22 NOV 2017 by ideonexus
Removing Prepositions in Defining Thought
Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he responded, “I think in thoughts.” It was a wonderful answer, but also wonderfully uninformative. What the hell’s a thought then? How does it carry information? Is it like ...17 MAY 2017 by ideonexus
The Collector's Fallacy
There’s a tendency in all of us to gather useful stuff and feel good about it. To collect is a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge. Let’s call this “The Collector’s Fallacy”. Why fallacy? Because ‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as ...19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Transclusion
Now, with respect to literature, authors are frequently faced with the task of re-explaining and restating background material that has been explained well elsewhere. If you could just borrow that material, those existing good explanations, and incorporate them (with automatic credit where due), your efforts could be spent stating what is new. We introduce the concept of transclusion to separate the arrangement of a document from its content. There is an underlying shared pool of contents, an...Folksonomies: communication conversation
Folksonomies: communication conversation
From Mark S. Miller's "The Open Society and Its Media"
24 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Imagination Builds On Our Experiences
...you can’t have a storage space that is filled to the brim with boxes. How would you ever come inside? Where would you pull out the boxes to find what you need? How would you even see what boxes were available and where they might be found? You need space. You need light. You need to be able to access your attic’s contents, to walk inside and look around and see what is what. And within that space, there is freedom. You can temporarily place there all of the observations you’ve gathe...Folksonomies: knowledge imagination
Folksonomies: knowledge imagination
It works within the confines of what we know and how we can work with that knowledge.
30 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Museums for Rebooting Civilization
"You don't see the point of a museum, Horst. It's for the next rise in the Cycles. Savages come to put together another civilization. The faster they can do it, the longer it'll be before another collapse because they'll be expanding their capabilities faster than the population. See? So the savages get their choice of a number of previous civilizations, and -the weapons to put a new one into action. You noticed the lock?" "I did," said Potter. "You need some astronomy to solve it. I presume...An alien species that suffers regular collapses of civilization due to overpopulation keeps their museums out in the middle of nowhere and under bomb-proof domes to protect their contents so future savages may rediscover them and rebuild from their predecessors.
29 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Contents of the Doomsday Chest
The contents of a Doomsday Chest will include stainless steel or titanium sheets, laser etched with an archive of the fundamentals of human knowledge. Each sheet would be carved, front and back, in the five most widely spoken languages of the 21st Century; Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic and Hindi. To aid in their translation, aRosetta Disc style object would also embedded in the Chest, providing easy visual translation between the "key" languages and over 2,600 other languages. The le...Folksonomies: knowledge civilization
Folksonomies: knowledge civilization
A list of the media, dimensions, and list of subjects to be covered on the sheets that go into the doomsday chests.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
Description of the Evolutionary File Structure (ELF)
Here were the preliminary specifications of the system: It would provide an up-to-date index of its own contents (supplanting theFolksonomies: new media
Folksonomies: new media
Ted Nelson's precursor to hypertext.