Year: 2005

Sadly ironic to note in the story [via BBC] of the recently-convicted-for-life Algerian Al-Qaeda police-murderer and ricin-terrorist that, on the one hand, the police chief is playing down religion (99.99% of moslems are law abiding, etc), whilst the bereaved family is playing up it’s christian faith.

Football that is. Yeovil fan just walked up to me here in Changi, keen to check the Southend result from last night – they lost to Orient.

That means if Yeovil beat Kiddy today, they’re in champions spot apparently. Interestingly Reading were interested in the defeat of Blades by Derby last night – now we only need Millwall to beat Hammers for our play off place to be entirely in our own hands.

The connection ? Johnny Mullins of Reading is on loan at Kiddy and being influential according to manager Watkiss, who wants to extend the loan. (Though he’s an injury doubt for this particular game.)

Football outside the premiership really is interesting these days – so many outcomes dependent on so many results with just a few games to go yet again this season.

… or maybe France … Gibberish, computer generated “scientific” paper is accepted for conference in Orlando [via BBC]. To be fair, it was passed unreviewed by default due to missing reviewing milestones. So no-one was actually conned by its content, unilke the French existentialist quantum genetics (?) example earlier, but Oh Dear.

Perversely, I’ve just been corresponding with Chris over at Enlightened Caveman about the difficulties of getting serious, thoughtful but amateur material published or even read in academic channels.

And … His Essence ? … did I get that right – CNN in the background again – Hand lotion and wax candles infused with “His” essence from some holy spring – who buys this stuff ? Who thinks it up ?

File under conspiracy – see below.

Finished reading Caldwell and Thomason’s “Rule of Four” in transit here at Changi.

As I predicted in the previous post the theme becomes “Love Conquers All” – with the reminder of the double edged meaning in that aphorism – “mis-directed love destroys anything” is not a recipe for happy endings – though this book does indeed have a predictable one – just like the eponymous US version of Brazil.

Anyway whoever described The Rule of Four as The Name Of The Rose in the style of Donna Tartt’s Secret History was spot on. So many plot components are straight from Eco – not least the conflagration destroying the evidence (or does it ? type suspense), the labrynthine passages and stairs, the whodunnit murders, the dead-languages intellectual and philosophical references, and the poisoned paper trick. Had they never read Eco ? Did they not have an editor who had ? Either way I might be embarrassed.

The main theme is the same – western / christian church suppression of renaissance knowledge originating with the mediterranean, middle and eastern ancients. In The Rule of Four, the evil side is simply academic competitiveness personal jealousies and loves – no suggestion of a Da Vinci Code style institutional conspiracy of secrecy over the ages. The quote from St Paul’s Gospel neatly sums it up “I [god] am going to destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the understanding of any who understand”. Compare that with David Deutsch’s understanding or Sue Blackmore’s open mind if you dare. (A certain irony in the TV news headlines playing in the background beside me here – “The world waits for the announcement of the next pope …”)

It’s a conspiracy allright, A metaphorical conspiracy of memes.
But it’s no secret, it’s on CNN, that’s how memes work.

Actually I’m being unfair, Rule of Four is not a bad read in its own right, but I’d recommend the others mentioned here ahead of it. Except of course unlike the Da Vinci Code the fictional / mythical aspect of the source material content – The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – is acknowledged, even though the mysterious book itself is real.

Some annoying cliches throughout – constant references for the hard of thinking, to the significance of changing pronouns in dialogue – and the obligatory “love-interest”, but the style and phrasing makes an entertaining read – Echoes of Raymond Chandler in the character descriptions early on, and some creative quotable phrases throughout.

“[She] can be heard muttering in dead languages to the books around her; A taxidermist whispering to her pets.”

“[He] speaks in shades of the obvious; Some stopgap between his mouth and mind gone missing”

Also a nice variation on the existing …
“Some things have to be believed to be seen“,
“Belief creates“, or
“Belief has to be-lived”
… Caldwell and Thomason have …
“Only a man who sees giants can ever stand upon their shoulders”.
I liked that.

Almost blogged this BBC news story about Hitachi’s new technology to shift disk storage up an order of magnitude a few days ago. But I needed to see (and hear) this from the Toronto McLuhan Message blog before I actually did it. Neat.

