On Snow Shoveling

By thomas | Published: December 24, 2009

So, beware. You will encounter spreadsheets that make no sense. You will also encounter spreadsheets that make sense, but require a large portion of your attention to understand. Be careful to not confuse the two. You will be asked to perform hacks and tricks. Your duty is that of the magician: to take something worthless and put it into production use. As such, you should be sure to take this task quite seriously. Failure in these tasks have large, long lasting, and sometimes irreversible consequences. Follow the instructions below. Do it right the first time. Test before you do something. Always check the results of your work for error. If you make an error correct it right away. And, finally, regard this task as a fun and difficult challenge– a puzzle to be solved. Thinking about it this way will make this Sisyphean task more enjoyable and improve the results of your work.

citation needed [1]

Works Cited:

1. ?

Posted in method | Leave a comment

Where is the bleeding edge of the internet?

By thomas | Published: December 12, 2009

An interesting question by Metafilter[1] user Pastabagel [2], “Where do you people find the things you post to the “blue”, and how do you consistently find them before the rest of us?

I should note that Metafilter’s main goal is to be a log of the best of the internet; the main site ( Metafilter.com ) is often referred to as the “front page”, or the “blue” ( because of the default color of Metafilter’s front page background ). Pastabagel’s question was not posted on the front page, or the blue, but in a sub-site of Metafilter called “Metatalk” or the “gray”, where readers, instead of discussing the best of the web, discuss Metafilter itself.

I find the resulting thread [3] quite interesting, as it gets to the heart of what I do every day– how to collect new information that is either interesting or useful to me. I should note that in my online information gathering pursuits, I don’t use digg, stumble upon, boing boing, and for zeus’s sake I don’t use fark. I gather most of my information, and have conversations about it, with a combination of books, software documentation, personal conversations, MPR, email, following smart people on Twitter/Flickr, and as a last resort Google. And in the case where the information I desire simply cannot be found online, when I have come to wits end in my pursuit of some topic, I often find I have to create that information myself ( which humph has written about [4] ).

But back to the question Where is the bleeding edge of the internet?, and I would like to cite a comment from that thread, by user jason’s_planet[5]:

There is no singular bleeding edge, there is no one MeFi-style high-profile link aggregator that could possibly answer to that name because, as noted above, once a decent link hits a high-profile site, it makes the rounds within a few days and it’s no longer cutting-edge.

No, there is no singular bleeding edge. Instead, there are hundreds of millions of bleeding edges. Little microscopic shards of cutting edge, if you will. Any possible topic under the sun, any body of knowledge that the human mind can conceive of, will have its own gurus, its own mavens. A sub-set of those gurus will have off-the-radar blogs dedicated to those obscure interests. And that’s where you’ll find the good stuff.

I pretty much agree with jason’s_planet, in terms of the question of where the edge of the internet is. I would add that as far as gathering and sharing the bleeding edge of the internet with others– it takes a lot of work. I’ve made a total of 20 posts in my 3 year membership at Metafilter. [6] Some of them were rather lame, and others were deleted. The good ones, however, required anywhere between 4 and 20 hours of research, writing, editing, hand-wringing, and finally an honest desire to share.

…

Going back, I would re-phrase the question of this post into a broader question: Where is the bleeding edge of thought? And also, How do we find it, and, if it is not there, how do we create it?.

On this blog I’ve made it my task to use the lessons I’ve learned in my interactions with Metafilter, and amplify them. Almost every post here is the work of somewhere between 10 and 40 hours of work– finding articles, going to libraries, reading, taking notes, talking with others, editing, thinking, doubting. Sharing interesting, valuable information is hard, and I feel we would all do better to realize this and act accordingly.

Metafilter user bigmusic [7] towards the end of the thread cited above writes about a certain “crunchland method”, which, though I’ve used the site for upwards of 3 years now have never heard of. Upon inspection it seems a quite excellent method [8] for making new posts to the blue, and perhaps exists as the information which Pastabagel was searching for. But further than that, I find it an interesting method for finding new and interesting information in general, and perhaps interesting to us in a broader sense that just the world of Metafilter.

…

As an aside, I might note that crunchland’s profile page resembles, in a sense, the traditional Unix man page[9] in the fact that it provides a certain kind of manual, or set of instructions for how to use metafilter, and add to it. It is also of note that the crunchland method is an undocumented feature [10] of Metafilter, a feature found not so easily, and only in combination with extensive experience with the site and a desire to know how do to things right.

Appendix

1: Metafilter http://metafilter.com

2: User profile: Pastabagel

3: Metatalk Thread: Where do you discover the links you post to the blue?

