May 09, 2006

Melody & Code

Code is data. Melody is rhythm.
Puzzlement is progress ;)

Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 05, 2006

A Dead Guy

A kid just wandered up to me at lunch and asked, "What book are you reading?"

I was stumped.

I said, "a book about a dead guy." It's The Cambridge Companion to Pascal.

Posted by Noel at 05:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 13, 2006

The Gospel of Judas

I read the gospel of Judas today. I was disappointed. Perhaps my standards for heresy are too high. When I first read about this YAGG (Yet Another Gnostic Gospel, not to be confused with the earlier 'revolutionary' gospels of Thomas, Mary, the Savior, Peter, et al), off my imagination lifts, fancying over the Pythagorean influence, the enchanting Egyptian cultic rituals, the deep, Matrix-y suspicions that things aren't how they seem, etc. All I get is a few little number tricks and some self-generating-emination dude named Saklas. Hell, Borges' fiction is more pruriently believable than this dross. Why can't the secret, forbidden knowledge be more exciting???!!!

Additionally, I have also concluded that Scientology is a new Gnosticism, based on similarities between their cosmologies. In reading the gospel of Judas, the full picture of what L. Ron Hubbard was striving to capture all those years quickly appeared.

Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 12, 2006

You Will Try to Take It With You

Your technology, that is. Further proof that society isn't modern, nor is it advanced. Heaven knows how my PowerBook functions as a security blanket. Ask my wife about sharing the bed at night.

Regarding such uncomfortable arrangements, there's a vague twist in the belief of the South Africans in both the witch doctor's spells and in technology's saving power. I suppose my dismissal of their perspective says more about my faith in technology than their faith in spells. It's silly to ask the question of whether science and faith coexist. They do. Just look. Imagining from such an assertion, technology and miracles are equally mysterious, and become less so through intensive study. Neal Stephenson pointed out in one of his books that geeks became priests in the Middle Ages just as naturally as they do hackers now.

Both professions realize that you can't take it with you. Fie on the materialism of the consumer and the metaphysicist.

Posted by Noel at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2006

An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

This is the last lecture from Alvin Plantiga's guest lecture series at Covenant College. My notes from the first lecture were posted a few days ago. Gillikan has also posted his notes from this lecture.

There is a science–religion conflict The argument Questions

Posted by Noel at 08:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2006

Notes from Al Plantiga Lecture: "Evolutionary Psychology and Scriptural Scholarship"

As Josiah Roe and Matt Gillikan have reported, Al Plantiga, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, is in Chattanooga lecturing at Covenant College for the weekend. Here are my notes from his first talk, "Evolutionary Psychology and Scriptural Scholarship". My interjections are in italics. No quotes are direct.

[Update]: Gillikan posted his notes to the same lecture early this morning.

Method


A True Conflict between Religion & Science



Questions


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February 07, 2006

Professorial Podcasting

...as if members of academia needed another outlet for their blowhard bloviating. And I mean that nicely.

Last week I noticed iTunes introduced a selection of class lectures from Stanford profs, along with other silly university marketing content. I listened to a discussion on whether philosophy is the handmaiden or queen of the sciences with Peter Godfrey-Smith, guesting from Harvard University. Not a terribly stimulating session, but the potential is there for exposing your pedagogy and advancing your thinking in a way that is both hip and accessible.

Stanford is the first university to take advantage of Apple opening up iTunes for free hosting and distribution of college/university content. Josiah, I know that you were working on something like this for some Covenant faculty. Perhaps a setup like Profcast could assist in getting that off the ground--between Profcast and the new iTunes U, you have the recording, editing, hosting, and distribution of content, close to maximally automated.

Posted by Noel at 05:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 25, 2006

The Chuck Norris Law of the Excluded Middle

The Chuck Norris Law of the Excluded Middle

For any proposition P*, it is true that either P or ~P will be roundhouse kicked by Chuck Norris.**

Welcome to the dialectic of pain.

* Where a proposition is something that can stand on at least one leg, like the letter P. Also, Chuck Norris does not roundhouse kick things that can't stand up.

