Ironick

Furling

Note the change to my weblog. I've added a list of recently "Furled" pages to my home page "navigation box" to the right of this post. What's Furl you say? Furl is one of a number of emerging "bookmark" ASPs (application service providers). (Since, I'm an analyst, maybe I should coin the term "Content Service Provider". Naw.)

Rather than storing my bookmarks on my hard drive using good old Compass. I now store them at Furl, which has serveral advantages:

• I can share them with others more easily (including letting others subscribe to see new bookmarks as I collect them)
• Furl permanently caches a copy of the Furled page, just in case the link breaks down the line for some reason (this is what initially attracted me to Furl)
• I can see who else has Furled the same page, which is a great way to find people with similar obscure interests)
• I can see how many people have hit one of my bookmarks (maybe someday Furl will let me see where the hit came from)
• I can comment on the page (this eliminates the need to do such commenting on my web page)

So give it a try. Click on a Furl that interests you or click on Full Archive of Furled Pages to see all the cool pages I've encountered in my travels. Furl is highly recommended. (And yes, you can download an XML document with all your bookmarks at any time. Something that A9 lacks.)

Happy New Year.

Sorry for the lull in the posts. Busy, busy, busy. I just made a minor change to the site, so I thought I'd mention it here: categories. I finally turned on Radio's categories capability. Now I can annotate each entry with one or more categories so readers can read through just the entries on a particular topic. You can see my initial list of categories on the right of the home page in the "navigation box" or whatever it's called. Of course, now I have to go back and manually catagorize all past entries. What fun!

Please use my new RSS feed.

For those of you reading my blog via a feedreader (aka RSS aggregator), please take a moment to redirect to my new and improved RSS feed provided by Feedburner. Feedburner is a cool RSS "intermediary" that will translate my basic RSS feed into multiple RSS formats and other cool things. To get the URL for my latest feed, simply use this chicklet ( ), or the one in my "masthead" on the right side of my blog under the Radio Mug. Thanks.

A lesson learned.

A while back, I made the connection between Neurath’s Boat and the Ship of Theseus. I thought the lack of connection elsewhere on the Web was interesting. Only a site by M.R.M. Parrott (MP) mentioned both terms. So I emailed him  (see below), hoping he might be a kindred spirit. MP did not find it interesting and his reply seemed a bit snarky, especially a comment about trolling, and what appeared to be a sig block with a quote about stupid (see below). So I originally posted his full reply on my blog so I could comment on it.

However, a few days ago, MP discovered that I had quoted his email and emailed me to delete it. Guess what, this email was snarky too. Obviously, I was pissed off. I felt like telling MP to f-off. Instead, I made myself think about his request for awhile. Certainly, given that he had sent the original email to a total stranger, he had no legitimate privacy concern. As for copyright, clearly my quotation would be within the realm of fair use, since I was commenting on it and deriving no commercial value from it. So I decided to visit his site to see if it would reveal something about his personality or attitude that would help me decide what to do.

While there, I read his article on wikis, thinking this would give me insight as to how MP felt about posting etiquette, including copyright issues. The article contained the obligatory reference to Wikipedia, but also mentioned a wiki I'd not yet heard of Wikinfo. To make a long story short, it appears that MP posted a Wikipedia entry about himself, which was voted for deletion because it was self-promoting. MP then joined Wikinfo, partially in response to this, where he could post an entry about himself, given Wikinfo's looser point-of-view rules (compare SPOV to NPOV).

Though I do think MP's pseudonymous self-promotion is unbecoming (others may disagree), I do admire his independence, talent, tenacity, and industriousness. Helping to build a spin-off encyclopedia with the posting rules of one's choosing, rather than merely submitting to the authority of others, is a great example of the freedom the open source and open content world is enabling. I especially value the XML import innovation of Wikinfo, which is a great step towards better wiki federation (e.g., I can post MY views on subjects in which I have a POV in my wiki, but link to other wikis for subjects in which I have not [yet] expressed a different POV). This might come in handy for a wiki project I am considering.

In the end, given the sensitivity he displayed in the thread re deleting his entry, I decided to honor MP's request. I post this story here only to demonstrate that if one takes the time to get to know someone else better, instead to returning slight for perceived slight, one can learn something interesting and useful, and perhaps avoid an escalating conflict.

---

From: [email protected]
To: "pixel"
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 6:56 AM
Subject: "Neurath's Boat" "Ship of Theseus"

I recently discovered that essentially (no pun intended) the same paradox has two different names, both quoted in my subject line. Of course I googled the two phrases in quotes and your "Generation of 'X'" was the only hit. (There's a googlism for a search that returns exactly one hit, but I can't remember what it is.)

What struck me as curious, and hence motivated this email, was that you did not seem to notice the connection. The two phrases are used in distant parts of your book. Did you think they are the same paradox? If so, why no connection in your book? If not, why not?

Given that both are fairly well known paradoxes, I'm surprised that no one has made the connection. I guess I will have to do so on Wikipedia and my blog.

