(Being an extended email after an odd weekend of web surfing) My Weekend of Web Surfing A Punishment in Pthree Parts (the P in Pthree is silent) ----------------------------------------------------------------- (Too Cool! a Table of Contents!) TOC : Part the Phirst : Why? or "What the hell is This Jefu Guy doing with all this email." Part the PSecond : Semiotics or "I just could not ignore Derrida Deriding me any longer" Part the Pthird : A page on Everything2 Things guys think girls should know 1.25. If you want us to put the seat down when we're done, you should put it up when you're done. 2.31. If something we said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad and angry, we meant the other one. ----------------------------------------------------------------- (Clever : a contents!) C: Part the Phirst : Why? Why do I keep posting these silly things? Rather a while back, when I was working for GE, a local physicist (Dr Dick StPeters - who somewhere decided to elevate himself from archangle to GOD) built a mailing list called GOD's mailing list. At first there were only a few of us and it was minor chat, some computer questions, and GOD's thoughts for the day (kind of a mail based blog). Over time it grew until there were probably a hundred people on it - and evolved from being a blog + comments to being a place for humour, puzzles, commentary and all. It was rarely dull, often maddening, and almost always intellectually stimulating. Organizational mailing lists to me seem to be little more than random collections of "for sale" signs - not that those are out of place, but it could be more? A place for people to share interesting thoughts, to ask questions they have no easy answers for or to share interesting websites, books and the like. All of these could add valuably to the intellectual activity around the neighborhood. Or maybe not. But its a beautiful day in the neighborhood anyway. But since I (at least) think that this kind of activity and challenge is A Good Thing, I'll probably continue tossing infons into the void - just to see how many times I can make them skip. In any case I'm having fun, and learning. (Most of the learning would go on anyway, but the process of trying to formalize it is always valuable.) Some people have asked me how I get the time to see all these websites and things. There are several factors - I have DSL at home (wheee!), I use the tabbed browsing feature of mozilla where things load in the background so I don't have to wait while each page loads. I often interleave this curiosity based surfing with that more directly related to CS. But the Biggest and Best reason of all is to wonder how, if I want to continue to learn and explore, I cannot take this time. Part the Psecond : Semiotics or "I just could not ignore Derrida Deriding me any longer" I ran into a page on something like "Algebraic Models of Semiotics in User Interfaces". I knew that semiotics was a branch of discourse involving signs, their relationships and meanings. So, user interfaces seemed reasonable - but "Algebraic"? I've been avoiding any serious coping with post-structuralism, deconstructionism and semiotics having spent a wonderful hour or two trying to puzzle out a couple of Foucault's sentences. Almost opaque they are. Worse than Proust mixed with Joyce with a bit of Beckett to bring out the Irish flavor a bit more, sprinkled with Gaddis and baked in a delicate crust of Faulkner - all served in a delightful presentation with a light wine sauce (a 1974 Synergetics from Bucky Fuller's vineyard (the northwest corner by preference)). (Be thankful that I did not try to do it in fancy restaurant French.) The availability of "Derrida for Beginners" comic book on amazon.com tempted me for a bit. Unsuccessfully. But... sigh... its impossible to keep up with even a part of whats going on in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. Trying to keep at least _aware_ of whats going on overall is a huge task. (To give you a notion, amazon.com gives a match of 6419 books when I search on Shakespeare, and 32000 for a search on computer. Add in (to be fair, we'll do it for both sides) books not listed under these primary search terms but definitely in the same areas. I suspect that the relative ratios will remain about the same. Add in journals, research/development oriented web pages and the amount of CS to keep track of gets, well, Big. So, I've learned that sometimes I do need to say NO! to that builtin curiosity that is a big part of Who I Am (and probably an equally big part of why many "bears of little brains" (of whatever species) find me Annoying As All Shit). But I've also learned that its also good to follow my nose, to toss in a dash of randomness and to always, always chase down things that recur more often than chance would indicate. So (phew, back to the topic) the mention of semiotics in conjunction with UIs when added to some ruminations (but only one stomach ones) on Charles Palliser's "Betrayals" (which seems to be a kind of semiotic "Rashomon" mixed with a dash or two of Sherlock Holmes), and a synchronous reading of an article in an older New Yorker raised the incidence level of semiotics well above the ignore-it threshold. Anyway, I've spent more hours than I'd like this weekend looking into semiotics, deconstructionism and the like and am still digesting what I have found and looking for more viewpoints. One of the first websites I found - and one which explained some of the facets of semiotics to me in a way that finally penetrated and determined me to spend some real time on semiotics is : http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/ I do suspect that some of the