Grok Headline matches for Black-hole travel theory refuted
To black hole, or not black hole, that is the question
To black hole, or not black hole, that is the question02/18/2004 10:44 AM I really need to get things together and finish the time-limited black
hole route system I keep thinking about. Digging through the logs
recently I've been finding that there are patterns in there to be
teased out--systems that constantly hammer me with viruses or bang on
the webserver with attempts to post comments to non-functional cgi
programs. (Yeah, I left mt-comments.cgi around and just marked it
non-executable) While it's not a lot of traffic, it's annoying
traffic, and in the case of the virus bombs it's repeated over and
over. I could just install a blackhole route for these things,...
Physicist Rethinks Theory on Black Holes (AP)
Physicist Rethinks Theory on Black Holes (AP)07/21/2004 07:59 PM AP - After 29 years of thinking about it, Stephen Hawking says he was
wrong about black holes. The renowned Cambridge University physicist
formally presented a paper Wednesday arguing that black holes, the
celestial vortexes formed from collapsed stars, preserve traces of
objects swallowed up and eventually could spit bits out "in a mangled
form."
"A legal black hole"01/18/2004 04:54 AM In an extraordinary Supreme Court filing, five military lawyers equate
Bush's denial of legal rights to the Guantanamo Bay detainees to King
George's oppression of the American colonists.
Black Hole Organizer v2.7e
Black Hole Organizer v2.7e04/22/2004 05:22 PM Black Hole Organizer is a web enabled free-form notes application
that's been designed to make document management easier. Find notes
quickly with Power Find. Create categories and sub-categories
(folders) that are meaningful to you. Quickly insert stock text into
any note using the template feature! Being web enabled means that any
web url or email address is a live link as well. Includes a full
featured spell checker and Thesauraus as well. [Shareware $24.95 30
Days 3.47 MB]
"Black hole" in the Balkans
"Black hole" in the Balkans04/14/2005 12:33 PM A report says that democratic development in the region is a failure
and calls for drastic changes in European policy.
The black hole riddle -- solved!
The black hole riddle -- solved!07/22/2004 09:38 AM Stephen Hawking does a U-turn on his theory of the parallel universe
–- and loses his bet in the process.
Black Hole Seen Ripping Star Apart (AP)
Black Hole Seen Ripping Star Apart (AP)02/18/2004 02:40 PM AP - Two space observatories have provided the first strong evidence
of a supermassive black hole stretching, tearing apart and partially
gobbling up a star flung into reach of its enormous gravity,
astronomers said Wednesday.
Hungry Black Hole Rips Star Apart02/19/2004 06:06 AM X-ray observatories capture act of 'celestial gluttony' that
astronomers say proves a long-standing theory that black holes can
pull in cosmic bodies, stretch them to the breaking point and then
consume them.
Huge black hole tears apart star
Huge black hole tears apart star02/18/2004 05:33 PM Astronomers claim they have observed a "super-massive" black hole
ripping apart a star and consuming part of it.
Cosmologist Hawking Loses Black Hole Bet (Reuters)
Cosmologist Hawking Loses Black Hole Bet (Reuters)07/21/2004 06:41 PM Reuters - Cosmologist Stephen Hawking
lost one of the most famous bets in scientific history
Wednesday after he rejected the 1975 black hole theory that
helped make his name.
Voracious Black Hole Generates Most Powerful Explosion Known
During
my ten years as a Chief Knowledge Officer, I spent a lot of time
trying
to figure out how people should use knowledge, and to some extent how
people learn, but it never occurred to me to develop an overarching
'theory of knowledge' until I decided to write a book called The Cost of Not Knowing. This
article summarizes that theory.
This is not a new epistemology. I am disinterested in academic
arguments that use language, a clumsy and artificial abstraction, to
try to justify theories that to me are needlessly complex,
counter-intuitive and of no practical use. For students of philosophy,
and I'm sure this will come as no surprise to my regular readers, my
theory is consistent with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological
view
of epistemology. For those interested in the philosophical basis for
this theory, I would recommend David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous,
much of which is devoted to explaining Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I'm
merely interested in its practical implications, in work and in
life.
