The MS vs Mac Scam. This story, linked from Adam Curry, has been circulating in many forms, including amongst colleagues at work. Adam makes the strong point – Why are we surprised ? One commentator says – Why do we go through the motions of appearing offended ? Interesting that in the workplace the main reactions were Friday afternoon humour – the right place for it. All life is about constructing stories (illusions) from existing information and metaphors. I say – What do we think facts are anyway ? What else is accounting but creative ? The place for simple scientific logic and arithmetic is confined to very narrow spheres of life. Adam also makes a link back to Bernard McGrane’s Zen TV Experiment, a link I blogged a year ago. He’s right.
Why Science Needs Us to be Afraid
Why Science Needs Us to be Afraid. From Cringely, quoting a letter from Australian engineer scientist Richard Worsley. [Quote] … I’ve done my time in the trenches …. therefore feel able to comment on the lot of the scientist today….. science is not separate from society …. what you are seeing is a symptom …. of a broad social trend to globalization, market driven, efficient use of resources …. to such an extent that there is no intellectual freedom any more … without that, creativity is dying …. scientists spend more time justifying their work ….. science has always worked on the fact that we don’t know the answer …. we ask the question without having the answer ….. try getting that concept up when you have to justify continued expenditure ….. best scientists I know are all crazy …. you have to be ‘on the edge’ or unstable …. like the best fighter planes. [Unquote] The classic Catch-22 of having to rationalise the irrational. Tell me about it. A good documented example.
The Pepys Connection
The Pepys Connection. Atlantic Online review (via Jorn) by Philip Hensher of “Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self” by Claire Tomalin. Interesting angle on the plethora of seemingly irrelevant first person details being key to why Pepys’ record represents a more important body of knowledge than any other 17th and 18th century objective accounts. Good advert for James Joyce in [Quote] Pepys’s commitment to recording the totality of experience would not really be matched until Ulysses and the diaries of Virginia Woolf. [Unquote]
Kurzweil’s Paradigm
Kurzweil’s Paradigm. Report on talk by Kurzweil by Weinberger of JOHO [Quote] Killer soundbyte from Kurzweil: The genomic information about the brain is 12 million bytes of compressed data, “smaller than Microsoft Word.” [Unquote]
Harrelson Tired of American Lies
I’m an American tired of American lies. Woody Harrelson (!) in The Guardian (via Gimbo). What was it I was saying about lying ?
The Classification of Links
The Classification of Links. Interesting link (via Seth) from “Hypertext Links: Whither Thou Goest, and Why” by Claire Harrison at First Monday. The ontology is a bit contrived and a bit focussed on e-biz dot.com web site domains, but (like Jorn’s simple text buttons) a step towards modelling the right bits of the semantic web IMHO. There is something fundamental here worth looking for.
We are accustomed to lying !
Managing to find some time to read Eco’s Kant and the Platypus at last. He is a big fan of Nietzshe’s Truth and Lies and quotes ” … truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms … that subsequently gel into knowledge.” That’s just about where I’m coming from. Eco goes on to say “… we become accustomed to lying according to convention …. placing our actions under the control of abstractions …. having reduced the metaphors to schemata and concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks ….. constructed entirely by language …. the graveyard of intuition.” Exactly, “reification kills knowledge” is my mantra, “lying by (western) convention” is Argyris’ thesis. This could almost be the last word on the matter of justifying why rational objective ontologies are the last thing a model of knowledge needs.
[Metonymy and other forms of rhetoric seem to be a flavour of the month on the web.]
Pirsig’s “SODV”
Subjects, objects, data and values. Sept 2001 (Rev 10 !!) of Robert Pirsig’s original 1995 paper. Although I bogged a link to the Quantonics site many moons ago, I didn’t spot there was so much Pirsig related stuff here and on the MoQ “Metaphysics of Quality” site, both recently added to the side-bar. Spooky to me that Pirsig directly, (and indirectly through a band of followers) has already closed the loop with his static / dynamic quality levels with quantum information et al. Another rich seam of research opens.