We Didn’t Start the Fire. Thanks to Rivets for this one. (Turn your sound on) A bit literal but pretty neat all the same.
The Beach at Scheveningen
The Beach at Scheveningen. Thanks to Adam Curry for this BBC link. A bit of a tortuous one, but the beach at Scheveningen is a place I’ve spent many a knowledge modelling moment in recent years, meeting generic information modellers in Den Haag / The Hague.
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].
Spiral Linking
Spiral Linking. Whilst investigating back-linking options the issue of exponentially increasing links that link to each other has been bugging me for several weeks. Some recursive web that might explode to consume all the web resources in some unstoppable nightmare – I’ve seen it happen on mail servers with automated replies anyway. This particular story featuring Moen’s Law of Bicycles (classic bad-money / good-money economics anyway BTW) is about breaking such a chain – (!) pun unintended.
[via Oblomovka, via Jorn – different Danny and Seb, not to be confused.]
[Basically if we set up a web page that automatically updates itself with links to pages that link to itself, and in the course of doing so it creates a link to a page with the same feature, where does the nonsense stop ? Scary. Just occurred to me too that this is the semantic web equivalent of a rumour based on some minor piece of misinformation getting out there – like a meme – and establishing an unfounded urban myth – metaphor, chaos, cellular automata – aaaaagggghhh!!!!.]
OK, What’s a Quine ?
OK, What’s a Quine ? Via (Miscoranda). Named after the eponymous “Van”, but not apparent why.
[I guess I’ll have to research Hofstadter to work that out.]
Picked up on Miscoranda via the backlink from the Heisenberg story.
Nonaka’s Knowledge Model
Nonaka’s Knowledge Model. Thanks to Spike for this link to the Knowledge Board summary of Nonaka’s stuff.
Made several references to Nonaka earlier but this is a neat summary.
[Added Spike’s blog to the side bar links – looks like some thoughtful contributions to the debate.]
The Rhetoric of Economics
Given the number of figures and stats quoted by economists and economic commentators, it is refreshing to find one (Gavin Davies of the Beeb speaking on More or Less yesterday) who recognises that what matters is telling a good (convincing) story – irrespective of the figures. No economist worth his salt believes the numbers etc. He quoted a reference to a 1998 publication called The Rhetoric of Economics by Deirdre McCloskey. (Pretty close to Argyris’ “Budgetary Games” “Creative Accounting” organisational behaviour stuff.)