**Note: The intuitionist school invites a world of pain by maintaining otherwise.

Posted by Noel at 05:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 24, 2006

The Chuck Norris Anthropic Principle

The Chuck Norris Anthropic Principle

The universe is how it is because if it wasn't, Chuck Norris would roundhouse kick it into consistency with our existence anyways.

With apologies to the many, many cosmologists who read this blog.

Posted by Noel at 05:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 03, 2006

Questions on a Tuesday

I'm back, and ready to begin the 2006 blogging campaign. We'll catch up with other things later. For now, I have some questions.

First Question.

What ever happened to distributed peer-based digital signatures and public keys using webs of trust? I am reading The Code Book, and today at lunch hit the chapter on the development of public-key crypto and the saga of Phil Zimmerman. I remember quite a fuss in the mid-90s about cypherpunks bootstrapping a decentralized trusted-key infrastructure. It seems quite relevant and do-able today. Has that project met demise and failed to get off?

Next question.

Has anybody done thinking on the epistemological criteria of encryption systems? Is there a formulation for knowledge wandering around which includes encryption? The history of crypto has seen a succession of knowledge-claims about the unbreakability of systems, and a matching set of persuasive counter-examples. Is there work in this area of philosophy? Additionally, what is the status of encrypted information? Is it knowledge, and what affect does the encryption state have on status?

Last question.

In day-to-day practice, I've supplanted my previous criteria for precise knowledge (being able to ask a good enough question that I can get a useful answer from someone knowledgeable) with the criteria "be able to formulate a Google search query which returns the desired information." Is that wrong? What is the qualitative difference between the two?

Please answer below, or in trackbacks. I exist to be enlightened by someone other than myself.

Posted by Noel at 05:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Questions on a Tuesday

I'm back, and ready to begin the 2006 blogging campaign. We'll catch up with other things later. For now, I have some questions.

First Question.

What ever happened to distributed peer-based digital signatures and public keys using webs of trust? I am reading The Code Book, and today at lunch hit the chapter on the development of public-key crypto and the saga of Phil Zimmerman. I remember quite a fuss in the mid-90s about cypherpunks bootstrapping a decentralized trusted-key infrastructure. It seems quite relevant and do-able today. Has that project met demise and failed to get off?

Next question.

Has anybody done thinking on the epistemological criteria of encryption systems? Is there a formulation for knowledge wandering around which includes encryption? The history of crypto has seen a succession of knowledge-claims about the unbreakability of systems, and a matching set of persuasive counter-examples. Is there work in this area of philosophy? Additionally, what is the status of encrypted information? Is it knowledge, and what affect does the encryption state have on status?

Last question.

In day-to-day practice, I've supplanted my previous criteria for precise knowledge (being able to ask a good enough question that I can get a useful answer from someone knowledgeable) with the criteria "be able to formulate a Google search query which returns the desired information." Is that wrong? What is the qualitative difference between the two?

Please answer below, or in trackbacks. I exist to be enlightened by someone other than myself.

Posted by Noel at 05:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 16, 2005

"I can't believe it. He was always such a stateful monad..."

The self-dubbed "Swiss Army Knife of Admin Tools" that Microsoft, for reasons which I am very curious about, has code-named Monad, seems quite the little bag of tricks. It's a command shell, it's a scripting language, it's a strongly-typed object-oriented .NET language, it's interpreted, it's dynamic, it's scriptable, it's a bird, plane, a bit of cheese, and your dessert.

Now, as to the name, all I might wager is this. Objects know their states, and the states of others, better than the text that current command lines must parse in order to pipe and slice. This makes the user the Chief Monad of the system, arranging objects into a pre-existing harmony of computery goodness. Eat it, Voltaire.

Posted by Noel at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 23, 2005

For the Last Time, Harry Potter != Satanic: A Response to Doug Phillips [Updated]

Subject: Re: Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade On Jul 23, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Mom wrote: Noel, would you please read this treatise and let me know what thoughts you have after reading it. I would really like to hear your opinions on what Doug Phillips has to say. Thanks. Love, Mom

...And poof, there went my Saturday morning. My Mom forwarded me an email-only essay by Doug Phillips of the Vision Forum organization titled "Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade". From appearances, they're not posting the essay on their site because, one would surmise, of its rather poorly argued nature, I mean, its rather inflammatory nature. What with all the false analogies and such. Anyways, I won't reproduce it here out of respect for their copyright, but if you want to read it, just leave a comment below and I'll forward it on to you a poster at freerepublic.com has put up an unformatted copy. Below is my heated response to the argument that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series should not be read by Christians because it is an imagined world that is rooted in magic as practiced by humans, which for Phillips equates to, well, I'm not quite sure, but reading about that world is like worshipping other gods, which we may all agree is bad.