My theory starts with learning. Learning is the process of direct and
indirect experience and observation, and knowledge is simply the
personal, collected, internalized result of learning. We learn in
different ways (fig.1): The best way is through active participation,
which engages all our senses in the learning experience. Next best is
observation, where we see or hear but where some of our senses are not
engaged. The least effective way is second-hand, through communication
of reports from someone else. When a squirrel learns, by personal
trial
and error, how to defeat a baffle on a bird feeder, this is powerful
knowledge, well retained and employed. When that squirrel instead
watches another squirrel show how to do it, the knowledge is less
valuable, less credible. The observing squirrel may not be able to
replicate the other squirrel's moves, and the method may not be the
best one for the observing squirrel, which may have a different
body-weight or dexterity than the demonstrating squirrel's. And if one
squirrel merely tells another, unfamiliar squirrel of the presence of
food in a bird-feeder 'over there' that can be accessed by navigating
around the baffle, that knowledge is even less valuable. The squirrel
listening may doubt whether the baffle was or even can be overcome --
perhaps this second-hand report is merely bragging or a ruse on the
part of the reporting squirrel.
In human activities, we now get almost all of our knowledge
second-hand, through books, newspapers, television and online, and its
relative lack of credibility causes us to develop and assign a trust
'rating' to different sources, based on how often, in our experience
and that of others we trust, that report has turned out to be accurate
or useful. A blogroll is one manifestation of that need to rate the
trust-worthiness of second-hand sources of knowledge. Schools,
unfortunately, now provide almost all learning second-hand, and it is
not surprising that 'field trips' are so loved by students -- an
experience to learn something first-hand. It is also not surprising
that the most effective and credible form of second-hand report is the
story, which conveys
knowledge in a way highly analogous to the way we might have
experienced it personally.
Why do we learn? The squirrel learns in order to survive -- by direct
participation at first in play and then, often by observing its
parents, in gathering food, building a nest etc. The squirrel draws as
well on instinctive
knowledge, which is coded in its DNA as an evolutionary advantage,
which 'teaches' it the knowledge of its ancestors, for example to
'freeze' when it senses a predator species, which is often more
effective than fleeing predators whose eyesight is attuned to motion,
more than shape. That instinctive knowledge also tells it at what
point, as the predator approaches, to flee, based on its ancestors'
cumulative learnings of that point at which the probability of evasion
through flight begins to exceed the probability of non-detection by
the
predator. Instinctive knowledge doesn't need to be learned, so it doesn't appear on
fig.1 above. We're born with it.
In natural systems, where the community, the physical area in which
animals spend their entire lives, is small and almost completely
'knowable', we learn only to survive and make a living, and because
nature has evolved us, as an adaptive mechanism, to find learning fun
(fig.2). In such closed systems, we can get almost all the knowledge
we
need from direct experience and observation, and from our instincts --
there is little need to rely on second-hand reports as a source of
learning. As that physical area that we need to know to survive
increases, we can no longer get by with direct experience and
observation, so we need to evolve languages to convey more and more
knowledge second-hand. Our society becomes inevitably more
interdependent, and in addition to survival there are now three more
reasons to learn:
To be a responsible
citizen
of that society we need to know as much as possible. Crows have fairly
sophisticated and interdependent social structures, with 'travellers'
that move back and forth between different crow communities, carrying
information about the location of food and predators with them, and
they have developed appropriately sophisticated languages to convey
that second-hand knowledge. In fact, they have developed 'body'
languages and sounds that communicate the location of food to other
species (notably wolves and indigenous humans) on which they depend
(since their claws are not strong enough to tear flesh and kill, they
locate food for other species that can, and then eat the leftovers).
To be an intelligent consumer
we need to know enough to evaluate our choices. In a society where you
don't just eat what you kill and live where your ancestors did, there
are often more choices than we can try out through direct personal
experience.
