Month: August 2004

Inspired by “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”, by Lynn Truss, Jennifer Garret has posted “Eats, Blogs & Leaves“. I have to agree.

Bad punctuation is only the half of it. Spelling, grammar and syntax are all victims of the rapid publishing habit that is blogging. I’m constantly embarassed to discover howlers in my own blog, often many months or years after the event, often as a result of a search hit containing the same innocent typo.

I guess the point of the original article is that this is not just a matter of tolerance of ongoing language evolution in a new genre (like txting, no doubt more extreme), but more a plea for taking communication seriously. When people are memetically programmed to read what they want to hear, and we all are, then meaning transposed by mis-punctuation or other typos, may be far more than subtle nuances.

CEO Blog – Glenn Reid at FiveAcross [via Stuart Henshall]. [Quote] The bathtub was invented in 1842. The telephone was invented in 1876. That means you could have sat in the bathtub for 34 years without the phone ringing. [Unquote] I like that.

Slightly more practically, he says, though in Microsoft knocking mode, [Quote] … projects involve human beings, and as a species we don’t handle complexity very well. We are wired to simplify: vision simplifies what is really there, recognizing patterns; socially we simplify: you’re either Good, or you’re Bad, Guilty or Innocent; intellectually we simplify: the scientific method is based on reducing an experiment down to as few variables as possible so you can “control” for them and measure the one you’re interested in. Humans can support up to 3 simultaneously contradictory thoughts at once, before melting down into indecision and confusion [or hypocrisy ?]. So what happens when you put 400 programmers on one project and try to run it? [Unquote]

Also like his ease of use vs discoverability post.

Mentioned indirect references to this many times, but I came across the original report thanks to a cross-search-hit.

I almost forgot.

Mark Richardson completed his ZMM trip and posted his initial photographic record and comments here on Henry’s site.

And so did Franz und Gregor.

As I was with Eco’s plot below, I did also mention earlier that I had obtained Nils Brunsson’s “The Organisation of Hypocrisy”. Read only a small part so far …

Interestingly, Brunsson says most people interpreted his first edition as pointing out a hypocrisy that was in need of stamping out in order to improve management of organisations. In fact Brunsson wishes to make clear that his motive is much more pragmatic (and dare I say hypocritical) in that he simply wants to improve understanding of a fact of life that exists, so that people can manage it, exploit it to their advantage. He is making no value judgement about whether hypocrisy is good or bad per se.

Seems self-defeating to me, so I’m going to find this harder to read than I thought, but I’ve started, so I’ll finish.

I’ve blogged a couple of times already that I’ve been reading Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”. Well today on flight CO5 to Houston I completed it.

I said before that the high mediaeval historical content made it difficult to sort fictional characters and events from real. Few of the important doubts (people or artefacts) survive the final carnage (I’ll say no more) so it’s mostly pretty clear by the end.

In many ways it’s a formulaic who-dunnit detective story – Holmes & Watson, Poirot & Hastings, Morse & Lewis. All the usual ingredients – multiple heinous deeds, even more motives and suspects, reversals of fortune snatched from neat conclusions, staged set-pieces involving all the suspects, heavy-handed investigation by the authorities cutting across the hero’s informal sleuthing, wise sleuth whose inexperienced sidekick unwittingly uncovers the key clues, denouement scene with “conversation” to allow explanation of the plot. Of course The Rose is far more than that. A tale of good and evil on a fundamental (philosophical) scale – is there any right and wrong at all; what is truth anyway ?

There’s also a good dose of “follow the money” and “cherchez la femme”, though in the case of mediaeval monks you can read “femme” as any young flesh, novices being more freely available.

Apart from intending to be an educational insight into the machinations of the holy roman church at the time of the inquisitions – the hypocritical paranoia in the name of the infidels and the anti-christ in political pursuit of wealth and power – the book’s main theme is the suppression of doubt by the imposition of faith.

In fact, the suppression of Aristotle’s “Poetics” is at the core, and the idea that humour, jest, irony and rhetoric can contain a good deal more truth than any declarative decree, papal bull being the main target.

(PS – the church conflict between the Germans and the Italians, with the ironic Brits mediating couldn’t help but remind me of my own recent experience of the Dutch / Norwegian / British saga in data standards collaboration, about which I’ll say no more, in order to protect the innocent. Go read it guys, you know who you are.)

Anyway, I hope I haven’t given too much away. A thoroughly recommended read. Top 5, maybe even top 3, of my all-time best reads.

From a multitude of bloglines search cross-hits I picked-up this metafilter link.

This is a small world, full of small worlds, each full of … etc.

Amazing how each thinks it is the first to find something (anything). Takes us back to the nothing new under the sun theme, and particularly the conceit of believing in invention [after Mitch Ratcliffe]

I thought emergence was going to be last year’s word, but it looks like it’s going to arrive this year at last.

It’s been a thread on MoQ Discuss recently and I find this post from Seb Paquet too.

Recipes for success are always doomed, in management just as anywhere else in life. Success is emergent from a process, involving support and tension; it’s not a state in itself. Pure Dynamic Quality in Pirsig’s MoQ terms.

Support and tension ? I’m getting tightrope-walking, falling then flying, I’m getting Douglas Adams, Nietzsche and Pirsig all in one go.

I’m also getting the “immigrant tailors” story as a recipe for success … Nobel prize-winning George Wald quote [after Pinker].

The CIA World Factbook [via McGee’s Musings][via Jack Vinson] (The UK is a “money laundering center” – which is nice. Apparently Northern Ireland doesn’t count as an international territorial dispute – which is also nice. !!)
The US declaration of Independence [via McGee’s Musings][via Jack Vinson]
The Value of Certainty, from Jack. Like it.
Personal Knowledge Management, also from Jack
Play & Humour are the most important forms of work. [from Rebecca Ryan]
Organisation design is about What You Know.