mathematical metaphors used helped me in understanding what he was trying to say. He has information on the following subtopics that may be of interest to us here : multimedia semiotics on-line education the structure of the modern university Here are a couple quotes that interested me : On deconstructionism in the social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. "His deconstructionism, primarily a movement in literary criticism and similar disciplines, is very threatening when applied to the social sciences. It undercuts the possibility of their being positive sciences at all, of their pretensions to "objective knowledge" about the social world. But then deconstruction raises the same epistemological problems for the traditional sciences as well, without negating the usefulness of their technologies" The next quote raises in me some very interesting notions about information theory - and hence with algorithmic information theory (a slightly different thing) and on to the very fundamental problem (believe it or not) of randomness. This (and the last one) also remind me of some thoughts I've had chasing their tails (or since its semiotics we're talking about) in my feeble cerebral (feebum cerebrum?) about how to impose geodesics onto the information structures and use that... well, somehow. "The most fundamental principle of semiotics is that meaning is possible only because not all possible combinations of things, events, contexts, are equally likely. The particular odds on various combinations describe the culture of our community: our expectations and our patterns of behavior, including how we interpret meanings and how we interact with our environment" Some good thoughts on the learning process and how it is essentially artificial in the university context : "In science education, for example, we expose students to science textbooks instead of, say, to scientific text; to science teachers instead of to scientists; to school laboratories instead of to scientific and technological workplaces. Simplified equipment, simplified procedures and processes, whether intellectual, conceptual, or manual will not suffice. They may have a function as adjuncts to learning, once students have already participated in the actual social practices being taught, but we cannot expect them to function, as they do now, as substitutes for such direct participation. It is only after we have learned how, say, science and technology operate in our communities in real laboratories and workplaces that we can intelligently participate in the construction of correspondences and similarities between what happens there and what happens in science classrooms or school laboratories." And on ANT (Actant-Network Theory) : "ANT has much in common with Ecosocial Dynamics, but adds one crucial observation: that the usual view of dynamical systems assumes that they have a local topology, and so events nearby in space and time are more relevant than those at a distance, leading to neat separation of scales of processes. ANT notes that the topology of networks is in general non-local, and further that semiotic artifacts are often the 'boundary objects' that mediate non-local, scale-breaking interconnections. This leads to a powerful generalization of ecosocial systems theory to include network topologies (and the rarer laminar topologies) and makes possible a general inquiry into scale-respecting vs. scale-breaking dynamics." Now, aren't you just ever so glad you read it all! If you think that was fun, wait for the five minute tour of deconstructionism, semiotics, phenomenology, Yakko, Wakko, Dot, Pinky and the Brain, the Usual Suspects, Tyrone Slothrop, Dickens, Joyce, the White Knight and Coricopat. I can hear you all packing to flee the area in avoidance of that Unnatural Disaster. Part the Pthird : A page on Everything2 Things guys think girls should know. Everything2.com is a kind of homegrown web encyclopedia. For those who want odd serendipity, this can be a good place to look - and get lost in. I ran into this page by starting with semiotics and wandering a bit. True enough to be funny and funny enough to be, um, funny. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=581001&lastnode_id=134220 ----------------------------------------------------------------- (Awesome! an appendix!) A: I know, this is rather longer than my usual babbling, but I was experimenting with using some dictation software. It took some practice and training - both for me and the program (the software "learns" pronunciation and can be "coached" into adding new vocabulary). I'm using Via Voice from IBM - and it works wonderfully. The "Standard Edition" costs about $55 - there are higher priced versions - but having looked at reviews and the Feeping Creaturism, I think the Standard Edition will do well for most needs around campus and that the very expensive one is a decent example of Conspicuous Consumption (A very few people with very large dictation needs MIGHT benefit from the middlin expensive one.) I HIGHLY recommend that this software be included in the standard software packages that come with most new computer acquisitions. Despite the (probably inevitable) growth in size of verbose (hey, just look at this post) academical male bovine digestive by-product. Mandatory Obscure Literary Reference : The Books of the Psomethings, the Psayings, the Pnotes, the Psongs and the Pspeciastes. I'm hoping to experiment with XML, XMLSchema, XSL, the Dom and CSS2 to produce better formatting for subsequent similar nonsense. (No Phool I - No Phootnotes Inserted [1]) [1] At least no ordinary Phool ----------------------------------------------------------------- The End