To understand
our purpose
we need to learn as much as possible about our physical world and the
history of life in it. We have an instinctive desire to understand how
and why things are, which serves an evolutionary purpose -- it helps
us
to survive. As we assimilate more and more knowledge we assemble
patterns and theories about how and why things are. These are belief
systems (fig. 3). When early man observed how nature automatically
corrected population and resource imbalances quickly and painlessly,
he
began to believe in a higher power. When more recently he invented
civilization, a 'man-made' way to live apart from nature, he developed
new, anthropocentric belief systems to justify and explain this new
'separate' purpose for living. Belief systems so powerful that they
allow us to tolerate, and even celebrate, incredible suffering, and to
ignore and disregard our intuitive knowledge, which is inconsistent
with these belief systems.
So where does all this get us? Of what practical import is this
theory?
My prospective book is about the cost of not knowing, and that is the
'so what' of this theory:
Because we did not
know
the degree to which extreme and sustained suffering and outrage
perverts the human mind, and the malleability of those minds, we
allowed the slaughter of nearly a million innocent civilians in Rwanda
in 1994, and of nearly 3000 in the US in 2001.
Because we did not know
the consequences of reliance on catastrophic agriculture, we allowed
millions to die in the Irish potato famine, eighty million more to die
of starvation in China during Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the
horrendous threats posed today by BSE (Mad Cow), the Asian bird flu,
and as-yet-unevolved diseases and pests that prey on massive
concentrated quantities of astonishingly homogenous, vulnerable human
foods.
Because we did not
know
that nature uses diseases to winnow overcrowding, and that these
diseases will always evolve faster than we can prevent or treat them,
we allowed half the people of Europe to die in the Plague, and more
than one billion to die of Smallpox, and despite 'clues' like AIDS of
what is to come, future diseases we do not yet know, we still have not
taken drastic steps to reduce human overcrowding on our
planet.
Because we did not
know
the impact of our wasteful and thoughtless burning of hydrocarbons and
forests on our planet's climate, we now face cataclysmic global
warming
and the paradoxical early triggering of the next ice age.
Not knowing led
directly
to the loss of biodiversity and much of the carrying capacity of our
Earth, the demise of Enron and its auditors, the Great Depression, the
dot com bust, the atrocities of Stalin, and the Great Extinctions that
regularly obliterate much of life on our planet. And because we still
don't know these things for
sure,
we allow ourselves to hesitate, to do nothing, to hope these problems
will magically go away, to allow the conditions that almost certainly
gave rise to these and other disasters to continue, to in fact
continue
to get worse.
I had dinner last evening with some of our neighbours, and we were
talking about some of these immense problems, and one of my
neighbours,
a student of history, said that no problem in history has ever been
solved until it got so bad for so many that there was a spontaneous
revolution. What would it
take,
he asked, before these problems -- overpopulation, famine, oppression,
violence, disease, resource scarcity, pollution, war, suffering,
cruelty, misery -- got bad enough that people would rise up and demand
immediate resolution?
I think the massive unrest and strife we see everywhere in the world
indicates that we have already passed that point. However, in order to
have a revolution there must be (a) consensus on the need for change,
(b) consensus on the change that is needed, and (c) a simple process
to
bring about that change. Historically, the solution has been political
-- to oust, violently if necessary, an identifiable oppressor, the
cause of the problem, and replace him (or them) with new leaders
committed to the consensus solution. And although billions have shown
that they see Bush's corporatist imperialism, and the oligopolists'
'free' trade and globalization, to be causes of some
of the major problems we face, once we get rid of these scourges, most
of the biggest problems will remain. These more intractable problems
have no identifiable enemy and, as yet, no consensus solution. They
are
systemic problems that
can only be changed by a radical change to our entire global economic
and political systems. And changes to these massive, entrenched and
leaderless systems have historically almost never come about by
political means, but rather by introduction of disruptive technology
innovations that undermine the existing system, as the agricultural
and
scientific and industrial revolutions did. It is tempting to believe
that scientists, not collective human energy and collaboration, are
the
only hope we have for saving us from ourselves, of rescuing us from
our
colossal ignorance.
