Category: Uncategorized

Burt Rutan, co-owner of the sub-orbital X-Prize-winning spaceship, describing his past with Werner von Braun et al in the space-race concludes with “Mostly what I’m doing though, is just having fun.” Life’s-work rather than day-job. That’s the spirit.

Eeek, it’s a week since I’ve posted. Actually, I’ve had a cold, and found myself sleeping whenever I had the opportunity, so that might account for letting things slip. Been continuing to read Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”, which has ben getting a bit technical brain-physiology-biochemistry-wise, and a bit detailed on the teaching and practice of Zen.

As a result of the latter, I’ve resurrected Eugen Herrigel’s “Zen in the Art of Archery” which, although brief, I read none-too-thoroughly first time around. Like D T Suzuki, Herrigel seems de-rigoeur background. Already noticing details I’d missed. The focus on breathing, the straight-arm / clamped-thumb grip, to name a couple.

Talking of brain activity reminds me of Adam Zeman’s talk on the scientific basis for consciuousness at Cambridge Crosstalk Society in June 2003, in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for Quantum Computation. [Summary here, half-way down.] He also has a book published, which was the basis of his talk. Seem to remember his stuff was more up-to-date / comprehensive in terms of scans with colour maps to document levels of consciousness. Austin’s book is mostly textual in describing this stuff.

Following up the link to Gerald Edeleman, I find a reference to Richard Feynman’s “Meta-Wondering” – I wonder why I wonder why I ….. wonder why I wonder. Nice concept.

De Wolfe site full of “anonymous” musical backing tracks and background music and effects, intended for media productions. [via Apothecary]. Mind-blowing range.

You’ll like these Alex. Saw these demonstrated at FIATECH yesterday. Really neat. Aimed a ultra-low power distributed network architectures for control systems, but the neatest aspect is their individual awareness of relationships to other motes. By negotiation they organise their own network topology. Reminded me of our smart templates approach to self-knowing packets of XML.(Can’t help thinking of the AI / A-Life connotations.)

Obvious “toy” potential – “They’ll be in the shops for Christmas”.

Should we be worried about this ?

Dr Austin again. “Sperry takes over where William James left off. Neurosciences have rejected reductionism and mechanistic determinism on the one hand, and dualisms on the other…. higher level interactions [of the] brain are presumed to be reducible [only in principle] in terms of fundamental physics. How does it help us to know about quarks, molecules and the brain’s high water content ? We have personal quirks which go beyond our quarks …. Interactions of a [complex] system, always much more than the sum of their parts …. our brain develops new emergent properties.” Whahaay, ‘ere we go. See Brian Josephson below.

Who was it said something like “To know about a man’s make up in terms of his chemistry is only of interest if you intend to make fertiliser out of his body” ? Blogged somewhere ealier.

“Thinking with meat” [after Terry Bisson]. Getting there.

The plot thickens further …

I’m now reading Dr Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”. Not surprisngly for a real US medic he spends a fair amount of time apologising for his mystic tendencies and acknowledging christian religious sensibilities, before he dares launch us into his Zen treatise. (I suspect 2/3 of this 800 page tome is down to such political correctness.)

Plenty of homage to Herrigel and Suzuki in laying down the history of modern Zen foundations. Not a single reference to Pirsig – oh well. But a positive citation for a certain Father Andrew Greeley. A Catholic PhD Sociologist of some note apparently, and the very same Andrew M Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center who slammed Pirsig in 1975 for his “bigotry”.

(I just sent Pirsig a question about that reaction a couple of days ago – weird.)

Picked-up on TiddleyWiki via Ton. A really neat peer-to-peer wiki, to collaborate on building, editing and linking information fragments, known as Tiddlers, without any server side components. So simple it has to be a winner.

Review at Frontwheeldrive of Protocol by Alexander Galloway. Via a cross-hit on my earlier P2P / Rhizome view of web organisation.

At Web2.0 Brewster Kahle pointed out that most books are out of print most of the time and only a tiny proportion are available on bookshop shelves. Scanning the 26 million volumes in the US Library of Congress, the world’s biggest library, would cost only $260m (�146m). The scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space and cost about $60,000 (�33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf. [via BBC News]