Robot Wisdom auxiliary

i'm caught between two platforms...

robotwisdom.com will blink out again
at the end of this month
unless another volunteer host turns up

i was appalled to learn that google
declines to index pages with more than 100 links
assuming they're spam
(i think pages with <100 are lazy)


google-reader-shared
has killed linkblogging for me
at least temporarily

i've fallen in love with reCAPTCHA

the little boost of knowing
i'm proofing random texts
makes that burden a joy

i tried the new online Monopoly
and find it pointless
except the perspective it offers
on googlemaps AI

if it implemented a map-recaptcha
i'd love it
to fill out the googlemaps model
with geographic intelligence

(Monopoly relaunches this week
if you want to try it out

about the only strategy
is sabotaging neighbors
or not

rural areas have few/no neighbors)


it may be a dark age for linkblogging
but it's interesting times for web 2.0

with tiny tweaks from myspace to facebook to twitter
bringing revolutionary vibe-shifts

which have many evolutions to go

it has to go back to
usenet's decentralised distribution




and i've got an idea
for a new antimath symbol
probably just "+"
that represents
a hypothetical absolute moral ideal

snubbed by almost all
subbing half-measures

pursued tirelessly by one or two

 
 
 
 
 
.

a semantic-web-savvy pc
will know the web's deweydecimalsystem
and the consensus 'best' web resources
for each topic-area

you will customise this
to your personal preferences

rating streams of new resources
in favorite areas

catching up on resources
recommended by
topic-experts you trust

searching for experts/streams
with similar tastes

archiving/mirroring/monitoring
your web2.0 presence

 
 
 
 
.

whether they're dna or not
there have to be molecules in the brain
that embody specific words

so someday a visualisation
will be able to sort the whole thesaurus
into specific brain regions

down to the level of specific molecules

so life events
are continually
verbalised
at the molecular level

 
 
 
 
.

wouldn't del.icio.us
have 90% of twitter's functionality
if they just exposed (as URLs)
their internal IDs
for individual posts
(so people could link eg
my specific comments
on any given bookmark)

and also then allowed
posts with no associated bookmark/links
(so i could post about nothing)?

 
 
 
.

everyone's experienced 'awakenings'
where the Con loses its grip
(as in Carpenter's "They Live")

but always falling back then
to sleep




after enough cycles
of wake-sleep-wake

a pressure-point
may come into focus

thru which the dark cloak
descends

but which can be resisted
standing up against the conformity
of millions of people
over thousands of years

and might this pressure-point
even be a single molecule
or at least a small cluster
in the brain
between the eyes

the ultimate battleground of good and evil

torn between
a state of comfort
and a state of virtue?

 
 
 
 
.

clay shirky has
educed a simulacrum
of boingboingist groupthink

by soliciting 'novel' futurist predictions
(150 so far, horribly nonnovel)

none of which connect The Singularity
with human wisdom
(at best hoping it will be left by
googleSanta
in our xmas stockings)

but robot wisdom
for the semantic web
will require slow painstaking
literate esthetic
disentangling
of the motives that roil our hearts

and confronting the Cons
that enslave us

 
 
 
 
 
.

[recent news item]

• DNA is the memory molecule
  
• some 'silent' DNA is race-memory/collective unconscious [Wiki]
  
• this quantity increases slowly via evolution
  
• it starts with the highest-priority 'knowledge'
  
• it must be profoundly universal
  
• the coding system has to allow generalisations
  
• generalisations are behavioral 'puns'
  
• Joyce's Finnegans Wake was his attempt for a universal inventory of the highest-priority behavioral puns
  

 
 
 
 
.

reagan's victory in 1980
was a cold awakening for us hippies
the progressive dream drowned

and ever since we've been pedaling in sand
in tar
no traction

i see one hope

the solidity of science

social science without academic bs

an a.i. simulation of the Con

world history rewritten

in the broader context of psychological evolution

the etymogeny of meaning

the mysterious depths of sexuality

wakefulness intimidation ego and sleep

 
 