4: The Other Side of Search, David Humphrey, 2009

5: User profile: jasons_planet

6: My own user profile: localhuman ( If you are wondering what MarkovFilter is, I am sorry to say that it no longer exists, though more information on Markov in general can be found here

7: User profile: bigmusic

8: User profile: crunchland (scroll down to see the “crunchland method”

9: Wiki: Man page

10: Wiki: Undocumented Feature

Posted in Robert K Merton, investigation, reflection | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

a bug report for mozilla, or the importance of randomness and sound

By thomas | Published: December 5, 2009

In a few words, this post explains my desire that the HTML5 audio tag provide an API for the reading and writing of sound spectrum data of that tag, natively, in the Firefox web browser ( and, hopefully, all others). It is my hope that this would involve a Javascript API similar to, or better than, the current API provided by Adobe’s Flash technology. If you wish to know why I think this may be important, please skip this link and read on. Otherwise, here is a miniscule sample of the drawing capabilities of Javascript when provided with spectrum data:

Note: this link is no longer functional. sorry. hopefully you’ll read on.
http://modern-carpentry.com/workshop/html5/jsmusic

long version

Over the past few years, my favorite interactions with programming have been in trying to visualize music. I’ve made a number of efforts at doing so [1] [2] [3.1415926] [4] [5] ( Nota bene: You may only have one of these experiments open in your browser at one time, otherwise they will not work ) and yet I feel it hasn’t been gotten right yet, so I’ll keep trying.

It is a goal of mine to build instruments– tools of understanding and play. I am most motivated in this goal by my wish to understand the phenomena of sound and music, and also see it visually, in a natural way. In these pursuits I have found that an investigation of randomness, and its uses in graphical programming are important. [6]

I’ve always had a peculiar feeling that the random is what is special, it is what we must pay attention to. The random separates a normal bus-ride from one in which a kind stranger gives you a compliment. The random is a divide between a normal hurricane and Katrina. The random is the placement of a bullet just left of your heart, in your shoulder, rather than otherwise. It makes life interesting in that, for most people, the most happy and the most sad moments of their lives may be random ones, rather than moments they had thought out and planned to have. An un-expected phone call, the great harbinger of random, initiates unplanned actions regardless of whether it involved good news or bad. But I’d not like to get into a discussion of ‘what is random’, because that will take much too long. I will only say that the beautiful, the terrible, and the sublime often involve randomness.

One goal of many programmers is to make things look ‘natural’. Though there is much structure involved in natural processes, and many repeatable, non-random procedures for emulating nature, the best simulations of nature, or the real, are a combination of non-random and random processes. While there is no such thing as programmatic randomness ( the pursuit of programming randomness is a rather absurd one [7] ) there are many methods whereby we might approach randomness. Often these methods are enough to trick the eye, and end up providing us with pleasant things.

In my pursuits of programming randomness I have heavily relied upon Perlin noise, and am often pleased with the results. The Perlin noise method, however, is computationally expensive [8], and, as such, is restricted in its value for us in situations where large amounts of processing power are not on hand ( on the web, on a mobile phone, etc ). Because of this, I have been investigating different ways to simulate randomness in order to provide natural seeming and beautiful experiences.

One approach of mine has been to use the prime number data set as a way to simulate randomness, because of the fact that there is no formula to predict prime numbers along the continuum of 1 to infinity [9][10]. I have not yet completed these investigations, but they have informed my approach.

Another approach I have taken, with perhaps a bit more success, is to use sound data as a source of randomness. [11] I have found that a frame by frame analysis of sound and music provides us with a pleasant data set for our uses in the approach of randomness and naturalness– the real. An analysis of the distribution of frequencies in a sound at a particular point in time can easily be done, and, while such an analysis does not provide us with true randomness, its results often look random, and perhaps even natural.

Because I have found sound data so interesting, and also useful in my attempts to create natural motion and shapes, I have filed a bug with the Mozilla Firefox browser in regards to their audio tag [12][13]. The current HTML5 audio tag does not give us the capability to analyze sound on the fly. I am confident that, if this feature is regarded as important enough, it will be implemented, and I look forward to the day when I can begin using Javascript rather than Actionscript in my efforts to build instruments.

works cited

1:http://modern-carpentry.com/music/proto

2:http://modern-carpentry.com/workshop/musicdraw3/

3.1415926: http://modern-carpentry.com/area51/musictool

4:http://modern-carpentry.com/workshop/musicdraw4/

5: http://modern-carpentry.com/workshop/html5/jsmusic

6: From the programming world, I have been mostly influenced by Ken Perlin, Jared Tarbell, Robert Hodgin, Mario Klingemann, and Andre Michelle. I have also enjoyed Nicholas Tasim Teleb’s book, The Black Swan, and its analysis of the random, and the probable. Most important are my studies of the late Robert K Merton and his investigations into the concept of serendipity.

7: the idea of programming randomness or nature, of manufacturing the real with code is downright impossible, a task for Sisyphus [14], a rock I gladly put my shoulder to.

8: http://modern-carpentry.com/workshop/perlintest

9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number

10:http://modern-carpentry.com/workshop/primes/

11: The flash application on this page uses sound data ( though the sound is unheard ) along with the x and y position and velocity of a reader’s mouse in order to draw shapes http://articulture.org/

12: bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490705

13: about the bug: http://modern-carpentry.com/workshop/html5/jsmusic/about/

14: Camus, Albert. “The Myth of Sisyphus” Ed. Robert C. Solomon. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974

Posted in Robert K Merton, investigation, reflection | 6 Comments

No one sees the barn

By thomas | Published: November 25, 2009

After reading a post [1] about watching the American Music Awards, I am reminded of a great passage from a book of the late 20th century White Noise by Don Delillo. [2] [3]

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here. We’re now.”

