Hijacked Blogspot

My readers will have noticed a 'change of tone' of my past few messages on the Liquid Development blog. I was experimenting with publishing options on blogspot, so that I could also publish the blog to a different domain name, and blogspot without no apparent warning decided to release my subdomain name liquiddevelopment.

Next thing I knew, people start writing me that are getting garbage through my feed. It seems that some porn spam king got hold of the name as soon as blogspot let it go and they put it to nefarious use.

I wrote to blogger.com 3 days ago and I hope they will be able to fix the situation.

Fortunately the content of the hijacked feed is so extreme and out of character that there cannot be any doubt to my readers about what happened.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes with blogspot.

Perceptual Stances: Start Small

I am interested in the tricks and hacks that we can use to somehow 'mechanically' steer and control our perception.  

Presentation Formats are one way to do this, forcing you to express some content within an artificially imposed presentation frame.  The unusual 'shape' of the container can force you to reshape the content and discover some previously hidden properties.

Perceptual Stances (Thinking Formats?) do the same thing by forcing us to focus only on certain aspects of our subject matter.  Business Pundit wrote an interesting post that points out how you can unleash your creativity and get started by focusing on small thing rather than on grand theories and stereotypical thinking.

It strikes me that some of the examples he uses seem almost related to techniques I found in Drawing On The Right Side of Your Brain: Drawing Negative Spaces and Semantic-Neutral Drawing.  These are not the names the author would have used, but if you are interested I can expand on them.

Minimal Descriptions and Metaprogramming

see Minimal Descriptions and Metaprogramming on the Liquid Development blog

Lost Garden: Creating a system of game play notation

Notations for representing game knowledge

Read more at lostgarden.com/2006/01/...

LANGUAGE EVOLUTION: A BRIEF GUIDE FOR LINGUISTS

Read more at www.derekbickerton.com/...

Native American Languages

Read more at www.meta-religion.com/L...

The Social Evolution of Software

Today I came across CodeTree.

Can digital artists learn new techniques, be exposed to new coding structures, and better express themselves by working in tandem or in a group?

CodeTree is an attempt to create a worthwhile dialogue between new media artists of different skill levels and backgrounds. The project's objective is to offer a social network that facilitates learning and artistic expression—a place where coders can dissect, share, and expand upon one another's code.

The site is nice, but what really strikes me is the possibility of creating some kind of 'live' repository for code.
Ok, I know we have sourceforge, rubyforge and all those other forges and they do have forums and tools to comment on dovelopers, but I'm thinking about something different. Smaller piecies of code for a start. Nuggets of code that can be understood at a glance and modified with a quick brush on the keyboard. Think Java Almanac.

I would like these piecies of code to be tracked during their evolution, and to be able to follow the personal history of their contributors too. I would like to comment on them via a wiki-like interaction. I would love to use them via intellisense in my code.

I want to be able to sketch my intent and as soon as my 'Intentisense' picks up interesting keywords, somethink looking a bit like Google Suggest. If I do my own modifications I would then like to upload them directly to my Noosaurus, my shared executable knowledge thesaurus.. for other people to see and modify and rate and rank and tag.

Coding like tagging like blogging... I feel this can have huge potential.

ChragokyKyberneticks

Interesting site.  Bizarre visualizations.

I'll have to investigate this further.

Read more at www.chragokyberneticks....

Accounting as a Brainframe

These days I am reading De Kerckhove's Brainframes, a book that puts forward the idea that as we are shaping technologies, technologies are also shaping us, on the very neurological level, making us into very different kind of people.

He attacks the rethoric of 'the same old human nature with new better tools'. New tools make new humans.

I would like to put a link to the book here, but I couldn't get anything from the web. weird.

Anyway, I came across to this article that seems to point out how accounting has been a fundamental brainframe (neurological stance?) in the evolution of our society.

Algorithms Dictionary

This dictionary gives short definitions of all the major and many  minor algorithms.