 
 
.

not just
in
every grain of sand

but in every field
of every database

(even the simplest:

name address age gender title
etc)

we
must
see
the whole potential universe

ie
all those simple fieldobjects'
real-or-potential
relationships
with all other fields/objects

naturally ordered
most-important first (a

literary

criterion
you must then
(now) begin
to spend the whole rest
of your life
studying)

as if
every field has an extra
asterisk p.s.

where anomalies are noted

(how certain is the value?
why or why not?
when and why did it last change?
etc)

 
 
 
 
.

[this is the first
and hopefully the
least
articulate and
most
controversial
of a projected series]

any semantic web first needs
a mental model of all possible semantic webs
(and this mental model must include
a mental model of all possible
mental models)

say

mentally model each 'object'
(including mental objects)
as a named point
of known or unknown duration
(some objects
more important than others
from the perspective of any given mind)

with lines between points
modeling relationships between objects

relationships changing in time

relationships mentally modeled
by related mental objects

relations affecting
and affected by
(more or less strongly)
related relationships with other objects

(all mental models of relationships
necessarily related to the mental models
of all related objects
and of their relationships)


and mental models differ in depth
in wisdom
some shallow some deep

deep or shallow
in many different ways

different wisdoms
characteristic of the deep or shallow
people who hold them

but mental models of semantic webs
and mental models of mental models
must be deep by every definition

constructed atop a distillation
of all wisdoms
(art philosophy religion
politics economics history
fiction poetry humor
psychology philology anthropology sociobiology
criticism design logic math)
only by the wisest of the wise

.

the semantic web movement is 8 years old
and has delivered little more than
a microformat for business cards [Wiki]

and nothing to rank with
roget or lenat

so i'd like to propose
using del.icio.us for prototyping
much more ambitious
microformat-like linksets

starting eg with
prototype person-profiles
[Jorn Barger]

replacing pagetitles with microformat fieldnames

using Wikipedia placeholders
if the fieldvalue isn't already a url

using del.icio.us tags
to sort fieldtypes



other possible prototypes:
website-profile microformat
webpage-profile microformat
blog-profile microformat
video-profile microformat
song-profile microformat
porno-profile microformat

(each of these should be
summarizable
via heraldic barcodes)

necessary web 1.0
was about content
and wikipedia has mostly solved
that problem

necessary web 2.0
will be about generalising
interface insights
so that all web2.0 apps share
all the predictable functionality

something google
could bootstrap into beta
within a year, i'd bet

starting from google pagecreator (GgPC)
for creating all manner of webpage
which offers authors
a private view of all their hosted pages
as a list or icon-grid
sorted by name or date

which ought to be available as well
as a public view
(effectively a changelog-blog)

and GgPC could/should also
automatically archive earlier versions
of each page, allowing authors
to reonstruct their state
on any given day

and if each created page
includes a short summary/description
and/or an illustrative pullquote
and/or a 'pull-image'
and/or a summary of recent changes

then that public blog-view
could also include
some or all of these

and the author herself
could customise a 'recommended' blog-view
of site updates
suppressing minor changes
promoting major ones
and even quoting short pages in full

which already cannibalises
most of the functionality
of blogger.com
(which should, itself
open to the public
the author's private, sortable
list-view of post titles)

but we can also add to each page
a set of topic designations or tags
which google could treat
as postings to GgGroups topic areas
(tag = topic = group)

and pages that refer/respond
to other pages
can include the URLs of those 'parent' pages
as topic/tag/groups, as well

so google can trace discussion threads
without the original authors even needing
to turn commenting on

and if this can be streamlined enough
google could let websurfers
rate every page they visit
(openly, or anonymously)
and aggregate these ratings as well

offering now a link-blog view
of all a surfer's ratings
(eg above a threshold level)

to support all this
the GgGroups interface needs to streamline
back to an ajax re-implementation
of the pre-WWW goldenage newsreader 'trn'

where you'd subscribe to
groups/topics/tags/urls/authors/communities

with killfile filters
to minimise annoying noise

and encouraging blogging-community experiments
like slashdot/digg/linkfilter/memepool

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

This is a companion to my 01Feb 2005 post on rec.arts.books, Fifty Joycean Conjectures. Percentages in parenthese are my estimates of probability (100% = certainty).