What is the cost of not knowing when, even if we could communicate
enough knowledge to achieve global consensus on the need for change
and
the change that is needed, there is still
no simple process to bring about that change? If we were to magically
and suddenly be able to bring knowledge to bear that would persuade
the
vast majority of people on the planet that unless we quickly reduce
human population below one billion and reduce each human ecological
footprint to no more than one eighth of the current Western footprint,
would that be enough to precipitate a combination of voluntary
abstinence, intense social pressures, and (over the objections of the
very powerful elite) laws and taxes and sanctions, to ensure that
these
targets were met? We did
bring about the end of slavery this way, and the end of the Vietnam
War, and in much of the world women's suffrage. Is the intractability
of our greatest problems really the lack of a simple, known solution,
or is it rather the lack of consensus on the problem, and of its
severity and urgency and what needs to be done to find a solution? --
The cost of not knowing.
Until the reactionary cult of leadership took over business thinking a
few short years ago, there was a consensus that the best way to run a
business was to agree on and articulate the business' objectives, get
each employee to define their role in achieving those objectives,
remove the obstacles that prevented them from fulfilling those roles
effectively, and otherwise stay out of the way and trust the Wisdom of
Crowds to produce better results than the arrogance of a few. Could
the
same principle, applied to the world's most challenging and
threatening
problems, work in society as a whole? And if not, why not?
It is the examples of slavery and the 60s peace movement and women's
suffrage that have caused me, insufferable optimist that I am, to
think
that there is hope. The solution of reducing human population by 90%
and ecological footprint by 10% (in the third world) to 90% (in the
West) is daunting, but it's also a simple, clear, measurable
objective.
And if we have six billion people working on it, convinced that this
is
what must be done to save the
world, there's no reason why it shouldn't be achievable. Women choose
not to have babies if they know pregnancy would put their lives in
danger, why wouldn't they choose likewise if they knew it put their
world
in danger? Would knowledgeable people agree to participate in an
annual
lottery for the right to have a baby, and live with the results, as
they now compromise so many of their 'rights' for the greater good?
Would they agree to a 100% tax on all wealth beyond sustainable
consumption levels, to be distributed to the poor? Would they shut
down
permanently businesses that knowingly damage the environment? Would
they abandon urban sprawl and big centralized governments in favour of
self-managed, self-selected, self-sufficient communities if it could
be
shown that these are more socially and environmentally responsive, and
responsible, political units? Would they wrench power, by citizen and
consumer action, from unrepentant corporatists who refused to give up
their excessive wealth and influence?
It is hard to give up old paradigms. I know a lot of people that see
the salvation of the world in global government, to which all states
will cede authority. I see no reason to believe that bigger more
powerful governments, which largely got us into this mess, and which
are more removed from the people they supposedly represent, would do
anything but make the problems worse.
But as the Internet has shown, the real power in any system remains at
the ends: The front lines, the communities, where people learn by
direct experience what works and what does not, what makes sense and
what does not. It is as individuals and as members of small
communities
that we define ourselves and establish our belief systems and commit
ourselves to action and to change. As citizens and consumers and
members of communities, if we only
knew, we could accomplish what needs to be done.
It is time for a bloodless coup, the taking back of power and
authority
from central corporatist political and economic institutions and its
reinstatement in local communities and in individuals. To bring it
about, we need only accomplish these four daunting tasks:
We need to communicate to everyone on the planet, one
person at a time, that there is a better way to live: happier,
healthier, safer, more egalitarian, more harmonious, more responsible,
and sustainable for future generations. We need to tell everyone a new story of our planet's
destiny.
We need to achieve, by a great deal of open
conversation,
discussion, and sharing of knowledge, a huge consensus that there are
two root causes underlying all the problems we face today and
preventing us from achieving that better way to live: Overpopulation
and overconsumption, and to set and agree upon deadlines and targets
for solving these two problems. Just as in past we agreed that slavery
and imperialism and suppression of women were our global enemies,
we need to agree that overpopulation
and overconsumption are our global enemies, a
threat to everything we believe in and a threat to our future. With
the
right mix of empirical and intuitive knowledge, we can achieve this
agreement.
