wrythings

Lately I have been studying XSLT in a course taught by Wendell Piez. (Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Transformations is a programming language for transforming XML source documents.)

Wendell offered a comment that if working with XSL is hurting, you are probably approaching it in the wrong way. This applies to many other things in life, certainly.

In the Mumonkan - the Gateless Gate - a collection of 48 koans, the second koan is known as wild fox koan. Having recently reflected upon that koan at some length while thinking of the a-temporality of xslt, I’ve been reading some Zen into the programming philosophy behind XSLT. I’ve applied my own transformation to the question posed in the Wild Fox.

Shall the XSLT Master, applying templates with devotion, escape the law of temporal-causality?

It is worthwhile to think more about the FLOSS (free/libre open source software) context in relation to the Gateless Gate.

I’m taking a course on storytelling. Although I have been involved in community informatics for several years as an activist and organizer on digital divide/digital excellence and community networking, I found this work to involve the telling of stories and general reframing community and what we are about, or what is possible for us.

I was watching a video from the TED conference where Isabel Allende offered the old adage: What is truer than truth? The story. (Variants on this answer may be a matter of translation: Legend, Myth, Story, Narrative.)

I grew up on Grimm, and many mythologies… great preparation for an early encounter with Joseph Campbell via the Power of Myth (where Bill Moyers, another hero, interviewed him). I later made extensive study of semiotics and have an enduring interest in narrative, and the importance of story and discourse.

In recent years Italo Calvino brought me back to the play of stories/storytelling in the work of the OuLiPo — where art is craft that you work at each day, and good art or literature arises from finding the right combination of signs through experiment and experienced judgment.

Campbell’s work on myth and ritual, the idea of the story opening a path to greater truth than mere facts, or perhaps a greater truth in discourse around a story than in any particular telling or offering of an account, and the idea in Calvino that folktale is not myth degenerated but that myth arises out of folktale when the right combination his hit upon, these are all connected.

Storytelling is part of the natural and necessary repertoire of human behavior… it helps us cope and adapt as well as honor and remember. Though stories can be used to divide, their healing potential is critical in this moment. Our creative play can reconfigure our individuality and our collective life.

Lars found this excellent statement by Marvin Minsky (The Society of Mind).

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

that which arrests the motion of thought is false

This is an ethical and an intellectual principle for me,  dare I say a semeiotic principle?

So much to say! I have been a fan of the Grass Commons vision (not to mention the team) for some time. So much so, I’ve recently joined their Board!

When I first learned of the vision to develop the Network of Integrated Consumer Knowledge - NICK I was stunned. It’s something we clearly need. I thought: how the heck are we going to get there? It takes some chutzpah to even dream this thing, but that is exactly what we need more of. And we do need NICK. Though it looks to be a long-range project, it may be better to think of NICK as establishing a standard and a technology for sharing consumer knowledge. That’s what I like about it. The Open API for Consumer Knowledge.

If that wasn’t cool enough, look at the underlying technology they have evolved in trying to bring this big vision to the world: WagN

They say Wiki + Tagg’n = WagN, and that’s a good mash-up style descriptor. But being a stickler for the evolution of our language and logic in these new worlds I wonder how we will describe it in the future when it is more natural to us…. when we are, let’s say, more fluent in WagN. And I do think we ought to think of these applications in terms of a grammar of what they make possible. We’ll leave that aside for now.

And then there is Hooze.

Hooze?

I don’t know.

Third base.

Abbott & Costello aside, Hooze will help us to know or remember who’s behind a product and that will help us mean what we pay as the Grass Commons saying goes.

we give them what they want

that has been the refrain…

our hands are clean … we give them what they want

I don’t accept the premise.

If you give some of the people some small part of what they want, or a substitute for what they want… that would be a more accurate statement.

There is much that people really really want that the mainstream press is not giving them. Is that not clear?

Some things the press gives the people is really a substitute for something else they want …

Much of what people want, the press cannot give in direct way - it would be beyond the power and form of the press…

The press cannot give people power, money, or sex in the sense that the people would have those things … rather it indulges fears and fantasies of power, money and sex.

Does no one want information, does no one want good reporting and investigative journalism of high caliber? Where shall they (we) go?

You cant give people a meager sliver and say you have given them what they want.

The base … the lowest common denominator leaves a lot of people cold.

Try a new refrain. Sing a new song.

My friend Gerry Gleason recently commented:

Now that the peer-produced encyclopedia, Wikipedia, surpasses all but the premier commercial encyclopedia in completeness and quality, and it is arguably the equal to that one (Britannica), I see it as only a matter of time before peer-produced independent media surpasses all the commercial offerings (can anybody name one that might compete, ok maybe in print, the NY Times, but that’s it)?

Gerry’s comment brought forth an echo from my recent visit to the Pantheon (Paris) where there is a statue to Diderot to the effect that the Encyclopedia paved the way for the social revolution…

So, now, the revolution of the Internet and a wiki-mode of participating in knowledge.