Straight Talking on the Beeb

Jim Naughtie on BBC’s Today this morning, interviewing some expert about the latest conclusions, that prescribing below strength spectacle lenses was actually damaging to the future eyesight of child wearers, got the answers “Yes”, “Yes, that’s right” and “Yes, exactly” to his first three questions and was left floundering momentarily like a fish (flounder ?) out of water at not needing to probe more deeply. A magic moment.

Progress with the Platypus

Two weeks or more since I last posted – been incredibly busy recently – but in the last couple of days of air-travel and hotels I’ve managed to catch-up on reading Eco’s Kant and the Platypus. 80% finished now. Still on-message – much good stuff in here on the sociology of knowledge and so many good reference sources cited too. Particularly also liked the Quine and Gavagai references in the “Vanville” story.

Picked-up in a conversation with an information modelling colleague a positive reference to Lakoff’s – Fire, Women and Dangerous things also cited by Eco. (Lakoff also co-author of Metaphors We Live By – what was I saying about my bibliography / reading wish list ?).

Spooky Synchronicity no 297 in a series of thousands. Read the Eco sub-chapter – The Real Story of the Platypus, just before getting off the plane, and came into the house to find David Attenborough explaing the same story of incredulity as part of his Mammals series on the Beeb.

Rene Thom Obituary

Rene Thom Obituary. Thanks to Jorn for the Guardian link. Never quite understood the relationship between catastrophe and chaos theories, so this is useful source. Also interesting in that starting from Bourbaki school of French mathematics and a particular interest in Topology, Thom moved into philosophical biology and linguistics. Very much on the same page as Eco’s Kant and the Platypus.

RSS Syndication / Subscription ?

Blogger creates RSS OK, with basic title / description / link tags only, but has no subscription / syndication service (yet). I’m just gathering some useful links to other RSS resources here.
VoidStar’s RSSify does no more than Blogger, but at least you can apply it to existing archive pages.
Phil Ringnalda
Morten Frederiksen
Syndic8
Meerkat at O’Reilly

And whilst I’m on the subject what about linking / backtracking
TrackBack Seems to have died a death ?

Alternative Logics

Alternative Logics. Thanks to Seb for this Kuro5hin link. A good summary with some links to more detailed sources. Includes multivalued / fuzzy logics and qauntum logic amongst several others new to me. It is fundamental to my thesis that knowledge models must recognise that classical logical rationale is much too limiting – it forces rationalisations even where these destroy the facts – it “conspires to misinform” or “reification kills knowledge” I may have mentioned before.

Identity Crisis ?

Identity Crisis ? Dave Weinberger at JOHO says ID’s are nice but not the centre of the universe. Well I beg to differ. On aspect of our “semantic web” is that the nodes become less significant than the links, in fact the nodes simply become “pointers” for the links to link to – just look at URI’s / RDF / RSS. Without identity (identifiers) the nodes disappear entirely.