doubt is good

Funnily enough I was having a conversation yesterday with a friend about the joy of doubt and how it leaves you open to new ideas and fresh insights, and then vincent t left a comment on my blog, so I checked out his, and found this quote:

Existence is frail and changeable. It is always unpredictable and full of doubt. But this doubt need not be negative. If all things were known about our lives much of the magic would be gone. Doubt brings with it the element of surprise, of continual newness. Sensitive and intelligent people are always full of doubt. They see it as a positive influence for spontaneity and continued growth. It is the element of uncertainty that adds the spice to living. How different life would be if we could predict tomorrow with moment-to-moment accuracy. How dull would be our world. How soon we would lose interest, cease dreaming, become bored. But life is not like that. It is always full of questions. It shows us dramatically that we can be certain of nothing. We cannot be sure of what the next moment will bring. This causes most of us to spend a large portion of our lives engaged in worrying about possible outcomes, most of which are beyond our control. It doesn't seem to matter that much of what we worry about never seems to happen anyway... we continue to choose to worry.

(excerpt from Personhood by Leo F. Buscaglia, PhD.)

What an excellent quote, it sums it up beautifully. Very Taoist, I thought - the Tao Te Ching advises the reader to go with the flow and not try to organise everything. PL Travers makes a similar point in What the Bee Knows - that only by embracing the unknown can we truly experience the numinous. And Joseph Campbell made the same point with regard to serendipity - fortuitous events will occur only if we make space for them in our lives.

I also like it when I have a ocnversation about something, and then stumble upon something relevant to it quite by chance - a nice instance of synchronicity.

freaking out

Trading Spouses Margaret freaking out - Google Video

This is the scariest thing I've seen in a while. All I can say is, I'm glad there's a large ocean between me and this woman. I have to admit this video clip made me laugh a lot, but I feel really sorry for the kids. They look completely stunned and scared, and not by the Tarot cards etc., but by the way their mother is reacting. Well, I rebuke it in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

tele-cloning

I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg

-- Douglas Adams

Quantum teleporter creates laser beam clones

As science fiction writers realised about ten years ago, if you teleport something you make a copy of it, you don't translate it from the place of origin to the destination. And the bits can get muddled up on the way. This could create some interesting ethical dilemmas. If you delete the original and retain the copy, is that murder? This problem is dealt with in a novel way in Empire of Bones by Liz Williams.

bona Lupercalia

Happy Lupercalia
Hey, those Romans really knew how to party. Naked young men running through the streets -- oo-er!

Whether your thing is hearts and flowers or depravity in the streets -- happy Lupercalia & Valentine's Day.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|

religion

There are two kinds of religion, exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric religions are where the rules are imposed from above and you sign your freedom away and stop thinking. Esoteric religions are where you discover your own spiritual path, sometimes in the company of others. Followers of esoteric religions don't believe that we have found a one-size-fits-all solution, so we don't feel the need to impose our views on others.

low budget genius

LEGO Technic Difference Engine (Spotted by Green) - that's amazing.

The Science Museum spent shed-loads of money building their Babbage difference engine, and this guy manages to do it with Lego. Wow! That is seriously cool. (Ooh, am I being a bit geeky here?)

long live satire

Excellent post by Joe about the cartoon controversy.

I particularly liked this bit:

I am a very devout Seventh Day Cartoonist; I worship at the Cartoonist altar almost every day and believe in the Holy Trinity - Tom, Jerry and Bugs Bunny. I believe in the literal truth of the Complete Crumb Comics. I believe Matt Groening and Fred Quimby were sent down from Cartoon Heaven to be the Great Animator’s disciples on Earth and show us the way to a better, more tolerant and relaxed society by using satire, humour and cartoons. As such I resent the way some Muslims have attacked the Cartoonists. Where are my rights? These unbelievers deserve our wrath - fortunately we Cartoonists don’t believe in burning down buildings, books or threatening the safety of individuals, but we shall be writing to Steve Bell and Ralph Steadman about this. Eat our ink, unbelievers!

splitting the difference

BBC News: Middle East: Iran paper seeks cartoon revenge

The difference between publishing cartoons with the face of Muhammad on them and publishing cartoons about the Holocaust is that Holocaust denial is a big pack of lies, whereas printing a picture of someone's face is an artistic interpretation of their face. Also there's nothing remotely funny about millions of people being sent to the gas chambers.

flat web

Users Interleave Sites and Genres (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own.

It is exactly this kind of problem that calls for the multilayered relational searching enabled by the Semantic Web (and hence OWL and RDF and stuff). I wish I understood all this Semantic Web stuff better though, it's fearfully complicated.

the floating world

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

We went to see Memoirs of a Geisha on Saturday night. It was excellent. There were a few weird things, like why did Chiyo have blue eyes, and selling your virginity to the highest bidder is not actually part of the geisha lifestyle, but it was a beautifully made film. I read Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwasaki last year, and Mineko's story was similar in a number of ways. According to Wkipedia, this is because the book Memoirs of a Geisha was largely based on Geisha of Gion. A pity the film-makers didn't just make a film based on Geisha of Gion. Though I did like the character of the Chairman, played by Ken Watanabe.

focus

Pip has just pointed out that if someone was only interested in one aspect of my blogging (e.g. the geeky posts), they could click on the topic link at the top and subscribe to the RSS feed of the del.icio.us page. Cool.

AWOL

This week I arr bin mostly investigating OWL and RDF and other ways of expressing ontologies.

It appears that there are ways of expressing terminologies / thesauri / ontologies using OWL and RDF.

Pip found this article about creating online search interfaces for museum collections: Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web: The user's Perspective on MuseumFinland.

And I found their selection of tools which you can download:
Download Semantic Web Project tools

I've also been browsing around FISH and writing entries for our in-house Wiki about all this.

Other than that, I've been answering emails and setting up Trac environments and trying to make e-learning Javascripts cross-browser compatible. I reckon if I just turned my email off for the most of the day, I'd get a lot more done.

sheela-na-gigs

And while we're on the subject of deities letting it all hang out, I thought I should include Sheela-na-Gigs for a bit of gender balance.

Then there's the fabulous Vulva Glove Puppets, each of which is named after a different goddess.

And the flashing goddesses, such as Baubo (Greek) and Uzume (Japanese).