Thursday, February 20, 2003

The more I go backcountry skiing in the Sierra, the more I want to go. Reading John Muir's The Mountains of California only intensifies the wish. The difficult conditions last week — boilerplate, wind slab, breakable crust — were just a chance for more experience and discovery. Difficult kick turns with ski crampons, bootpacking icy pitches, may have been hard at the time, but now they feel great. The hard-gained corn and chalky windpack taste even better then. Skiing inbounds in ski areas is still fun, but increasingly feels limited. Go out there, enjoy the silence and the hard work. Learn with a good guide. 10:49:07 PM

During my California trip, I read Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett. A few comments: Sometimes lucid, sometimes opaque. Cartesian irony: the great critic of the Cartesian theater of the mind falls into a Cartesian model of state and causality, assuming the notion of a global "world" state. Which is incompatible with modern physical thought. The best idea of the book — the idea of the book by my lights — is that freedom emerges from the increasing complexity of evolutionary computations. This is my way of putting it. What's missing here, and it the book, is something more than anecdotes about evolution and complexity. If we reject a global "world" state, there may be a sensible interpretation of freedom as real options at the local level, in the style of compositional models of nondeterministic concurrent processes. It won't convince the unconvinced, and sometimes frustrates even friends: information and computation are there, but not as sharp as I would like. 10:06:43 PM

DaveNet: Comments on the Google-Blogger deal. [Scripting News] A somewhat different interpretation: Google cares about informative, deeply linked content on the Web, which they excel at indexing Google wants the best minds in the business Blogs are deeply linked content, covering a growing range of topics and perspectives Pyra's people are some of the best minds in the business Pyra's future was uncertain The acquisition brings to Google great talent and supports the continued creation of great content Seems straightforward, and matches some sources. The intranet angle is gravy. 9:37:52 PM