1. An atmosphere of one molecule will have an identical temperature profile, and a similar pressure profile, to atmospheres of any number of molecules. (95%)
   
2. Snowflakes are acoustic standing waves. (85%)
   
3. Any pure gas in zero-G can freeze into hexagonally symmetric flakes. (50%)
   
4. ATP is like a blasting cap, and enzymes are springy. (80%)
   
5. Muscle fibers don't need ratchets, they just use ATP's recoil. (70%)
   
6. The pattern of punctuated equilibria is a consequence of sexual stereotyping. (60%)
   
7. ESP involves sexuality, scent and low-frequency sound. (50%)
   
8. (added Oct2005) The ear is a megaphone/transmitter as well as a receiver. (20%)
   
9. (added August 2007) Eyebrows are 'virtual' representations of the shoulders, for signalling purposes; the mouth corresponds to the genitals. (80%/30%)
   
10. (added August 2007) Humans retain light body hair to amplify the movements of vermin. (50%)
    
11. Human males are closer genetically to chimp males than to human females. (80%)
    
12. The first firestarters used meteoritic iron. (30%)
    
13. Humans lost most of their sense of smell when they started cooking their food. (40%)
    
14. Preverbal language is wiser than verbal. (60%)
    
15. Science begins with play, description, and classification. (99%)
    
16. Minoan Crete was a brothel of sex slaves, not a goddess culture. (75%)
    
17. The Iliad recalls a quixotic Minoan attack on Egypt, not Troy. (25%)
    
18. Josiah founded Judaism in 621BC, based partly on Greek models. (40%)
    
19. Ezra c400BC reconciled (by duplication) the Jerusalem and Babylonian variants on creation, Adam and Eve, Deuteronomy vs Leviticus, and Kings vs Chronicles. (50%)
    
20. These represent the only pre-600BC Bible texts. (30%)
    
21. (added Oct2005) Jesus wasn't taken seriously, even by his acquaintances, until they seemed to be getting communications from him, after his death. (30%)
    
22. (added August 2007) The gospels confuse Jesus the Galilean with Jesus the Egyptian. (25%) [more]
    
23. could deodorant increase the divorce rate? [post]
    
24. (added August 2007) Phonographs incidentally record ambient sound as they play. (40%)
    
25. Von Neumann was wrong about hidden variables in QM, and he plagiarised Eckert and Mauchly's cpu-architecture. (75%)
    
26. A simple line is to orthogonal cartesian n-space as a simple hierarchy is to a fractal thicket. (100%)
    

[original date 24 sept 2005]

given joyce's attachment to symmetry
a portrait/ulysses/wake trilogy
would have seemed lopsided

 _ _________ _________ .
 | | | | :
 |P| | |S:
 |o| | | :
 |r| Ulysses |Finnegans|S:
 |t| | Wake | :
 |r| | |A:
 |a| | | :
 |i| | |T:
 |t| | | :
 | | | |S:
 | | | | :
 ~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ .

unless he hoped to append
"something simple about the sea"

.

we know joyce determined in 1907
to rewrite 'stephen hero' as the prequel to ulysses
because he needed stephen dedalus
to reach the end of that book
in just the right shape
to serve as bloom's telemachus

and in fact
joyce couldn't finish 'portrait' in 1914
until he'd drafted the opening of ulysses
so the intervening gap would be minimal

