Robot Wisdom auxiliary: robotwisdom

Showing posts with label robotwisdom. Show all posts

06 October 2008

miscellaneous topics

i'm caught between two platforms...

robotwisdom.com will blink out again
at the end of this month
unless another volunteer host turns up

i was appalled to learn that google
declines to index pages with more than 100 links
assuming they're spam
(i think pages with <100 are lazy)

google-reader-shared
has killed linkblogging for me
at least temporarily

i've fallen in love with reCAPTCHA

the little boost of knowing
i'm proofing random texts
makes that burden a joy

i tried the new online Monopoly
and find it pointless
except the perspective it offers
on googlemaps AI

if it implemented a map-recaptcha
i'd love it
to fill out the googlemaps model
with geographic intelligence

(Monopoly relaunches this week
if you want to try it out

about the only strategy
is sabotaging neighbors
or not

rural areas have few/no neighbors)

it may be a dark age for linkblogging
but it's interesting times for web 2.0

with tiny tweaks from myspace to facebook to twitter
bringing revolutionary vibe-shifts

which have many evolutions to go

it has to go back to
usenet's decentralised distribution

and i've got an idea
for a new antimath symbol
probably just "+"
that represents
a hypothetical absolute moral ideal

snubbed by almost all
subbing half-measures

pursued tirelessly by one or two

Birth of blogging

i may or may not use this post
to aggregate debate
about the origins of blogging

my word 'weblog' was intended to summarise
some simple basic design features
that hadn't yet been recognised as such

- the best web links
- of every kind
- briefly described
- added as discovered
- top-down
- keep the page short/quick
- link direct to the juicy stuff
- everybody shares their tastes

existing models all lacked some of these
(justin hall's was long/slow
winer kept rearranging the day's items)

i avoided 'news' at first
looking far and wide for good content
most others hadn't yet discovered

it was a (small) catastrophe
when blogger.com co-opted the word
for online diaries

few people maintain proper weblogs

and i'm still waiting
for a decent online web-logging site
(delicious is closest)

twitter isn't a good fit
urls are masked
archives are clumsy

the explosion of options
has become frustrating

'onebit blogging' a la
hypemachine and flickr
seem hopeful, in their way

[mefi thread]
[Ammann]
[Rosenberg]
[Winer]

Twitter motifs

these are themes i see repeatedly in twitter jokes

it's not meant as a criticism
but as a step towards semanticweb-ai-tagset

they're arranged as a storysequence as far as possible

stayed up all night
insomnia
noisy neighbors
woke late
dream
morning wood
hungover
morning mouth
woke in strange place
woke with strange bedmate
woken by kids/pets

need coffee
hair of dog
strange breakfast
high-calorie breakfast
leftovers for breakfast

strange dress for work
late to work
skip work
unemployed
self-employed
to-do list

internet addictions
videogame addictions
teevee addictions
wasting time
ocd

exercise/gym
music soundtrack

commute
weird co-workers
stupid bosses
stupid software
poor social skills
asperger's

boring life
no friends
clumsy flirting

getting favrd
getting followers
losing followers

if life were like tv/games/movies

better software ideas

m&mworld

replace each human with an m&m

color each m&m
according to its philosophy

when their philosophy changes dramatically
their color changes as well

some never change, from birth

some share their parents philosophy

some don't

healthy whole personalities are represented
by whole m&ms

broken and wounded personalities
by broken m&ms

the tragedy of being broken
is normally blamed on another broken m&m

Twitter profile for Jorn Barger/ Robot Wisdom

since i've got 3 twitter accounts going
and none allows a real profile
i'll post a combined profile here

http://twitter.com/robotwisdom
is personal/miscellaneous

bkgd image: my 1st pc [pic source]

http://twitter.com/robotwisdom/favourites
are all faves, mostly humorous

http://twitter.com/rwaux
is a mirror of my linkblog

rwaux icon source [flickr]

http://twitter.com/rwaux/favourites
is the serious tweets from my favorites
artistic or useful or deep

http://twitter.com/jornbarger
was a special purpose experiment

http://twitter.com/jornbarger/favourites
is still unused

My version of the ideal Wikipedia bio [RWx]

Highlights of RWx

bOINGbOINGzEITGEIST

clay shirky has
educed a simulacrum
of boingboingist groupthink

by soliciting 'novel' futurist predictions
(150 so far, horribly nonnovel)

none of which connect The Singularity
with human wisdom
(at best hoping it will be left by
googleSanta
in our xmas stockings)

but robot wisdom
for the semantic web
will require slow painstaking
literate esthetic
disentangling
of the motives that roil our hearts

and confronting the Cons
that enslave us

AI in the comix?

