Invitations and Becomings

The spatialisation of thinking needn't be at the service of its mathematicisation: sometimes it resists it.

Question: is there a one to one mapping of suburbs to postcodes?

Because we can make lists of suburbs and postcodes, it seems as though the question is one of counting. Not the total number of each. Rather, if I have one of these, how many of those do I have? However, it turns out counting is completely the wrong way of thinking about the problem.

This week in Crikey, Bernard Keane suggests a couple of different ways of tackling climate change as an economic problem (of stimulating a certain sort of investment). 

> DESIGN > 

After upgrading to Drupal 6.4 my HTML comments were suddenly appearing. The htmlcorrector inside the filter module was incorrectly escaping them - I applied this patch by jcnventura which worked a treat! http://drupal.org/node/222926#comment-930745.

While I'm a big supporter of Firefox, I've been having a very annoying time since I downloaded Firefox 3 - YouTube clips have been stopping after 2 or 3 seconds and cannot be restarted. The clip itself finishes downloading, but playback never gets any further. Turns out Firefox 3 doesn't play well with Adobe Flashplayer 9.

Just home from day one of the conference, and slowly processing the various stimuli.

Some highlights of the day were:

1. August de los Reyes on Emotional Design (more below...)
2. Grant Young's talk about Social Media gave me heaps of ideas for a charity campaign I'm working on, and articulated a question that's been plaguing me for months (in a vague and uncomfortable way). When it comes to engaging with social media, will it be my place or yours? And in general, it seems, your place is the place to be!

"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because
I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of
them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave
me my name!" Arthur Miller, The Crucible

I was lucky enough to attend a demonstration of some of Vignette's latest offerings, beyond their more well-known content management system, VCM. One of these is Vignette Recommendations.

Recommendations is best described as a behaviourist's wet-dream. It aims to anticipate the behaviour of a visitor to the site, and provide the content that the visitor will ultimately find most valuable. The thing is that this content may not actually have anything in common with what the visitor thought they were looking for - e.g. it may not share any keywords with the search that brought the visitor to that site.

Chris Bertram has a lovely post over at Crooked Timber on having a second-order desire not to have your first-order desires satisfied all the time.

So, for example, I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much.

Ah, Chris. We can tell so much about ourselves by the kinds of examples we use! You see, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Yes, that's the difference between porn and burlesque."

Browsing through some bits and pieces, I came across this quote from Mark Choate's book Professional Wikis

"Being propositioned by some young twenty-something about brain-dumping your wisdom into a wiki after having every utterance scrutinized by your superiors for your entire career is like suddenly being told by your wife of twenty years that she thinks you should loosen up a little and get a girlfriend."

It made me laugh - it still does - but the more I think about it, the less I'm satisfied with just laughing. Because there's something serious in there. After all, is it so obvious that we should all loosen up a little, be a little more promiscuous with our knowledge, or cognitive surplus or whatever?