I’m not so sure what to make of the passage, other than that it resonates deeply with me

1: David Humphrey, Bread and Circuits, 2009. I want your love

2: Don Delillo, White Noise. Viking, 1985

3: I actually remember first encountering this passage and, even though I held a library copy, I underlined every line of it. (If you end up with that copy from the MPLS library and you also happen to have read this, then let me know) I should mention that I came to White Noise after reading David Foster Wallace[4], as I read somewhere that he had much enjoyed Mr. Delillo’s work.[5]

4: David Foster Wallace, influential fiction and non-fiction writer of the early 21st century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

5: cannot find citation, will work to correct this

Posted in reflection | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

notes on methodology

By thomas | Published: November 15, 2009

Before beginning any serious efforts as to the questions of Who was Socrates?, and, further, What is Philosophy?, I think it may be necessary to share a few thoughts I’ve recently had about how we share information online. I think it prudent to consider the aims of writing for online consumption, and also the advantages and disadvantages involved in doing so. Hopefully through a careful analysis of these subjects we may be informed as to what is the best manner in which to share writing online.

history of the term ‘blog’

I must first make a short digression into my own investigations about the term ‘blog’. ‘Blog’ is a shortened form of the more descriptive term ‘Weblog’- first coined by Jorn Barger [1] (editor of the once famous weblog Robot Wisdom ) [2] in order to describe the process of “logging the web”, and in the fashion of Robot Wisdom it is a useful term. Robot Wisdom had as its mission to scour the internet for interesting things and provide links to them. This is a very valuable thing to us; I am currently a very enthusiastic member of one community blog Metafilter [3], which serves the purpose of logging the best of the internet very well.

Over time, however, it seems that we now regard many or most online collections of writing as “blogs”, or “logs of the web”, and I think that in many instances this word choice is not supported by the original definition of “weblog”. A log does not have as its goal to present coherent, trusted information; the goal of a log is simply to record without commentary. I would argue that the common usage of the word “blog” implies something different than its original usage. I could cite many blogs that actually log very little, or even nothing- and even more blogs have as their mission to simply spread commentary and opinion without regard to actually logging anything.

problems with the term blog

If you would tolerate my personal laundry in this argument, I must admit that I cannot stand the aural properties of the word ‘blog’. It sounds like something that happens in the private confines of ones own bathroom, and should probably be kept there– but that is only my aesthetic. I would, however, propose the idea that perhaps many self proclaimed ‘blogs’ that are online are exactly that: some personal stuff that may be kept best private- a blog where one discusses a recent break-up, blog about how someone is currently feeling, a blog about the parties one has recently gone to, etc. While these subjects I think are interesting in themselves, and perhaps deserve attention to more private communities, I think it would be safe to say that many people use blogs as sort of an online diary- a place to record one’s thoughts and opinions. It is rare that a blog purports as its mission to deliver factual information, and, if a blog does purport to doing so I would examine their aims and methods clearly before believing as fact anything written there.

And so we have this popular understanding of the word ‘blog’, and this understanding connotes a lot of things. It connotes a sense of being a diary, or perhaps a list. It connotes an emphasis on opinion rather than fact, an emphasis that tends toward lazy speculation rather than rigorous investigation.

What is unfortunate is the fact that almost all writing online, with a few exceptions,(Wikipedia among them) is regarded as a mere blog- a diary, a nice contribution to culture and etc but not very academically important. There are, however, ‘blogs’ and online collections of writing that do strive to adhere to the strict citation standards of traditional academia, and these places on the internet serve as valuable starting points of investigation. The unfortunate detail is that these sites are dumped into the category of ‘blogs’ along with joe internet’s blog about how great his night out at VIBE was or something, and we have no terminology to, in a sense, call a spade a spade, a diamond a diamond. We have no language to differentiate between what are actually viable works of thought online and what are just passing thoughts, tweets, and diaries.

solutions for the term ‘blog’

One possibility of action is to create new language to differentiate the two, a new term for a website or blog that purports that all of its contents are rather verifiably undeniable, and also interesting to our attention. But I would not want to get into such a task of creating new language, though, for the simple reason that if there were new language to differentiate between joe internet’s blog and joe interesting’s investigations, the new terminology would rapidly be misused, and end up confusing everyone even further. It seems like we’re kind of stuck with the word ‘blog’, and perhaps I just have to get over my dislike of the aural properties of the word.

It could be that the question of finding a way to differentiate between different kinds of writing online is moot, and that the only way we may verify that a piece of writing is of actual interest is that it is edited and displayed in a peer reviewed environment. But such an argument brings up questions about accessibility to information, when we consider the prohibitive costs involved in subscribing to and interacting with such journals. For anyone not connected to an institution of higher learning, access to this level of rigor is impossible online.

