Author: geoff

Random 10

Another Sunday, another i-ching thrown by iTunes:

  • “Ghostly Horses Of The Plain” by Al Stewart (from Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time)
  • “Suite in G Major, HWV 441 – Adagio” played by Trevor Pinnock (from Handel: Chaconne in G Major, Keyboard Suites)
  • “Precious Heart (Joshua Ryan Remix)” by Tall Paul (from Music Through Me)
  • “The Merciful One” by Zohar (from Buddha Bar 1)
  • “Perfect Way” by Scritti Politti (from Cupid & Psyche 85)
  • “Drifting Away” by Faithless (from Reverence)
  • “Answering Machine” by Marillion (from anorak in the uk live)
  • “Underneath The Rainbow” by Men Without Hats (from …In The 21st Century)
  • “End Of A Century (Live)” by Blur (from Best Of Blur)
  • “Since I’ve Been Loving You” by Led Zeppelin (from Led Zeppelin Remasters)

"Let me count the ways to tell a weasel"

This afternoon I bopped over to Cambridge* to attend one of the MIT philosophy colloquia. The speaker was Ruth Millikan, and her subject was Let me count the ways to tell a weasel: On extensional meanings and nature’s clumps [PDF, 692KB]. To brutally summarize a nice, wide-ranging account, she set out to show that the classical question of how linguistic reference can be justified is simply answered by the natural “clumping” of class-defining properties in the real world. I agreed with her thesis, and enjoyed the way she presented it. However I think that she overemphasized the importance of the intrinsic “clumpiness” of the world and understated the role of agents (i.e. us) in choosing the clumps that were significant to us. This certainly confused a couple of the audience, who perceived an unintended dichotomy between “natural” and “purposeful” clumps. (They’re all natural: we are part of nature.)
I participated in the Q&A, and went upstairs for the social afterwards, but Millikan was surrounded by old friends. Thus I wasn’t able to ask my two big questions:

  1. Was her main thesis about language or meaning-making intentional agents in general? In other words, is human language the focus of the work, or is it simply a convenient system used by a particular class of agents?
  2. Although she focussed on “language as it is”, she did discuss how linguistic usage shifts and evolves. So does she like the concept of memes, or does she have another explanatory model that she prefers?

I was pleased to find that I felt right at home, and thoroughly comfortable with the material. One reason I’d wanted to attend this particular seminar was that when we read Millikan in Dennett’s course a year ago, I found her stuff particularly hard to wrap my head around. I guess I learned something after all. Cool.
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* Well, actually I took the Green Line to Park Street, wandered through the back streets of Beacon Hill, and then walked across the Longfellow Bridge.

"Content is something you can run an ad alongside of"

Nice piece by Nora Ephron (And By the Way, the World Is Not Flat) on The History Of Stupid Thinking About The Internet. Bottom line:

Which brings me to this conference on the Internet I attended last week, where it will not surprise you to hear that it was suddenly clear that there were billions of dollars to be made in the Internet from advertising. This is the new conventional wisdom: there’s a lot of advertising money out there, and all you have to do is provide content so that the ads have something to run alongside of. It crossed my mind that the actual definition of “content” for an Internet company was “something you can run an ad alongside of.” I found this a depressing insight, even though my conviction that all conventional wisdom about the Internet turns out to be untrue rescued me somewhat from a slough of despond on the subject.

Great Hackers

Check out this essay by Paul Graham. Sample:

It’s pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that’s full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client’s complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.
The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don’t learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn’t teach you anything, because the bugs are random. So it’s not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It’s more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers.

Another argument for open source

This is strangely reminiscent of the arguments about Microsoft’s EULA, isn’t it?

Britain threatened the United States yesterday that it will cancel its £12 billion order for the new Joint Strike Fighter unless America agrees to give the Armed Forces full access to the warplane’s critical computer codes.
[…]
Without full access to computer software, the next-generation aircraft would effectively remain under the control of the Americans and could be “switched off” without warning.