Mar 2008 links

Ostrich autobiography (vDaily)
20 most expensive celeb divorces (list via Yeeah)
Hasidic Jews classed by gov as 'disadvantaged' (iSteve)
Obama-on-Israel update (mWeiss)
Hiphop/cookery mashup (yTube-3min)
NYC blogger bars (GgMap via Fim)
'Clarke event' = 1st filmed black-hole birth (sciBlog w/pix) (blog via /.)
250Myo biomolecules found in saltmine (sciBlog)
Terahertz tech explored (arcane w/graphs)
Peek at 11Byo galaxy formation (sciBlog-no-pix)
More blessed to give than receive (SciBlog)
Amazon's unhip new print-on-demand policy (/.)
Cheap power makes Iceland attractive Net hub (BizWk-3pg via /.)
Casting rumors for OliverStone's wBu biopic (Cinem)
10 'most prophetic' scifi movies (pg10of10 via Cinem)
Rembrandt daffodils (Zsaj)
New Tibet-myths-themed Bjork vid (Flash-8min)
jKoons owes IlonaS $2M support? (Reuters via Jz)
Short defense of GirlsGoneWild guy (Jez)
vBoat's been excellent lately (blog)
Iran pwns Iraq (pKrug-vshort w/link)
New NYRB incl gGreer on wShak (toc)
Hillary's tally of lies (list via Sam)
Post-Busharraf Pakistan (UkG via Sam)
Sex-workers' jargon (2pg-gifs via Sam)
Mass media ignored bubble warnings (E&P via Sam)
Me c1973 (Sinfest-Saturday)
Us always (Sinfest-Sunday)

HisDarkMaterials prequel (UkG-extract)
Esquire's insomnia issue (multipage)
State-of-Iraq update (aAard-longish)
Sirius-XM merger eliminates broadcast-data competition (PhilG)
Text-animations of classic movie dialogs (15yTubes via lf) (300)
'uok' = are you okay? (ttod)
'Hole' in the night sky (AstroPic)
hRollins claims Britney can't even sing (short via Jz)
Walrus/girl dance-vid (yTube-50sec)
Use GgTrends to graph meme-popularity (Blgscpd)
Neoconservatism As A Betrayal Of Jewish Values (Philly via mWeiss)

Mathematical Easter-egg designs (Wolfram)
The problem with pennies (NYer-long)
eating a soft-boiled egg-- just one-- / from a tiny, hesitant, glittering spoon (Poems.com)
'Black' magician fails on reality-teevee (India via tOccult)
Mindboggling cynicism of banking lobby (pKrug-short w/pic)
Ten way-over-the-top JackieChan stunts (Flash-6min via vBoat)
Realtime econ-text-revision blogging (pKrug-vshort-arcane)
Sims3 Create-a-Sim slideshow (Flash-7pix via gTxA)

o christ i cant keep typing this (Onion-pic)
Some semiliterary semantic topologies (RWx)
Shakespeare was jewish woman? (shortish via wakeUp)
't+' = think positive (ttod)
Nicer browsing-view of my 1288 flickr faves (flickriver-no-rss)
Petri-dish-themed Halloween desserts (pic)
I will rest and be free of you then (vDaily)

Frontline reviews wBu's war next week (E&P)
Yoga-forum debates 'Inhale' (tv) (2pg-2005)
Lively VivWestwood interview (Jez w/link)
MartaSebestyen on yTube (fave)
Obama saying right things on Iraq (aAard w/link)
Chumby for dummies (Forbes via angus)
5th anniversary of RachelCorrie's murder (WakeUp)
Internet-over-powerlines a nonstarter? (Oz via dy)
Purpleurpleorangeangeange (Zsaj)
Content-typology pages for the semantic web (RWx)
dMamet ?outgrows liberalism (longish via cPnch)
eWurtzel mourns ?fading feminism (shortish via Jz)
'virtual water' = consumed by production (sciBlog)
Around the fast food dumpsters, gulls implement late capitalism (Poems-longish)