Though certain attempts are being made to offer a more open model [4], the problem still remains that there is a lot of really good writing online, and none of it ever went through a peer review process, nor did the author of said writing ever intend to validate his or her ideas in a professional peer community. Maybe the author believes the work can stand on its own. The question becomes: what is an author who chooses the web as his or her medium to do, in order to guarantee to his or her dear reader that they have made all diligent efforts to verify the information they intend to share?

It is my opinion that we cannot solve the problem of the connotations that come with the word ‘blog’ at this moment, and we cannot easily rely on peer review communities to verify the quality of a piece of writing. It seems that the only recourse one has is, simply, to write and think well, and to hope that the quality and depth of a piece of writing is enough to place it in a valuable realm.

One fact, however, is that sometimes a blog wants to offer non serious, perhaps more playful or reflective content. In these cases we see seriousness right alongside playfulness and irony, and it may be hard to distinguish between the two. For the purposes of this blog, I will file each post into one of two catergories: investigation or reflection. Any writing that falls within the category of investigation will be clear, cite its sources, and be generally much more serious. Posts that are in the reflection category will have a more playful tone, and may not offer the clarity that traditional academic writing requires of us.

Having considered the effects of the term ‘blog’ on the act of writing online, I would like to now consider the problem of citation of things on the web, in terms of its nature and severity, and consider existing and possible solutions to the problem.

the problem of citation

The most severe problem confronting a writer of online content is just how we cite sources when writing. Citation is an important method in presentation, both as a way of giving validity to a thought by referencing one that inspired it, but also, just as importantly, as a way to guide readers to where they can find more information about a subject. I would argue that citation is an indispensable part of writing, for the fact is that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants [5] whenever we have a novel idea worth sharing.

The MLA [6] has now for some time provided a standard for doing so, and that standard has worked rather well as it “has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and intructors for over half a century” [7]. I would argue, however, that current MLA standards fail when dealing with the web. The MLA standards do not recognize the dynamic nature of websites and their cycles of birth, change, and eventual death; and, in doing so, these standards present us with some troubling problems. [8]

Take as an example the latest (7th) edition of the MLA’s approach to the citation of websites. If one were to reference an article online, a good student of philosophy, or the humanities in general, would be correct in doing so like this:

The Socratic Problem. Thomas Saunders, Oct. 2009. Web. Nov. 2009. http://philosophy.modern-carpentry.com/2009/10/the-socratic-problem/.

A web citation requires (in order) a title, a publisher or sponsor, a date for the publish of the article, a date for an author’s access of the article, and, finally a link to the web resource. While this form of citation approaches the certainty we require, we are left wanting in an important way. There is no guarantee that the possession of the required datum will provide us with the same certainty that a normal MLA citation would.

the web changes in a way that old models of publishing didn’t

A reference to a book is a reference to a title, date, author, and more importantly, a publisher. We can take solace in the fact that by referencing both publishers and authors we can be sure that at least one of these to parties ( or a library somewhere ) probably kept some copies of a certain edition of a certain book around, and, most hopefully, we’ll be able to track one of those down. A reference to a book or written article, then, carries a kind of certainty to it, in that we know we can track a citation down and confirm it in its original form. But sometimes we cannot, and this problem becomes a challenge to bibliophiles and others worldwide. If we cannot get our hands on a book we need to read discovered by citation, we are probably trained in the humanities or are most probably beyond the fringes of research into any topic, and possibly verging towards a personal love or obsession with a topic. In these cases, though, we are dealing with the failures of those who have gone before us to preserve data, not the failure of the MLA style guidline.

On the other hand, a cited web link brings with it no such certainty. The austere fact is that websites and their authors, just like publishers and authors, go out of existence. The first problem is that where the great libraries of our time probably keep copies of expired publishers and authors’ work, there are no institutions capable of preserving the web in a meaningful way. While honorable institutions such as the Internet Archive [9] have as their purpose to do this task, I am pessimistic as to their ability to do so in a thorough way.

Websites, unlike books, can change every day, or, indeed, almost every moment. A simple act of saving something online changes forever how it will be viewed by those who encounter it, and so, in less than a moment, a web author can change what is recorded of them with the ease that would never have been available to article and book writers who relied on the publishing industry to share their ideas. In a sense, a website could say any of many, many, things at one moment of time and quite another thing at another time, and we have no way to predict how these changes may occur. In short, the MLA method of website citation offers us no guarantee that what is presented to us in a link is the same as what we are confronted with when we click it.

While we do have resources such as the Internet Archive, or Google (TM) cache services, it must be understood that these resources are inadequate representations of what the internet consists of at a certain point in time, and that a simple reference to URL and time of access does not guarantee a person that they are viewing what an original author was viewing. While many sites are monthly or daily archived, there are no sites which the Internet Archive or Google can properly record the minute by minute changing nature of websites. Such a task is near impossible- to accurately and centrally record what every certain website looked like at a certain moment require resources far beyond that of the Internet Archive and possibly beyond current human data storage efforts ( I hope to be proved wrong on this! ).

It may be said that perhaps Google will soon probably be able to actually cache and record the breadth of the ever changing web. If they were able to do this, I think people would have volumes to learn by studying how the internet changes, in minute ways, over time. In short- it would be incomprehensibly awesome. But I am still hesitant towards leaving the responsibility for such a task, that of being the 21st century library, up to a private corporation. I would hope that if something were ever done it would be a public institution, open to information seekers and free from speculation about monetary motivations in the preservation of the history of the web.

