Psybertron Asks

WebLogs in Meatspace via [curry]. Dave Winer’s plan for a face to face conference of bloggers. No apparent decision on location, but the comments out there in blogland suggest there can be no ideal place. Wait and see. The intent is to model it on Davos.

The Zen of Programming. Jim Waldo via the Bright Eyed Mr Zen. [Quote] …. all require that the programmer change …. we need to give up a measure of control and accept that we cannot have full knowledge of the systems we are building …. we will know is a minimum set of behaviors …. over time the system will change in ways we could not have foreseen. Just as Socrates found that he was the wisest of men because he knew that he didn’t know anything (as opposed to others, who thought they knew something but were wrong), programmers must come to the realization that their knowledge of systems will be more and more Socratic. Rather than knowing everything, we will know what it is that we do not know …. the result will be more reliable, more flexible and more dynamic than the systems ….[Unquote]

Started reading Daniel Dennet – The Intentional Stance last night. A collection of his essays old and new, as a prelude to his forthcoming book on mind and consciousness. Good read so far and looking like a good introduction to this important writer that I’ve not read so far. Instant reinforcement of motivation or purpose being the prime axis of any model of real knowledge – the main thread I guess. Quote of a quote that caught my eye (in view of the string theory reference below) along the lines of “the dreams that stuff is made of”. Very much from the many a true word camp of ironic aphorisms.

Lifecycle of a Big Idea. Sally Bean via Knowledge Board. Can’t quite get my head round the concept of “Open Space” events in the originating article – sounds just like TQM Brainstroming to me – but this is at least amusing.

Intersting article also from KB – “Generations of Knowledge Management” tries to counteract the “bandwagon” effect of constant re-invention of new generations KM. Good content sources – but the article knocks too much and synthesises too little for me. Anyway at least no-one argues that human interaction is not the key component of knowledge.

We Didn’t Start the Fire. Thanks to Rivets for this one. (Turn your sound on) A bit literal but pretty neat all the same.

The Beach at Scheveningen. Thanks to Adam Curry for this BBC link. A bit of a tortuous one, but the beach at Scheveningen is a place I’ve spent many a knowledge modelling moment in recent years, meeting generic information modellers in Den Haag / The Hague.

Jorn’s Fractal Thicket. Originating in 1993. Made several references to this as an intersting alternative to simple hierarchies, and was led back to it from Jorn’s Knowledge Representation Timeline. Reification, complexity, fractality, physical fundamentals at incredibly fine-grained scale, whilst realities of everyday life very broad brush. Still avoids “chaos” ? Evocative of Seth’s idea of fundamental identity vs real expressivity as conjugate variables in the quantum sense. Jorn’s motivations may be too subversively political for most people, but his core ideas about knowledge are right on the mark [Quote – depoliticised] The weak point [of established thinking in western organisations] is their need to rationalise their acts by sophistries. The radical proposal is to [create a knowledge model] that can unflinchingly put the lie to their rationalisations. [Unquote]. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to agree – the conspiracy is a natural outcome of the rationalisation, not a motive in itself.

Skilled Incompetence Par Excellence. Cringley’s latest is actually a review of the inevitability of P2P, but he uses the story of BP (Anglo-Persian Oil) vs Mellon (Gulf Oil) as an example of how the official encumbent (BP) managed to spin out (and presumably rationally justify it business-wise) failing to find oil in Kuwait for 22 years as a metaphor for what will happen if P2P channel is taken over by “big-media” companies [Check out Bertelsmann]. [Quote] Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where, for more than 3,000 years, oil has seeped all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder. [Unquote] [See rationalisation thread].

Spiral Linking. Whilst investigating back-linking options the issue of exponentially increasing links that link to each other has been bugging me for several weeks. Some recursive web that might explode to consume all the web resources in some unstoppable nightmare – I’ve seen it happen on mail servers with automated replies anyway. This particular story featuring Moen’s Law of Bicycles (classic bad-money / good-money economics anyway BTW) is about breaking such a chain – (!) pun unintended.
[via Oblomovka, via Jorn – different Danny and Seb, not to be confused.]

[Basically if we set up a web page that automatically updates itself with links to pages that link to itself, and in the course of doing so it creates a link to a page with the same feature, where does the nonsense stop ? Scary. Just occurred to me too that this is the semantic web equivalent of a rumour based on some minor piece of misinformation getting out there – like a meme – and establishing an unfounded urban myth – metaphor, chaos, cellular automata – aaaaagggghhh!!!!.]

OK, What’s a Quine ? Via (Miscoranda). Named after the eponymous “Van”, but not apparent why.
[I guess I’ll have to research Hofstadter to work that out.]
Picked up on Miscoranda via the backlink from the Heisenberg story.