Rene Thom Obituary

Rene Thom Obituary. Thanks to Jorn for the Guardian link. Never quite understood the relationship between catastrophe and chaos theories, so this is useful source. Also interesting in that starting from Bourbaki school of French mathematics and a particular interest in Topology, Thom moved into philosophical biology and linguistics. Very much on the same page as Eco’s Kant and the Platypus.

RSS Syndication / Subscription ?

Blogger creates RSS OK, with basic title / description / link tags only, but has no subscription / syndication service (yet). I’m just gathering some useful links to other RSS resources here.
VoidStar’s RSSify does no more than Blogger, but at least you can apply it to existing archive pages.
Phil Ringnalda
Morten Frederiksen
Syndic8
Meerkat at O’Reilly

And whilst I’m on the subject what about linking / backtracking
TrackBack Seems to have died a death ?

Alternative Logics

Alternative Logics. Thanks to Seb for this Kuro5hin link. A good summary with some links to more detailed sources. Includes multivalued / fuzzy logics and qauntum logic amongst several others new to me. It is fundamental to my thesis that knowledge models must recognise that classical logical rationale is much too limiting – it forces rationalisations even where these destroy the facts – it “conspires to misinform” or “reification kills knowledge” I may have mentioned before.

Identity Crisis ?

Identity Crisis ? Dave Weinberger at JOHO says ID’s are nice but not the centre of the universe. Well I beg to differ. On aspect of our “semantic web” is that the nodes become less significant than the links, in fact the nodes simply become “pointers” for the links to link to – just look at URI’s / RDF / RSS. Without identity (identifiers) the nodes disappear entirely.