Looking at the Internet Archive a bit closer, I’ll cite a few examples of what they have recorded and how their version of a website at a point in time is not useful to us. The first case comes is that of an organization I’ve been involved with for a few years, Twin Cities Open Circuit [10] which began in 2007. Here are the results, which, actually, look to be a better representation than I thought the Internet Archive would have:

click images to view full size

Twin Cities Open Circuit at the Internet Archive

The largest problem starts when one looks at one of the versions. You can see two of them here:

Twin Cities Open Circuit at the Internet Archive

The first edition can hardly be said to represent the original version, as it existed in February of 2008, and the July version doesn’t do much better:

Twin Cities Open Circuit at the Internet Archive

If you are thinking that Twin Cities Open Circuit don’t have very good web developers on staff, you are in the wrong; the websites linked above look, at that time, looked very much like the site does today. What explains the discrepancy here I am unsure of, but I would venture to guess that the folks over at the Internet Archive chose to save only semantic and textual data, in order to save space used for such a small and un-notable website such as ours. I would guess they chose to leave styling and other information out.

While this ends up being a pragmatic question- only so much space, so many websites, what is really necessary to archive? I would argue that it is necessary to save everything, and to present it in the manner that the normal user experienced the site, and otherwise not save the website at all. Layout and design of a website are often just as critical to clearly presenting information as actually having the actual information itself is. By only saving out the textual data we lose access to the textual data itself, in the fact that we can no longer access it and experience it in the way it was intended to be experienced.

Going further, we might examine the Internet Archive’s treatment of the much more popular website Metafilter, and how this may be lacking. We need only one image to do this in that the first reveals how incomplete such an archive is, as it does not provide even a consistent, much less a more momentary edition, of what Metafiter was at any point in time:

Metafilter at the Internet Archive

Though we can see that the archives for Metafilter are much more consistent, and almost regular, it would be hard to prove that the archives were complete. I can say with certainty on many days which fall between updates listed on the archive that changes occurred to Metafilter that are not reflected in this archive. In this case we are presented with gaps between updates of a site, that, while it seems like something we could pass off as unimportant, I think that it cannot be passed over. It seems as if the limit of the ability of the Internet Archive to archive the content of the internet here meets up with the exponential content of a fruitful website, and this presents another problem, which I will not elaborate on.

In addition to concerns of the inadequacies of the completeness of existing or possible web archives, we may be troubled further by the fact that malicious forces work often on the web to alter, mangle, or destroy various portions of it. I would assume that at this moment many pretty smart individuals are trying their best to earn the spammer’s dime and make some grub off of companies and individuals who are too lazy or ignorant to write secure applications or enforce standards. Because of this, there is a lot of odd and creative noise online- faked comments and odd emails add a very random depth to the internet that kind of amazes me. It adds a level of randomness to what is online that seems to infect the real things that happen online. Going further I would also assume that there are at least a few and probably many really smart individuals of a certain quality that are this moment focused on breaking things and messing up systems, and that they are probably pretty good at it. I would hope that most of these people are doing so in a quest to understand systems and their vulnerabilities, so as to improve those systems. I would, however, guess that there are some individuals who may take their power to add, edit, or delete any thing from the internet, their power to completely destroy an anonymous user’s computer, and their power to break systems as something to be exercised and improved. A power where, with a simple typing of a command and the satisfying press of the enter key, millions of computers, or, indeed, the course of history might be altered- this is not a good power to have.

In order to make penance for my previous paragraph (in which I overused some metaphors and tried to scare the ever-livin s*** out of anyone about the internet, and in general didn’t say anything I’ve carefully proved) I would like to offer to you what happens when a script kiddie [11] ups his skills and messes with Twitter and MSNBC:

What up motherfuckers?

Going further, however, we realize that what is most important to consider in these matters is that our technologies so quickly now become obsolete. The current state of data storage, retreival, and citation matter little when viewed through a longer lens. In 30 years, will we be using HTML? Will it be supported on browsers of the time, will there even be browsers? How do we know that what is currently considered a valid source ( as an MLA HTML weblink ) will, in the same way that a source to a book survives 30 years), be rendered to the end user in the same way that we are confronted with a 30 year old book?

Stepping back from the problem of time, and Google and the Internet Archive, I must finally say that our current methods of referencing websites in general is broken. An MLA version 7 styled link to a website is useless to both the person who wishes to cite the web, and also to someone who, perhaps 30 years later, wants to go back and investigate what was linked to. An MLA citation to the web offers no guarantee that a linked source will:

  • still exist
  • still exist as it was when the person who cited it saw it
  • exist in a form that technology of the age can interpret

And because of these problems, we might begin to consider what we can do to provide more accurate citations of websites and content, and to, perhaps, consider this an important aim in our pursuit of clearness of source online.