MetaLex: The Code and The Law

You must have heard the saying: if you have an idea, there is already a site about it on the web.  If you have an original idea, then there must be at least ten sites about it.

I googled for 'legal engine' and I found MetaLex.  This seems to be an XML legal ontology that could be a first step towards Executable Law.  This paper details some of the concepts.

Executable Law

Democracy 2.0 is a project that plans to rewrite laws from scratch via a wiki medium.  I'm not entirely sure of the validity of this experiment as I believe that a system as complex as a body of laws needs to evolve and adapt rather than being designed.

However this project gave me an idea.  Law is knowledge and some knowledge can be encoded in an executable format. What if laws could be translated to code?

You would have systems of laws that can be checked for consistency and loopholes.  The laws that apply to a given situation could be searched and legal simulations could be run as well.

Laws of course need interpretation, but I still wonder if there is a useful subset that could be mapped to code.

Time vs. Distance

When shaping knowledge, you should always remember what use it will be put to.
An underground map, for example, should represent the following information:

• connections between stations
• time taken by a train between two stations
• relative positioning of the stations over the city

Most maps do not answer to the time question, reflecting the view of the designer rather than the view needed by the user.  This london map considers time instead of space.

Lecture Notes Online

Lecture notes from finance, economics and mathematics.

word words and words

More links to the universe of words: Phronistery by Forthright
An excellent resource on linguistics

The Rules of Naming

When you need a word for that just so elusive concept..

How to generate names: WorldLab Naming Tools
Good names for componaies: SnarkHunting  Seth'sBlog
Find names for companies: Nameboy

Nooclay

Imagine a new smart software material that reacts to the actions and expectations of the shaper.  A sort of software live clay. 

Imagine a software material so advanced and yet so simple to interface with.  Not just a few intents, but the evolving semantic universe of human knowledge. 

Imagine a semantically rich material that changes shape in your hands, following your hints, your nudges, and at the same time offering the forms of the culture it has been tuned to.

Imagine Nooclay.

A sort of nooclay is already possible.  A software material with a cultural bias that is opinionated and makes assumptions, yet allows you to bend it to new shapes.. even if it give its best, it is really smooth when following that specific bias, the stylistic school it has been tuned to.

Evolving Maru Batsu from Intents

I invite you to read Maru Batsu, an experiment in code evolution, driven by intent and language.

Refactoring Emphasis in Language

Language is one of the most ancient forms of knowledge encoding and transmission, yet we have so little conscious knowledge of how we can use it to achieve the communication that we want.

Words are programs, psychoglyphs running into other people's head. Shaping words means shaping active executable knowledge.

While reading "sleight of mouth" by Robert Dilts, I found a couple of very interesting concepts.

Look at the following sentences and feel the difference, although they have the same informational contant at face value:

• I want to do X, but I have a problem
• I want to do X, and I have a problem
• I want to do X, even if I have a problem

I call "But", "and" and "even if" Emphatic Tags and they can be used to move the emphasis between:

• justification, passive stance
• equanimity, objective stance
• drive, propositive stance

You can do a little word magick by restating sentences, while refactoring it for an emphatic change, and throwing them back with a more empowered meaning, even if you have never tried before.

The other emphasis trick is the enabler/toll stance.

Read the following and feel the different emotional effect in front of apparently identical information:

• If you feel like putting some effort in it, you can do anything you want
• You can do anything you want, if you feel like putting some effort in it

The sentence order makes a world of difference. The first part of the sentence sets the context, while the second part clarifies the meaning of the first one.

The if-opening sentence is a Toll Sentence. It's asking you for something, for a precondition, before giving you what you want. It's even hinting at the fact that you are not doing what is necessary. It feels like you are trying to convince someone of something.

The you-can-opening sentence is an Enabler Sentence. It offers you a wide range of options: anything you want, and it then points to the path to go and grab those options.