 by Flemming Funch
John McPhee: "The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." You know, 'marine' as in 'under water'.
Chris Corrigan is posting lots of great stuff about self-organization and open space principles. He quotes a friend who writes about the book Education on the Edge of Possibility: "... They hypothesize that the reason most educational reforms don't foster much real change is because the underlying beliefs/rules aren't changing. They posit the idea that self-organization is happening all the time, AND that we naturally self-organize around those beliefs/rules that we hold to be true. (This last part is new to me. Can't quite get my mind completely around it. Don't know if I agree with it. Is that what we mean by self-organization as we use the term here?) One example is hierarchical beliefs self-organizing into hierarchical social structures. ..." Hmm, very interesting. There's obviously something to that. That's not the self-organization I'm looking for either, but of course it is true. People organize into hierarchies because they believe that's how things are. So, minds need to change. We of course can't just order people to self-organize in a networked pattern, if they don't believe in it.
Shawn Murphy is working on Nooron, which is a self-organizing knowledge management system. I'm excited about what he is working on. I met Shawn in Utah over the weekend and we have much in common in terms of what we see needs to be done. But he's probably smarter than I am. Nooron is in part based on PyOKBC, which is a Python implementation of Open Knowledge Base Connectivity, a standard proposed by Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center. So, this is about a fundamental approach for defining and storing any kind of knowledge. The details are probably hard to explain to people who haven't been looking for such a thing.
Shawn has some thoughts on Goodness is Not Enough. We're talking about ratings there. Most things you can rate on the net gives you some kind of 1-10 scale that doesn't really tell you what it is you're rating. But, to be general about it, what you're rating is the "goodness" of some resource. But that isn't really all that useful. We need much more flexibility. People should be able to rate resources based on whatever they have an opinion on. They should be able to self-organize, rather than being limited by too few, too general options.
Future Form is a project of designing the Workplace of the Future. You can contribute to some degree, by leaving online comments. I'm not sure what that will do.
The U.S. Army is planning to use NanoPaint to cover vehicles within just a few years. It would change color or paint scheme with the push of a button, or might even make a vehicle appear invisible.
Hillary Rosen, representative for RIAA, the music industry's organ made a pathetic case in a debate against free music. You know, listening to music for free is essentially a threat to the future of music itself. Not!
"Hydrogen is an odorless, colorless gas that after 13 billion years produces people." --Carl Sagan
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