"This is the real world, kid. There are no sprinkles." (oDchgo)
Where Change Really Comes From (Sam-long)
Panther genetic-eve lived in 20thC (newSci)
How Iraqis are feeling (aAard-stats)
If the USA withdrew... (aAard-longish)
'He has eyeglasses and he's a woman' (oDvrwhr)
5yo to 7yo: 'I'll punch your Adam's apple straight down your throat!' (oDinny)
Shuttle vaportrail (AstroPic)
The semantics of priorities (RWx-short)
DVD-release economics (Cinem)
Bs-mesons may explain antimatter asymmetry (newSci-arcane)
bristly mourning bride / rooted in a single thickness of glass stones (vDaily)
WaPo leads Obama Lobby-smear (mWeiss)
War-oil costing $1B/week (AmCon via xym)
acClarke's '2001' diary (etext via Steve)
New old Ethan/Uma gossip (nyMag via Jez)
I felt like Pythagoras / standing in my drawers / at the window (tethered)
GetYrWarOn blog finally getting its war on (mnftiu)

We're all rustbelters now (philG)
Yikes (postSecret)
By their neutrinos we can know them (ETs) (newSci-short)
LA's housingbubblehomeless (BBC-yTube-90sec)
Uncannyvalley robot mule (yTube-3min via vBoat)
'hallwalker' = executive eunuch (dTongue)
'meez' = cooks' mise-en-place (dTongue)
c1980 scifi fanzines cover gallery (1pg)
Life always complicates? (sciBlog)
Communicating one photon at a time (short via /.)
tSwinton: HarryPotter "fetishizes boarding school" (nyPost-recent-short)
'For sale:baby shoes,never worn' and the semantic web (RWx)
aJo feeds brood junk (pic)
jDepp taught kMoss secret of mystery (vshort via Jez)
Yellowelloworangeangange (Zsaj)
Salmon population crashes (NyT w/popup via vBoat)
Krugman on bailouts (NyT)
"A hedge fund manager can make himself rich simply by exposing his investors to risks they don't understand" (vshort w/links)
Boring new NYRB (toc)
Quality-of-life 'recession' started in 1975 (LaT-CD-shortish via Sam)

Scifi creations traced to realworld antecedents (1pg w/pix)
Dems should run on restoring USA's image abroad (dArse-short)
70 best science books (3pg via gPost)
Harvard student data hacked. published (Cnet via gPost)
Native Americans had 6 'genetic eves' (AP via gPost)
Ethics as universal grammar (NyT via gPost)
"I had to growl at someone" (oDvrwhr)
8bit platformer cubed (Fez trailer) (Flash-5min via Fim)
'fish w/feet' = evolutionary misstep (dTongue)
New $200M space-robot in coma (USA2 via nWatch)
Lobby smearing Obama? (mWatch w/link)
Gratuitous U2-bashing (FMU)
Sorting out Israeli cause-and-effect (Xym-short)
Silda Spitzer visibly aged by scandal (pix)
Gothic Lolita update (Jez w/pix)
"It is important to be King of All the Wild Things" (MeMo-short)
The semantic web and the wisest of the wise (RWx-varcane)

Distinctive ?impressionist portraits by Monica Cook (pic, links)
ParkerPosey interview (OnionAV)
'black dog syndrome' = shelters can't place big black dogs (dTongue)
Plotter-hack prints detailed logo atop latte (yTube-2min via Make)
Britney's new anime video (GgV-4min)
TheSims theory (gTxA-chapter)
Those shortterm psychological effects (Sinfest)
A little boy with a nailgun... (CulDeSac)

Emo bath... (pic via Rufus)
Dutch documentary on IsraelLobby (GgV-50min via WakeUp)
Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt (Onion)
DrStrangelove's take on 3am military emergencies (yTube-3min)
'vertical corpse' = boring newsphoto (dTongue)
dDenby on the Coen Bros (NYer-long)

