A metaphor lets us view something as something else. Thus it has creative potential: “a forest of legislation” lets us take the behaviours, meaning and ideas we normally associate with forests and apply them in a completely different context. But if no two situations in “reality” are the same – if Heraclitus is right that everything […]
Internet services and systems such as Google and Amazon usually appear to us as a visual representation of a page, as if it were taken out of some kind of printed publication. For almost all of the users, these visual qualities are all that will ever be seen. They are always present and never present, […]
Some scattered thoughts on idea flows. The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an […]
We distinguish between inventions and discoveries. You can own the intellectual property rights to an invention, but not to a discovery (you can’t patent the discovery of mercury or selenium, for instance). Inventions are meant to be created, and discoveries are meant to be sought for. But sometimes, the line between invention and discovery is blurry. […]
Today an oppressive, passivizing heat covers Tokyoites like a massive woollen blanket. Summer is here. In a feeble attempt to defy the heat, I follow up on my previous post on languages and automata. That post ended with the suggestion that we can apply these concepts to interactions in society. But can we? As a […]