(if scylla and charybdis really was conceived
as chapter two
and not relocated until after 'portrait'
had gone to press
that original plan may have left
discernible footprints
in the last chapters of the earlier book)

but if, now, finnegans wake
is really the key to ulysses
with bloom the dreaming everyman

then these three works
are a true trilogy

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

the talmud includes some scurrilous gossip
about jesus the galilean
(eg that his real father
was a roman centurion called 'panther')

but also about
an egyptian healer
of the same name
about the same time
who had magical tattoos

so is it possible that 'mark'
in gathering stories a generation later
for his authoritative gospel
managed to confuse these two
in fact to conflate them

'jesus a' the uncharismatic loner
at odds with jewish law
(his only 'disciple' a backstabbing judas)
whose execution was shattering as john brown's

'jesus b' the crowdpleasing miracleworker
who called gentiles dogs?

 
 
 
 
 
.

in designing
the riddles of ulysses
i think joyce relied on
a fiendish corollary
to conan doyle's 1890 dictum

only those who've studied ulysses
closely enough to eliminate the impossible
will dare to acknowledge
its improbable truths

so take the following
with a grain of saltpeter:

16 june 1904 was the historical date
of the general slocum disaster
termed in ulysses a beanfeast
at which 1021 attendees died in a fire

so when
on 10 march 1923
joyce drafted the first vignette of fw
dating it internally as
"after that same barbecue beanfeast was all over"
we may suspect we're still
at #7 eccles
with ROC = Bloom-the-dreamer
and Boylan and Stephen the "all of them gone"
and ROC's heeltapping perambulation
equated to Bloom's own
in the last half of Ithaca

but if ROC is Bloom
then Tristan and Isolde
can only be Bannon and Milly
putting Bloom's condom to use
the following day

so then
could Patrick's eventual socking
of Berkeley
be a hidden explanation
of Stephen's wounded hand
after the altercation with Mulligan
between Oxen and Circe?

Mulligan might naturally have told Stephen
about Milly and the condom
or about Bloom's gluepot

but could Stephen have been so offended
as to strike Mulligan in Bloom's defense?

and if Berkeley is Mulligan
and Patrick is Stephen
then is holy St Kevin
Stephen as well
rather than the awol-in-ulysses Stannie/Shaun?

.

I often complain to interviewers that 'weblog' is the least interesting of my many neologisms. Here's a sampling of others:

1. meta-expressive (1974) = inauthentic, expressing an image rather than a reality
   
   
2. noofog (1974) the stupefying side of the noosphere-- pressure to conform making us blind (cf negative intelligence, below)
   
   
3. ron riddles (1975-friv) riddles where the answer is a portmanteau of two phrases eg 'TS Eliot Ness' (Who wrote 'Sweeney among the Untouchables'?) or 'The arm and hammer throw' (What's the intensest sport at the leper olympics?)
   
   
4. priorating (no date) rating by priority
   
   
6. [Greek letter phi], [Greek letter psi] (no date) philosophy, psychology (abbreviations)
   
   
7. junk-food vegetarian (1977?) no meat in soda or potato chips
   
   
8. filters, speeds, and scales (1978) three exercises for deepening understanding of any given phenomenon-- picture the world as pitch black except where the phenomenon supplies a bit of colored light (this directly led to the tree-of-life/worldtree visualisation); picture the phenomenon at microscopic scale, at macroscopic scale, slowed down and speeded up
   
   
9. literary indications (1978) images from novels or other literature that capture some nuance of human behavior, i used to save these on index cards that i then sorted and re-sorted
   
   
10. cybernetic psychology, robot wisdom (1979) a scientific methodology that builds from literary indications (qv) to computer simulations of realistic human behavior
    
    
11. appublication (1979) making public
    
    
13. pyschology, spychology (1979-friv) bad psychology, good psychology
    
    
14. antimath (1979) a simple notation system for story-skeletons, based on comic strip conventions [more]
    
    
15. cx. (no date) contrast (cf 'cf')
    
    
16. lifelines (1984?) a cross between antimath and feynman diagrams, evolved into worldtree model [more]
    
