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I’m that close to finishing Northrop – 20 pages maybe (Post note – Completed Northrop BTW) – so I’ve got some more reading material lined-up, already despatched from Amazon.

Richard Rorty – Philosophy and Social Hope
Richard Rorty – Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Owen Barfield – Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning
Owen Barfield – History in English Words

Interestingly it’s taken me since late July to complete Northrop – though I did fit in George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By and most of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, and a re-read of Michael Talbot’s Mysticism and the New Physics along the way. Can’t think what to say about Northrop yet, except it was worth the difficult read. Pretty much a complete history of politics, law, religion, empire, invasion and philosophy of the whole world ever in one long book, with some very tricky whole-paragraph-long sentences. Bad news is that because it was an old fragile copy of thebook, I didn’t dare annotate it like I do with all my modern paperback editions – so I’m going to have to read it again to dig out the key references. Well worth it though – what was I saying “Nothing New Under the Sun”……..

Do You Skype ? – Skype – From those whacky people that brought you peer to peer file-sharing via Kazaa in the wake of Napster, a peer-to-peer, free, international, internet, voice and text, PC phone service – dead simple and it works – remarkably well, no-delay and crystal clear. Noticed cropping up on several blogger pages, then noticed Stuart Henshall had a link to his own experimental Bloggers on Skype page, to create a community of bloggers connected by Skype. Like anything peer-to-peer it’s going to need a critical mass of subscribers to be effective – but it’s free while stocks last.

Added the links to my side-bar. Let’s see if this takes off. What have you got to lose ?

Picked up Jack Vinson’s blog [Knowledge Jolt with Jack] from a backtrack link. Some interesting knowledge management stuff with common chemical engineering heritage. Great set of links in his blogroll, beyond the usual KM’ers, including for example …

Hal Macomber’s blog [Reforming Project Management] has this Insead paper on Uncertainty and Chaos on Project Management.

Introducing New Ideas Into Organisations – Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising at Uni of North Carolina [via Spike Hall] have a paper (draft of a book) that intrigues me. Partly this is because introducing change into organisations was the subject of a dissertation I wrote ealier, and partly because I am in the middle of a long process to introduce a novel idea into an organisation.

The clincher was seeing the problem of blurring the distinction between the idea and the means of its introduction. Particularly severe in the case above because the idea is about “patterns” as means of introducing – well – ideas ! Stangely this recognition of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” even turned up in the day job recently.

As We Know It – Paul Kelly’s blog is always a good intelligent read even if I don’t often blog specific links. Good one on recently deceased Neil Postman’s Technopoly. The whole Apollonian Posession series. The update on his necessary hype blog from earlier. Go have a read. (Envy blogging – linking to things you wish you’d written yourself ?)

Pete Johnson – Interoperability researcher in Bath, UK, with an interesting set of links to other blogs concerned with intelligent standardised (XML) linking.

The Third Way – Essay by Dave Pollard [How to Save the World]. Interesting here because of the immediate link between human evolutionary psychology and Daniel Quinn (Ishmael and The Story of B) who I’ve yet to read.

ACMS – A trackback link from “Point of Beginning” the newsletter of the American Congress of Mapmakers and Surveyors (ACMS), and a Viewpoint article by Frank Hissong on cultural change and the value of agility in surveying and mapmaking in the digital world. Intrigued because of the references to Tom Peter’s with whom I updated links recently.

Some snippets – Irrationality really is better. Avoid “rational / comprehensive models”, they don’t work. Ready, Fire, Aim – said Peters yonks ago – likening business to a guided missile. We need to “move faster and faster until the thrill of the speed overcomes the fear of death” says Hunter S Thompson. Leap of faith. Tipping point. It’s all there, all completely counter-intuitive, but essential for successful business. [See Manifesto]

(Interesting for me to follow the ACMS link further – my father used to be a cartographic surveyor – all their little stories and competitions about “throwing a chain” and pacing a distance and estimating an angle rang bells. Is it an art or a science ? Should we make any distinction ? Is this “Rta” or plain old Quality ?)

Gregg Rosenberg’s Theory of Natural IndividualsA link from John Gregg’s Consciousness Site to Gregg Rosenberg’s book “A Place For Consciousness”.

[Post Note : notice that Gregg (Rosenberg) is linked with Tuscon conferences and specifically refers to Chalmers in his work. It’s a small tanged world.]

Anthony McWatt’s Textbook on Pirsig – Anthony’s new web site hosts a complete copy of his recently completed ten year quest to create a Textbook on Pirsig. (Link added to the Pirsig Pages too) I’ll post a review when I’ve had a chance to read. Looks promising, from a real Pirsig scholar.