Conclusions

At the bottom of the issue is that we cannot rely upon third parties such as web-hosts of original content, the Internet Archive, or Google Cache, to record and save the web for us to responsibly cite later. We have no reason to believe that, when provided with a link, an author, and a date that we will be able to track down the actual web experience that originally inspired the citation’s author to cite it. Because of this fact we have a breakdown, or perhaps a bug, in how MLA standards work for any writing that references an online source.

It could be said that web links as sources have never been taken seriously in academic writing, and I would have to agree with that. To those who may say web links never will be taken as serious sources, I would urge you to look around the internet for a bit and see what the children are doing these days, and how. Though I mourn to say this, there will be a day, not so far off, where our best students will never step in a library and never be confronted with the challenge of tracking down an old book with all the wit and wisdom of a good detective ( though the good ones will ). At a certain point, for most people, the libraries of our current age will become relics of another age, a tourist destination or interesting architecture; for others, libraries will remain as shrines to past human efforts at knowledge that they always were. At some point, however, everyone will find the information they need with some clicks on some device, and at no point will the hand-holding of an actual book be necessary.

In short- the progress of human thought is moving online. It has broken out of libraries and academic institutions, and it is freely available for anyone who dares to know. Whether you want to know what Plato said in the early 3rd century BC, or if you want to know what your best friend who moved to Portland wore to her friend’s halloween party, the information is either there, or it is sitting in a library somewhere and it will soon be digitalized for our uses.

Because of this, it is imperative to consider how we are to cite writing that we find online, in a clear way that stands the test of time.

Solutions to the problem of citation of online sources

This is a breakdown that must be fixed before we can trust content online. The tricky part involves how we can source the internet at a particular point in time. It gets trickier when we consider how to preserve a place on the internet at a particular point in time well into the future ( say, 50 years or more ). There are no guarantees that the technologies we currently use to display and view content on the web ( browsers, html, javascript, php, flash, unity plugin, etc ) will remain available for easy use.

What is needed is a system of reference and storage, where users can provide a link to a page they are want to cite, and be provided with a URL which will archive that page as it was originally seen by the user. I have some ideas [12] as to how a system such as this, which I will for the present call the Open Citation Directory, but there is much to be considered by such an endeavor.

For my current purposes, until such a system in operation I will begin to save web pages I cite myself. When I reference another website, I will actually link to my copy of that site, as it was when I experienced it. I understand that this is an insufficient solution to the problem, but it is the most I can do for the moment.

references

1: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2007/12/blog_anniversary

2: http://www.robotwisdom.com

3: 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review

5: On The Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, Free Press (1965)

6: Modern Language Associtation

7: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MLA_Style_Manual

8: I would also like to note that the MLA does not publish its standards on its website- you’ll have to either buy their $32 book or actually go to a library. MLA style is, in a sense, a proprietary standard of citation in opposition to an open standard. [13]

9: http://www.archive.org/

10: http://tcopencircuit.org

11: script kiddie, definition

12: My own thoughts about a possible Open Citation Directory

13: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard

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one proper way to start a career, or, I wasn’t too stupid at 23

By thomas | Published: November 4, 2009

As an aside to the study of What is Philosophy?, and perhaps more as an historical note to myself, I would like to share some writing of mine from a larger email between me and a close friend, Emily August, in the June of 2006:

i say that i’m confused and don’t know what the hell to do with my life, but it doesn’t bother me in the horrible way it used to a few months ago. i’ve been constantly reminding myself that i’m only 23 and i can do ANYTHING because i am smart and awesome and beautiful (which you’ve helped me realize) and that if i constantly try to improve myself something good will happen for me. this state of post B.A. angst has been almost exhilarating lately because i know i am free to do whatever. what i have to do now is choose something i love to do and just do it with all the love and passion i have for god’s sake. i haven’t chosen what to do yet but i think i’ve found some things i love and i’ll pursue those things.

I certainly enjoy the line, “what i have to do now is choose something i love to do and just do it with all the love and passion i have for god’s sake.”.

It seems to be a proper way to start doing.

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investigation requires of us persistence

By thomas | Published: November 1, 2009

the_process_of_investigation

I am currently looking further into the question of who Socrates was, why he did not write anything, and why this may be significant. I would now say that my previous dialouge between Socrates and Plato, while playful, is probably in-accurate. When I have completed my research I will place my findings here. After that I can move on to the question which is bugging me, that of What is Philosophy?

The image above was composed by craig, and I thank him for giving me insight into myself by doing so. The full image is viewable here.

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the socratic problem

By thomas | Published: October 29, 2009

In my investigations into the question What is Philosophy? I’ve come into a bit of a snag: Socrates. I wanted to know what it was that he thought philosophy was, because, you know, he pretty much is the go-to guy in terms of ancient western philosophy. It could, of course, be argued that Aristotle is in fact the go-to guy, but it probably ends up being a matter of preference. Either way, the crux of this post gets into some really interesting ideas about the manner in which we share information, as I will show later.

In trying to find out what Socrates thought about what philosophy is, I remembered that we don’t actually know what Socrates said on that matter, or any matter at all. He never wrote his philosophy down, and all we have is Plato and Xenophon’s accounts of his teachings. Many other greeks, among them Aristophanes, were quite definitely inspired by his teachings, and of course we can share many of his insights through others’ interpretations of his teachings.

