Friday, October 11, 2002

HipBone takes to the blogosphere. My favorite Glass Bead Game specialist has started a weblog! Glass Beads and Complex Problems collects "materials relating to the analytic and game design work of Charles Cameron". Charles writes in an introductory post:: The complex problems I'll be blogging mostly have to do with religious violence. The glass beads reference is to the idea of the Glass Bead Game in Hermann Hesse's novel, Magister Ludi. I am interested in the application of some ideas drawn from Hesse's Game to the visual representation (mapping) of complex problems, and am developing an analytic style based on a minimum of two data-points in conjunction, in which symmetries and asymmetries are particularly fruitful indicators. In a way, the Glass Bead Game is a knowledge representation tool. I've always had a hunch that it could be used to make conflicting world views explicit and connect them, making it easier for people to examine other world views than their own. It's nice to see someone who's actively digging into the idea. Here are more recent ramblings of mine about the Glass Bead Game: The Glass Bead Game again shows up in my news aggregator Hesse's Glass Bead Game and Interdisciplinarity Communication [Seb's Open Research] 3:28:34 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Aaron and the Bookmobile. Aaron Swartz: Mr. Swartz Goes to Washington, and meets up with the Internet Archive Bookmobile. Unlike most Bookmobiles, this one didn't contain any physical books. Instead, it connects to the Internet Archive's servers in the Presidio to download them. Then the high-speed printer prints out the pages. The chopper cuts them in half so you can fold them together to make a normal-sized book, and the binding machine heats up the glue-smeared cover to hold it all together. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes. ... "People have a hard time understanding the public domain," Brewster says. "It's an abstract concept; it's hard to grasp. The bookmobile changes that." He picks up one of the books he's made. "This is the public domain! The public domain means giving books to children. You want to extend copyright? You want to steal books from children? No one wants to steal books from children." [FOS News] [Seb's Open Research] 1:39:47 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Aristotle. "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way...you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 12:56:07 PM    trackback []     Articulate []