Psybertron Asks

Spotted somewhere earlier, and made a mental note but failed to link to [Piers at Monkey Magic – thanks] an article on the etymology of author and authority. Anyway noticed a post from Johnnie Moore remarking that we no longer look for any “authority” independent of our own view of a source.

I see he is facilitating / presenting at “Blogging – A Real Conversation” over at Knowledge for the Digital Economy.

Interesting given the earlier link today to XHTML2. Rivets linked without comment to this Schematron site – “A language for making assertions about patterns found in XML documents”. Another ISO proposed specification. Intriguing, patterns asserted, not pre-defined.

[Aaagghh – Zamora has scored, from an Etherington cross.]

Review in the Times by David Lodge of “What Good Are The Arts” by a certain John Carey, brought to notice by Platt over on MoQ-Discuss.

If the only tool you are prepared to use is Occam’s Razor (or Aristotle’s “analytic machete”), then you can hardly conlude anything other than art is worthless – fortunately the alternative conclusion is the knife of objective analysis is too blunt an instrument to explain anything of value anyway. (See previous blog on quality computer programming.)

[HT – Preston & West Ham remain goalless, North End getting on top after Hammers early domination.]

Just one on many interesting remarks in the blog from Grumpy Old Programmer [link from Leon by e-mail]. I can’t argue – everything is evolutionary psychlogy – is a recurring mantra.

Don’t know who GOP is / are, but I sympathise with the general thrust – objective quantification misses anything worthwhile by a mile – “vain attempts to de-skill” – architecture is more important than perfection in design.

As a result of a legacy of blogs going back four years, migrated most recently from Blogger to WordPress, my permalinks are a bit of a mess.

In the WordPress set up I simply defaulted the permalink style – an index number for individual posts and a month-year format for each archive page. That has worked great except for a significant proportion of my earlier Blogger posts, where I put the source link in the header, rather than in the body text or a separate RSS tagged link field. For those posts my permalinks no longer contain links to the post itself, but rather to the referenced source piece, which is darned fustrating.

Doesn’t seem to phase Google in the slightest though. I noticed that within two days of migrating to WordPress – same home page URL, but without any index.html and every individual post and archive re-named with a new URL, Google could hit any of my content instantly. I’m constantly amazed – even when I seem to have found a hole in the indexing, it always seems to be my memory (or spelling at the time of posting, playing tricks.) Seems Google can only index what I posted, not what I actually meant to post. Never fails to impress though.

Full text appears invariably better than imperfect structure. Weird.

[Less than 15 minutes to the play-off final KO. Come on Preston.]

Not really kept an eye on XHTML, having been an early convert to XML with standard reference libraries of Schema and Schema fragments, as the basis of sharing semantics – on the web or however. This update on XHTML2 is interesting … in the words of a comment on XML.org “[of XHTML] Simple functionality and common sense appear �” at least temporarily �” to have triumphed over byzantine theological imperatives.” Hmm, yes, data modelling committees, I remember those.

Interesting too, for reasons not immediately apparent, that it includes a couple of snippets from Joyce’s Ulysses, but that might explain why Jorn picked up on it.

As Jorn says, this interview of Bono on meeting the great and the good makes interesting reading. About Dubya, he says “As a man, I believed him .. I believed him. Listen, I couldn’t come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically, but … you don’t have to be harmonious on everything �” just one thing �” to get along with someone.”

Lost touch with a Michael Anderson in Cambridge a couple of years ago, and keep getting cross hits from this different one. He’s involved with the Active Logic, Metacognitive Computation and Mind Research Group whose aim is “to design and implement common sense in a computer”.

Anyway the reason I captured the link, apart from an interest in the subject, is that I notice one of his forthcoming papers is co-authored with a certain Gregg Rosenberg – is that the same one to which I already have a link ? Yup it is, AI Centre at Georgia Univ, and author of “A Place For Consciousness“, which confusingly, but correctly I originally found referenced by someone whose surname was Gregg.

Very strange site linked by Ray Girvan, but with a wonderful gallery of pictures of various aircraft vapour cloud and vapour trail effects. Only of interest because of the tenuous reason I had to mention vapour trails when Dawkins referred to compressible flow. Any excuse – sorry.

” … an inquiry ought to be launched into exactly how he finds the time. Under all that pressure and stress, I’m sure most of the rest of us would end up looking like John Prescott … The public demands to know: what exactly is your weapon of mass reduction, … Tony ?” Says Hydragenic.

A man of my physique couldn’t possibly comment.