Storage R Us

was just talking to Soomin about Ludwig Wittgenstein and she pointed to his Philosophical Investigations I - remark #593 that she's been contemplating:

A main cause of of philosophical disease -- an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example

how true this is .. singular examples can often become the bane of a balanced architecture - too often i'll have to talk to customers that are stuck in a particular mindset because of the lack of diverse examples they've been fed over the years for a problem they're trying to solve

now if you balance this with Abraham Maslow's hammer:

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail"

and apply this to computing, you can begin to see that there is a disease we can propagate when we take certain tools and blindly apply them as a singular solution without really rethinking the problems we might be trying to solve.

Ok .. mostly testing to see if this works (.. slid it to the sidebar .. I gotta start putting some better pictures on my flickr site) .. I should also start posting again

This phrase is starting to drive me nuts .. I find myself hearing it everywhere (on the news, in conversation, sports interviews) and am amazed at the amount of passivity behind it - I guess it stems from the fact that our a priori knowledge is limited so instead we like to watch, deconstruct and debunk .. our creation is no longer an active event, but is instead driven from the context of what we observe which leads us to relativism (anything can be anything) and the creation of reality through phenomenon.

I'm still playing with this idea, but it seems that if we explain the explanation away (to borrow from Lewis), or deconstruct the deconstructionism we have the logical equivalent of not seeing anything at all. Think of it as looking out a glass window and seeing everything else as a transparent object to the point where there's nothing really there (Abolition of Man I believe).

Anyhow, in the past year or so, I've also found myself playing with the logical connector "so" that I hear in explanations all the time. I believe this stems from the desire to attach and draw conclusions based on what has happened (an event), or what we see as a relative observation (perspective) while trying to honor objectivity as an ideal. Ultimately, I think there's a desire for community that we're trying to create in what we see as potentially isolating and unrelated events that we're trying to draw a correlation to .. but that's a much larger discussion.

For an interesting experiment, try seeing if you can go for an entire day without using the word "so" as a connector, or using a variant of the phrase "we'll see what happens next" ..

It looks like the Munch Museum was recently hit with the scream being stolen again. It appears that they've taken anxiety and birth from munch's constant frieze of life inspired themes .. i guess love and death didn't matter as much:


"I have always worked best with my paintings around me. I placed them together and felt that some of the pictures related to each other through the subject matter. When they were placed together a sound went through them right away and they became quite different from when they were separate they became a symphony." Edvard Munch.

So here's 3 for the upcoming week:

anxiety, despair, the scream