GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Thursday 28 February 2002

Future Topics (No Singularity; P&S; End of Science)

Future Topics (if I don't get a life soon ...)

I've been playing with Radio's outliner. Pretty cool. Got some half-baked ideas about

Vernor Vinge's "singularity" (summary: won't happen, because intelligence is not one-dimensional. It's not even n-dimensional for any n you'd care to name. IMHO.);
Russ Lipton's essay about Publish & Subscribe (e.g., "content-free ad hominem flames and hobby-horse USENET-kook obsessions simply don't get linked to"); and
"The End of Science", John Horgan's book examining several disciplines and asking prominent scientists from each, "Have all the big questions been answered?" I feel obligated at least to write a review of it once I finish reading it.

7:10:40 PM comment/

Cohousing

Still being unemployed, I was thinking about ways to reduce expenses. I live in Santa Cruz county, which was recently ranked as the country's #1 least affordable place to live, in terms of housing prices versus family income. And I've always been intrigued by nontraditional cooperative living arrangements (communes, etc). So, I wonder whether the current recession is helping the Cohousing idea to gain any ground. "The Cohousing Network" says "Over the last decade the Cohousing movement in the United States has grown exponentially...", but that decade ended with the start of this recession.

The current recession is causing many of us high-tech workers to do some re-evaluation of our entire lifestyle. The perceived exodus from places like Silicon Valley is opening up possibilities in people's minds. Cohousing can be seen by some as a way for some to keep the "lifestyle to which they've become accustomed" but in a more economic and eco-friendly style.
1:13:13 PM comment/

MTB Weblogs

MTB weblogs

A couple of years ago, I created an "ed itt hisp age" site for mountain biking , though I didn't get many chances to keep it current. Now I start seeing a few other spots where weblogs mention mountain biking -- Will Leshner (thanks for the kind words), and an MTB trail being built in Wales . It's a start...

Note the odd spacing in "ed itt hisp age" above. I tried two other ways to spell that, with my own HTML brackets <a href=...> and </a> around the linking text. But Radio has its own idea of what you mean to link to if you happen to use the word e*itthispage either as one word (it links to www.editthispage.com) or if you space it out at the word boundaries (it links to a DaveNet piece). Weird weird weird.

later: Weirder yet, a small test of this weirdness doesn't manage to exhibit the behavior at all. Was it cosmic rays?

MUCH later: It was Radio's "shortcuts", i.e., text macro/abbreviations. All you have to do to get normal quotes is to escape them with backslashes. Of course, you first have to notice that you've accidentally run into one.
3:42:11 AM comment/