US distribution of Walmarts vs Starbucks (graphs via Waxy)
AlanMoore for dummies (OnionAV)
Clever tips for hiding cable-clutter (1pg w/pix, links via Make) (500)
5day rockbandcamp empowers girlz (yTube-3min-dontmiss)
aKutch punking tabs (Vh1)

$10/hr to create 2ndLife content (Reuters via eAard)
'Menopause rocks!' (oDoffice)
pWeiss thinks Obama-vs-HRC will widen Lobby debate (shortish)
Simulated puppet-gymnast (yTube-2min via fMotion)
Felix the ram looked / proprietary in his separate pen / while fatherhood accrued to him (shortish via gKeil)

1980 KateBush vid parody (yTube-3min)
ArundhatiRoy reflects on success (India)
How to tell Clinton and Obama apart (Sam-list-long)
MOMA explores commodified color (cLovers w/pix)
'Vaginatown' (oDinny)
Two more mWeiss's on Lobby mechanics (1) (2)
Spacecraft anomaly matches mystery-formula (newSci-arcane)
Semi-found poem (vDaily)
[source-NyT]
Moths remember caterpillar lessons (sciBlog)
'food desert' = far from grocery stores (dTongue)
'Busharraf' = derogatory for Musharraf (dTongue)
"Needs more robots" (Sinfest)

Nader on MeetThePress 24Feb (2yTubes-17min)
NyT on IsraelLobby trial (NyT)
Waxy hosts Joni's SummerLawns demos (9mp3s)
How to win at Monopoly (1pg) (1000)
US drought maps (maps) (80)
Palestinians' shrinking territory since 1946 (maps via angus) (100)
MemeWatch: "toward a..." (GgW)
How does a band become synonymous with mediocrity? (OnionAV-short)
Spy-gadgets currently available (1pg w/pix via lf) (150)
Severe tardiness damage (oDvrwhr)
she / tears out the gills—- / with the crack of tooth extraction (poems.com)

More difficult than flight itself / was learning how to brace a wing / for someone else (vDaily)
Hide your bed behind your books (1pg-pix) (75)
NicholsonBaker's Wikipedia ID (Wiki via Fim)
GossipGirl vs Lolita (NYer-jMalc)
Good Democrats can't diss Nader (Sam)

2008: Feb Jan
2007: Dec Nov Oct Sep1 Aug2 Aug1 July June May April2 April March Feb

Semantic topologies

the remaining gap
(to be bridged)
between the concept-system of mathematics

and the full semantics of literature

might be smaller than it appears



partial-vs-complete sets
(many human stories hinge on
sets with missing eleements
eg the overlooked opportunity
the missed clue)

mappings between sets
(literary allegories
microcosms
graphic representations
mental models)

orderings
(chronological timelines
euclidean axiomatisations
most-important-first prioritisations (cf holograms)

cluster-sorts
object hierarchies

fractal thickets of relationships between
objects in the same hierarchy
(cf indra's web)

branching timelines
storycycles

timelines of changing priorities

clustering(s) of top-level priorities

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Content-typology pages

strict reverse-chronological order
for blogs
is a semantically braindead ordering-scheme

so i used to put a lot of effort
into exploring other possibilities

especially
picking any promising topic
and winnowing search results
picking the most promising pages

and sorting those links by
type
of content

so the resulting index-pages
offered an implicit content-typology
simply via the clusters
of similar content-types
embodied in the resulting page layouts

eg for persons:
short bios
individual works
influences
gossip
etc

(if there's to be a microformat
it would have to be
a person-pages-content-types microformat)

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Quotable Iris Murdoch

I suspect Iris Murdoch generated more quotable quotes than Shakespeare, and covering more topics. A random sampling:

"paying attention in itself is a moral act" [?]

"One of my fundamental assumptions is that I have the power to seduce anyone" [1948]

 “Some subtlety can be so voluptuous.” [letter]

“You can’t write any novel without implying values.” A novelist “is, in a sense, a compulsory moralist.” [Paris Review]

"Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality... Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal." [Sovereignty of Good]

“There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.” [The Sea, The Sea]

 "Children, if they are lucky," she said, "are invited to attend to pictures or objects, or listen quietly to music or stories or verses." "'Look, listen, isn't that pretty, isn't that nice?' Also, 'Don't touch!' This is moral training as well as preparation for a pleasurable life." [?]

