Author: Psybertron

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]

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.

Dysteleology – A word I’ve been looking for – courtesy of Paul Kelly and Jean-Luc Delatre. The MoQites keep accusing me (in a roundabout way) of Nihilism. Dysteleological seems closer.

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)

Pollard Predicts the Future of Communication – An interesting analysis of patterns of communication now and in the future from Dave Pollard.
[Quote]
I see the weblog becoming a ubiquitous communication medium, a proxy for every individual, where everything you want to know about that individual (which they have given you permission to see) can be called up. The effect of that will be to eliminate many communications whose purpose is simply to get information. The blog will be the main vehicle by which we educate, inform and explain (the first of the five communication objectives) and express ourselves (the last of the five objectives). The middle three objectives – to persuade, decide and relate – are the more intense and participatory reasons for communicating, and even the much-improved weblogs of the future aren’t going to be up to those tasks.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the communication ‘killer app’ of the future will be peer-to-peer videoconferencing. Not the bulky, cumbersome room videoconferencing tool of today, but the next-gen personal wireless webcam-based tool that will allow you to look at, and talk to, some one on the other side of the globe as if they were right beside you. For the same reason that I have predicted weblogs will transform the way in which we share information, by becoming the proxy for what you know, so do I predict webcams will transform communications by becoming the proxy for where you are. Turning on your individual webcam in the future, so others can see you, will be as simple and automatic as putting on your glasses is today, so you can see others.
[Unquote]

How – Peer to peer – Agreed, as I’ve said several times too.
Want to know what I think – see my web-log proxy – Agreed.
Want to communicate with me – see my portable web-cam – I wonder ?

Complete BBC Archive On-line [Oblomovka] [via Jorn] Will it ever really happen ?

Chance and Stupidity have Changed History – Top Ten history books by Terry Deary in the Guardian [via Jorn]. Particularly interested in No.7 The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity have Changed History by Erik Durschmied. Reminds me of “Tipping Point” [see Ton]. One of my themes is chaos / catastrophe and the fact that significant outcomes are often controlled far more by subtle circumstantial details than rational plans.

A butterfly flies through the forest rain,
And turns the wind into a hurricane.
A schoolboy yawns, sits back and hits return,
And round the world computers crash and burn.
by Neil Hannon – The Divine Comedy
(The Certainty of Chance, from memory)

Res Cogitans – Interesting blog from Steven Fettig in Wisconsin. Makes link to Spike Halls’s blog. Added to side-bar.