    
17. friv (1985) frivolous
    
    
18. romantic psychology (1988) narrowly, the scientific study of romantic love; broadly, the complement of cognitive psychology [Solace]
    
    
19. storycycle (1988?) compilation of literary indications into a (usually) cyclical monomyth [more]
    
    
20. fractal-thicket indexing, semantic topology (1991) a generalisation of antimath that builds complex content by repeatedly creating 'cross-products' of any simple hierarchy with itself [more]
    
    
21. usual stories (1992) a way to defuse AI's 'frame problem' by considering any content-node to imply the full usual storycycle of that content-item [more]
    
    
22. task-savvy applications (1993) applications with enough a.i. to guess what you're trying to do [more]
    
    
23. confabulating arranger (1994) a model for interactive fiction in which the past is created backwards [more]
    
    
24. alt.music.alternative.female (1994) newsgroup [newgroup]
    
    
25. misery pizza, misery burritos, etc (1994?) ersatz entrees using lowest-possible-cost ingredients: white bread, ketchup, american cheese food, pork'n'beans, etc
    
    
26. the responsible party (1995) semifictitious 'conservative left' political party
    
    
27. naive witness (1995) heuristic visualisation of unprejudiced guy-in-the-street [more]
    
    
28. chase-down design (1995) writing webpages so they start by cutting-to-the-chase [more]
    
    
29. parent test (1995) judging political candidates (etc) by whether you'd want them as parents [more]
    
    
30. static a.i. (1995) knowledge representation [more]
    
    
31. skeptical correctness (1995) jumping to conclusions based on 'scientific' prejudices [cite]
    
    
32. self-knowledge horizon (1995) what alan watts called 'the taboo on knowing who we are' [more]
    
    
33. AI complementarity principle (1995) the idea that an expert system capable of understanding a domain should equally be able to generate a simulation (or a vision sytem to generate an image) [more]
    
    
34. pork'n'beans vegetarian (1995?) it's not enough pork to bother paying double for the vegetarian beans
    
    
35. w3* (1996) trick for distinguishing search keywords from ordinary words [more]
    
    
36. full-disclosure capitalism (1996) capitalism might not be so bad if businesses were fully transparent [more]
    
    
37. negative intelligence (1996) internet phenomenon where bad ideas drive out good [more]
    
    
38. philosophy lab (1996) the idea that philosophical ideas could theoretically be tested in an advanced computer simulation of human behavior [more]
    
    
39. propanoia (1996-friv) the unfounded fear that a Usenet newsgroup's messages don't propagate to your site [cite]
    
    
40. pride cycle (1997) the storycycle/monomyth behind Finnegans Wake-- hero sins, falls, rises via conformity or experiment [passim]
    
    
41. hypertext lab (1997) the notion that web-design theorists ought to use their sites to experiment with new design ideas [more]
    
    
42. elvis index (1997) search-engine popularity ranking normalised to standard term 'elvis' [more]
    
    
43. weblog (1997) a log of interesting web readings in reverse chronological order
    
    
44. ?* (1997?) uncertain. eg '?x' is short for 'x (?)' (after Herring)
    
    
46. gotcha-links (1998?) web links that without warning entrap you in (eg) slow-launching helper apps like Acrobat [more] a special case that throws you out of your surf history is the ejection seat
    
    
56. e-communication, e-video, e-audio, s-text, h-text, h-audio, h-video, p-text, p-video, p-audio (1998) electronic/spoken/handwritten/printed communication/audio/video/text [more]
    
    
57. new game (1998) an approach to finnegans wake via close reading of manuscripts in the order they were written [more]
    
    
58. liquid page (1998) later and more widely called 'liquid html' [more]
    
    
59. xhtml (1998) my original proposal was better than what They ended up with [more]
    
    
60. project-proposers anonymous (1998) 12-step group for people who have better ideas than follow-thru [more]
    
    
61. nuppies (1999?) compulsive one-uppers [cite]
    
