Roger Costello wrote a version of Conway’s Game of Life in XSLT. You apply a transform against a grid. Use another transform to display the resulting grid. Then apply the first transform to get to the next state. Didier Martin took the XML data and transforms, and made a version that’ll run in Internet Explorer [...]
Urs and Bernhard Seefeld are discussing using FoAF as a way to manage multi-author blogs. If you’re in that blog’s chain of trust, and can assert your identity, you’d be allowed to post to that blog. Having a common weblog format would smooth the way for this.
The notion of path dependence — that history matters, annoys economic libertarians the same way that evolution annoys deists: it implies pure dumb luck is a factor in the order of things. It’s a knock against the Learned Hand Doctrine, market dominance may not derive from superior technology or execution alone. So while Blogistan revels [...]
Richard Powers plays with the notion that all those web pages, IRC logs, and USENET posts are critical mass for an autonomous narative engine –a self organizing Scheherazade who leaves us wanting for the next installment– in his short story ‘Literary Devices’. It’s up on Salon for two weeks.
[ via laughingMeme via DavosNewbies ] A diagram, large, of the interrelationships between the entites and players in the current round of financial miscounduct. You can get it on a tshirt too.
Hamish’s writes a weblog full of interesting stuff on modeling, simulation, and information.
Oh man, I love Half Bakery. A writer could do no worse than to stop in and look for versimilitude-creating widgets. For example: Create a solar-powered artificially intelligent motorised road cone that, through the simplest behaviour model possible ends up grouping around holes in the road.
I neglected to link Phillip Winn’s extended comments on my response to his discussion of Chomsky, and my tirade on the response to Megnut’s article on Blog structure. He raises a question, which I’m still thinking through, about my politics.
Shelley, I think we’re talking past each other. You said: However, telling me that I can’t disagree with Meg because of her status in the community, or that I must pay deference to the technology I’m using when I write this post, sorry, no can do. You tell me something’s untouchable and the first thing [...]
I’m joining the RSS link bandwagon, and have put html:link elements in the head of the weblog for RSS auto-discovery. Update: I forgot to add the link elements to the category and permalink views. That’s done now.
Shelley, over at the Bird That Burns, has been wondering about the disproportionate power of weblog links on Google results. While I agree with her that there’s been a massive rightwards shift in weblogs since the technology’s become accessible, the onus is on the data user to detect bias in the data they’re using. In [...]
The editors at Cockeyed.com unwittingly started a journey up the river. They were in Sacramento, attempting to determine why anyone would live there, when they noticed a plauge of “work-from-home” signs affixed to every telephone pole in site. They started following the trail, and found a cult, not unlike Col. Kurtz’s, at the end.
I’m excited about David Weinberger’s forthcoming Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s still not out, but the first two chapters are on the book’s web site. He’s also written an online version of the book, that summarizes the arguments for kids. What an idea! Write a kids version of one’s book as an exercise in refining [...]
April’s Atlantic Monthly has a great article by Jonathan Rauch on work at the Brookings Institution on simulating societies. The work is revealing how simple rules and preferences amoung actors can give rise to behaviors as segregation in housing, corruption in business and government, genocide, and the size distribution of firms. The Atlantic’s website has [...]
I like Cory Doctorow’s essay celebrating the garage-band, cheap/fast/out-of-control qualities of the Internet. The Internet is antithetical to commerce. There, I said it. … The Internet is full of fantastically useful and frustratingly unavailable services, from the elegant simplicty of Weblogs.com’s XML-RPC interface that accepts a URL and a link-title and shoves ‘em on top [...]