthesis of its molecular parts. There is an emergent level, called life if you like, which requires a holistic systems view of the parts interacting, not just adding together. This is Capra’s connections, and Pirsig’s levels. Biology is distinct from physics, in the same way that consciousness is distinct from biology. That is, not very.

If you want to do more useful than just scientific analysis, the connections / relationships / interactions are more interesting than the distinctions.

Updated biographical timeline now includes a number of corrections, as well as aditional updates taken from the St.Paul newspaper clippings and articles.

Sorry, I’m jusy housekeeping collecting / checking non-dead links for ZMM resources…

Jones Pegasus Bibliography
The Bruce Charlton Review
Brad Cox’s Site
Chicago Graduates

A little overblown – I’ve got the solution for the sematic web style – but I guess we’d all like to believe that. Nova Spivack’s Minding the Planet blog is marketing stuff from his Radar Systems venture, but his paper From Semantic Web to Global Mind brought to me by Matt Whyndham includes some good concepts amidst a review of their relevance to achieving the semantic web dream.

Breathless Fluff to Deep Thought Matt calls it, but I think Nova touches on a key point in the ability to characterise new links, and see these as additive to a given knowledge object as he calls them.

e-Biz sounds awfully passe already, but as Business Week’s special issue, “The E-Biz Surprise” (May 5, 2003), noted, “The Web is the same age color TV was when it turned profitable.” It’s gonna need a new name but e-everything has barely started, and the technological capability aspects of it are arriving plenty fast. That’s not (never been) the problem.

The Futurist: The Intelligent Internet. [via FN4] This long review of “The Intelligent Internet – The Promise of Smart Computers and E-Commerce” By William E. Halal actually reads very naively and uncritically about the many technology advancements it catalogues arriving around our ears. What it doesn’t really address is the “business modelling” side, though it does identify the problem …

[QUOTE]
Cynicism persists over unrealized promises of AI …. forecast for a glorious IT future may seem extravagant amidst the dismal mood of IT today …. main obstacle is a lack of vision among industry leaders, customers, and the public as scars of the dot-com bust block creative thought.
[UNQUOTE]

Cracked record time … this is the memetic problem, which the web suffers from in spades. “Next big things” circulate at the speed of light, particularly if they’re catchy and easy to understand, whether or not they are likely to be successful in any pragmatic sense beyond the marketeers wet dream. This would be an annoyance, but for the fact that such traffic noise drowns out the possibility of analysing the more difficult (human) questions, whose answers might actually create uses for us (humans) amidst the free-for-all.

Evolution leads to dead ends as well as progress, you know.
“We do these things because they are difficult, not because they are easy.” JFK

Blogged all of these “consciousness” scientists before but find them more closely linked that I’d realised. John Gregg’s site draws on the other two and indicates Chalmers / Rosenberg biographical as well as subject links. John (Gregg) clearly finds Gregg (Rosenberg)’s thesis very important – a metaphysics for consciousness he says …..