Psybertron Asks

In between a hectic schedule of family, sailing and football I seem to have found little time to read anything over the break, let alone blog.

Logic vs Analogy – Bill Kuhns McLuhan Studies at Toronto Uni [also via Jorn]. Somewhere I need to go.

Occult Philosophy in 17thC – G MacDonald-Ross at Leeds Uni [via Jorn] Hmmm.

How ’bout you? [via Rivets].

Keep it Snappy – Why don’t people publishing RSS keep their output to headline and link url, rather than padding it with their entire posting content. Surely the point is to publish the link. That way aggregators contain dense summaries of many links rather than actual content of the most recent few.

Did anyone see this article in the FT on 9th April 2003. Needs registration to read. (Links given are www.agsm.unsw.edu.au/eajm/0209/michelson.html and michael.skapinker@ft.com ) Gossip and informal e-mail comms tell us more about the real state of a company than any formal management reports. So what’s new? Michael Skapinker points out that any attempt to formally harness the informal is doomed to kill the goose. See response to the earlier e-mail article from Hewlett-Packard, which recognised the real value in informal e-mail correspondence. Great, completely correct, 100% true, but totally useless ? (As the “Doc” used to remind us junior engineers. Useful = Better than true. True = Merely true, but useless.)

Zen and Brian Josephson – Curiouser and curiouser, closer and closer. Brilliant parody of the paradoxical by Daniel Drasin via Josephson.

Does consciousness collapse the wave function ? Now this is far too close to mysticism (Gary ?) according to Dawkins anyway. But I’m not so sure.

Elizabeth Hill, recorded in the same QM2003 proceedings cannot help also invoking Schroedinger [Quote] the major weak point of the arguement being the explanation as to why we have a collective scientific regard so that out of that scientific regard we all see the same thing. [Unquote]

Fujimura [Quote] substance is a series of events [Unquote]

Brian Josephson sees Quantum Reality as “emergent from the metaphors of Chaos and Complexity”. Brian, did you really pooh-pooh my queries about real life chaos this time last year ?

Lakoff’s Metaphor and War has been much linked and quoted in the blogoshpere. This Joho link picked-up from Solipsism Gradient (Rainer Brockenhof). Blogged a link to Lakoff’s piece earlier without comment, but found it disappointingly shallow given the subject matter – Joho calls it “close to self-parody”. I still have “Metaphors We Live By” and “Fire, Women and Dangerous Things” on my reading list however, and now find Joho’s reference to Lakoff and Johnson’s “Philosphy in the Flesh”.

Quantum, Powerpoint, Simpsons – Why did someone at the Delft Technical University enter this google search string ?