Browsing Gimbo, which has changed since I last looked (he’s got married ?) the issues being blogged seem higher level. Several good posts – the UK Government ID Card story, The TinyURL (risks) story, and the women in sport (world full of idiots) link.

I was taken by the “risks” link simply because the link was catless.ncl.ac.uk which I recognised as the domain of Rivets (@ncl.ac naturally). Anyway the catalogue of risks (of IT mis-use in devices) makes interesting reading.

Matt at DoubleLoop has a new post on a survey of link collectors / organisers. As he says the common feature is Tags, Tags, Tags, Tags, but for me what is key is the semantics of Why, Why, Why, Why ?

The thing I liked about del.ici.ous was that the links were to categories, and since you could create the categories themselves, you could categorise the categories too, though I see no evidence of inheritance in the linking. I wonder if any of the others stretches that far. (Must look at both del.ici.ous and CiteULike again more closely.)

It’s like this …

If I have a category of “People” with 10 “Members”
And I have another category of “Animals” with 10 “Members”, one of which is “People”
Does my click on “Animals” return 10 or 19 hits ?
64,000 dollar question.

If that’s possible – then I make my categories aspectual – ie in terms of why the interest / intent / reason in the link, rather than simply “what is at the end of it”, then Robert is your father’s brother – Semantic Web – I think you’ll find.

You may have read it here first.

OK, so the inescapable key of David Deutsch’s world view is that the Everett / Wheeler idea of many worlds forming the multiverse, is … well … fundamental to all of reality.

I’ve said twice – once after his introduction and again after reading the whole of his Fabric of Reality – that Deutsch argues his case convincingly. The real world behaves virtually “as if” it was as it really is. However convincing, boy, is that gonna be hard to absorb into a natural world view.

Christian Hauck provided some helpful links to Max Tegmark’s MIT work on the parallel universes aspect of the multiverse. Hmmm – do I really want to go there ? Seems unavoidable – I may be some time.

Seems I’m obsessed with Sue Blackmore – just re-read all the articles on her web site, again – particularly the mid-life-crisis post-50-years career switch from the paranormal expert to philosophy of mind novice. Such deep material, such human and witty delivery, and painfully open too.

Anyway after my fix, I’m reminded of the connection I was following – Sue’s (and Dan Dennett’s – see previous post) conclusion that conscious mind and free-will are illusions. Metaphorical ? yes; Illusory ? please no. Now, where was I – the link is David Deutsch’s “explanation” of this as an error of our common sense model of the flow of time, using the Multiverse idea.

Following on from Sue Blackmore’s works, I have at last ordered the Dan Dennett materials so I can read him in the original. Also ordered David Chalmers book – I guess I need to read that too, even if it seems I disagree with him on Qualia. (What I forgot to order but will do next time is some Hofstadter – “Mind’s I” presumably, since he was influential on Chalmers.)

Meantime, having read Sue, and followed that with David Deutsch, both impressive – I started reading Ian Stewart’s “Flatterland” – the most recent of the sequels to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 fictional Flatland. Interesting idea, and nice allegory to get your head round concepts you can’t visualise in your current “world” – mainly dimensions beyond 3 in this case. [One omission that nags, is the idea of biological life in a 2D world – which as Martin Rees points out is impossible – a digestive tract splits you in two, unless you excrete through the same orifice you ingest – messy.] The thing that really gets in the way of my reading it is the dear diary, dear-unseen-correspondent please-lead-me-through-this-story style of Sophie’s World. A real turn off now as it was then. Pity, I though Stewart’s book on chaos was much better than Gleick’s, …. in exactly the same way I prefer Talbot to Gladwell, hopefully not a UK vs US thing ?

Apparently not, I’m now reading Caldwell and Thomason’s “Rule of Four”. Picked up and blogged about the subject of this book – the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – soon after I’d read Donna Tartt’s “Secret History”, when I’d seen “Rule of Four” described as being Eco’s “Name of the Rose” written in the style of Donna Tartt. (Though since Dan Brown has ejaculated all over this memespace in the intervening year, I now prefer the UK Independent’s rather snooty tag of “The Da Vinci Code for people with brains”.) A promising start – like Tartt’s Secret History the plot involves the riskier side of US College frat house traditions – Apollonian Educated Genius vs Dionysian Reckless Madness leading (presumably) to a Love (and Humour) Conquers All thesis. Anyway I’m hooked.