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Berners-Lee on the Web radio
When the inventor of the World Wide Web speaks, we listen, at
least if we are in earshot. Tim Berners-Lee's recent appearance
on NPR's Science Friday raised some interesting issues, that
point to what is ahead for the Web. The toughest days are still
to come perhaps for Berners-Lee, the Web originator and steward,
as commercialism and television-like attributes spread across
his baby.
It could be worse: Look at the fate of email.
The role of patents, said Berners-Lee, "is a very difficult
issue." And, he adds, this is one of the ways in which "the
whole thing could come off the rails and come to a horrible
halt."
Open technology was the force behind the explosive growth of
the Web, he said. So people and companies have to find a way
to see value in making sure they let the 'common increase make
the general foundation of technology bigger, so you can build
exciting [one might guess, proprietary] technology on top of
it.
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Quito
Covered in Ash by Volcanic Eruption
-Reuters, Nov 3, 2002
China
Launch Spacecraft in Manned Orbital Prep -Reuters, Nov 3,
2002
Rich
Gave in at Climate Talks to Protect Kyoto Pact -Reuters, Nov
2, 2002
Court agrees
with most parts of Microsoft settlement -ADTmag.com, Nov 2,
2002 |
The radio discussion was also notable for Berners-Lee's apt impression of a modem engaging in an ASCII handshake.
Also of interest on the show was a discussion with IBM Almaden lab molecule-level chip makers
Links
Science Friday for Nov 2, 2002 -Nov 2
Conversation with Tim Berners-Lee -Nov 2
Poe Boys, Long Way from Home
The links between philosophy, spirit (or religion) and science were
strong before the Renaissance, no doubt. Since then, all have been
on their merry ways.
A recent PBS
show on Galileo focused on the now familiar battle between Galileo
and the Roman Catholic Church that seems to be the point that marks
the birth of modern science, and the last days of alchemy. A somewhat
off beat book of 1980 takes a somewhat different tact.
In "Galileo", Stillman Drake states that Galileo's argument was not
with the church. This may be grasping at straws, the societies of
his oppressors were intertwined, but it is worth a look see.
Galileo did knuckle under to a church that did not want to look at
empirical contravention, but — Galielo's daughter was a nun,
and they kept in touch, and he seemed willing in instances to distinguish
between the church's work and its workers— the nonreligious theorists
whose pet models were under attack might have been his real nettle.
G's bigger problem may have been with the philosophers whose
theories took a drubbing in the vise of his logic and data, at least
per Drake Stillman.
But the fact that publication of his inquisition's transcript came
at a time that debated Darwin — when science and religion were
more firmly on different rails in a wholly other era than his own
— is an important guide as to how Galileo's differences with
the church were likely to be perceived.
Really will talk about Poe, honestly
None of which brings to mind a recent Times item on Edgar Allan Poe
and his little known prose poem Eureka.
Writer Emily Eakin notes that Poe, without the benefit of experimental
data, took a swipe at cosmology and proposed a type of Big Bank way
back. Writer Tom Siefgried describes such prophesies as 'theoretical
anticipation'. The book here says that Poe was a mystic poet not afeared
of philosophy or theory or science, really.
And, it is worth noting that the non-mystical Poe's credentials were
considerable, having achieved the best math scores to that date in
time as a math student at West Point. Lee or Grant must have wondered
what could have been.
A bit more on Galileo
A bit more on Galileo: He is at the first great instantiation of modern science.
Other's probably earned the wrath of his church. But his science survived
the encounter as science by name. And religion and science have been
on different apparent paths since then. Philosophers don't quote him;
scientists do.
His grapple as the Starry Messenger was with the philosophers that
did not want no mountains on no moon, Electra!
Eakins on What did Poe Know about cosmology and when did he know it? NYT - Nov 3, 2002
EAPoe Society of Baltimore transcript of Eureka
At Amazon Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time by Tom Siegfried
At Amazon The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory-The New Physics of Informationn by Tom Siegfried
7:43:19 PM 
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