But what remains of Socrates is only others’ interpretations and recordings of him. We don’t have any actual evidence that what Socrates is reported to have said is really what he said, and further, if we assume that what he is reported to have said is the same as what he said, we still cannot conclude that what he said hasn’t in some way been filtered by those who recorded his teachings.

There is no doubt that Socrates, despite his ability to not write things down, had a great influence on his contemporaries. There is also no doubt that his thoughts shaped what would become one of the coolest civilizations on earth, and, eventually, it has come to be that he is required reading for many high school and undergraduate level courses over two millenia later. And, most importantly, all done without ever writing a single word down.

And here we are confronted with a couple of interesting ideas. The first is that we cannot trust what it is reported that Socrates thought or said. We simply have no record of it. In light of this, how are we to view the work that is known as Socrates? What is Socrates?

The second question that is much more interesting to me is this: why did Socrates refrain from writing? Why did he avoid being literally transcribed, and what might we learn from that? He had the tools to write. I think he was probably smart enough to figure it out. It seems to me like he might have had an objection to his teachings being written down.

I need to do much more research here, but it seems that Socrates came during a period of transition between an oral tradition of sharing experience and a written one. Up until his time, most thought was transmitted via stories and conversations between people. Homer’s Illiad is a perfect example of a story that no one knows really who made it up, if it was true, and how it got to us. Regardless, it is awesome, and a very powerful thing to consume. Regardless of our ability to discern the veracity of the origins, legacy, and existence of both Homer and Socrates, we are still able to gain insight into human nature by reading and carefully considering what has been passed down by them.

If it is the case that Socrates came at a point of transition between the oral tradition and the written one, I wonder why he preferred the oral tradition. I suspect that he valued actual conversation- a going back and forth between two or more people- as a way to practice philosophy, and this idea is supported by the fact that his ideas have been all shared as dialogues, rather than a more conventional method of writing philosophy.

Perhaps he thought that simply writing down some words for others to consume would be in-sufficient: he deemed writing to be a faulty way of sharing data with others. A static text is much more prone to misunderstanding; did Socrates think that his philosophy couldn’t be shared in text?

I’m going to pull a little Plato here, and make up a dialogue with Socrates as its main character. (note- Socrates never wrote this, I did, but I think he may have agreed with something like this..)

Socrates and Plato are walking through the country side talking about sharing experience:

S: Stop writing down what I say.

P: But I wanna.

S: Why? Why do you insist on transcribing our conversations with your primitive writing tools? What do you expect to gain, dear Plato.

P: I must record your teachings so that men who wish to understand philosophy can read what you have spoken of, and that so men of the future may know your name.

S: Why do you think that men could find wisdom by reading what I have said? Why do you think that reading a conversation is the same as having a conversation with someone? Don’t you understand why I myself haven’t written anything?

P: I see your point that it is different. But I think that with care, I can capture the essence of your ideas. And, the unfortunate fact is that some day you will pass from this earth, and people will no longer be able to have a conversation with you. Would you rather that your ideas not be shared with men and women of the future?

S: If you insist on sharing them in written form, then yes, I would rather that my conversations not be shared with future men and women. Perhaps they will read what you have written down, but understand incorrectly. We all know that a little wisdom is a very dangerous thing, and I would rather that future men and women not read my words at all than to read them and mis-understand them.

P: Well then how the heck am I supposed to pass down your wisdom to future generations?

S: By doing what we’re doing right now, you twit! I don’t even have any wisdom, and I know so very little. What in Zeus’s name do you plan to pass down?

P: But you do have wisdom.

S: No I don’t.

P: No I don’t.

S: Are you copying me now, you childish spartan?

P: Are you copying me now, you childish spartan?

S: For Zeus’s sake, quit transcribing me! I cannot even know that you won’t insert your own ideas into mine. For all I know, future generations will think that I believe in those silly abstract forms of yours. If you want to share my ideas, get yourself out into the Agorá and talk to men, and make those men talk to other men, and so on.

P: Ok. I’ll just wait until you die and then start writing stuff. You cool with that?

And that is essentially what Plato did. Though the publish dates of the Socratic dialogues are rather unclear, we can be rather certain that Plato’s first Socratic dialogue, the Apology, was not published until 10 years after his execution in 399 BC.

So, back to why this whole topic interests me- the difference between sharing information and experience in conversation versus the method of sharing information via written word. How are these two methods different?

More interesting, then, too, is to consider that we are currently undergoing a similar transition between methods of communication. Socrates and Plato were transitioning from an oral tradition into a written one, and we have been slowly transitioning between the written ( or analog ) form of communication into a digital one. Hence the death of the newspaper, rise of craigslist, etc., etc.

Here we may pause to consider what is gained in this transition. I would be the first to shout from a mountaintop about the awesomeness of digital information, social networks, search engines, wikipedia, etc, etc, and all along down the line about how awesome digital communication is.

But I am more interested in what is being lost. I would argue that with the explosion of digital information in the past 10 or so years we have lost context. I think we are often presented with information which we are probably unprepared to understand. Or, perhaps, we are unprepared to do the hard work and research necessary to gather information.

