Archive for March, 2008

Troubled sciences, evolutionary physics…

When I heard Lee Smolin talking at SciBarCamp something struck me: this gentleman from the “hard sciences” distanced himself from all the pop science theorizing that made physics and maths popular in the late 90s: He wasn’t extolling the virtues of one Grand Unified Theory over another, nor was he gushing about the strange and [...]

art.tinuum.net

well – the title says it all, folks. I thought it might be neater to put some of my creative stuff on it’s own blog. You can check it out here.

Power Laws and Life

Network theory. Power law distributions. I won’t digress into explanations (for that try going here briefly then come back).
Now let’s talk about life. What does the power law say about life? It says that life isn’t fair.
How, you might ask, can a class of polynomial equations possibly have anything to say about the Master Plan [...]

SciBarCamp’ed out!

Wow – what a weekend. I spent practically all of it at SciBarCamp and I simply don’t know where to start in terms of telling you all about it. I guess I lack the journalistic instinct. I lack it so much that even in spite of taking my camera I took very few pics… [...]

Test case repositories : taxonomies vs tags

Perhaps I’m still high on Clay Shirky’s thoughts about ontologies and how they’re largely outdated, cos I recently created a bunch of test cases and found that the neat (and traditional) categorizations of test levels and test types just wasn’t going to cut it for the application in question.

Ontologies: the web vs traditional archives.

I came across this very interesting article talking about how ontologies are largely useless for the web – a place where ‘folksonomies‘ will rule, while ontologies will die a well-deserved death.
I love Shirky’s article and it is very insightful, but he himself hints at one reason why we can’t pooh-pooh old-school classification systems quite so [...]

Africa’s piece of the internet pie

On most maps, Africa is either bright red, signalling “badness in overdrive”, or white, meaning “no data available”. So imagine my lack of surprise when I followed Mike Miner’s link to a page showing worldwide distribution of social media applications.
Is there really no data available? I got curious and started wondering about this. I know [...]