We need to organize six billion people to use their
collective wisdom to tell us
how to meet these deadlines and targets, and then free them to
work in their communities to make it happen.
We need to help
each other clear away obstacles to
success.
That means a lot of humanitarian and peacemaking assistance, helping
to
build new infrastructure that will work in the new community-based
world, redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, and
disarming those that will try to establish new wealth and power
hierarchies.
So maybe knowledge is power after all. About two centuries ago some
new
stories arose that were so compelling that they became the world's
dominant religions, the basis for everything the vast majority of
people on our planet believed, and still believe today. Those stories
spread person to person, by word of mouth, before the printing press
accelerated their influence. At that time the people of our planet
were
struggling with the new problems of civilization, like famine,
disease,
poverty, addiction and violence, and they were desperate for new
knowledge, a new story, something to give them faith, purpose and
direction. Today we face much greater problems on a much greater
scale,
but we also have powerful new resources for spreading knowledge, for
telling a new story. We also have a much better sense of what the root
causes of, and solutions to, our problems are, and knowledge
offers
the most potent, perhaps the only, means to achieve global consensus
and global mobilization to solve these problems.
The cost of not knowing is the end of our world. It's too great a cost
to pay, and the answer, if we use the power of knowledge, is within
our
collective reach.
Consumer Report Part 1: Look at this -- the Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole | Black Box Voting
Interesting Theory. But Journalists Don't Do Theory. Do They?
Interesting Theory. But Journalists Don't Do Theory. Do They?01/07/2004 03:12 PM Everett Erlich calls Dean a Third Party "taking over" the Democrats.
Jeff Jarvis says the Dean campaign is really a one way machine pumping
out propaganda like all before it. Meanwhile, Tom Mangan, newspaper
editor, wonders what good "theory" does in journalism.
Travel with Your Pet at pet-friendlytravel.com and Receive an $80 Coupon for a Cooper & Cadie Premium Pet Travel Kit
Travel Information Without Travel Sales Pitches12/31/2004 01:03 PM I get so many announcements about sites which are designed to sell
things, or to be roundups for e-commerce information, that's it's
startling (and refreshing) to find out about a...
‘Hole in One’ Instead of ‘Hole in the Wall’ Office?
‘Hole in One’ Instead of ‘Hole in the Wall’ Office?06/24/2005 02:37 PM Perfect your golf game in spite of rain and lightning, crowded links
or a schedule that keeps you traveling. This interactive, on-line golf
game can hone your skills for multi-player tournaments. [PRWEB Jun 24,
2005]
Diller To Show IAC Is No Travel Company By Creating IAC's Travel Company
Diller To Show IAC Is No Travel Company By Creating IAC's Travel Company12/22/2004 01:16 AM Barry Diller has done a good job buying up various online "middleman"
companies in a variety of spaces from travel to social networking to
dating. However, he says too many people view InterActiveCorp as a
travel company and that's making it more difficult to acquire
non-travel companies. So, in order to prove that he's not
running a travel company... he's
going to show them what it means to really run a travel
company. That is, he's going to spin off all of IAC's travel
properties, including Expedia, Hotwire, TravelNow and Hotels.com, into
one company (which he'll still run), and keep all the other properties
as IAC. While it may be a good idea to realize the value of those
other properties, from the beginning Diller kept talking about the
synergies of having all of these properties under the same umbrella.
Apparently, those synergies only go so far when the stock price isn't
as high as he had hoped.
Looks like all those pastel
PSPs Sony was showing at E3 were just a tease. According to an
interview in Japanese game magazine Famitsu, Sony claims the
various color PSPs were "just for reference. We plan to make the
system black." I wouldn't worry too much, though. I'm sure if the PSP
does well at all, color models will start showing up in no time at
all. Read
[IGN via Portagame]
Chris Abraham: Evil Man in Black and His Evil Black Suitcases Tackled by the Good Guys
chrisabraham.com/2005/04/evil_man_in_bla.html track
this site | 5 links
RSI Theory
RSI Theory12/03/2002 11:46 AM This is an interesting theory on RSI. I believe that this person is pretty darn close
to the reason it all happens. I had to quit using my laptop cause it was hurting
my wrists so bad :-(
A Theory
A Theory02/01/2005 09:07 PM I don't think anyone has ever been fired for blogging....