Follow the jump for my savage six-paragraph retort that I wrote for my lovely Mom...

For the Last Time, Harry Potter != Satanic!

In my reading, Jerram Barrs' treatment of Potter is more consistent logically, as well as more grounded in Biblical criticism. I wrote something along the same lines a couple of years ago. Phillips goes off the deep end here. I counted four circular arguments in a brief skim, and I have no doubt more could follow a deeper read. But really, the first circular argument sinks his entire ship.

The tip of the iceberg might be found in Phillips inconsistent usage of what to call those who practice magic. He repeatedly refers to those, both male and female, as 'witches'. In fact, he never uses the term 'wizard' to refer to a male practitioner of magic. I see this as the first indication of a systematic failure to grasp the place of magic in fantasy and in reality (both of which by definition of our faith are created, upheld, and brought to an fore-ordained end by God alone). The failure, moreover, is not just definitional, but hermeneutical. For a full exploration of exactly what magic in the world of Harry Potter is and means, please read my earlier-mentioned essay. I shall soldier on and explain the hermeneutical failure that Phillips shows.

Don't be fools and think that we can imagine something outside the law of God, which has been imprinted on every human heart and is reflected in some way in every output of human imagination. The wretched trope of equating magic with homosexuality that Wilson pushes at the beginning lumbers, clumsy and insipid, toward constructing a logical equivalency between a single sinful act (homosexuality) and an entire moral vista as imagined by a profoundly fecund mind (J.K. Rowling's moral, magical world of Harry Potter). Any small amount of brain matter that tries to reconcile this equivalency will spit it out like so much spoiled milk; they are not. Even the most morally wretched world as imagined by man, like the recent movie Sin City, cannot run far enough away that it gets away from Almighty God. To posit that Rowling has accomplished what Jonah failed elicits my laughter at the small, small god in which Phillips evidently believes.

Let me make clear here what Phillips leaves as an exercise to the reader: in his argument, The Lord of the Rings was a sinful exercise in imagining a godless, abominable world. Don't agree with that? Yes, I thought you might not. But if we accept that the sympathetic inclusion of humans practicing magic is sinful, then that's where we're going to find ourselves. Not that I follow Tolkien rather than Jesus, but I trust him a hell of a lot more than Phillips.

Frankly, I'm sick and tired of the lack of hermeneutical imagination displayed by those of Phillips and ilk, and find refuting their every latent legalistic literalist law tedious. Which leads me to my strongest argument. Does Phillips actually think that Rowling created an entire world based on the worship of Satan and the practice of satanic powers by humans intent on destroying the People of God? I don't know what Harry Potter series Phillips is reading, by its not the one that is #1 on the New York Times bestseller list (or, for those who like their lists compiled by a Christian source, World's best selling books list. It's on both, kids).

For the record, I find the most amusing circular argument in the third point of Phillips' argument, where he attempts, after repeated denials that the portrayal of magic of any kind by a human is sinful and, by implication, punishable by death as under Deutronomical law, to carve out a small space for magical creatures (and reading between the lines, is trying desperately to allow C. S. Lewis' Narnia back into his little AV1610 world). It turns out that writing about dragons is okay because the Bible mentions dragons. In the KJV. Based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew in 1610, therefore, dragons are in, but sinful bastard creatures like fauns are out. And heaven help us if we attempt to create an allegorical world that uses magic as a metaphor for society's use of technology and as a device that examines isolation and anxiety as we grow from children to men and women. As it is said, so may it be.

