Seb's Open Research
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Friday, September 26, 2003
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Standard bodies and funding
This
great post is about the International Standards Organisation's plans to
require licensing fees from those who use their language, country, and
currency codes, which would break the Web big time, and the laughable
Dewey Decimal System vs. Library Hotel lawsuit.
When good institutions go bad. The
last few weeks have seen a dismaying upturn in the number of
semi-public institutions which seem to out to make a buck rather than a
contribution, risking the contributions they've already made. [ Simon St. Laurent]
The last paragraph is especially insightful:
The larger problem this illustrates isn't the greedy nature of
everyone, but rather the difficulties of trust in a world where
organizations are underfunded and expected to scramble for dollars.
Building organizations which are intended to promote the sharing of
resources requires an independent source of funds. Otherwise,
organizations will end up placing tolls on their results, impeding the
very sharing they were set up to create.
 10:46:06 PM
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The Fourth Place?
Ideas Come When: Ideas
come to me when I’m doing the laundry or the dishes; when I’m
drowsy—either just before going to sleep, or when waking up after
dozing off on the couch; when I’m reading; when I’m walking.
How come software
teams seldom have arranged places specifically for stimulating ideas?
It’s obvious that you need to detach from what you’re usually doing.
Got to go. [Tesugen.com: Peter Lindbergs Weblog]
In the time I spent in university settings I saw a huge difference
in collaborative behavior and creative friction between those labs that
featured a couch and those that didn't. Furniture attracts ideas.
We do have a couch where I work now, but it hardly gets used; I think
it's because it isn't located in a strategic location - it's in a place
that doesn't feel intimate enough.
(My title referred to the notion of third places, beyond home and work, that act as social condensers.)
12:49:35 PM
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Knowledge-at-work
I'm late with the news, but the insightful Denham Grey - who is to be credited with building much of the impressive Knowledge Management wiki - has started a Typepad blog.
This is great news. I feel Denham is among the very few who possess an
understanding of the KM landscape that is at once broad and deep. I
know I have a lot to learn from him.
9:57:01 AM
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Self-explanatory syndication
Greg: "Subscribe" is a term that is much more accessible than RSS or "XML."
Or "syndicate this site (XML)" (found on half a million pages according to Google), might I add. The comments shed more light on the topic. As Greg writes:
the flaw is in the interaction design, moreso thant the naming
convention. When a user clicks on the orange XML box, they are
presented with a mishmash of XML and no context for what should be done
with that XML unless they have already been initiated into the
community of RSS users.
The XML buttons are many people's first contact with RSS. It's indeed a
pity that they are not more self-explanatory. Perhaps just having a  button besides them, linking to an accessible article about news aggregation would help?
8:36:44 AM
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Thursday, September 25, 2003
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Museum of self-reproducing programs
The Quine page.
This one works in LISP or Scheme:
((lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))
(quote
(lambda (x)
(list x (list (quote quote) x)))))
I find the J version eerily beautiful, in a "Wish I could understand it" kind of way:
".a=.'''".a=.'',q,q,~a#~1+a=q=.39{a.'
9:29:32 AM
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Sincerity in game design
Timothy Burke:
I’d suggest that anyone who sets out to “design for the other” as an
altruistic or political gesture, as a kind of gift or recuperative
gesture, is going to fail even worse than the male geek designer who
normally only makes games for male geeks but who has been assigned to
make a game for someone else. That’s the kind of impulse that produces
turgid, repellant stuff that has had all the fun and joy sucked out of
it and that functions as a caricature. It’s especially deadly when it
comes to children’s games: the absolute worst are the ones that have
been designed by someone whose main ambition is to be socially
responsible and “educational”. Then come the horribly licensed properties.
Spot on. And speaking of licensed intellectual property in games, the topic has been discussed recently on Greg Costikyan's excellent Games*Design*Art*Culture blog.
and Kevin recommends a few kids' games:
The key is, as Liz and Tim imply, is build model worlds for the
children to explore and create in, not linearized presentations. The
best children's software - Zoombinis, Zap!, SockWorks and Cocoa do this.
8:16:18 AM
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Wednesday, September 24, 2003
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Science tinkering resource
Another treat from Kevin Kelly's Recomendo site. [McGee's Musings]
This is excellent - and free! Pretty much all of the experiments
require little material beyond what is commonly found in the house.
Some of the things you'll learn how to build on that site:
- An electric motor in 10 minutes
- A quick and simple radio
- A 10 minute railgun
- A solar battery
3:25:35 PM
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Tuesday, September 23, 2003
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Sydney Smith.
"You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor
will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave."
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. "The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract."
[Quotes of the Day]
3:11:29 PM
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Patterns and viral rules
"The Structure of Pattern Languages", by mathematician/architect Nikos A. Salingaros
offers a good overview of the pattern idea. There's a neat riff on the
interdependence of patterns in the electronic and physical worlds:
On
top of the existing path structure governed by Alexandrine patterns
(Salingaros, 1998), we need to develop rules for electronic
connectivity (Droege, 1997; Graham and Marvin, 1996). To define a
coherent, working urban fabric, the pattern language of electronic
connections (which is only now being developed) must tie in
seamlessly to the language for physical connections. Already, some
authors misleadingly declare that the city is made redundant by
electronic connectivity. Such opinions ignore new observed patterns,
which correlate electronic nodes to physical nodes in the pedestrian
urban fabric. The two pattern languages will most likely complement
and reinforce each other.
(if you feel like digging further into this, be sure to check out Marc Demarest's excellent Cities of Text, which is chock-full of parallels between human settlements and intranets)
I liked the part towards the end called "Stylistic rules and the
replication of viruses",
where Salingaros describes how arbitrary rules sometimes drive the
widespread adoption of superficial features for no good reason. I see a
connection here to Clay's ideas on process as an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. and to Joel Spolsky's "Talent Doesn't Scale" argument. Successful recipes get replicated out of the context in which they were relevant.
[found via the social_software channel]
12:12:18 PM
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Monday, September 22, 2003
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The taste of freedom
John Bethencourt:
Today marked the end of a harrowing, ongoing struggle in my life. I'm not sure
when it began exactly. I suppose it began about two months ago.
My coffee machine began producing terrible tasting coffee...
4:04:21 PM
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Growing a language
Ted Leung quotes from a talk by Scheme co-designer Guy Steele (pdf):
My point is that a good programmer in these times does not just write
programs. A good programmer builds a working vocabulary. In other
words, a good programmer does language design, though not from scratch,
but building on the frame of a base language.
Scientists (especially theorists) also do that, building new constructs
on top of existing and widespread ones. And I believe that, in the
future, more and more non-programmers will also be called upon to build
upon common language, creating a rich ecosystem of new semantic spaces
for themselves and others to inhabit and grow further.
3:55:58 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:13:21 PM.
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