Singing Kitten#
Jon Husband writes about Cooking, Blogging, and Being Canadian.#
When we blog, who we are springs forth. It must. It's there in black-and-white in front of us…we know not who will read and what they will think. We can't fool anybody — ourselves or other people. Our essence is interpreted for us, by sharing it with others and having it reflected back to us. We're using our recipe, and we're beginning to experiment with it.
As with recipes, what we express — our thoughts and feelings — must somehow relate to where we have been and what has gone before, the modes of cooking, recipes and favourite dishes of our respective cultures. By blogging, we build on what has gone before and how it has been filtered by us…we participate in a great experiment, sharing our essential humanity with anyone else that cares to take the time to read what we have written (said) on any given day. What a miracle !
Blogging is as close to essential humanity as we can get in a process-reengineered, integrated information system world — except for moments with our children, our partners, our neighbours over a back-yard fence, and with good or new friends in a pub or restaurant or other shared venue. Unless we do not participate in the online world, blogging is as close to real conversation as it gets.
Innovation is most often, I think, supported and/or enabled by bringing new patterns and different combinations to bear on existing structures (recipes, if you will). Blogging is, I think, innovation in action — we present our points of view, our perspective, based on what we have learned in life up to this point, and we go forward, saying "here's what I think and how and why I thought it, and here's what I'm wondering about, and look…here's some other people saying this or that, and what do you have to say ? Let me know and we'll go from there…and see what we get up to, what will happen"
Brian Weatherson writes about causation.#
The other day George Bealer did his "Mental Causation" paper at MIT. It was fun, or at least as much fun as a 90 minute paper at the end of a long day can be. The main idea is rather clever - intentional actions follow by causal laws from both mental states (e.g. decisions) and physical states (e.g. neuron patterns) but the mental states get to count as causes because they "trump", in Jonathan Schaffer's sense, the physical states.
There's plenty of examples that we could use to illustrate trumping. Here's one that Bealer leans on a bit. The troops are trained to respond to any order from a higher ranking member of the army, and if conflicting orders come in, to respond to the order from the higher ranking of the orderers. The sargeant and the major both shout "Advance!" and the troops advance. What caused the troops to advance? Some people (not all!) have the intuition that it is really the major's shout, not the sargeant's. How could we capture that intuition? One nice suggestion is that it is because when we vary what the sargeant shouts, nothing changes in what the troops do, but if we vary what the major shouts, in general it does vary what the troops do. ('In general' rather than always, because if the major does not shout, there is no change in what the troops do.)
Ian Bicking on Morphic and Ravioli code.#
I used Squeak quite a bit several years ago, but found it extremely difficult to achieve that last 5% of the development process -- great for making toys, but hard to make real tools. And Morphic was really a big part of what pushed me away -- besides the performance issues (which are very significant to this day, despire Moore), Morphic is a deeply cryptic system (classic ravioli code) with little effort expended at the time to make it accessible to a programmer. The rest of Squeak, while not particularly well documented, had a sort of simple beauty that made it accessible, the quintessential example of good object-oriented programming and a class hierarchy that served as better documentation than narrative could have. Morphic isn't like that -- to many small features only become sensible when viewed in the larger framework, and its own object model which you could only see in relief. It was obviously born of a strong vision in the creator's mind, and perhaps it is well communicated in the informal lessons that happen in the Squeak core team if not to the wider public... and perhaps with its maturity you don't have to understand it -- it's concrete, you needn't program it, you can simply manipulate it. But this is obviously not satisfying to a programmer.
Steven Johnson released a neat Blogger to RSS 2 tool.#
Pussy Ranch: Doesn't Work
It's like a Curse that is the Cure: Kinda Works (The left bar is listed as a post.)
Carly: Doesn't Work
Mad Pony: Doesn't Work
This concludes the Blogger blogs I read without RSS feeds.
Draft Clark on the future of leadership and the true means to our world vision.#
the challenge of global prosperity and technology includes the challenge of creating a society which can live with the consequences of it. This is not advanced by randomly overthrowing dictators which have become an irritant, and then running. Instead, it imposes a burden which must be met with discpline and honour - integrity, vision and a mission to build insitutions which "bring us meaning beyond our prosperity". This because it is meaning in people's lives which, ultimately, directs their efforts to positive rather than negative ends.
These traits, vision, leadership, integrity, honour - are notably lacking from the current Executive, its policies, its implementation of those policies and the means used to gain public support for them. But it is not simply enough to replace the Executive, because the damage runs deep, and must be reversed, not merely halted. The American people must decide, not only that they do not want 4 more years of Bush, but that they want 8 years of someone else. Because electing a failed leader, as Gray Davis should have taught us, is merely an invitation to losing power shortly their afterwards, and leaving behind a discreditted party in the process.
If Americans look at the question in this way: who do we desire to lead us? Then it ends the questions of the horse race or who has the better campaign.
Jason Kottke on the Paris Hilton Sex tape: "Is Paris Hilton a raccoon? And if so, why haven't we noticed it before now?"#
I'd like to say I'm in the third camp (because who wants to be thought of as being interested in something...how gauche and unhip!), but I find celebrity sex tapes kind of intriguing. On one hand, they're a fulfillment of the fantasy that if TV shows like Baywatch and movies like Cruel Intentions or Showgirls are going to have celebrity actors and actresses acting all vampy and slutty, then they should just bite the bullet and go porno all the way. And on the other hand, these tapes are very celebrities-are-people-too; they look, sound, and act just as ridiculous as the rest of us when having sex.
Michael Feldman on blogging galaxies.#
I am starting to think of the blogosphere like a rapidly expanding universe, composed of unimaginable numbers of galaxies, each in turn composed of a handful of brilliant stars and who knows how many gravitationally affiliated lesser luminaries.
In my own local galaxy the signature stars are Winer and Reynolds and Lessig and Doctrow. We tend to see our own galaxies as the center of the blogging universe, but who can count the galaxies? The amazing thing about the Blogging universe is that we can visit these other galaxies whenever we want, with or without a guide, and bring things we learn back to our own local star systems.
Joi Ito writes about why the Japanese don't trust the military.#
Just had an interesting lunch conversation about the Japanese military. There is a famous Japanese military head. (I didn't catch the name...) who wrote a book about the retreat from China. In it he remembers the military leaving all of the Japanese civilians behind. Okinawa was similar, where the military used the civilians as shields and ran away. [...]
The Japanese remember the military as a cowardly and powerful and remember the police state during wartime Japan and do not want to relive it.
Joi Ito posts some notes from a speech by Koji Murata.#
The Japanese talk a lot about American Neo-Conservatism without really understanding it. The Japanese don't realize that it's specific term referring to people like Leo Strauss.
US nationalism, unlike most any other country is focused on the political system and system of government which makes it quite unique.
The US is quite religious. (not sure if I got these numbers right) 72% of Muslims polled think religion is "important" whereas 85% of Americans thought religion was "important".
[...]
The Japanese understanding of the US is shallow. Most Japanese law students haven't even read the US constitution. Most of Japan's understanding of the US is economic or cultural.
"People who know only one country could not even understand their own country."