Posted by Noel at 11:04 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

July 20, 2005

Models Map Most Monads

Models that work. I often silently criticize computer models of real-world happenings, their occasional usefulness sniped by over-hyped and under-powered accuracy. Indeed, that's the gist of my Strong AI critique. Mr. Hayakawa taught me "don't confuse the map for the territory" while philosophizing about language. And Tufte sent a few zingers at models that actually obfuscate reality instead of opening up a new understanding of it.

But models do have their uses, bringing out features that we cannot access IRL. It gets better when the models allow unconstrained real-time interaction with the data they represent. When you can run those models on your laptops, nerd-bliss arrives.

This morning, Mr. Peter Ryer at Boeing nailed just that with his Desktop Tool Suite of flight model software. Want your engineers in the back of the plane to watch a model of the plane as it flies, feed in real time by thousands of sensors on the plane? Yep. They can even move the camera around the airplane as it maneuvers, see the instruments and the pilot's view, etc.

Recently I’ve read reminders from Elissa and from Andy Crouch: don't assume the model tells the full story.

Posted by Noel at 05:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 15, 2005

Further Reflections on "Zombies in St. Elmo Redux"

I allowed my brain to cogitate upon the matters brought up in addressing the zombie threat to St. Elmo over these intervening nights, after arriving home in exhaustion and chemical ease from Scott Borger's bachelor party, and our Mailsite/Outlook migration Long March.

I had concluded, "The dead become undead cannot become dead again". I stand by this conclusion. But two more matters press themselves upon my mind as I lay a-sleeping.

First, my just-quoted conclusion is true, unless you could destroy zombies utterly. You know, something like the Greek "diapthairo", sending them to Gehena or Sheol of the Hebrews. If you could somehow hit them with a double-existence whammy and destroy completely their body and their being, then that might work. By destroy utterly, I mean the universe must lose the sum of their atoms. I suppose they could become antimatter or dark matter, and that would work too. And you'd also have to metaphysically destroy their evil animating spirit (the demon in Josiah's account). The point is, the body must be gone as well as the zombie demon.

A Holy Hand Grenade might do the trick.

Second, in the beginning of my last essay, I believe I glossed over an important conundrum regarding the ontological status of zombies. I said, "it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that if a zombie bites you, you become dead, and then undead, joining their ranks." I think there's something lax here. Does the zombie actually kill you when it bites? Or does it transform you straight-aways into the dominion of the undead? Alive -> Dead -> Undead, or the more straightforward Alive -> Undead? I must confess my ignorance upon this point, and kindly beseech my readers who are more educated in matters regarding the undead to guide me to a correct understanding upon this point.

Now, to address additional points brought up in Josiah's generous reply to my first post regarding zombies in St. Elmo.

Josiah's obsession with the dichotomy of spiritual redemption and heavy weapons is appreciated, and explicated by him as, "In this purpose there is the assumption of the living returning to righteousness in this life, and I can see that occurring in no other way than with somehow killing the undead." In this he seems to combine the ideas above summarized in the Holy Hand Grenade, but I am afraid that Josiah has actually done little to clear up my misgivings, save for the reassurance that we may, in fact, kill zombies as a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. But their ontological status, which for me is the more important question, remains unknown, a rather mysterious, dare I even say zombie apparition shrouded in philosophical must. Faith in what might be seen as a type of Plantiga's Great Pumpkin Return is not epistemically tenable with the waving of hands and unwavering belief. Just because I really believe that zombies are sent as instruments of redemption does not make them killable if that is not in fact their ontic aim.

His note regarding the difference between Halo's Flood and a proper Zombie Attack on St. Elmo is noticed and accepted. May I propose that we focus further studies on this important matter, because as biomechanically-enhanced soldiers enter the battlefield in the near future, they may be thrown into a similar situation as Master Chief, and require the proper set of tactical and philosophical guidelines as we are now laying out for a zombie attack in Stelmo. Shotguns, the moral and physical high ground (as noted by Duffey), and a stiff upper lip. Because my goodness, observe at how quickly those zombies can take over! Is Mayor Littlefield's office running these same simulations for the City's disaster recovery plan?

