Organizational Design
I was reading /. today and I realized that the entire GNU/Linux community has had a remarkable underground success, that can be attributed to a few key assumptions about people in general. Individuals are semi-intelligent, and don’t always act in…
Icons for Government
It occured to me that if I’m to create a new country I also have to create symbols for that country to rally behind. For a flag I’d want to have something that incorporates Freedom and Chaos. But there are…
Words, Thought, and Meaning
Studying German I realized that, much of what I think consists not of pictorial representation nor of idealogical conceptualization of objects, but rather of linguistic terms. My thought are formed by, and therefore controlled by language. More importantly, my thoughts…
Terminal and GUI
The power of the linux os is in the terminal. It was arranged from a few very powerful utils that can be piped with each other. This modularity needs to be extended to the gui, for the gui to be…
Axiomatic Law
I was reading some article on Asimov’s 3 Laws, and thought that they have some difficulties. 1. The laws are in english, a language that is inherently ambigious. This ambiguity is difficult for machine implementation, but may imbue the robots…
Math and Occam’s Razor
In discussion with Ben about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I concluded that the success of mathematical elegance in solutions is a physical manifestation of Occam’s Razor. Indeed, mathematical elegance is to be held above normal logic. As…
Set Theoretic Programming Language
If set theory is the foundation of all mathematics, then why not also programming (which is a kind of constructive mathematics). The closest to that existing today is, of course, Haskell. Don’t neglect the cool multimedia things that it can…
Blasphemous Ideas
I was on the bus and these two old men boarded at a stop and were embroiled in some sorta argument. One was sorta bummish, and was saying “there is no fear, I love everything” while the other, kept repeating…
Grokking Meaning
Thinking is a terrible terrible thing. By insight provided from reading GEB, I am firm in believing that there is no meaning intrinsic to the world. Unfortunately our minds are predisposed to thinking, an act that seeks to create meaning…
Topological Fantasy
There should be a short story or mathematical fantasy book about people that can perform topological transforms on their world simply by thinking through the math. They could fight in topological wars, where quickly finding the inverse is essential to…