Psybertron Asks

I’ve just finished reading Fitjof Capra’s “Hidden Connections” – it’s just a bit too earnest on the “eco-warrior” front. Too anti-global-business and anti-global-capital-markets, too doom and gloom for me. Call me a wimp, but for me “revolution” is an unfortunate consequence when someone’s misguided command and control management or government model omits “evolution” or backs it into an impossible corner.

Let’s encourage evolution, not incite revolution I say.

That said, he does collect together many sources (outside his own spehere of Tao Physics) demonstrating that, everywhere from the way DNA communicates within the biosystem of cell structures, to the players in the globally communicating capital markets, or the society participating in the global comms village, what matters is the interconnected system nature of things rather than the “cogs” themselves. So much is emergent from this complexity / chaotic systems theory view of the whole, rather than being in any way causally related to any of the activities of particular cogs or nodes in the system.

Genes have had their ephemeral 15 minutes of fame. They alone explain very little, whatever the early hype of the success of the human genome project.

This is exactly, and I mean exactly, the same TBL / Dan Brickley point in the previous post, about characterising the arcs (connections), and merely identification of the nodes (objects / players), in the semantic web model.

I took delight in discovering some time ago that the “semantic web” was coined by Michel Foucault (“Les Mots Et Les Choses” 1966, aka “The Order of Things” to distinguish it from Quine’s “Word and Object”) many years before Tim Berners-Lee came along. Not that I have anything against Sir TBL – it’s just part of my interminable “nothing new under the sun” thread, whereby I keep finding evidence of no-brainers in the archaeology of knowledge management. (I’m currently reading Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge purely by coincidence).

In other words “Knowledge IS a Semantic Web”. That’s what it is, not just what someone, anyone calls it or characterises it.

Another link I unearthed today, re-reading Dan Brickley’s 2001 Semantic Web presentation (on RDF and all that), is Sir TBL’s original 1989 CERN Proposal for his “mesh” of information – the word “web” appears a couple of times, and the word semantic not at all. He coined “world-wide-web” later when first coding his ideas in 1990.

The facts that jumped out at me …. I’ve been involved in exploitation of associative information modelling since before web technology existed …. it has been amazing to see the convergence of the W3C technology with the ideas in general. The first key is “identification” (Namespaces & URI’s et al), the next is “overlapping vocabularies and meta-data conventions” and the third is relationships or more precisely “types of relationships”. The other mind-blowing point, given the “evolutionary schema frameworks” idea I’m currently working with, is this summary from Dan,

The common model:
why use ‘nodes and arcs’? :
[An associative model with identification of the nodes
and typing of the arcs.]

– arbitrarily extensible (just add more connections)
– we can decentralise control using URIs
– we can disagree about node and link types, yet still share infrastructure (syntax, databases, editors)
– URIs create a market for data merging, aggregation, annotation and filtering services

Spot on Dan. It’s the decentralised control and the “market” for services, which gives rise to “emergence” and evolution – the opportunity for change in an environment which is both nurturing and competitive.

Just updated my Pirsig Pages and links to pages of Pirsig Photos and of Montana State College, Bozeman, in order to better incorporate links to the excellent photo collection on Henry Gurr’s site and the Gary Wegner’s wonderful ZMM Route Map and Photos from his own 1978 trip.

I think I’ve just made a commitment to create a new version of the Route Map linking all our photographic and biographical resources ! My current feeble attempt remains here.

Watched a documentary on Alice Martineau (Cystic Fibrosis victim, model-musician-singer-songwriter, deceased aged 30 in 2003) last night. Someone very talented, whose work had sadly passed me by.

Anyway, the highlight for me was seeing Stevie Lange, voice coach and session singer to the stars and countless ads, in front of the camera, being interviewed about Alice, with occasional documentary clips where Stevie’s magic voice came through. I have a web-page of photos of Stevie from an earlier life. A Google on her name throws up a name-droppers dream of artists she’s coached or backed – Tears for Fears, Swing Out Sister, Robbie Williams, Sniff’n’the Tears, Manfred Mann (natch), Blue, even Limp Bizkit (!) to name a few.

Stevie now runs her own music business operation via “Let’s Talk Music”, which has a full bio / discography / artists list. Go to her page and click on her recent (1995!) track “What Would You Say” to get a taste of that rockin’ voice – 1979 again ! (And also 3 tracks from the 1979 “Night” album on that page.)

[Update – Stevie’s latest official site is stevielange.com]

Another good post by Ray Girvan. Pointing out his “boot-through-the-TV-screen moments” as evidence that the divide between scientific and artistic cultures can still be excruciatingly apparent. How can one be so happy being ignorant of the other ?