No one who has read The Boondocks
has a neutral opinion about its writer, Aaron McGruder. You either
love
him or hate him, or vacillate between the two extremes. The
twenty-something radical leftie is working on a Simpsons-style
animated
series that will air, ironically, on Fox, probably next year, and as
the New Yorkerreported last
month,
he's managed to outrage almost everyone of every political stripe,
including other cartoonists who say that he's gotten lazy (the strip
is
now drawn by Jennifer Seng, though McGruder still does the writing),
and that he's relentless to the point of being tedious and unfunny. He
is the most banned cartoonist in history, with many of the 300+ papers
carrying the strip having cut it at one time or another. But as I
think
the above strip from last week shows, McGruder's biting wit has lost
none of its edge, and demonstrates a fearlessness that goes beyond
even
what Doonsbury and Bloom County achieved.
Hair Theory
Hair Theory03/06/2004 02:02 AM It wasn't until well after I graduated high school that I started to
understand the point of combing my hair....
IT WAS INVENTED FOR A NOVEL. SO HOW IS IT A "THEORY"?
Jeffords' Theory04/11/2005 03:00 PM Jeffords'
Theory: "U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords, the Vermont Independent, may
face a clear field right now in a 2006 re-election bid, but his March
22 performance on Vermont Public Radio's Switchboard program raised a
few eyebrows. I think it was all done to get oil, Jeffords
said of invading Iraq. And the loss of life that we had, and the
cost of it, was to me just a re-election move, and they're going to
try to live off it. Probably start another war, wouldn't be surprised,
next year. Probably in Iran, said Jeffords, echoing Seymour
Hersch's words from January.
Theory of Computing (ToC) is a new Open Access online
journal dedicated to the widest dissemination, free of charge, of high
quality research papers in all areas of Theoretical Computer Science.
The journal will not differ from the best existing publications in its
commitment to and method of peer review to ensure the highest quality.
The scientific content of ToC is guaranteed by a world-class editorial
board. Following the model of the highly successful Electronic Journal
of Combinatorics, ToC is an all-volunteer operation. The key
difference between ToC and existing publications (paper as well as
electronic) in the areas covered by ToC is its commitment to free
access. We believe that the Theory community can no longer turn a
blind eye to the plight of CS libraries, around the country and around
the world. Publisher: University of Chicago Department of Computer
Science. This will be added to Academic Resources
2005 Internet MiniGuide. This has been added to Research Resources
Subject Tracerâ„¢ Information Blog.
Theory vs. Practice
Theory vs. Practice04/15/2004 01:03 PM The distance between theory and practice is always so much smaller in
theory than in practice. I spotted this as a sig on an email from
Christian Traue on Dave Farber's IP list recently and loved it. How
true, and how applicable to so many areas of life, as well as recent
current affairs....
Knot Theory
Knot Theory06/29/2004 10:34 AM In response to a question from Christian Romney: this web page was the
inspiration for my current favicon.ico. ...
In my previous post, Stasis and
Synchronicity, I scratched the surface of something that's been
bothering me recently. I've been sensing a degree of stasis in the
blogging world, not to mention in my own life (and given what I wrote
12 days ago about weblogs being
avatars, perhaps the two are intermingled). I finished my previous
post with a rhyming play-on-words: I swapped 'MTV' for 'synchronicity'
in the famous Dire Straits tune Money for
Nothing. That came straight from my subconscious - and at the time
I didn't fully know what it meant. Which for me is an invitation to
explore...
