Barclay James Harvest, Mother Dear, album Barclay James Harvest, 1970. Wish you feel like we do.
Archive for August, 2007
now
Thursday, August 16th, 2007Persians on debtors
Monday, August 6th, 2007Herodotus was writing, in the Book I of his Histories, about the Persians:
There are many reasons for their horror of debt, but the chief is their conviction that a man who owes money is bound also to tell lies.
(translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt).
They were right: conditioning the individuals through debt is much more efficient than conditioning them through explicit imposition of rules by the state. So, the Persians’ insight is that any debt-based system will still appear flashy even the next day after its ruin; briefly, that the capitalism is built on bubbles and insidious slavery.
Histories can be read on the Internet Classics Archive at MIT (currently buggy: the Book I is truncated) or on eBooks@Adelaide.
theorem: searching means rewriting
Sunday, August 5th, 2007Imagine a network of concepts, each concept naming a combination of words (symbols). Imagine searching for words belonging to that concept through a collection of digital documents containing text.
Then each query corresponds to a path through that network, path which reaches a collection of documents.
Then each document found can, essentially, be represented (as an alternative to its current representation as a series of words) as a collection of paths through that network.
This means that, given a refined enough ontology, an arbitrary digital document is formally rewritten according to that ontology through the search process (by collecting and inverting the hits).
This ultimately means that searching means rewriting too.
A consequence of this is that we have, in principle, an alternative solution to semantic authoring (authors using semantic mark-up to write new documents). Another consequence of this is that old, semantically flat, documents can recover semantic depth over time while the public gets involved in this playfully.