I think we've just been cussed out in the universal language of mathematics

most science fiction
punts the hard questions of AI
by assuming that robots achieve
consciousness
in one fell swoop
without intermediate stages

but the premise of 'robot wisdom'
is that the intermediate steps
must progress from mathematics
thru literature
to psychology

along which path
we'll achieve
universal human/scientific wisdom

not least the ability
to cuss in math

Blogkeeping (meta)

i'm increasingly dissatisfied
with blogspot/blogger
for my linkblog

they recently changed how they handle
posts dated in the future
so now
to keep my newlinks on top
i have to date my other posts in the past

also they're very slow to load in GgChrome

and their rss feed is useless for linkblogging
so i've tried to offer various alternatives:

mainly del.icio.us
which only allows one link per item
and always places the link first
and doesn't even support italics
(though it previews the occasional flickrpic)

but also Feed43 [rss]
(which needs special, constraining markup)

i'd like to embed some of the gorgeous images
i'm finding by the dozen at flickr
[rss-able but filtered and small]
or [large and less filtered but no feed]

combo feeds (delicious plus flickrfaves + twitter)
are now available at Tumblr [slow and partial]
GgReader [slowish]
and FeedBurner [slowish, rss-able]

but really i'd like a cross between del.icio.us and tumblr

btw
i've become very lax
about linking my other rwx blogposts
in the linkblog
because they feel 'unfinished'
so i expect people to occasionally visit
http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/
and scroll past the links to see what's new

as well (more often) as
http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/2009/10/god-of-old-testament-is-depiction-of.html

The ontology of the Con

reagan's victory in 1980
was a cold awakening for us hippies
the progressive dream drowned

and ever since we've been pedaling in sand
in tar
no traction

i see one hope

the solidity of science

social science without academic bs

an a.i. simulation of the Con

world history rewritten

in the broader context of psychological evolution

the etymogeny of meaning

the mysterious depths of sexuality

wakefulness intimidation ego and sleep

The usual url/bookmark story

bookmarks
are the primary currency/coinage of the Web

so if we want to
nail the bookmark entitytype
into its usual-story-historical framework
for semanticweb purposes

we need to sketch
the usual url-bookmark story

the creator substory:
content conceived
content created
content posted
url shared

the consumer substory:
surfer has motivation
surfer has methodology
methodology ranks url-sources
surfer offered url by url-source
surfer notes offer mentally
surfer notes offer physically ('to-read' list)
surfer visits url
surfer partially consumes content
surfer rejects content, erases notes
surfer extends notes for later
surfer wholly consumes content
surfer passes-on url with comments
surfer acknowledges url-source(s)

the derivative-work substory:
surfer conceives related new content
surfer acknowledges url's influence

the historian substory:
broader path of url traced/reconstructed
traced-path posted

of course
there are almost infinite variations
on this skeleton

but a true semantic Web
will only become possible
when every stage
of every bookmark's history
can be tagged with its appropriate
story-context

Real post date: 15 Oct 11:20am
(Blogger no longer lets me
finesse my linkblog to the top
via postdating
so my nonlinkblog posts
will now be 'pre'dated)

05 October 2008

The universe of stories

The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser [cite]

the internet is swollen
with lists, sorted
alphabetically
by date
by popularity

but the deepest sorting
is (almost) nowhere to be seen

the story sort

personplacething
each particular individual
has an individual history
of creation
of relationships
of eventual dissolution

and every abstract type
of personsplacesthings
has an abstract, 'usual' story

a branching monomyth
of classes of creation
sequences of relationships
classes of dissolution

so when the semantic web
tries to nail down any entity

it's doomed to failure
until that 'nail' can be hammered
into a freestanding framework
of that entity-type's usual storyhistory

10 September 2008

Urk

Jill Tarter [Wiki]: It's the slow-thinking speed of the humans relative to the mechanicals that makes me wonder whether in fact they might be so reduced in number that a small glitch, a fluctuation, can mean the end of them. Or whether they won't be purposely eliminated, or choose to eliminate themselves.

Will Wright: It's an interesting point, because if you basically take the brain out, what other part of human biology would you want to keep?

JT: Right.

WW: In which case, is that to say that we're likely to transition into purely designed creature or entities?

JT: That's what the singularity is all about — having the first opportunity ever to do that. Who will take it is the question. [my emphasis]

Am I reading this right, that they take seriously the possibility that humans will/should let the species die out, so superior robot brains can take over?

"...if you basically take the brain out, what other part of human biology would you want to keep?"

01 April 2008

Blake's psychedelic semantic web

not just
in
every grain of sand

but in every field
of every database

(even the simplest:

name address age gender title
etc)

we
must
see
the whole potential universe

ie
all those simple fieldobjects'
real-or-potential
relationships
with all other fields/objects

naturally ordered
most-important first (a

literary

criterion
you must then
(now) begin
to spend the whole rest
of your life
studying)

as if
every field has an extra
asterisk p.s.

where anomalies are noted

(how certain is the value?
why or why not?
when and why did it last change?
etc)

21 March 2008

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

14 March 2008

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

28 November 2007

Autobiography 2.0: a 'person' microformat experiment on del.icio.us

the semantic web movement is 8 years old
and has delivered little more than
a microformat for business cards [Wiki]

and nothing to rank with
roget or lenat

so i'd like to propose
using del.icio.us for prototyping
much more ambitious
microformat-like linksets

starting eg with
prototype person-profiles
[Jorn Barger]

replacing pagetitles with microformat fieldnames

using Wikipedia placeholders
if the fieldvalue isn't already a url

using del.icio.us tags
to sort fieldtypes

other possible prototypes:
website-profile microformat
webpage-profile microformat
blog-profile microformat
video-profile microformat
song-profile microformat
porno-profile microformat