The comments by Mr. Davidson, OTOH, are greatly appreciated and do begin to excavate the definition of a zombie. In particular, he stated, "You don't "kill" zombies, you dismember them to the point that the enchantment/ensorcellment/possession that has caused their peculiar appetite for the brains of the living can no longer function." Though this does not jive with Josiah’s account, it at least seems open to an inquiry from the faculties of reason, an opening that Josiah’s more pietistic account does not allow. If zombies are reanimated dead, the simple bodies unanimated by the Divine breath of life but still twitching muscles and firing low-level cerebral cortex neurons, then there is no question of whether they may be killed. They may be killed just like a robot, a machine, a vegetable. By anyone’s definition, they are no longer human, nor alive, and so may become fodder for Model 87 shotguns with no moral harm to the shooter. Animated by an evil entity, but lacking human status, a zombie should be blasted apart with whatever the most suitable weapon on hand might be. St. Elmo is not their home.

Posted by Noel at 06:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 23, 2005

Code is Law, Version Two

In an event that either indicated my impeccable timing or my penchant for procrastination that hurls projects towards irrelevancy in this time-span, , author of the book noted on the right that I have been perennially finishing, has announced that he is revising and publishing a version Two late this year.

The trick this time is that the revision will undergo a revision a la Wikipedia; yours truly and others much more fully will revise, argue, battle, and agree their way to a wild working copy that Prof. Lessig will swoop down, snatch up in his legal talons, scrape away the obfuscations, and publish. Strange and neat, eh? Author, editor: meet your new maker: the Mobb.

Posted by Noel at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

Digital Identity

Man, I can still remember the frustration in Metaphysics as we discussed identity. For every good theory on what constitutes identity put forth by a philosopher, there is a whole slew of critics arrayed on the firing line, shooting down the skeet with glee and Gettier-style counterexamples.

So, if things were tough in the philosophical sphere, where we have the luxuries of semantic vagueness and dialectical truths, not to mention freedom from worries in the implementation details, imagine what a state those who are attempting to craft a specification document for digital identity are in! "What is a digital identity?" they ask, and darn it if figuring that one out ain't chewing tough rubber.

[Bonus: You can ask me sometime as to what my favorite Chinese Room-style thought experiment is. It starts out with two twin sisters who grew up together all their lives, and then were unfortunately chosen by an evil genius for his diabolical experiment in identity in which select memories were shifted from their own perspective to the others...puts chills up my spine and most people to sleep.]

Posted by Noel at 08:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 09, 2005

More on Walker Percy, Terrorism, and English Languge Data Parsing

In the 1987 novel The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy sketches a couple of scenes that seemed to me quite ludicrous from a software and data angle. In response to the inevitable crisis, the love interest (apparently with l337 h4X0r 5ki11Z) runs to her home in the marsh, boots up her pc, and interfaces with four different government databases to cross-reference and visually display a map that correlates the chemical elements in state water supplies with a map of the state.

Not that the hardware is silly, nor that the data is silly. Both were quite accurately described by the incomparable Mr. Percy. What my mind balked at was to believe that four different government agencies have databases that are so easily mined, and a visualization software that can scale so well (from chemical concentrations in water to maps of the state).

Now, I think, I can finally see where we could get this. Google Maps + XML + Web Services for databases + English language data parsing.

The hard part was never getting the data (though that's interesting). Nor was it matching one thing with another (that's pretty cool too). The hard bit is, how do you come up with a thing in the first place just from raw data? There's no ontology in data, it's just data.

From the article:


"We have guys who can crack hard drives," Mr. Alexander said. "Getting the information out is easy. The hard part is sharing it, and organizing it, so that everybody in an agency, even nonexperts, can use it."

The data has always been there for the terrorists to use, or for companies to, ahem, lose track of (a la ChoicePoint). It's just that there's no easy way to pull it together into something useful.

This post is partly in response to willas comment on my last post about English language data parsing.

Posted by Noel at 05:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 01, 2005

Transparency & The Atomic Bomb

I first learned about transparency from Photoshop. Beginning in version 3, Photoshop's editing metaphor became layer-based. Images are 2-D, and in Photoshop each image becomes a 2-D layer sitting in a z-axis stack of layers. Play now with many layers stacked on top of each other. What good is this? Well, if part of a layer is transparent, you are able to see the layer underneath (and if that layer is transparent, the layer underneath that continued). So if you make the background of a layer transparent, the foreground will be set in the background of another image. Repeat about ten times and mix with vaguely medieval religious imagery, and you're well on your way to becoming a mid-90s graphic designer of the Seattle grunge style!