    
62. iq infinity (1999?) heuristic for studying joyce-- that he knew everything
    
    
63. en-passant linking (1999) web links that can only be detected by (eg) blue underlined text [more]
    
    
64. one-layer web design (1999) making portals that flatten out all web resources so they're a single click away, by linking every useful subpage of a site, not just the main page [more]
    
    
65. resource pages (1999) sifting thru all web resources on a given topic and linking all the best ones in an organised way (search engines should someday do this automatically) [more]
    
    
66. mournography (1999) orgies of exploitative sentimentality after tragedies [cite]
    
    
67. first-cut parser (1999) document-parser that finds a likeliest interpretation for each segment of a text [more]
    
    
68. stripped-grapes web-design (2000?) tables of contents (etc) that link to subpages with no description but the page-title [more]
    
    
69. url-hacking (2000) studying the structure of complex urls so you can customise them [more]
    
    
70. content-centered web design (2000) web-design that foregrounds the content rather than the design (eg avoiding sidebars and other distractions) [more]
    
    
71. text buttons (2000) a design philosophy that tries to minimise hard-to-read blue underlined linktext by isolating the link at the end of text, with a single word description, usually of its document type [more]
    
    
72. hyperbolic linking (2000) topically closer pages should have more links on a given page [more]
    
    
73. phat (2000) high-bandwidth (of webpages)
    
    
74. information density (2001) eg 'faqs' are high density [more]
    
    
75. text-blocks and separators (2001) alternative to uptight 'hierarchies of containers' model of text [more]
    
    
76. minoan illuminati (2001) mostly tongue-in-cheek reconstruction of Bronze Age Crete, emphasizing their remarkable disdain for giant ego-monuments [more]
    
    
77. jumpbar (2001) a row of offsite links at the top of a blog (or any page) so you can quickly jump elsewhere if there's nothing new there [more]
    
    
78. mindwrestling (2001) ESP-based power-struggles [more]
    
    
79. content stubs (2001) interface elements that can be expanded to reveal more content/choices (eg menus) [more]
    
    
80. contemplation-factor (2001) how many calories does it take to contemplate something [more]
    
    
81. html-junk (2002) webpage cruft [post]
    
    
82. ToC-footers (2002) putting site-links at end of (one-column) document [more] rediscovered 2007 [blog]
    
    
83. the Necessary Web (2002) just the faqs, sort of [more] [more]
    
    
84. W3C secession (2002) top-down amateur a.i. has got us on the wrong track entirely, time to start over [more]
    
    
85. the pragmatic web (2002) semantic web optimised for relevant content [more]
    
    
86. action hypertext (2002) web-authoring tools should accommodate dynamically evolving pages [more]
    
    
87. the Joyce police (2002) cruising joyce-sites for errors and issuing citations [more]
    
    
88. EWRs (2003) epiphanies-while-reading [less]
    
    
89. etymogeny (2003) a way of sorting words/concepts according to when the nervous system became capable of dealing with them [more]
    
    
90. page memory (2003) the universal ability to recall where on the two-page spread an interesting bit occured [thread]
    
    
91. v* (2003) very (eg vshort, varcane, vfriv)
    
    
94. Philosophy Markup Language, History-of-Science Markup Language, Rhetorical Markup Language (2003) what they sound like [more]
    
    
95. goldfarb's conjecture (2003) the illusion that text styling should be associated with semantic markup [more]
    
    
96. grand metasynthesis (2004) aka The Singularity, but with an eye to the sorts of problems that will actually have to be solved along the way [more]
    
    
97. crystal tags (2005) hypothetical elaboration of nntp (network news transfer protocol, ie usenet/netnews/newsgroups/DejaNews/GoogleGroups) to replace email, blogs, and newsfeeds [more]
    
    
98. view-scaling (2005) optimally fitting the view of any object to the allocated space [more]
    
    
99. hoaxtop (2005) negroponte's olpc (a cellphone designed by the proverbial committee) [more]
    