(each of these should be
summarizable
via heraldic barcodes)

05 November 2007

The best of RobotWisdom WebLog

[links updated]

Dec 1997

17Dec

first post:

A thread about gangs on chi.general led me to this reference source on Chicago gangs: [Wayback] which offers a ton of details-- names, symbols, alliances-- you never see anywhere else. In the newsgroup discussion [new url], "Tommy the Terrorist" wisely suggests that if gangs have corrupt cops watching out for them, then their territorial boundaries ought to match those cops' precincts' boundaries as well.

18Dec

I enjoy "Dilbert" (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/) as much as the next nrrd, but FAIR's Norman Solomon is arguing that it's sneaky capitalist propaganda. See his regular column in the Portland Alliance for May 1997: [new url]. (Many of Solomon's other commentaries are archived [new url] at ~~DejaNews~~ [GoogleGroups].)

23Dec

The next time you're headed for the library, spend a half-hour with Danny Yee's book reviews first: [new url] He has excellent taste...

Sam Smith... offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow at: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/usat.htm.

Salon.com... offers a cute new (though obvious) gif

25Dec

YAY! One of my favorite culture critics-- Candi Strecker-- has found a niche on the Web, at Tripod. [Wayback]

One of my very favorite singers, Mary Coughlan, a smoky Irish blues singer, formerly very obscure, now has a harrowing biographical sketch online at [Wayback] . "...during one point in her set Mary kept the audience transfixed as she sang 'Strange Fruit' without musical accompaniment, If you were to drop a pin you would have been beaten up for it... The greatest, sexiest redhead since Rita Hayworth" -The Times

JM Graetz was present at the creation of the first videogame, Spacewar, and tells it like it was: [new url]

At least someone is trying to keep an eye on netnews society: [new url]

27Dec

Michael Parenti is a GREAT political speaker who's put out a lot of tapes (on the net in RealAudio format, if you can handle that). His newest book, "Blackshirts and Reds", is an attempt to rehabilitate communism. From the preface at [new url]: "U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism." ...the book's first chapter document[s] the forgotten story of how Mussolini and Hitler were funded by rich capitalists, to crush the labor movement. And there's a horrendous compilation of the statistics of American misery ("37,000,000 regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs"): [new url] And a nice dismantling of the myth of free speech in the USA: [new url] The ~~three~~ [one] online chapters of his "Against Empire" give[s] a taut portrait of recent US imperialism, [new url]: "In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor--and it is because of the pillage they have endured."

Among many outstanding essays on another site: [new urls]

Parenti spells out explicitly his prescription for healing the USA, and debunks terrorism hype especially against Libya.

28Dec

[pending]

29Dec

[pending]

[Flowers pic]

Gorillas make gorgeous representational art! [new url]

25 October 2007

Toward a unified model of information

[thoughtmesh edition w/extra links]

my whole life since
maybe 1969
i've been struggling to write
a single book

with an evershifting shape but always
a psychology text
that at least sketches an outline
of human motivation
viewed thru a literary lens

like 'the sims XVI'
in textbook form

like solace perhaps
a composition of extracts
of nuances

like brainfeathers or finnegans wake
everyman's everyhistory

like laws of form or antimath
built up elegantly
from a single bit

like a pattern language for literary patterns

like polti or roget
a classification of plots
of story skeletons

like knuth a catalog
of data structures and algorithms

like cyc
a knowledgebase of common sense

like adler's syntopicon
an inventory of philosophies
wisdom marked up for robots
like the semantic web

a hierarchy of metadata
most urgent first

a constitution
for some possible utopia

and now centered on
colored lines in spacetime

x normally longitude-space
y simply ordinary time

with one line per
true human lifestory

and now with a suggested
simple first coloring

white for happy familymembers
all alike

blue for sad
red for bad

yellow for sickly
or better
for enslaved?

30 April 2007

Discourse patterns synching fractal thickets

we can posit a series
of levels of significance
for database synching

least significant would be synching
the values of attributes
for particular instances

(each instance gets
a record or a row
each attribute
a field or a column)

then slightly more significant
the addition or subtraction
of whole row-record-instances

then adding or editing
attribute-field-columns
that apply to all record-row-instances

and finally
whole new database/speadsheet/tables
with new systems of attribute-field-columns
appropriate to a whole new
object type

and in object-oriented systems
these objects are associated too
with methods

but more generally we might rename
'methods' as 'story skeletons'

each object type participating
in a usual range of stories

object-creation stories
object-change stories
object-spawning-new-objects stories
object-destruction stories

and a whole universe of
object-relationships-to-other-object-types stories
most conveniently sorted
into a local copy of the object hierarchy
(ie a fractal thicket)

Robot Wisdom auxiliary