I’ll use this blog post as case in point. I’ve written now over 1400 words, and provided no citations. I could have lied about anything and you may have believed it. I plan to offer citations where they are needed after I have done my proper research, but until then this idea I am sharing with you is rather un-trustworthy, and I will have to digress.

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in defense of a new blog, or, hello world!

By thomas | Published: October 28, 2009

It is estimated as of February 2008 that there are over 112 million blogs on the internet (and I will admit to creating at least 8 or 9 of them). With this consideration in mind, we might wonder this: when you have created 8 or 9 blogs and only one of them has received any significant attention, why create another one? And further, why not just start using the one I already have?

The first purpose of this entry is to defend my choice to start “just another wordpress blog”. Against whom I am defending consists most significantly of myself for now, but I would presume that others may be interested in my reasons for such an endeavor as well. Other purposes of this entry include, but may not be limited to explaining my various inspirations for this blog (aka giving credit where credit is due!), detailing the subject matters that are to be covered by it, and finally giving a description of what I hope to gain out of the effort that I plan to put into writing and maintaining another blog. The contents of this post are divided as such in order to give the reader some help in consuming it.

defense of a new blog

My current weblog has as a main focus of actionscript design and development, and despite how heavily involved I am in those two things, I have found it difficult to keep writing about those activities. Maintaining a blog takes a lot of time, and writing about actionscript feels a bit too much like work to keep doing it in my spare time. While I could begin posting my investigations into philosophy over there, I have found that successful blogs are those ones which have a specific focus, and don’t stray too far from it. Because of these reasons, I think it prudent to start a new blog with a focus on philosophy. Perhaps the two can co-exist, and in fact complement each other.

inspirations

My inspirations for this undertaking come from a number of sources, which I will mention as quickly as possible.

I first began thinking about web development and coding in a new way after reading my friend joe’s article about debugging php. I came away from reading his article with the thought that writing code is a lot like doing science- your code is your hypothesis that a certain thing will work, and it is the developer’s job to test that hypothesis, break it, fix it, and break it again until it can be accepted as a useful application. Viewing the process of writing code through the paradigm of the scientific method changed what I thought about what I do, and as I have thought further about this, it has become clear to me that important topics in the field of philosophy of science have direct implications to how I practice my work.

Another source if inspiration is my current employer at Analog Interactive, Shawn Sheely. Shawn is the first employer of mine to recognize my training and skill in philosophy as a valuable one, and, further, to actually put these skills to work. He has provided an excellent environment for me in which to do research and development in various languages ( example example) , and that research has become valuable to us in our client work.

Further, Shawn is the one who actually sparked my current track of research into the nature of discovery, on which I plan to write much more later. But his spark led me down a path of thought in which I bumped into the late Robert K. Merton. Reading his post-humous work The Three Princes of Serendip has been a very interesting experience, and one of my main goals of starting this blog is so that I can process the volumes of ideas he has so carefully and kindly shared with us.

Another inspiration of mine has been a short email conversation I’ve had with David Humphrey, who I would presume at this moment is either debugging C++ or reading Heidegger. He remarked that it is rather uncommon to meet a developer with a training in the humanities. In response I wrote that I wanted to study how my background in philosophy influences my work as a developer, but that that may take a few pages. I hope to write those few pages here.

Lastly, I must mention my friend Maran. Over the fall I have been helping her think about her doctoral thesis ( On The Production of Medical Knowledge), and the collaborative discussions we’ve shared on the topic remind me of my days as an undergraduate, and the pleasure that comes with the practice of philosophy.

map

Before finishing up this post, I’d like to quickly sketch out the topics I intend to cover, and what I hope to get out of them.

I would like to first start out with a quick investigation of the question What is Philosopy?, as I think it might be a prudent question for anyone to start out with before starting to practice philosophy. Hopefully that investigation will be useful to me in any activities that ensue. Following that, my first series of posts will almost exclusively study the works of Robert K. Merton, both The Three Princes of Serendib, and later his most famous work On the Shoulders of Giants. These works mainly deal with the philosophy and sociology of science, and I am interested in investigating how his ideas may be applied to computer science.

Other areas of interest of mine include the philosophy of language, the divide between analytic/anglo-american philosophy and European continental philosophy, bio-medical ethics and the production of medical knowledge, and finally the philosophy of pedagogy or education. I have been most influenced in these fields by most of the ancients, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, Camus, Kripke, Dewey, Carl Elliot, and probably most importantly one Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein. I would not be surprised to see any of these names come up in my investigations.

One main goal of this endeavor is to create a symposium where I can discuss with others how our studies in the humanities can inform our work as developers. I am confident that there are many others who have much deeper and more mature knowledge on these subjects than I possess, and it is my hope to be guided- in whatever manner occurs- in my investigations by others who have gone before.

I intend to make this a welcome space for discussion, should others wish to share, and hopefully things may get so interesting that we can even have some respectful argument and disagreement every once and a while.

If you’ve read this far, I thank the length of your attention span, and welcome you to philosophy and modern carpentry.

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