Gnodal Journal

When I was a kid I read not only the dictionary, but encyclopedias too. My drill sargeant was not impressed to find my copy A. J. Ayers’s “Language, Truth and Logic” among the few personal belongings allowed me in my footlocker. So … let’s just say I don’t routinely expect to find myself in with the ruling paradigm or majority opinion.
That being so, it’s a treat, while drilling down through something concerning transparent inference and the nature of community documents, to come across something as outspoken as this: European Society for Developmental Psychology “Searching for research literature – Although the WWW is often written about as if it was a database of original sources (like a library), there is actually rather little in the way of complete “texts” to be found. There is a lot of information on the internet – but not a lot of ideas. Not a lot of expository text.” [emph. added] I would actually disagree with the opinion, but find it heartening that I’m correct concerning the illusion: whether the wealth of brochures we’re dealing with comes from corporate spin doctors or well intentioned free (as in speech) crusaders, brochures is what they remain. Hence the goad behind my “Miss Peebles” project.

In the Who said he died? department:

Eric Raymond is back and blogging at “Armed and Dangerous” where he writes, “No, I have not vanished from the earth: The book is nearly wrapped up and I may be able to start blogging again shortly. In the meantime, note that my website has moved. It is now at http://www.catb.org/~esr/.

“The Ecosystem Returns” reads in part, “After a long hiatus, the Blogosphere Ecosystem has returned to The Truth Laid Bare. You can find it right here, in all its glorious silliness. This time around, I did it right: it’s fully automated, executing once a day in the early morning using PHP scripts and storing all the results in a MySQL database.”

The similar announcement at WebBlog MetaData Initiative reminded me to think about adding weblog page attributes to my own blogs.

---

Of passing interest:
Not only does blogads have an interesting set of blogs that are selling ads, but they run an interesting blog themselves.

blogroots (with blogpopuli) and blogstreet, “Blog Neighborhood, Top Blogs, Search, RSS and Utilities”

I stumbled acros Rock, Paper, Stone: The Biz Stone Guide to Independent Publishing from last spring … a dandy article, and I hear Biz Stone‘s “Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content” is good too. [You noticed that it isn`t a link? Well, a) I think the title sux, and b) it pissed me off that I can`’t afford it. (Yes, I really do think the title sux … that wouldn’t stop me from buying a good text though.)]

Testing NewsCrawler Blog interface … so far so good!

InfoWorld: Many Large Corporations Avoid Using Scripting Languages for What They Do Best Slashdot pointed out that Chad Dickerson spent an entire column discussing the fact that some major corporations discourage the use of scripting languages like Perl and Python to solve problems to which they are uniquely suited. According to the article: Although it has often been subtle, there is a level of quiet discomfort between the ?scripting? versus ?programming? factions in some corporate development environments in which I have participated.”

You’re using unregistered version of Newz Crawler v1.4. Please register.

—
Composed with Newz Crawler 1.4 http://www.newzcrawler.com/

—
Composed with Newz Crawler 1.4 http://www.newzcrawler.com/

In The Village Voice Nation, Nat Hentoff’s “Ashcroft Out of Control” reads in part:

“Until now, in our law, an American could only lose his or her citizenship by declaring a clear intent to abandon it. But—and read this carefully from the new bill—”the intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct.” (Emphasis added). Who will do the ‘inferring’?” [likewise, emph. added h_b]

You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone …

My recent loss of internet connection and my temporary resumption forebodes what is to come unless I connect with the “punchline” of the “economic conversation” pretty damned quickly.

But, to make hay while the sun shines … transparent inference has seduced me entirely. (The last time I was swept away so completely was when a cognitive psychology project got me into historiography. [Can there be universally communicable meaning without absolutes?]) … so, returning to the challenge of indexing document sets, I’m nibbling away at pages such as these:
XML and Search: SearchTools Report … Lou Rosenfeld’s “XML: Text & Context” (accompanied by “Data Does Not Equal Information” is nice, but boy … Feb ’99 … I’ll be hunting down fresh versions of this material. Similarly with “XML and Semantic Transparency” by Robin Cover, which dates from late ’98.