Brandymore Castle

In a previous post I said no one truly knows anything. Of course, we must use reasonable knowledge. The knowledge we act on is always imperfect, it's important to recognize that, since many people go about their lives believing they are acting on evidence. I doubt anyone really makes their daily decisions on evidence. There is always a smarty pants who says that saying "nothing is truly knowable,"is just a high toned stance of philosophers and not really anything people in the real world should go by. The problem I have with such statements is that there exist people in our world, called rationalists, who pretend to act only on evidence in their decisions and lives. They act as if everything is knowable and that everything they know comes from evidence. They are frequently vocal advocates of science and reason as the only legitimate truth. That may be, but since we know reason is subject to fallacy, and that reason is a product of the human mind, it lacks the power to dis

I've been reading the Citizendium's approach to governing what goes into their content. This new attempt at a wiki encyclopedia favors an approach with less rules, greater oversight and tries to accommodate a multiplicity of views on truth. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Neutrality_Policy I wish they would not call it a neutrality policy. I strongly dislike the oxymoronic "neutral point of view." I don't know how far the Citizendium will go, but I do believe multiple truths should be represented transparently. There is no reason not to accommodate multiple truths and no reason not to build information systems capable of accommodating multiple truths. Contrary to popular belief, there does exist more than more than one truth. In genealogy, for example, the idea of multiple truths is necessary, since the same individual is frequently claimed by more than one family. Information about the past is sketchy and subject to interpretation. When the first online geneal

I love the idea simple software. Of software without cruft and bloat. When I create an application I want to make it simple, but that is not the way of the world. Most applications end up being complex. I have not entirely given up on the idea of fighting creeping featurism, featuritis and bloat, but it occurred to me that it may be a losing battle, after switching from SimplePHPBlog to Wordpress (not for this site) and Blogger. It seems that most projects to create plain vanilla or simple versions of software with a reduced feature set nearly always fail to gain popularity. If you look at Windows, it's sold on features, when you look at products in the store, they are sold on features. When you think of the natural world, it seems true that: All significantly interesting things will necessarily become complex and paradoxical given enough time.

I've long thought that the fatal flaw of what library science calls "finding aids" is that they only organize information according to how it relates to other information. What I've always wanted is a search that relates information to what I care about, to my interests, to me. I've thought about "personalized searches" but the trouble with this approach is that it is time consuming to express to a computer exactly what it is you want. You must set up some kind of criteria and the the search returns results for you based upon it, such as the simple eBay search notification. If lots of people are going to use this with the efficiency they now get from Google, something else is needed. We don't have expert systems and artificial intelligence yet, so what is a possible solution? Some are experimenting with attention. By tracking what you look at online, a profile of your interests can be built, which can then drive a personal search engine. People are r

A good introduction to what Yahoo Pipes are and the possibilities they offer posted to Read/WriteWeb . Also, a simple, clear, concise explanation of emergence: It is this automagical process through which elements of a system give rise to a higher order system. Emergence is how physics becomes chemistry and chemistry becomes biology.

By now, many have heard about a study making claims that exposure to "driving games" encourage risky behavior on the road. I can see where the effect may be real, just as the effect of violence in video games may be real, but most of these studies forget that violence itself is neutral, it is the purpose and context for violence that may be troubling. They also never seem to separate games from simulation. As others have pointed out , there is a vast difference between a simulation and a game. I fly flight simulators (Microsoft Flight Sim, Flight Gear and X-Plane) and have done so for about ten years. You can learn a lot about flight procedures, navigation and many other elements of flight, which are modeled to a good degree of realism. You obviously can't feel the effects of turbulence. You are not likely to feel your stomach in your throat from clear air turbulence. You are not likely to feel disorientation. But the rest you can learn a lot from. I'm fairly new to

