Category: Uncategorized

Skilled Incompetence Par Excellence. Cringley’s latest is actually a review of the inevitability of P2P, but he uses the story of BP (Anglo-Persian Oil) vs Mellon (Gulf Oil) as an example of how the official encumbent (BP) managed to spin out (and presumably rationally justify it business-wise) failing to find oil in Kuwait for 22 years as a metaphor for what will happen if P2P channel is taken over by “big-media” companies [Check out Bertelsmann]. [Quote] Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where, for more than 3,000 years, oil has seeped all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder. [Unquote] [See rationalisation thread].

Spiral Linking. Whilst investigating back-linking options the issue of exponentially increasing links that link to each other has been bugging me for several weeks. Some recursive web that might explode to consume all the web resources in some unstoppable nightmare – I’ve seen it happen on mail servers with automated replies anyway. This particular story featuring Moen’s Law of Bicycles (classic bad-money / good-money economics anyway BTW) is about breaking such a chain – (!) pun unintended.
[via Oblomovka, via Jorn – different Danny and Seb, not to be confused.]

[Basically if we set up a web page that automatically updates itself with links to pages that link to itself, and in the course of doing so it creates a link to a page with the same feature, where does the nonsense stop ? Scary. Just occurred to me too that this is the semantic web equivalent of a rumour based on some minor piece of misinformation getting out there – like a meme – and establishing an unfounded urban myth – metaphor, chaos, cellular automata – aaaaagggghhh!!!!.]

OK, What’s a Quine ? Via (Miscoranda). Named after the eponymous “Van”, but not apparent why.
[I guess I’ll have to research Hofstadter to work that out.]
Picked up on Miscoranda via the backlink from the Heisenberg story.

Nonaka’s Knowledge Model. Thanks to Spike for this link to the Knowledge Board summary of Nonaka’s stuff.
Made several references to Nonaka earlier but this is a neat summary.
[Added Spike’s blog to the side bar links – looks like some thoughtful contributions to the debate.]

Given the number of figures and stats quoted by economists and economic commentators, it is refreshing to find one (Gavin Davies of the Beeb speaking on More or Less yesterday) who recognises that what matters is telling a good (convincing) story – irrespective of the figures. No economist worth his salt believes the numbers etc. He quoted a reference to a 1998 publication called The Rhetoric of Economics by Deirdre McCloskey. (Pretty close to Argyris’ “Budgetary Games” “Creative Accounting” organisational behaviour stuff.)

The Memory of Water. The office chat around here is last night’s Beeb programme on Homeopathy, and several mentions of the 1984 Jacques Benvensita theory on “The Memory of Water” . The dilution levels at finite numbers of molecules of active agents per unit volume of solution makes it seem preposterous that a sample further diluted can have any amount of the active ingredient present in a physical sense. All sorts of issues with truly controllable, repeatable test conditions to prove homeopathic benefit, not to mention timescale and overlap issues with all the previous “contaminants” any part of any body of water may have been in contact since …. well, coming into existence / condensing from vapour ?

In any other light I’d have to count myself as a total sceptic on homeopathy …… however could the homeopathic property be some quantum non-locality effect of the contaminant and an emergent macro property chaotically determined by the micro component ? Perhaps worth a brief contemplation and then again perhaps not.[Homourous homeopathic antidote here.] [Many a true word here.]

…. in the BBC “Great Britons” poll. Well I’d like to have voted for an original genius thinker with an important legacy, given my current line of research, but I have to say the Brits in the top 100, all seemed a bit “derivative” of others. Our “revolution” never quite went the way of the French or the US. Is it part of the British Disease that I can’t quite hold Newton and Darwin to be the creators of important new ideas, however Newtonian and Darwinian the world Brunel operated in ?

Zen River Crossing. Nice one from Gimbo. I voted for Brunel (came 2nd) WTF ? Anyway Zen, bridges and Klogging, I couldn’t resist this one. [Quote] Interesting… I’d always thought of the Second Severn Crossing as just another suspension bridge (like the first one), but it is in fact a “cable-stayed” bridge. I think I always had a dull realisation in my mind that it was unlike other suspension bridges I’d crossed, but in that zen-like state we all drive in, I never really thought hard enough about it. *shrug* [Unquote] – Driving in a zen-like state – another one right from my “many a true word” thread.

The Official Truth ? Link via Seb [Quote] … how people find each other rather than just the officially published work …. [Unquote]. Same message again – knowledge is human – the “official ” story merely serves some transient purpose. See my earlier Cringley link.

Skilled Incompetence. Thanks to Danny for this 1995 essay on “Structured Procrastination” by John Perry. Magic. This is my main theme about information models Danny. Spot on the Argyris thread about how normal (western) culture in organisations institutionalises bad practices justified by rationalisations. I have a colleague that regularly characterises “displacement activities” when it is obvious there is something to do (some decision to be made) which is more difficult that some other more interesting tasks, and guess what ? Manana.