Year: 2004

£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.)

On The Road

Bought Kerouac some time ago; as the seminal beat-generation road story, it seemed de-rigoeur to have read it, since it forms part of the backdrop to Pirsig. Anyway I’m well into it at last. (Thinking out loud – Plenty of parallels with Pirsig’s mid-west already, though Pirsig’s timing does not overlap – his back-packing days were before Kerouac, Kerouac’s on-the-road days were Pirsig’s given-up / middle-age period, and of course the ZMM trip itself was another 10 years later ? Massive tributes to Hemmingway. And lines from Hendrix songs, 10 years ahead of their time, so is this where Hendrix got the lines ? – too much confusion, kiss the sky, weird.)

Yesterday bought Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and a mighty tome called “Zen and the Brain” by Dr James Austin – quite technical (and current apparently) in terms of brain physiology, as well “states of consciousness”, including those altered by meditation and/or drugs.

Lavery’s Evil Genius

Just read Lavery’s Evil Genius now in its entirety.

Looks unfinished (is that deliberate ?); ends with scene on 10th November 2004 (385th anniversary of Descartes’ birth). “I have set up a headquarters …” or is he (or she) just waiting for us all to join him (or her) there ? (Are the forward and back links either side of Nov 6th deliberately broken / ambiguous ? Stepping backwards through the pages follows a different thread to the forward links – Aha, have I missed a trick there ?)

Undisguised collection of quotations and original thoughts railing against Dualism. Pretty exhaustive collection of philosophical sources including plenty of post-modernists and AI / Sci-Fi writers. Many of my own favourites in there, Barfield obviously.

I won’t spoil the climax. Majoring on poetry as the purest form of knowledge, and god knows, but plenty of poets have arrived at mind-altering drugs before on this quest.

In fact Evil Genius is a blog – a series of diary pages, notebook pages and lengthier historical notes interwoven primarily chronologically, but with cross-links at the key points.

It’s advertised as an experiment, rather than say a “draft”. Gripping read for someone already into this subject – not sure if the narrative is intended to capture wider readership ?

OK David, what do you want us to do next ?

Paradox Of Our Time

Is that “sound” theory tends to destroy the state of affairs it aims to achieve, said Northrop in 1946. Always suspicious of “our time” claims about timeless issues, paricularly post 9/11, post blogging etc, next big thing claims generally, but I guess that was a period where global political organisation was truly in the spotlight.

Reminded of this by the current Guiness Ad on UK TV at the moment – where the young cowboy sets the wild horse free, and (you’ve guessed) a happy ending ensues. Cheesey, but true.

Neil Hannon puts it several ways in a Divine Comedy song I’ve quoted from before, The Certainty Of Chance, this stanza in particular.
You must go and I must set you free,
‘Cos only that only will bring you back to me.

Think Without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest (not released until Jan 2005) is “Blink : The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking”. Brought to my attention by Marsha at the MoQ Discussion board. About how much thinking & decision making is actually subconscious thought processes, I believe. Can’t argue with that.

I was none too impressed with Gladwell’s Tipping Point; perhaps I over-reacted to disappointment at not finding anything actually new after being much hyped in the blogosphere. The messages are true enough, they were ever thus.

Better Than Talking To The Televison

Blogging that is, according to Georganna Hancock at Writer’s Edge. “Can’t think without a keyboard, can’t wait to wireless my thoughts into a computer.” I know what she means. One to watch.

I see she (or her book club) are just starting Yann Martell’s “The Life of Pi”. I found it unputdownable (provided you suspend disbelief).

Myths We Live By – Review #2

When I left Mary Midgley half reviewed here, I suggested things were leading to Gaia.

Her final sub-chapter is “What Must We Do ?” and in it she concludes “In the last few decades we have learned a lot of new words, ecosystem, biosphere, Gaia, sustainable development and the rest … words framed to express a cooperative relation with other life forms … which our cuture has since the enlightenment refused to take seriously.”

Her main theme is that there is no single basis for decisions, it’s always a question of balance, lesser evils often, and in such value decisions the individual case must always be balanced with the general principle(s) involved.

After leading with the basic falacies of dualism and objective science, she proceeds through gender biases in culture and language, leading eventually to the moral issues of rights, freedoms and valuing life, any individual life, and the whole of life.

Liked her view of “parsimony” – in complex situations apparent scientific objective views will always be simpler and will tend to be favoured by Occam’s principle, whether they are a valid model of the situation or not. (Beware cutting your own throat with Occam’s razor / Careful with that razor Occam, are two aphorisms I’ve used repeatedly.)

Another feature that has exercised my mind recently is diluted meaning being spread in usage of words – I’ve usually dumped it under the headings of memetics and political correctness. She’s talking about “hunting” being referred to as “culling”, justified by wise-management. She says “the repeated misuse of a word cannot damn a practice … there is scarcely a good practice whose name has not been borrowed at times to guild something disreputable. Hypocrisy is indeed the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” I like that final turn of phrase.

She continues to be dismissive of Buddhism, science and any view of the world as essentially information throughout. Surprising, after dwelling so much on complexity of real-life decisions, that she pays no attention to the scientific views of complexity and chaos, or complex systems theory and emergence views of the world. Pity; I expect she does have views on these.