05 JAN 2023 by ideonexus
The Garden and the Stream as Metaphors for WWW
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relat...Folksonomies: metaphors digital distraction
Folksonomies: metaphors digital distraction
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1 The author will later call the memex the original garden.
24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Computer Metaphors for Biochemistry
The metaphor of the computer represents in some crude fashion the chemistry of life. Nowadays one may assume that the average citizen of an industrialized country is at least as familiar with computers as with rain forests. The idea of using the computer as a metaphor is a natural one. A computer is a device for handling information according to a program which it is able to remember and execute. A living cell, to remain in control of its vital functions in a variable environment, must also p...Folksonomies: metaphors
Folksonomies: metaphors
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notes
notes05 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
Sociological Metaphors for the Public
Social science and philosophy have generated a vast number of other
metaphorical descriptions of the public, rooted in different and often scientific perspectives on systematicity and relation. These are technologies in the broad sense that they enable different kinds of questions to be asked. An account of these would include the public as:
A Physical System or Mass: This metaphor underwrites work in mass commu- nications and allows one to ask questions like “What is the impact of a given... 1 notes
notesMetaphors are an important means of understanding abstract concepts.
12 APR 2013 by ideonexus
A Biased Explanation of Foxes and Hedgehogs
How Foxes Think
Multidisciplinary: Incorporate ideas from different disciplines and regardless of their origin on the political spectrum.
Adaptable: Find a new approach—or pursue multiple approaches at the same time—if they aren’t sure the original one is working.
Self-critical: Sometimes willing (if rarely happy) to acknowledge mistakes in their predictions and accept the blame for them.
Tolerant of complexity: See the universe as complicated, perhaps to the point of many fundament... 1 notes
notesNate Silver provides a very negative portrayal of those who think like hedgehogs, settling down in one field of expertise, compared to those who think like foxes, darting from field to field.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The "Second Half of the Chessboard"
Folksonomies: metaphors exponential growth
Folksonomies: metaphors exponential growth
1 notes
notesAn interesting reference to the exponential growth when the Vizicar asked the king for doubling growth of grains for each square of the chessboard he had invented. Not terribly large amounts at first, but they become vast as we work across the boards 64 squares.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Origin of the Name "Roots and Shoots"
The name is symbolic. The first pale roots and shoots of a germinating seed look so tiny and fragile; it's hard to believe it can grow into a big tree. Yet there is so much life force in that seed that the roots can work their way through boulders to reach the water, and the shoot can work its way through cracks in a brick wall to reach the sunlight. Eventually the boulders and the wall—all the harm, environmental and social, that has resulted from our greed, cruelty, and lack of understand... 1 notes
notesFor Jane Goodall's organization that encourages youth into good works and activism.
12 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
M-Theory is a Map
M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense. It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations. It is a bit like a map. As is weU known, one cannot show the whole of the earth's surface on a single map. The usual Mercator projection used for maps of the world makes areas appear larger and larger in the far north and south and doesn't cover the North and South Poles. To faithfully map the entire earth, one ...Just as there is no single flat map that can describe the Earth's surface, M-Theory is a collection of models that describe the laws of our Universe.
06 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies are Little Mars Rovers
Walk upstairs, open the door gently, and look in the crib. What do you see? Most of us see a picture of innocence and helplessness, a clean slate. But, in fact, what we see in the crib is the greatest mind that has ever existed, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. The tiny fingers and mouth are exploration devices that probe the alien world around them with more precision than any Mars rover. The crumpled ears take a buzz of incomprehensible noise and flawlessly turn it into m... 1 notes
notesThey are incredibly powerful learning machines.
19 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
How Culture Influences Scientific Metaphors
If you believe the cosmos is made up of
omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces
of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like
pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette
cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg
problem, doesn’t it?
Now, this definition of terms (like omelette universe) happens
all the time. The reason that we today refer to electricity in terms
of current is because in the eighteenth ...Electricity has a current because Franklin thought it flowed like water, mal-aria is named after "bad air" because people thought it was caused by that, and we define the Universe it terms of clockwork or information depending on the cultural innovations of the time.
09 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Genes and Their Effect are Cybernetic
The software, the program. is responsible for organizing hardware, the organism. Yet throughout the process, it is the organism in its various stages of development that has to run the program. In other words, the hardware runs the software, whilst at the same time the software is generating the hardware. 1 notes
notesWith the genes programming the biology, and the biology writing the genes.