-- Nick

---

MRM's Signature Block:

"Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid."

- http://users.gurulink.com/drk/humor/flame.html

[BTW, this flame is indeed the best flame I have EVER seen. -- NLG]

Here's what I've been thinking about in the meantime.

This is a list of ideas to blog about that I kept during my hiatus. I hope to follow up with an entry on each one.

• Compare “pov is worth 80 IQ points” to “a good notation”
• Dunbar Number
• Governance vs. Management
• Network Encapsulation (IFaPs) vs. Software Encapsulation (APIs): related to declarative vs. imperative, decoupling ends (how it is used) and means (how it works)
• Adapting is both changing how something is used (finding new niches for system as is) as well as changing how something works so it can be used in more ways (changing system to fit new niches)
• Evolution is not about “fit”; it is not survival of the “fittest”; play with the fit/fittest idea to accommodate Rorty’s apparent distinction between fitting reality vs. mere prediction/control.
• All evolution is co-evolution: spirit is not coming to know itself in the world, it is co-evolving
• What is history? History is recycled into the future since we can discover it. History is a theory we put on the world to explain the world. “Predicting the past.” (What fossils should I expect to discover.)
• History is the narration of the world. Or the contextualization of the world. It is the result of our interaction with the world. Textual “histories” are artifacts we produce (outputs) that then become inputs as things in the world to be (mis)read in our (mis)reading of the world. How does this jibe with Keith’s assertion that the only ahistorical/acontextual directions are entropy and “increasing historical richness”.
• Evolution from name binding to structure binding. Follow up to blog entry: http://radio.weblogs.com/0126951/2003/10/09.html#a64 . Name binding binds a scalar or structure to a name: reification.
• “A natural consequence of expandability is competition. Competing definitions should be accommodated, with some means for ranking them according to quality.” (http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/od/Existing_Automatic_Linking_Systems.html) This seems profound. To translate it to my language: “A natural consequence of extensibility is competition.” This leads to the realization that competition occurs on both ends of the hourglass: extended uses (users) and extended implementation (providers). This leads to the realization that competition only occurs when there is some common (standard) to compete within. This common standard is the result of some form of cooperation! Thus all competition is coopetition. Cooperation and competition are a duality/dialectic. Dialectic is the process view of duality, which is the information (data, material, static) view.
• What is the relationship among binding, naming, reifying/reification.
• “Data Encapsulation” analogy to sw encapsulation: packet terminology uses “data encapsulation” to describe packet headers and trailers
• Look for commonality among beaver dams, spider webs, bees nests, bird nests, in other words: complex extended phenotypes; especially look for ones that may be linked to sexual differentiation; see if symbiosis is involved in such phenotypes (or is the extension the symbiosis)
• Think about Semantics = data + behavior point
• Look into Universal Data Elements (UDEF): http://www.udef.org/
• Is a legal way around the SOAP prohibition against looking in the body to use an xpath pointer in a SOAP header, eg, WS-BizContent?
• Make the business protocol argument. MOA to SOA is creating models that are biz protocol models.
• Hybrids/Symbionts: Semiconductors; semi-pro (amateur publishing); transforms
• “As the standard history from the Internet Society notes, the "key underlying technical idea" of the Internet was open architecture networking - the ability to link together completely different networking technologies provided they followed the appropriate protocols.” From Netcraft. Generalize to: the "key underlying technical idea" of SOA is open architecture process networking - the ability to link together completely different business processes provided they follow the appropriate protocols.”

Back and Badder Than Ever.

On Wednesday March 17, 2004, just one week after my last entry, my new IBM T41 laptop drive died. Of course I did not have a recent backup of my weblog. So my drive was sent out for data recovery. Yesterday, I finally got my drive data back. Apparently, I didn't lose anything. So here I am, ready to blog again. Hooray! I've missed it so much.

Getting Back in the Groove

Ouch! Eleven days without a post. What can I say. I couldn't post from Las Vegas, where I was attending CA World (7/13-7/17). The dial up from the hotel room was too slow (21K), and the LAN at CA World screwed up Radio--don't ask me why. After that, I just got "busy." But now I'm ready to get back into the discipline of daily postings.

Radio Bug

It seems Radio has a bug/feature regarding updates to the Weblog Title/Description. The Stories Page and the individual stories pages do not update to the new title/desc, unless they are edited after the change. Minor annoyance, since I don't plan to change them often.

The Name of This Blog

Let me explain my weblog's description: "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity." It's from the title of a book by a philosopher named Richard Rorty. I think of Rorty as a post-modern pragmatist--a disciple of Dewey and Pierce, but very much a reinventor of their concepts. I consider myself an ironist as Rorty defines the term. Hence the description of the weblog.

First Problem

Strange. I tried to rename my Weblog from "Nick Gall's Radio Weblog" to "Nick Gall's Weblog," and it took on my desktop but not in the cloud. Even stranger is the fact that my Weblog description "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" in the cloud is out of sync as well. It shows my very first description, which was a disclaimer. Perhaps posting this entry will help sync things up.