Category: Uncategorized

Fascinating 1881 map of Europe showing the distribution of Jews before pogroms and the Nazis. Wow.

The very interesting Ptak’s Science Books blog, via Ray Girvan at Segal Books.

Improbable Research – The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.

Research that makes you LAUGH and then THINK

Hat tip to “Lingvisme“. Pinker and Chalmers in there.

Best (and worst) jokes from the Edinburgh fringe.

This Dilbert made me chuckle, earlier this week. Thanks to Dave Weinberger for reminding me of the taxonomic joke. Relevant to the day job – some classes / categories have more value than others. Miscellaneous / 99 / other categories and context specific groupings (classes of class) have value only in the context of their specific purpose.

This time to compete with their on-line library aspirations – The Open Book Alliance from Amazon, Microsoft, Yahhoo and The Internet Archive. Healthy stuff.

Been following these developments over the years – this post just to capture a latest news link – remaining problems are all engineering.

Great summary of mainly non-techie content tips on Google search optimisation tips from WordCamp09.

For now, just some significant quotes and paraphrases (from Closure).

THE PROBLEM

The contemporary predicament. The circle of self-reference in which thought has been increasingly enmeshed – typified by rhetorical self-denials and the use of inverted commas … a predicament so insistent and destructive that it is not sustainable at all. … signs of its destructive force can be found [in philosophy and] throughout our culture … to uphold moral behaviour despite acceptance that others adhere to different moral codes … to believe that science might uncover ultimate laws, despite our suspicion that science is not itself value-free.

[Many] people have shown the inevitability of the failure of closure – particularly linguistically [eg Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida] … [so how do we escape from arbitrary relativism or nihilism? ] … a world full of possibility but a world without any particularity.

To try to imagine material without activity is to imagine complete closure … The world realized through material necessarily has the appearance of stability. Look closer and this stability hides a seething flux.

THE FRAMEWORK

All forms of life … are closure machines.
[2nd law springs to mind – or, to avoid the mechanistic metaphor, all organisms operate by closure.]

Closure is many layered.

Preliminary closure … the means by which an organism converts the flux of openess into an array of possible particularities – [the means of pure experience, maybe multiple and linked at this level, but remain distinct].

First-level non-preliminary closure … preliminary closures become “held as one” with a new material form. [material form “arising” and not inherent to the preliminary closures.]

And so on …

Thanks to Rivets for the link, but coincidentally one of the largest sections in Diamond’s “Collapse” (two posts ago) is about Norse colonization of the north Atlantic – including Vinland outposts from Iceland and Greenland. Too far from home to sustain a viable Norse community without some serious attempt at integration with the natives and their local practices. But no doubt they visited and explored, Leif Erikson n’all.

The intriguing aspect for me was to learn that this area of Newfoundland was named by the Vikings because of its wine – hence Vinland. Talk about environmental change ?

PS – A little nostalgia – also from Rivets. Magic what sold for a few cents back in the day.

“Closure – A Story of Everything” by Hilary Lawson is something I first blogged mention of back in 2003. I was prompted to obtain and read it just recently by David Morey.

First my usual caveat – it’s clear from the first page that it “fits my agenda” so I am inevitably frustrated looking for “so what’s new ?” I can find only one thing so far.

I’ve read the Preface, the Prologue and Part I (Structure, Outline, System & Purpose of Closure) plus the Epilogue, End-Notes and Index – what I haven’t read so far are Parts II to V (Language, Science, Logic, Maths, Art, Religion, the Unknown, Politics, Power and Society.) – actually I have also read “the Unknown”. All the usual suspects are discussed in the notes.

Most of the message can be summed up – the world is not a “thing” it is openeness – dynamic possibility and potential, material and texture. Closure is what is fixed by static patterns of understanding and language used to describe those understandings – but closure is never ending, therefore always fails as closure and so for the world to be stable at all some framework is required to balance openness & closure. So far so good; already well established monism. Our post-modern predicament.

The new item ? Not exactly new, but unusual to see stated.

OK, so a theory of everything, cannot be closed – it cannot actually be a final theory of everything. But Lawson’s “Story of Everything”, Closure, is defined interms of Openness. There is therefore much discussion of self-referential argument, and the received wisdom that such self-reference is paradoxical, a denial of meaning – ultimately destructive.

Closure as a theory is evidently and quite deliberately self-referential – a reflexive theory. Being self-referential is a constructive attribute, not a failing. Paradoxes that arise are points of “intervention”, not alarms to abandon ship.

Neurath’s ship that is, a variation on Aristotle’s boat – not only being rebuilt and replaced whilst preserving its identity, but our ship, re-built with minimum loss of life whilst humanity is “at sea” in the cosmos.

The idea of self-reference as constructive rather than destructive is fundamental to Quine, Hofstadter, Dennett and a myriad of evolutionary philosophers of mind and morals – disappointed not to see any positive references to these (so far).

Most significant disappointment though (so far) is where is that “framework for stability” that will keep us afloat, prevent us going down with all hands ?

Reading on … Continuing …