Transparency, I've come to realize, is vital in more than image-editing. It's a fundamental ethical virtue. The present moment hosts a struggle between transparency and opacity that must galvanize us into living more transparently and calling for more transparency from our institutions. Government, business, education, and science must be transparent in important ways for their future fundamental integrity.

Korby Parnell tells a motivating tale of transparency at work in the splitting of the atom. But significantly, other institutions must act transparently as well. Higher-Ed springs to mind, perhaps from recent experiences. So does Enron, WorldCom, Google, and Microsoft. There's varying degrees of transparency in each of those companies (and varying degrees of failure therein). For lawyers and their firms, there's even less transparency, as Evan Schaeffer humorously relates.

Transparency. Not like a Johnsone-esque glass house, but like a piece of open code. Transparency over processes, models, and compliance. Not over execution and decision-trees. Think about why I believe it to be so important over the week.

Posted by Noel at 05:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 17, 2005

Castle in the Clouds

Just added a new category, “Castle in the Clouds”. It's about Covenant College, my alma mater. There's a lot of stuff going on up there on Lookout Mountain, and my feelings tender strength such that I should address publicly. So this category won't be too related to my normal geeky posting. Not quite politics, not quite religion, not quite geek. But quite barely legal substance. Ignore it if you wish.

Disclaimer aside, here's my proposal. We need to get a collective conversation going about Covenant. Crossman & Raymond resigning, Core changing, Residence Life & handbook changes, &c. You all know where I stand on most stuff from my student days. Justin, Ellis, Mesh, and Josiah have already posted regarding these things.

Tipping point? We should start putting some pressure the school from the blogsphere. Aggregate our posts into a group blog, perhaps. Get a conversation going, initiated by the recent alumni tip. There's no conversation happening now, and so we're left speculating and growing discontent. Between Wired Mesh, Irresponsible Journalism, and Subcurrents, we could get some attention, methinks. Goodness knows the comments on Josiah’s recent post were an indication enough. Anybody else want to join in?

Let's get NBN blogging, Anderson blogging, etc. Get guys like Derek into the mixtape. Two-way conversations are good things, and Covenant’s problem for two years has been a lack thereof. The power of blogs is that they effect changes in that nature.

Just a proposal. What say you, bloggers?

Posted by Noel at 09:46 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

February 11, 2005

Ends of Blogging, Part 2

I learn every day from blogging. One of my main purposes that drive this blog is to find the telos of blogging, to throw out a snotty but sharp ancient philosophical term. What am I pointing toward by blogging? Useful question. There's several answers that I've generated on my own, and it seems that I occasionally find other ends that I didn't think of. Vanity was never an end, but a "relationship accelerator" seems like a good one.

I started blogging because it seemed like good professional practice. This blog is my live resume, what I think about and work on. Here's what I'm passionate about. If my reputation is tied to my digital identity in the future, then my life depends on blogging.

There's a few other ends. It would be good for me to write about them--but later.

[Update: hmm, that gapingvoid link is dead. Don't know where it went; seems that Hugh removed that entry or some such.]
[Bonus: Yes, I know that this post doesn't have an individual/permalink page. Sorry. Working on it.]

Posted by Noel at 09:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2004

My Soul Is a 26-Dimension Bow-Tie

Absolutely delightful piece in the Old Gray Lady recently about string theory. My knowledge of physics doesn't go much deeper than what the article touches, but there are some superb bon mots and non-sequiteurs in there. "It's plausible that we will someday understand string theory." Or, "It would be great to have an answer. It would be even better if it's the right one." Ah, science is simply another social construction by a group of people that you are free to either buy into or decline. But with fun cartoons--do check them out in the article.

Posted by Noel at 05:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 23, 2004

Word to Power: 10x10

10x10, a sort of visual Google News, presents an interesting example of information design.