The New York Times obituary section notes the death of John Backus, who led the team to develop the FORTRAN. I suspect the members of the priesthood, coding in machine code, were the ones saying it was an impossible task. It is difficult to see how something so seemingly obvious could be such a struggle to achieve, but that is the way with hindsight. It is difficult and daunting to face into the wind. It takes courage and persistence. Words to live by: “You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” -- John W. Backus (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/obituaries/20cnd-backus.html 19 Mar 2007)

I develop the platform for the folkstreams.net website, which is a non-profit archive for rare folklore documentary films. We transfer the films to video and then stream them to the web so they are not lost, molding in some archive never to be seen. Many of our films have not been seen for twenty years or more, one was rescued from a barn. As such, we are strong advocates of open access to archives (and I am happy to learn many other institutions in the folklore world also understand how important access is to a sustainable archive and are using the web in wonderful ways). To the point. It has always been important for our films to be presented in context. I have always believed that media without context is meaningless, whether that is a family photograph or a documentary film. A photographic image is merely an interesting composition without the information necessary to understand it, to interpret it. All images must be read...oddly enough, since they are the seeming opposite of text

I made my first pipe today at Yahoo Pipes , which takes our Folkstreams recently additions feed and finds Flickr images that correspond to the folkloric subject categories associated with each entry, rolls them into the feed. I'm not sure if I constructed it properly of if it's useful, but it works, the Flickr images do show up in an element of the RSS item for each film. It's a fascinating concept, although a feed mashup is not a new concept, Pipes is very broad, powerful and slick. It borrows from several novel websites, shades of Ning where users build technology using Lego-brick-like software components. Of course, it's like Unix, a set of simple tools with standard input and output that can be endlessly combined into new, useful tools. It also draws upon open source software development, since others can see how you constructed a pipe, copy it and make it their own to study or build their own tools on. Pipes is a social network version of a RSS feed mashup servic

I also read When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber last summer. This is another book in the gathering storm against rational purism. It also suggests an intriguing possibility, that when a society becomes literate that it loses certain capacities for understanding intuitive knowledge of the kind carried in myth. The authors propose that myths function like delivery systems for messages, with an interesting story acting as an envelope for the myth, keeping ordinary people interested enough to pass the myth down generations, the useful information contained within the envelope. When at some future time, trouble erupts (literally, such as a volcano), the payload is delivered and people can be warned about a future event or danger. What literate people seem to unlearn when they make the transition from a pre-literate culture, is that the myth has a payload. They concentrate on the story, gods and their daughters fighti

Last year I read Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer for the first time, after seeing him on CSPAN BookTV several times and hearing a lot about the book. I was a rewarding experience and opened my eyes to many things and answered many questions. I can't say more right now, but this is an important book, perhaps one of the most important books you will ever read. It can change you mind about a lot of things. He will open your eyes to the folk culture that informs our supposedly rational opinions and decisions, which amounts to a kind of folk knowledge that everyone absorbs by osmosis from their parents, neighbors, community and surrounding culture growing up. What is very striking, and counter intuitive for many rationalists, is how the behavior of people is shown to be determined more by a persistence of culture than by a framework of social or ideological forces acting on them in their own time. Or at least the culture frames the debates and

What is Brandymore Castle? Brandymore Castle (also spelled Brandimore) is a limestone outcrop in Arlington, Virginia rising above the flood plain of Four Mile Run. In the eighteenth century, it was used by surveyors as a visual reference, although today the castle is worn down by time and vandalism, hidden in a small forest behind some homes. It once stood proudly and was probably the highest point on the surrounding flood plain of Four Mile Run when the forest had been cleared and farms filled the area. Today, the trees have grown back as farming ceased in Arlington beginning in the Great Depression and continuing as the suburbs grew and agriculture became the business of large corporate farms. When Interstate 66 was came through Arlington, a sound dampening wall was placed very near to the landmark, which now hems it in further. Brandymore Castle now sits crumbling and hidden, buried in a forest, surrounded by homes, wedged between the route 66 noise barrier and a basketball court wi