Meaning and Interconnectedness
Synchronicity is a term made famous by the psychiatrist Carl Jung. He defined synchronicity as an "occurrence of a
meaningful coincidence in time". Further, it as "an acausal
connecting principle". Which is to say that a connection occurs
through the sharing of a common meaning, not because one event caused
the other. Jung went so far as to boldly state that "synchronicity could thus be
added as a fourth principle to the triad of space, time, and
causality".
Synchronicity has come to mean a variety of things. Laurence Boldt
claims that synchronicity reflects the "underlying
interconnectedness of all things within the Universe" [my
emphasis]. An attractive theory for those of us addicted to Web
culture! Stephen
J. Davis states that synchronicity is "a very personal and
subjective observation of this inter-connected universe of which we
are but a small part". Another keyword that pops up in writings about
synchronicity is "flow" - which of course reminds me of the Web's Information
Flow. When used to describe synchronicity, it's all about the
"flow of life". For example, this
quote:
"When we are in the flow we experience more synchronous
events, more pleasure and less pain. The flow of coincidences is our
path to higher ground."
Synchronicity for Bloggers
What I was trying to express in my previous post was that sometimes
we become too insular, too caught up in our routines. Specifically in
the blogging world we get stuck inside the confines of our RSS
Aggregators and we miss out on the synchronicity in other parts of the
Web - and indeed in other forms of Art. Synchronicity to me means
looking for meaningful coincidences in multimedia, literature, music,
art, heck even television. So in this sense synchronicity means to go
outside the blog world and explore other worlds. The greater your
exposure to different ideas, the more likely you are to formulate
new ideas.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Glassd
og ;-)
In my travels on this topic, I came across this comment
which nicely complements my point:
"If you look for it, you will start to see parallels in
all kinds of things -- religion, physics, art, philosophy, psychology,
music, etc.. There is a pattern to it all - the synchronicity. Once
you notice the parallels, you might apply what you know about one
thing to another and have a New Idea (or just enjoy the moment to a
greater extent)."
And Serendipity too
There's a similar concept to synchronicity that has done the rounds
of the blogosphere before: serendipit
y, or "making fortunate discoveries by accident". The day after I
published my previous post, Stasis and
Synchronicity, I came across some old weblog posts on the topic of
serendipity. Anil
Dash linked to an old
Six Apart post from December 2002, which in turned linked back to
a bunch of posts from early 2002 - from old school bloggers Jon
Udell, Sam Ruby, Anil Dash
(again), and Rebecca
Blood. Their theme was that blogging is "changing the way we look
for information", in the words of Mena Trott. Rebecca Blood called it
"pointing readers to things that they didn't know they wanted to
see".
And it's hard to argue against that - I've learned a lot of things
I'd never have discovered if it weren't for weblogs. By subscribing to
smart people, like the ones on my blogroll, I make serendipitous
discoveries nearly every day through the stories they write and the
things they link to. But I need more. As I mentioned above, the blog
world sometimes can be too insular and so stasis sets in. To get back
the synchronicity, I want to explore outside...
Stay Tuned!
I'm going to try and eat my own dogfood on this over the next month
or so, by delving into things outside the blogging world. Particularly
literature, which is my drug of choice. But also multimedia, music and
other art forms. In fact, thinking about synchronicity so much over
the last week has led me to come up with some themes that would be
best explored in a novel. Hmmm, now there's an idea.
[Read/Write Web] Grok Description matches for Black-hole travel theory refuted GrokA matches for Black-hole travel theory refuted
Black-hole travel theory refuted
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
During
my ten years as a Chief Knowledge Officer, I spent a lot of time
trying
to figure out how people should use knowledge, and to some extent how
people learn, but it never occurred to me to develop an overarching
'theory of knowledge' until I decided to write a book called The Cost of Not Knowing. This
article summarizes that theory.
Looks like all those pastel
PSPs Sony was showing at E3 were just a tease. According to an
interview in Japanese game magazine Famitsu, Sony claims the
various color PSPs were "just for reference. We plan to make the
system black." I wouldn't worry too much, though. I'm sure if the PSP
does well at all, color models will start showing up in no time at
all.