Month: May 2005

As a result of a legacy of blogs going back four years, migrated most recently from Blogger to WordPress, my permalinks are a bit of a mess.

In the WordPress set up I simply defaulted the permalink style – an index number for individual posts and a month-year format for each archive page. That has worked great except for a significant proportion of my earlier Blogger posts, where I put the source link in the header, rather than in the body text or a separate RSS tagged link field. For those posts my permalinks no longer contain links to the post itself, but rather to the referenced source piece, which is darned fustrating.

Doesn’t seem to phase Google in the slightest though. I noticed that within two days of migrating to WordPress – same home page URL, but without any index.html and every individual post and archive re-named with a new URL, Google could hit any of my content instantly. I’m constantly amazed – even when I seem to have found a hole in the indexing, it always seems to be my memory (or spelling at the time of posting, playing tricks.) Seems Google can only index what I posted, not what I actually meant to post. Never fails to impress though.

Full text appears invariably better than imperfect structure. Weird.

[Less than 15 minutes to the play-off final KO. Come on Preston.]

Not really kept an eye on XHTML, having been an early convert to XML with standard reference libraries of Schema and Schema fragments, as the basis of sharing semantics – on the web or however. This update on XHTML2 is interesting … in the words of a comment on XML.org “[of XHTML] Simple functionality and common sense appear — at least temporarily — to have triumphed over byzantine theological imperatives.” Hmm, yes, data modelling committees, I remember those.

Interesting too, for reasons not immediately apparent, that it includes a couple of snippets from Joyce’s Ulysses, but that might explain why Jorn picked up on it.

As Jorn says, this interview of Bono on meeting the great and the good makes interesting reading. About Dubya, he says “As a man, I believed him .. I believed him. Listen, I couldn’t come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically, but … you don’t have to be harmonious on everything — just one thing — to get along with someone.”

Lost touch with a Michael Anderson in Cambridge a couple of years ago, and keep getting cross hits from this different one. He’s involved with the Active Logic, Metacognitive Computation and Mind Research Group whose aim is “to design and implement common sense in a computer”.

Anyway the reason I captured the link, apart from an interest in the subject, is that I notice one of his forthcoming papers is co-authored with a certain Gregg Rosenberg – is that the same one to which I already have a link ? Yup it is, AI Centre at Georgia Univ, and author of “A Place For Consciousness“, which confusingly, but correctly I originally found referenced by someone whose surname was Gregg.

Very strange site linked by Ray Girvan, but with a wonderful gallery of pictures of various aircraft vapour cloud and vapour trail effects. Only of interest because of the tenuous reason I had to mention vapour trails when Dawkins referred to compressible flow. Any excuse – sorry.

” … an inquiry ought to be launched into exactly how he finds the time. Under all that pressure and stress, I’m sure most of the rest of us would end up looking like John Prescott … The public demands to know: what exactly is your weapon of mass reduction, … Tony ?” Says Hydragenic.

A man of my physique couldn’t possibly comment.

Interesting cultural extravaganza at the Festival Hall, London. As well as Patti hosting, there’s Billy Bragg, Sinead O’Connor, Yoko Ono, Marc Almond, Beth Orton and the works of Blake, Burroughs, Hendrix and Sontag, to name only a fraction. Thanks to qB at Frizzy for the tip off.

I’m prompted here by a cross-search, that hit on a three year old post of mine referring to Sean Gould. Like me he’s a western engineer, and of a similar age, living in the far-east, in his case Thailand, and unlike myself, it seems he’s been there continuously for several years – his domain remains “.th” anyway (he doesn’t give away too much other personal info.) I only mention that preamble, because when I first linked to him, I noted the same aspects – an “amateur academic” with interest in philosophy and evolution beyond his “professional practitioner” remit. I must have said a hundred times myself, that “evolutionary psychology” appears to the core subject in explaining the world as we can know it, and interesting to see noted here too (with my Pirsig hat on) that he can explain the secular evolution of morality.

I’ve discussed with Chris at Enlightened Caveman – the drawbacks to getting yourself taken seriously and published from outside an academic arena. Well Sean has managed to get one book published and has a second on its way, both relating to a New Model for Evolution. Amateur no more ?

A Theory of Options
The Missing Algorithm

Both look interesting – the former has some serious reviews at Amazon, the latter reads convincingly in draft, even if I can’t yet claim to understand more than 10% of it from a brief read. If I get his point, he’s suggesting genes face a trade off in quantity of replication, vs (say) a greater quantity at lower fidelity. He uses his argument to explain “cooperative strategies” that “anticipate” change and increase survival flexibility. Of course since Dawkins, intentional language has dogged understanding of true genetic behaviour, and it’s no different here – caveat metaphor – as Sean says “genes of course, are inanimate; they do not want with intent to do anything. These [metaphors and algorithms] are only rules that help model how evolution works.” Very important not to forget that, as we well know.

Didn’t notice any memetic references – but one aspect of criticism of memetic models is the general lack of hi-fidelity in the copying. I wonder.

Shows what can be done, and who knows maybe the content really is valid or even as novel and important as it seems. More additions to my reading list.