Category: Uncategorized

Artistic License ?. BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning had an interview with the chairman of judges of the Turner Prize. The recent selection caused a stir when the UK Gov’t minister Kim Howell suggested it was 100% conceptual bullsh*t with pathetic rationalisations to justify it. Interestingly when Humphries was interviewing the chairman, he was getting at “but on what criteria” are the works selected. It was clear from the body language in the responses (oxymoron on the radio ?) that there were unspoken agendas that could not be expressed. A kind of “please don’t make me rationalise the irrational – it’ll spoil the art”. Reification kills art too then ?

String Theory of Semiology ! Ostensibly a hoax originating in France (via Jorn), full of gobbledygook pseudo-science linking quantum gravity and string theory with information models. The motive was probably originally to ridicule quantum information theories, but it succeeded in “fooling” learned publishing referees and escaped into the world as a serious scientific paper. However – could this be another case of “Many a true word …” ? (How many serious, respected theoreticians have produced suspect mathematics to justify their intuitions ? – Remember Einstein’s gaff, and see the Heisenberg link below.)

Hoax or Scam ?. Thanks to Rivets for this weird link. Someone going for the most linked site record ?

Spent some time last evening browsing old links, around a year old, in several blogs, including my own and Jorn’s, in prepraration for organising links and references and found countless links broken. Most news feeds would seem to have expiry times on their published pages. I guess the answer is if something you blog is important to you beyond the moment, then cache yourself a copy.

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. – Sir Winston Churchill [Quote via Foundations]

Peter Drucker Foundation. Some interesting stuff about management of non-profit organisations setting future trends of business management including this interview with Charles Handy. Some good recommended reading lists too, including ….

The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman (Ballantine, 1992), ….. the follies of humankind in bringing about …. disasters that could have been avoided …. the best and the brightest can blithely and arrogantly march into colossal blunders. (Warren Bennis favourite text).

Mary Parker Follett, Prophet of Management (Harvard Business School Press, 1996, orig 1920’s). It makes one wonder why the rest of us bothered to write anything at all! Read and Admire says Charles Handy.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (Bantam, 1995) [actually a trilogy] …. elegant inquiry into deep cultural assumptions that shape how we think in the industrial era. and Synchronicity by Joseph Jaworski (Berrett-Koehler, 1996). ….. leadership grows from how we think about reality …. our Western scientific view of reality is being turned upside down this century … says Peter Senge.

Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle. Can’t anybody get Heisenberg’s big idea right? By Jim Holt in Slate (via Apothecary). Not even Heisenberg apparently. Strange when I read Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy I posted earlier that I was puzzled as to why he seemed to imply the “measurement disturbance” view of uncertainty in his many examples. Not just me then.

[Post note: Seth picked-up on this link and suggested identity and expressivity as conjugate information variables. Neat idea, I think this equates to my “reification kills knowledge” mantra. The more information is defined by tight syntax / ontologies (identity? ) the less knowledge (expressivity ?) it actually captures. Less is more !]

Conspiring to Mis-inform. New page from Robot Wisdom with this quote resonating with the summary statement of my manifesto in the header above. [Quote] Defining a universal ontology will require defining explicit categories for every variety of human experience, and every step in this direction must tighten the noose around the conspiracy of self-deception.[Unquote]. My earlier words were … “models which continue to rely solely on scientific rationale conspire to misinform”.