Beauty is “the visible and accessible aspect of the Good" [?]

"the child who was myself" [Black Prince]

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." [?]

"You feel it coming in waves like a black tide" [Alzheimers?]

"every book is the wreck of a perfect idea" [The Sea, the Sea?]

"The conversation was not so much difficult as mad." [The Bell]

"Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love." [The Bell]

Consciousness is a "cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain" [?]

"A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia." [?]

"One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on." [Under the Net]

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck"

"The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe." [?]

"Marriage is a long journey in close quarters" [Black Prince]

"He led a double life. Did that make him a liar? He did not feel a liar. He was a man of two truths." [Sacred and Profane Love Machine]

"Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture." [Existentialists and Mystics]

"How recognisable, how familiar to us is the man so beautifully portrayed [by Kant]... Free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy." [Existentialists and Mystics]

"jealousy lasts forever — bad news for the young" []

"There are some parts of London which are necessary and others which are contingent." [Under the Net]

"Literature is meant to be grasped by enjoyment." [?]

"We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing." [Black Prince]

"In philosophy, if you aren't moving at a snail's pace, you aren't moving at all." [Acastos]

"I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature to clear our minds of selfish care." [Sovereignty of Good]

"His presence in the city was like that of a pop star. Chico Marx, who was there at about the same time, was less rapturously received." [Sartre: romantic rationalist]

"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved" [Sacred and Profane Love Machine]

"The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved." [An Accidental Man]

"We can only learn to love by loving." [The Bell]

"The way is always forward" ...the "annihilating silence" [of the cloister] [The Bell]

"the theatre may have been paradise, but the audience was purgatory" "What excites me more than the philosophy itself is the extraordinary bunch of good novelists which it is inspiring." [She had "abandoned what you call my 'quaint virginity cult' some time ago & haven't regretted it for one second. There are however remarkably few men who have ever stirred me to any sort of passion. You, for reasons which I can't conceive of, were one of the few." "Shortly after I wrote to you last I tore myself away, with agonies which I could not even have conceived of a year ago, from the utterly adorable but wicked Hungarian with whom I'd been living. Now that I'm no longer bleeding at every artery I see this was a very good move." [The Writer at War]

"Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina." [From a tiny corner in the house of fiction]

"Fear had entered his life, and would now be with him forever. How easy it was for the violent to win. Fear was irresistible, fear was king, he had never really known this before when he had lived free and without it. Even unreasoning fear could cripple a man forever. . . . How well he understood how dictators flourished. The little grain of fear in each life was enough to keep millions quiet." [Henry and Cato]

"A common soldier dies without fear, but Jesus died afraid." [?]

"If we are to understand someone else, we must know of what they are afraid" [?]

"Even if a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power." [?]

"I mean just that one’s ordinary tasks are usually immediate and simple and one’s own truth lives in these tasks. Not to deceive oneself, not to protect one’s pride with false ideas, never to be pretentious or bogus, always to try to be lucid and quiet. There’s a kind of pure speech of the mind which one must try to attain. To attain it is to be in the truth, one’s own truth, which needn’t mean any big apparatus of belief." [The Sacred and Profane Love Machine]

"The loss of lively and natural access to the Authorised Version of the Bible and Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer is a literary loss comparable to losing touch with Shakespeare...." [Encounter magazine?]

"We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" [?]

"Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self." [The Nice and the Good]

"One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats." [The Sea, the Sea]

Iris Murdoch said the definition of a happy life is to find 13 people you find absolutely fascinating [cite]

"We are all always deploying and directing our energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it" [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]

"High morality without religion is too abstract, high morality craves for religion… Religion symbolises high moral ideals which then travel with us and are more intimately and accessibly effective than the unadorned promptings of reason." [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]

"Serious art is a continuous working of meaning in the light of the discovery of some truth." [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]

"How can we make ourselves better? is a question moral philosophers should attempt to answer." [The Sovereignty of Good]

"[There] are no adventures. Adventures are stories and one does not live a story." [Sartre, Romantic Rationalist]

"Life can be seen as full of aesthetic imaginative activity which is scarcely distinguishable from moral activity." [?]