I had noticed the amazing number of search hits my original link to Elena had created, but had been oblivious to the ammount of debate stirred-up, questioning how much of her site was / is actually real / true.

Ray Girvan [at Apothecary] has two interesting anlayses and collections of links on the subject. Talk about memes taking over the web.

Keep getting cross-search-hits with an organisation called s_t_o_r_m_f_r_o_n_t – no-link / disguised here to avoid linking / hits and providing the oxygen of publicity.

Dreadful mentality these people (evil anti-islam propaganda forum in the current world climate), but the common ground is the Aryan (Proto-Indo-European) cultural origins, and the Vedic / Sanskrit sources of Hindu / Bhuddist thinking. Innocent cross hits on the word “Viras”. Apparently Sanskrit for “man” – probably perfect man in the Sanskrit language of perfection sense – but hijacked for the “master race” rhetoric of this group. My Vedic interests crossed with a reference to Viras as one surname of Pallikari-Viras, authors of a 1991 paper on Quantum Non-Locality. How remote is that ?

Each to his own I guess, but boy, does the web need at least some useful ontology.
Discrimination (discernment) of the right kind.

Talking of which – Save the Great White Males concludes Eric Idle. [via Adam Curry][via Lisa Rein]

Informal Education – Been browsing the INFED site since I linked to their Argyris biography earlier.

As well as the site’s own collection of educational content, it is dedicated to promoting the idea of informal education & lifelong learning, and other resources on the subject of education and learning. It’s heavily based around a 1997 (2nd Ed 1999) eponymous book by the same authors as the site – and as such is at least partly promotional with respect to the book – Good though. Decidedly London centred – includes an informal educational walk around Soho, Covent Garden, Euston and Fitzrovia, focussing on YMCA and other societies set up over the centuries for the “betterment of youth” – Fascinating list of famous-name-dropping-by-association with the buildings en-route – many more than the blue-plaques reveal.

Has a good conversation and story-telling focus – which is (rightly) fashionable in this sector of the blogosphere. Can’t help thinking this is where Pirsig was with his informal education “Chautauqua” too.

When I posted the piece on Francisco Ayala a couple of weeks ago, I amost started with a flippant aside about a spooky coincidence with his name – but thought better of it when I saw how significant the guy’s work was.

Anyway the story was this. The name Ayala rang a bell, because about 5 years ago I was working in the Philipines, in a suburb of Manila called Ayala. The software I was setting up had a web server running in a third-party component and it was called Ayala, on the box I’d brought in from the UK. I thought, that’s nice, the supplier called the server after the customer’s location – how thoughful. Well no, the supplier in fact had no idea we were in Ayala, or that Manila had a suburb called Ayala, in fact neither did I until I was in the taxi from the hotel to the office. Apparently the supplier was in the habit of naming his web servers after wines, and Ayala was the name of one of his favourites. (Makes a change from Star-Wars characters I suppose.) Spooky.

That’s Not What I Meant. Dave Pollard via Anol’s Soul Soup. Someone in this blogosphere published something very similar over a year ago, may even have been Dave.

Fits very much with the Cynefin warning about what people “hear” being massively influenced by their existing “schemata”, and of course the two “laws” of Schank and Dennett below.

It’s also the “send three and fourpence” syndrome. I call it shooting rabbits – once a misunderstood message gets out there, (for whatever reason it is mis-interpreted) correcting the situation is like shooting a whole herd (?) of rapidly breeding rabbits as they disperese away from you into the world – not very effective. Memes succeed because they are easy to understand from a current perspective, and because they are easy to pass on, not because they are in any sense right or true or otherwise “as-intended”.

Had another connection there, for a minute – damn, lost it … the Italian connection ? … Nicola Guarino … ah got it. His model is like an elaboration on Lakoff’s Conduit Metaphor. Messages look like they are passed from communicator to receiver, but in fact they pass thorugh many layers of filtering and distortion on the way, rather than through a simple conduit.

In fact in my original Manifesto I put it like this …

C.3 There are no facts, only interpretations of perceptions etc. of facts. Given humans in the loop the idea of facts being recorded or communicated becomes tenuous to say the least. You are brought back to interpretation of perception at every level from existence of fact, through observable phenomena, through formulation of model of observable facts, through formulation of decision or intent, through framing of message, through transmission of message, through observation of message phenomena on receipt, through model held by recipient, to interpretation and/or recording by recipient. Send three and fourpence is only the half of it !

And as if to prove my point – the prisoner abuse photos from Iraq may not have been the message the US Army and Government wanted to communicate (however true / false / distorted / exaggerated they might be in relation to the overall facts) – but once the genie is out of the bottle / the rabbits have run, the memes take over – they ARE the facts. Post on Salon, via Matt Mower this week.