    
100. Gg* (2005) Google (eg GgW = GoogleWeb, GgI = GgImages, GgN = GgNews, etc)
     
     
101. I'm-an-idiot day (2005) confess a weakness on the 13th of every month? [more]
     
     
102. weather giant (2006) visualisation of height of weather-phenomena via imaginary giant [more]
     
     
103. zipless blogging (2006) effortless blogging, interface-wise [more]
     
     
104. yahoo zodiac (2006) a more-or-less disciplined theoretical visualisation of a web ontology [more]
     
     
105. radial ontology (2006) any visualisation of an ontology that puts the root (of the 'tree') at the center [more]
     
     
106. heraldic barcodes (2006) schematic icons that encapsulate a lot of metadata for easy human scanning [more]
     
     
107. OS avatar (2006) inevitable interface feature where your OS tracks your current state [more]
     
     
108. self-conscious computing (2006) building debuggers' TRACE function into hard- and software at deepest level [more]
     
     
109. radio goggles (2006) visualisation experiment intended to explore why radio reception is so unpredictable [more]
     
     
110. pluripedia (2006) an evolution of wikipedia where multiple versions of each article are ranked according to your circle of trusted referees [more]
     
     
111. mini-blogs (2006) a 'view' that should be available on all web2.0 sites, allowing you to publish your own edition of the site's ongoing content, and to subscribe to others' miniblogs [more]
     
     
112. Glass earworms (2006) insane atonal earworms [more]
     
     
113. Polti vocabularies (2006) catalogs of (eg) plot skeletons [more]
     
     
114. worldtree (2007) was 'tree of life' (2005) 3D-worldlines visualisation of unique tree of life on Earth [intro]
     
     
115. discourse patterns (2007) a pattern language for rhetoric [more]
     
     
116. jLo notation (2007) shortening a two-word phrase by appending the lowercase initial of the first word to the capitalised last word
     
     
117. wBu (2007) GWBush = Pere wBu, wBu Roi (apologies to aJarry)
     
     
118. floaters (2007) blog-posts postdated so they stay at the top
     
     
119. meretocracy (2007) government by the most meretricious
     
     
120. tag portals (pending) the idea that any site with tagging should encourage taggers to create a portal-page for each tag, that gives an overview of everything the tagger thinks is important about that tag
     
     
121. net scouts (pending) incentive program for net.illiterate adults via 'merit badges'
     
     
122. Smithee dreams (pending) dreams with abysmal 'production values' eg plot holes, lousy special effects
     
     
123. dissipedia (pending) a wikipedia of links to negative criticism of ideas/people/etc
     
     
124. hypodata (pending) eg footnotes (cx metadata)
     
     
125. hypertext mashup language (pending) inevitable evolution where web markup allows multiple pages to be customised and/or combined
     
     
126. chronogram (pending) a graph with time as the Y axis (flowing up) and space as the X
     
     
127. .5* (pending) semi- (eg '.5friv' = semifriv)
     
     
128. pagestream (pending) eg your browser history, or your linkblog, or a page of search-engine results
     
     

.

i never cared for
sgml/xml/xhtml's insistence on
text as strict hierarchies
of containers

especially when
entirely notional
paragraphs
are granted positions of
(undeserved) honor
in those hierarchies

but lately i've been pondering
the ordering principles
(alphabetical chronological best-first etc)
by which we sequence
textbites

broadly generalising the narrow concept
of list
until suddenly the prospect
of text
discourse
as hierarchies of
lists within lists

has become attractive




formatting styles, of course
are vastly irrelevant here
(a list can be just
two words
unpunctuated)

the emphasis should instead be on
ordering principles
and set-membership principles

lists offering choices
lists exhausting domains
lists sampling subsets
lists specifying procedural steps
lists structuring arguments

lists arbitrarily
prefixing and postfixing
auxiliary text materials
like headers and footers
and sidebars

.