"The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future" [The Philosopher's Pupil]

"When we apprehend and assess other people we do not consider only their solutions to specifiable practical problems, we consider something more elusive... their total vision of life, as shown by their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessment of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny... what, making two points in the two metaphors, one may call the texture of a man's being or the nature of his personal vision." [paper]

"One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance." [A Severed Head]

"love is the perception of the individual." [?]

"Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real." [The Sublime and the Good] very popular

the purpose of literature is to "prove that other people really exist" [?]

"All that consoles is fake." [?]

"We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality." [Times of London, April 15, 1983?]

"The world can change in 15 seconds, when you fall in love." [?]

The humble man is the "kind of man who is most likely of all to become good" [?]

"There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship." [A Severed Head]

"The human soul craves for the eternal of which, apart from certain mysteries of religion, only love and art can give a glimpse." [The Black Prince]

"A saint is someone who absorbs evil without passing it on." [?]

"Bad art is a lie about the world." [Existentialists and Mystics]

"Real life is so much odder than any book." [letter to Philippa Foot]

"English socialism is perfectly worthy, but it is not socialism. It's welfare capitalism" [Under the Net]

"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us" [A Fairly Honourable Defeat]

"Images of light and space and movement are fundamental to our modes of cognition. Moral imagination is partly esthetic, it is a place where the esthetic is moralized." [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]

"Youth is a marvelous garment" [The Bell]

"Extreme love is fed by everything" [A Severed Head]

"There are few places where virtue plainly shines" [Sovereignty of Good]

"The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart." [The Red and the Green]

"Why not use one's mind in the old way, with pens, paper, notebooks, etc., instead of dazzling one's eyes staring at a glass square, which separates one from one's thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?" [1982]

"Oh, wonderful people of Britain! After all the ballyhoo and eyewash, they've had the guts to vote against Winston! I can't help feeling that to be young is very heaven!" [letter]

"philosophers are not often popular idols" [Sartre: Romantic Rationalist]

"the essence of love is the toleration of difference" [?]

"Most artists understand their own weaknesses far better than the critics do" [Black Prince]

"Good art is anamnesis... 'memory' of what we did not know we knew." [Plato?]

"'I don't want a loan, father. I want a great deal of money, not on loan. Nothing else will do.'" [Unofficial Rose]

"Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here." [The Sovereignty of Good]

"All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn." [The Black Prince]

"Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously." [Henry and Cato]

"I dare say everything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped." [?]

"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is." [A Severed Head]

"Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out." [Italian proverb?]

“Education doesn’t make you happy – nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are – or because we’ve been educated – if we have, but because education may be the means by which we realise we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.” [?]

"...at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over." [The Sovereignty of Good]

Early Greek history "sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the players lies in complicating the rules" [The Nice and the Good]

"socialist movement... moral void in the life of the country" [Existentialists and Mystics]

"Our life problem is one of the transformation of energy." [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]

"You see, love is energy. The soul is a huge vast place, and lots of it is dark, and it's full of energy and power, and this can be bad, but it can be good, and that's the work, to change bad energy into good, when we desire good things and are attracted magnetically by them." [Above the Gods]

Love is "the painful realisation that something other than myself exists" [cite]

"The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding." [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]

"Art, especially literature, is a great hall of reflection where we can all meet and where everything under the sun can be examined and considered" [The Fire and the Sun]

"Better to have fewer and more worthy readers." [?]

