Psybertron Asks

Two interesting blogs here via Jack Vinson’s Jolt with Jack.

This one “Open Source Knowledge” from Jack himself, quoting a blog by Karl Nelson.

Also this from Peter Bailey’s Synop.
Some great always-been-truisms quoted from Peter Drucker.

Made my comments at source – follow those links.

Following the Lisa Jardine trail … lots of interesting stuff Francis Bacon and Milton, to name a few … anyway … at the Center for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) …

The Auchinleck Manuscript was probably created in London in 1330/1340-ish and is currently housed in the National Library of Scotland. This is an on-line copy of an English language literary work that pre-dates Chaucer, so is important lingusitically and culturally as well as a work of literature.

I was moved to blog the link. because I happen to be reading Eco’s 1980 “The Name of the Rose”, set in and around the “scriptorium” of a monastery in 1327, under investigation by a member of the “inquisition”. The text is full of the jargon of scribes and manuscripts and the Auchinleck site has a useful glossary of such terms.

Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of King’s College Cambridge was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s “Devout Sceptic” programme yesterday. An interesting person – atheistic, brought up in an orthodox Jewish extended family, though her parents were also atheistic intellectuals, but with a love of rousing Christian hymns, at funerals, including her own – Jerusalem, I Vowe to Thee, etc. (I have a soft spot for Jerusalem too, it was my old school hymn, and indeed is that of my sons’ school.)

Lisa mentioned an epiphany moment in her life, seeing Dr Jacob Bronowksi pick up that handful of human ash mud near the gates of Auschwitz, speechless with emotion in the closing scene of one programme from his Ascent of Man series. I mention that same moment as a formative experience of mine, and apparently it was voted one of the top 50 moments in TV (though I wasn’t aware of that until yesterday.)

The late Jacob Bronowski was hero of mine. He was Lisa’s father.

(Excellent Bronowksi site by Stephen Moss … Bruno was a polymath, a geometer and a poet specifically. Interesting aspect of mysticism where art met science in the quote from his wife Rita Jardine, shortly after they had first met, whilst he was posing for her to sculpt … [QUOTE] Like many people he thought of Blake as an eccentric and a mystical, otherworldly character. At this reading he had sudden insight into the heart of the man, whom he saw to be a true man of his time, a real revolutionary. Bruno rushed off to research the newspapers of the time and wrote a breakthrough book called William Blake, A Man without a Mask which has had a strong effect on the manner in which William Blake is viewed today. [UNQUOTE]

[Post Note: Lisa was creating the definitive biography of her father but sadly died on 25th October 2015 before it could be completed.]

Also via Dave Gurteen, that article in the Independent by John Pilger.

Apparently Dave Snowden has left IBM and taken Cynefin with him. [via Dave Gurteen]

I collected a lot of fractal art links over a year ago, and in fact played around with some cheap tools myself, but these are really excellent images – Blatte’s Fractals – you can download them as backgrounds if you want. [via Rivets] (Some great coluration variants on the “infinitely fascinating” Mandlebrot set, but some other magic styles too.)
Loved this one for example :

Look out for Phoenix, Crescent-II & Tropical Beach.

One of Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) on the end of the world (again)

Another of Ernst Mayr (of Pirsig interest)

Just read most of the Mayr interview. Interesting. A bit of a sales pitch for Biology as a distinct subject (motivated by some round of budgeting somewhere I’ll wager). His point that biology is not just molecular biology, and molecules are not just physics, and physics are not just …. etc is the usual stuff. All biology is just molecular biology of course if all you are going to do is analyse it, but it is not just a synthesis of its molecular parts. There is an emergent level, called life if you like, which requires a holistic systems view of the parts interacting, not just adding together. This is Capra’s connections, and Pirsig’s levels. Biology is distinct from physics, in the same way that consciousness is distinct from biology. That is, not very.

If you want to do more useful than just scientific analysis, the connections / relationships / interactions are more interesting than the distinctions.

Updated biographical timeline now includes a number of corrections, as well as aditional updates taken from the St.Paul newspaper clippings and articles.

Sorry, I’m jusy housekeeping collecting / checking non-dead links for ZMM resources…

Jones Pegasus Bibliography
The Bruce Charlton Review
Brad Cox’s Site
Chicago Graduates

A little overblown – I’ve got the solution for the sematic web style – but I guess we’d all like to believe that. Nova Spivack’s Minding the Planet blog is marketing stuff from his Radar Systems venture, but his paper From Semantic Web to Global Mind brought to me by Matt Whyndham includes some good concepts amidst a review of their relevance to achieving the semantic web dream.

Breathless Fluff to Deep Thought Matt calls it, but I think Nova touches on a key point in the ability to characterise new links, and see these as additive to a given knowledge object as he calls them.