Author: Psybertron

Still reading – been busy recently – not too much time to research / blog, but still reading. Excellent stuff on language and taxonomies, and the organic complexity involved – all relevant.

Decision Making Chaos at NASA. Dr W H Jones at SpaceRef.Com (via Jorn). Interesting observation that “political considerations” force rationalisation of immediate tangibles to justify investment, even where these bear no relation to the real long term goals. (As an aside – the long term goal is apparently to get us off the planet – CF Stephen Hawking’s motivation.)

Cognition Research. Noticed that Gerry Wolff’s (Bangor Uni) stuff on SP (Simple is Powerful) Theory is now being marketed at Cognition Research as SP6.1 aimed at AI / NLP applications. (Link added to side-bar and resources page updated.)

Newsweek Blogging Article. Mentions Blogger and includes quotes from Ev.
(Don’t they all ?) Interesting backgrounder.

Book Worm Meter

Shut In 49% . . 51% Out Of The House Intellectual 95% . . 5% Moron High Attention Span 95% . . 5% Low Attention Span Bookitude 57% . . 43% Book Burner Book Worm 74% . . 26% Bug Stomper

Take your bookworm readings.

Picked up from Blogger “Ivy’s Blogenspiel” aka “Ablogalypse Now” – entertaining and thought provoking.

Read the Apoorva Patel article (dead link). Think this is the same one “Quantum Algorithms and the Genetic Code” (tough going for a non-physicist). Anyway, first time, I had one of those WOW! moments.

Just like one I remember in schooldays when I came across that integral that links e, i and pi in a single equality – spooky how three seemingly independant irrational numbers can co-exist in a single concept, I thought (and strangely still recalled the impression 30 odd years later.) Well Apoorva’s ideas have a similar spooky trilogy – can quantum mechanics, DNA and information processing really be unified – could this really be how meat thinks ? WOW!
[The original “Thinking With Meat” link from Terry Bisson.]

Thread on compai.nat-lang looking for predictive Markov Chain s/w to look for misinterpretation in the text of jokes, draws a humourous reponse from Darryl McCullough.
QUOTE
They all laughed when I said I wanted to build a joke-telling machine.
Well, I showed them! Nobody’s laughing now !
UNQUOTE.
Actually the post is quite interesting. (Strangely, Jim Balters threads on comp.ai all now becoming US Political flame-wars, not helped by George / Hoo Hoo.)

Reading Michel Foucault’s “The Order of Things” (1966) first published in English in 1970, and came across his reference to “The Semantic Web”. Seems this is the origin of the expression ? A good read so far, about history and culture of language in classifying things. Interestingly in French the title is “Les Mots et les Choses” – words and things, pretty close to “word and object” (Ref Quine below) – I wonder how the translation became “The Order of Things” ?

Following-up google search on Foucault and Semantic Web I hit this interesting Philosophy Loft site at Centroid Cafe. Interesting content on Critical Thinking, Reasoning (rational, binary, dialectic) and General Philosophy, including a link to Sasha’s page (see side bar).