Self Organising Motes from Intel

You’ll like these Alex. Saw these demonstrated at FIATECH yesterday. Really neat. Aimed a ultra-low power distributed network architectures for control systems, but the neatest aspect is their individual awareness of relationships to other motes. By negotiation they organise their own network topology. Reminded me of our smart templates approach to self-knowing packets of XML.(Can’t help thinking of the AI / A-Life connotations.)

Obvious “toy” potential – “They’ll be in the shops for Christmas”.

Oh, Oh, censoring the web ?

Should we be worried about this ?

Levels of Causality

And there’s more from Dr Austin. Taking emergent as high and fundamental as low, he talks of higher level emergent properties having causal effects on the underlying structures, such that the emergent properties are “causal realities”. As in Pirsig’s levels of static quality, the high can control the lower, but the lower must only ever support, never constrain, the higher. Never forget your roots.

Quirks Emerge Beyond Our Quarks

Dr Austin again. “Sperry takes over where William James left off. Neurosciences have rejected reductionism and mechanistic determinism on the one hand, and dualisms on the other…. higher level interactions [of the] brain are presumed to be reducible [only in principle] in terms of fundamental physics. How does it help us to know about quarks, molecules and the brain’s high water content ? We have personal quirks which go beyond our quarks …. Interactions of a [complex] system, always much more than the sum of their parts …. our brain develops new emergent properties.” Whahaay, ‘ere we go. See Brian Josephson below.

Who was it said something like “To know about a man’s make up in terms of his chemistry is only of interest if you intend to make fertiliser out of his body” ? Blogged somewhere ealier.

“Thinking with meat” [after Terry Bisson]. Getting there.

Greeley Tangles The Web

The plot thickens further …

I’m now reading Dr Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”. Not surprisngly for a real US medic he spends a fair amount of time apologising for his mystic tendencies and acknowledging christian religious sensibilities, before he dares launch us into his Zen treatise. (I suspect 2/3 of this 800 page tome is down to such political correctness.)

Plenty of homage to Herrigel and Suzuki in laying down the history of modern Zen foundations. Not a single reference to Pirsig – oh well. But a positive citation for a certain Father Andrew Greeley. A Catholic PhD Sociologist of some note apparently, and the very same Andrew M Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center who slammed Pirsig in 1975 for his “bigotry”.

(I just sent Pirsig a question about that reaction a couple of days ago – weird.)

Off The Road

Just finished Kerouac on BA2027. Aren’t west-bound transatlantic flights a great place to read – 90% of the book in the one sitting. I guess I need to understand a little of the circumstances under which it was written – one drug induced sitting ? – published 1955 about 1947 to 1949 period in which the author refers to writing and successfully publishing a first work.

The music and the locations are seductive; the drink, drugs, driving and women plain wild. A great east-west anthroplogical thread in there – the fellahin cultures, the Tao. (We know Pirsig was influenced by Kerouac. He would have read on-the-road immediately prior to his “teaching quality” episodes.)

What did Sal and Dean mean, headed for Times Square in 1948 driving through the tunnel from Jersey, by “We are a bunch of Arabs going to blow up New York” ? Intriguing.

TiddleyWiki

Picked-up on TiddleyWiki via Ton. A really neat peer-to-peer wiki, to collaborate on building, editing and linking information fragments, known as Tiddlers, without any server side components. So simple it has to be a winner.

Protocol – P2P Rhizomes

Review at Frontwheeldrive of Protocol by Alexander Galloway. Via a cross-hit on my earlier P2P / Rhizome view of web organisation.

140m to put Library of Congress Online

At Web2.0 Brewster Kahle pointed out that most books are out of print most of the time and only a tiny proportion are available on bookshop shelves. Scanning the 26 million volumes in the US Library of Congress, the world’s biggest library, would cost only $260m (146m). The scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space and cost about $60,000 (33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf. [via BBC News]

Social Life of Books

Brown and Duguid’s “Social Life of Information” (2000) I now notice was preceeded by a Xerox PARC paper of theirs called “Social Life of Documents” (1995), which I now also notice includes good old fashioned books. [Ref Univ Western Ontario Philosophy reading list]. In fact it seems to be a plea to remember that books / documents differ from electronic data in more than just physical forms of delivery mechanism. (Must read the paper further.)