"In the strange cosmic astronomy of the wandering zeitgeist we are closer to Plato now than in many previous centuries." [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals]

"You may know a truth, but [if it's at all complicated] you must be either a poet or an artist not to utter it as a lie." [An Accidental Man]

"loving attention" [A Fairly Honourable Defeat]

"Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger." [The Sea, the Sea]

"I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time." [The Red and the Green]

Iris Murdoch said of anti-gay bias that "the facts which will cure this prejudice belong to the ordinary talk of ordinary people." [The Ladder, 1964?]

"Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination. Whereas bad art is the soft, messy self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy." [Paris Review interview]

Early Greek history "sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the players lies in complicating the rules." [The Nice and the Good]

of learning a language (Russian, in her case): "I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect . . . My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me." Even better is her annexation of art within the realm of a selfless surrender to external reality: good art "resists the easy patterns of the fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are the recognisable and familiar rat-runs of selfish daydream". [The Sovereignty of Good]

Pubs are "universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of mankind" []

literary composition is [a period of invention followed by a period of composition] [?]

“One should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself.” [cite]

the reason she kept writing books was that she hoped each new one would exonerate her for the ones that went before [?]

[As philosophy becomes] "increasingly a matter for highly trained experts, it separates itself from, and discourages, the vaguer and more generally comprehensible theorising which it used to nourish and be nourished by." [Existentialists and mystics]

 
 
 
 
 
.

Priority-semantics

at any moment
in any person's
mental model

some objects are
more important
than others

ie
mental objects can be ranked
by importance

rankings changing in time

and different rankings
can be averaged
narrowly or broadly
by various algorithms

locally important details
demoted
as averages are broadened
(other times
other people
other places
other species)

today's average
year-to-date average
family average
community average
national average
species average

these ?universally? important objects
are named in english
with words like

sex death ego money
love family brains body
beauty art communication
celeb gossip sports politics



novelists projecting their private priorities
onto realistic characters
with individual priorities

 
 
 
 
 
.

Shortshort story semantics

what can xml do with
For sale: baby shoes, never worn?

start with a short-story microformat
on top of a want-ad microformat

the 'characters' in the story
being the parents who placed the ad
and the lost baby
(and the newspaper that took the ad
and the readers the parents hope to reach)

the want-ad microformat
entirely ignoring the critical facts
(the baby
and how it was lost)

mode: selling
topic: thing-clothes-shoes
size: baby
condition: 9
price: unknown



we'd like the story microformat
to include a field for 'theme'
but the only
(ignored)
possible approach
is something like my solace

eg: solace/losing#baby

so we need experts in
art philosophy religion
politics economics history
fiction poetry humor
psychology philology anthropology sociobiology
criticism design logic math

to compile comparable storycycles
on all their areas of expertise...

 
 
 
 
 
.

Wisest of the wise

[this is the first
and hopefully the
least
articulate and
most
controversial
of a projected series]

any semantic web first needs
a mental model of all possible semantic webs
(and this mental model must include
a mental model of all possible
mental models)

say

mentally model each 'object'
(including mental objects)
as a named point
of known or unknown duration
(some objects
more important than others
from the perspective of any given mind)

with lines between points
modeling relationships between objects

relationships changing in time

relationships mentally modeled
by related mental objects

relations affecting
and affected by
(more or less strongly)
related relationships with other objects

(all mental models of relationships
necessarily related to the mental models
of all related objects
and of their relationships)


and mental models differ in depth
in wisdom
some shallow some deep

deep or shallow
in many different ways

different wisdoms
characteristic of the deep or shallow
people who hold them

but mental models of semantic webs
and mental models of mental models
must be deep by every definition

constructed atop a distillation
of all wisdoms
(art philosophy religion
politics economics history
fiction poetry humor
psychology philology anthropology sociobiology
criticism design logic math)
only by the wisest of the wise

.

World wealth evenly divided

world population: 6,656,230,000 [eg]

Earth's surface: 1.26041536 * 10^11 acres

18.9 acres per person
13.4 acres water
1382 square feet fresh water (37*37 ft) [stat]
2/3 acre ice [stat]
5.5 acres land
3.18 acres arable [stat]

2.255 kW power [cite]