However, as 10x10 claims to present the world according to the Beeb, the Old Gray Lady, and Reuters, does it function so much as a definition of the time, or as a commentary on the powerful control of corporate news? It seems like such a small sample, and we're still relying on the big media companies to edit the world into our front pages. For a hundred possibilities, perhaps it is telling that there were only four discrete images on display in a recent visit. In essence, what our minds intake about the world is still seen through the filtered glasses of Reuters et al. This being a Kantian critique, our knowledge of what exists is thereby determined by these companies. How about a 10x10 that exposes visually what is not being covered by those companies?

How to design something more democratic, more exposing of the phenomenal?

Posted by Noel at 03:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 19, 2004

Wilco Unwittingly Formulates "Listener-Response Theory"

In a Wired News interview, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco goes all Reader-Response Theory on us to argue in favor of sharing music freely in digital form:

When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

Rosenblatt would be proud.

Posted by Noel at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 18, 2004

Paglia on Zappa: Moon Unit Provacateur

America's self-proclaimed "foremost intellectual provocateur" reviews a new biography of rock's strangest soul.

One of life's little pleasures is reciting the names of Zappa's children when you are bored in a meeting. Repeat after me: "Dweezil, Ahmet, Rodan, Moon Unit, and Diva."

Posted by Noel at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 05, 2004

Software as Works of Architecture

Finished reading Dan Bricklin's essay "Software That Lasts 200 Years" this afternoon. Reminded me a good bit of what Danny Hillis and the Long Now folks were talking about a couple of years ago. Point being, the idea that software needs to age well has been known for some time.

What's my timeframe for my software? Five years, I suppose. The idea that we can currently write stuff that lasts 200 years is ludacris. However, looking back at what has been done (New York Times digital archive project, etc.), perhaps twenty years is possible.

What do I think I can write in that will last more than two decades? XHTML, XML, CSS. Windows is the most popular platform (thus, by implication, the platform most likely to be around in twenty years), yet its track record does not bode well for future-proofing my current VB.NET apps (despite the best efforts of the Raymond Chen camp). Web apps are the way to go, IMHO, for long-term use. GMail, this blog, etc. I can see code like that running undisturbed for many moons.

What's your timeframe for your projects? What can you currently write in that will stick around a couple of decade?

Posted by Noel at 01:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 02, 2004

Barely Legal Software Pr0n, or, What I Almost Named This Blog

Allow myself to introduce myself, by way of an extraordinary statement that I almost, but not quite, believe.

By nature, blogging is inherently pornographic in the Baudrillardian sense. Blogging is an almost neurotic exposing of oneself to the scrutiny of strangers unmet. On the internet, there is too much information available; in your RSS reader, too much labor is alienated from the body of the laborer.

By blogging, you participate in creating information overload for the rest of us. I for one am daily paralyzed by the 'whelming tide of photos and words that are aggragated and linked together. HTML marks up data. The internet displays that data. Google creates enought context to turn the data into information. But we have yet to arrive at what we're after in, the prize gained by whacking through the paralysis and blocking the noise--knowledge. For we're in a knowledge economy, and the wisdom gained from knowledge secures our person in this age.

So, given what I've already remarked, why the hell am I blogging about it?

I'm no Derrida, and this post isn't under erasure. The above isn't quite true, in that there is great value in the insightful blog entry. Insight points to knowledge, and since we're after knowledge, then hope appears again for the blogger and the reader. Furthermore, blogs have the wonderful aspect of community about them, which in best form takes a bit of knowledge and expands upon it, opening up new meanings and providing more complete usage.

I keep my cards close to my chest and give you my polished thoughts, like a good little rhetorician.

By practicing this rhetoric and adroitly thinking through what is going on around me in the space of law, .NET, and computer science, I hope to avoid alienation from my labors as an application developer at a mid-size Southeastern law firm and bring a worthwhile thought to you, dear reader.

Enjoy, comment, and critique. Keep thinking—I’ll be doing the same right here.

Oh, the hanging question of the post title: I’ll keep the first two words uncommented upon, since they form part of the fun, gamey, semantic web of meaning of my blog’s name. I used software pr0n simply because it shocks the eyes a bit, and it aptly describes the way we look at what we write sometimes, getting too caught up in the awkward details and losing the thing-in-itself.

Posted by Noel at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack