Northrop Frye - Culture: It is of the essence of imaginative

Northrop Frye - Culture: It is of the essence of imaginative: "Northrop Frye


Culture

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable."

enchant

enchant: "
We didn't see the seven mountains ahead of us. We didn't see how they are always ahead, always calling us, always reminding us that there are more things to be done, dreams to be realised, joys to be rediscovered, promises made before birth to be fulfilled, beauty to be incarnated, and love embodied.


'Songs of Enchantment'
by Okri


We didn't notice how they hinted that nothing is ever finished, that struggles are never truly concluded, that sometimes we have to re-dream our lives, and that life can always create new light.


This is the song of a circling spirit. This is a story for all of us who never see the seven mountains of our secret destiny, who never see that beyond the chaos there can always be a new sunlight. "

Anti Patterns

Anti Patterns: "An AntiPattern is a pattern that tells how to go from a problem to a bad solution. A good AntiPattern also tells you why the bad solution looks attractive (e.g. it actually works in some narrow context), why it turns out to be bad, and what positive patterns are applicable in its stead. "

Reviewing Satre in The Nation

Accidental Friends: "Aronson is surely right to remind us that both Sartre and Camus fastened on part of the truth--the need, on the one hand, for real, if unpretty choices and, on the other, for moral verities. "

Noam starts Blogging

Turning the Tide: "Welcome to Turning The Tide
This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet Sustainer Forum System where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets -- always from Noam Chomsky."

The Brain?

The Brain? It’s a Jungle in There: "These theories are part of what Dr. Edelman hopes will become 'sciences of recognition,' studying how biological processes recognize other biological processes. It is an enterprise, he argues, that spurs amazement, because if it succeeds, it will show that out of accident and diversity, something as miraculous as human consciousness can be born. But this vision can also spur discomfort, because it implies that there is no supervising soul or self — nobody is standing behind the curtain. This, for Dr. Edelman, is Darwin's final burden. "

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia: "China's western ambitions do not end with the purchase of huge amounts of energy, the main products that Central Asia has to offer, international political analysts, Chinese and regional officials agree. Beijing's bid to secure vital fuel supplies is part of a bold but little noticed push to increase its influence vastly in a part of the world long dominated by its historic rival in the region, Russia."

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia: "'It is not Kipling's `Great Game' yet,' Dr. Blank said, 'but it is a hell of a contest in its own right: military and economic and everything else.'"

Quentin's Eurides Days

A Passion for the Classics and, Well, Passion: "Ms. Carson, 53, described the play in her typically elliptical way, 'Euripides had his Quentin Tarantino days.'"

JAlbum - free web photo album software

Great software, with a tad complex set of tweaking optionsJAlbum

Age/wisdom

I recall a Canada World Youth group leader saying that as a result of their experiences overseas the participants started reading the New Internationalist and the group leaders started reading the Economist. I think the naiveté of youth is fine - I'm still in favour of cheap cheap university tuition and generous funding and strong government regulation of the environment, etc - its just you also acquire these contrary experiences like seeing universities as institutions seeking corporate funding and the individual profs focusing on their pensions. And somehow you have to make sense of it. I don't think I allowed for enough self-interest or systemic absurdity in my youthful thinking.

Extreme Programming - Extension?

I wonder if principles in Extreme Programming apply elsewhere in life? For example:

DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork encourages us not to over (or under)-engineer;
AskTheCode because it knows;
ListenToTheCode;
ModelFirst plus SpartanUserInterface helps us concentrate on real customer value
ExtremePlanning suggests quickly building a map of the whole imagined system and incrementally refining it
The PlanningGame formalizes the rituals and roles of planning
CountDownToRelease discusses how to use the ExtremePlanning practices when you're getting close to release
ExtremeReuse - adopting third party software and making it XP-compatible by building tests
TossIt - making projects trim and keeping projects trim
SystemMetaphor - how we communicate the system to ourselves and others
XpSimplicityRules
OnceAndOnlyOnce
ExtremeDocuments - we do documentation, sometimes differently
SupportCrisis - what to do until the doctor comes
IncrementalDelivery
LazyOptimization and EarlyProfiling
OpenWorkspace

Results in...
IterativeDevelopment - tends to be a natural result of ContinuousIntegration and ContinuousIntegrationRelentlessTesting and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork at each iteration
DynamicDesign - from RefactorMercilessly and short Code-Compile-Debug cycle
FewerWorkHours [important]

Blog vs Wiki

Interesting post on combination of Blog and Wiki. Seems like a variant on presenting a structured arguement/discussion i.e. that somehow I want to collect, order, organize and present information in an only vaguely linear fashion. In the first instance I'd like to be able to do this for my reference only, ideally with a local copy on my pc and a synchronized web accessible. Some might want to 'publish' some/all of their information. Some software tackles this, such as The Brain... but it seems imperfect. Are there other solutions? HTML, text/word files, Visio, Inspiration, Endnote ... all have their specific uses ...

