What, Why & How do we Know ?
I have to say organizations participating in global conferences worked this out long ago. The best place to hold them is the place with cheap accomodation & catering, and plenty of travel connections – resort locations out of season typically. That said, the worst place on the planet has to be Las Vegas ?
Oddly, this one is very close to home too.
Noticed this somewhere earlier, but here from The Grauniad. (How many roads must a man walk down ? 42 surely.)
Fascinating 1881 map of Europe showing the distribution of Jews before pogroms and the Nazis. Wow.
The very interesting Ptak’s Science Books blog, via Ray Girvan at Segal Books.
Improbable Research – The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.
Research that makes you LAUGH and then THINK
Hat tip to “Lingvisme“. Pinker and Chalmers in there.
Best (and worst) jokes from the Edinburgh fringe.
This Dilbert made me chuckle, earlier this week. Thanks to Dave Weinberger for reminding me of the taxonomic joke. Relevant to the day job – some classes / categories have more value than others. Miscellaneous / 99 / other categories and context specific groupings (classes of class) have value only in the context of their specific purpose.
This time to compete with their on-line library aspirations – The Open Book Alliance from Amazon, Microsoft, Yahhoo and The Internet Archive. Healthy stuff.
Been following these developments over the years – this post just to capture a latest news link – remaining problems are all engineering.
Great summary of mainly non-techie content tips on Google search optimisation tips from WordCamp09.
For now, just some significant quotes and paraphrases (from Closure).
THE PROBLEM
The contemporary predicament. The circle of self-reference in which thought has been increasingly enmeshed – typified by rhetorical self-denials and the use of inverted commas … a predicament so insistent and destructive that it is not sustainable at all. … signs of its destructive force can be found [in philosophy and] throughout our culture … to uphold moral behaviour despite acceptance that others adhere to different moral codes … to believe that science might uncover ultimate laws, despite our suspicion that science is not itself value-free.
[Many] people have shown the inevitability of the failure of closure – particularly linguistically [eg Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida] … [so how do we escape from arbitrary relativism or nihilism? ] … a world full of possibility but a world without any particularity.
To try to imagine material without activity is to imagine complete closure … The world realized through material necessarily has the appearance of stability. Look closer and this stability hides a seething flux.
THE FRAMEWORK
All forms of life … are closure machines.
[2nd law springs to mind – or, to avoid the mechanistic metaphor, all organisms operate by closure.]Closure is many layered.
Preliminary closure … the means by which an organism converts the flux of openess into an array of possible particularities – [the means of pure experience, maybe multiple and linked at this level, but remain distinct].
First-level non-preliminary closure … preliminary closures become “held as one” with a new material form. [material form “arising” and not inherent to the preliminary closures.]
And so on …