: Irate Scotsman - Blog Wiki Blog: "However, wikis are not blogs, and I don't think they're particularly well-suited to be hacked into being blogs (which is the main gist of the links from Andrew's WikiBlogIntegration page). Sure, they can be used as (or made into) blogs, but the question is whether or not it's a valid approach. The problem lies with the basic concept of a blog. A (modern) blog is:
Ordered (by the chronology of posts)
Temporaly aggregated (a page displays the 10 or so most recent posts at any time)
Dynamic (the pages change constantly, due to the temporal aggregation)
Categorised (most modern blogs strongly rely on the use of various categories for posts)
Contemporary (a blog's primary external value lies in its current posts, or current topics)
A blog is a time-stream of information, which inherently understands the concepts of past, present, updating, recency and progress.

By contrast, Wikis seem to be more about the timeless accretion of static data. To my mind, a wiki is:
Principally unordered (wikis only care in a very secondary way about the most recent edits; recency is not core to the concept of what a wiki is)
Logically aggregated (content is within a mass of related material)
Primarily static (each individual page mostly contains its own relevant content and nothing else)
Not intrinsically categorised (categorisation in wikis seems to be human-enforced; internally, all pages exist at the root level, with no subdivisions or priorities)
Timeless (wiki content is long-term; rarely is it associated with a single point in time)
So, if you're looking to combine static with dynamic content, do you start out with a blog or a wiki? It's a matter of what you specifically need to do. For examp"

Creative Commons

Creative Commons: "Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share."

Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte: New ET Writings, Artworks & News

Project Management Templates

tools: Project Management checklists and templates: "Project Management checklists and templates"

Enigmas: Why don't people do what they say they will?

Why don't people do what they say they will?: "Why don't people do
what they say they will?" "In summary, the main issues are: competition for time, unhelpful personal motivations, lack of autocracy, lack of urgency, lack of prompts, and multi-tasking."

Writers on Iraq War

Guardian Unlimited | True colours: Collection of writers' views on Iraq War. Here is Le Carre - "I opposed the war before it began, wrote against it in the Times and marched against it in London. I believed then, and believe now, that this illegal and unprovoked invasion will lead to greater instability and suffering in the region than existed before it was launched."

Heartneing

Is 'network literacy' different?

jill/txt: talk at brown: "'Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network'"

UI elements

Widgetopia, Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities: "Widgetopia
Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities "

On Searching

ongoing On Search, the Series: "This series of essays on the construction, deployment and use of search technology"

Countries Visited

create your own visited country map

The Great Game II + China's Wild West

China's Wild West - 99.09: "In the terrible desert and desolate massif of Xinjiang, the Beijing government faces a volatile mixture of ethnic groups, some of whom are hostile to all that is Chinese.

"In the Hexi Corridor, between the mountain ranges of China's arid, north-central Gansu Province, the Great Wall crumbles to an end. "

The New 'Great Game': "The Caspian region may be the next big gas station, but, as in the Middle East, there are already a lot of men running around throwing matches."

ShangHai Eye - Hu for oil: "while Premier Wen Jiabao rushes around the poultry farms of China, personally wringing the necks of thousands of flu-ridden birds, President Hu Jintao is presumably enjoying himself in the swankiest hotel in Libreville. But it's not all fun and games. Hu is in Africa, doing his bit to solve one of China's biggest problems. "

Peking Blogs

Living in China: "Living in China is a member of the Living on the Planet, a network of regional blogzines around the world. "

danwei: "Danwei.org is a frequently updated website about media and advertising in the People's Republic of China. It is maintained and edited by Jeremy Goldkorn."

The Peking Duck: "A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing and finally to Singapore for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him... "

Oil, Tibet and other bits explained ... Not Shanghai Eye

ShangHai Eye - Not Shanghai Eye: "Stuff for which Shanghai Eye is not responsible, which you may nevertheless enjoy looking at."

Review of the Cambridge Illustrated History of China

ShangHai Eye - China is too big even for a big book: "“THERE IS nothing inevitable about the results of China's confrontation with the West,” Professor Buckley Ebrey writes, “a whole concatenation of contingent events contributed to the outcome.” A sensible statement in a very sensibly written - and handsomely illustrated - history. "

Walt Whitman - Inspiration for Writing

Walt Whitman, Proud Music of the Sea Storm

Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences—the tempest on the sea,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances, of religious fervor,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love, and grief and death,
I said to my silent, curious Soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh'd amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish'd henceforth by our celestial dream.

And I said, moreover,
Haply, what thou hast heard, O Soul, was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of stormy waves, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh scream,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic—nor vast concourse of voices—nor layers of harmonies;
Nor strophes of husbands and wives—nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the different bugle-calls of camps;
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which, let us go forth in the bold day, and write.

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia: "Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting. Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem The Second Coming as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot, but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats' apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the 1890s. "

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home: Poet Brodsky, whom I don't know yet, but who got a nobel prize:

… cities one won't see again. The sun
throws its gold at their frozen windows. But all the same
there is no entry, no proper sum.
There are always six bridges spanning the sluggish river.
There are places where lips touched lips for the first time ever,
or pen pressed paper with real fervor.
There are arcades, colonnades, iron idols that blur your lens.
There the streetcar's multitudes, jostling, dense,
speak in the tongue of a man who's departed thence."

Nobel e-Museum

Nobel e-Museum: "The Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation