Posts from — July 2008

As I re-do my blog, and very carefully re-create categories (they seemed haphazard and over-numerous in my old blog) I notice that categories multiply faster than actual blog entries (articles). How could this be? The answer is that each article can go in more than one category. In fact, I can often think of many categories that certain articles could potentially go into, but am not sure if there is a reason to actually create or use those categories.

For example, my article “The Future is in The CODE” clearly can be categorized under “science-biology”, and “computer science”, but also mentions a science-fiction author. Should I then also clasify it under “Science & Speculative Fiction”? That would probably be more appropriately a “tag”.

Another conceptual issue has to do with the hierarchy of categories. This is also related to the to a cultural issue: how we separate the “sciences” from the “humanities” and arts, even though, to my mind, they at minimum overlap, and many times are not truly separated in reality. There is much science and technology that goes into art. Depending on the person, this can be informal, learned-in-the-field technique, or well-researched and analyzed scientific approach to the materials and processes that one uses in their art-making. Likewise, there is much art in science.

This very article itself is an example of the issues involved: since it touches on both the humanities and the sciences, should I create a new blog category - “philosophy” - to cover that, as well as putting it under Writing/Literature/Publishing and “blogging”?

I’ll have to ponder this and perhaps do a little research…

Now, as far as Tags go, my impression is that tags are more particularized, whereas categories are more general and hierarchical. Think of a tag cloud: you can see how many posts have to do with a particular topic, and if you see some juicy fruit, you pick it - it’s a way of connecting that primate visual ability with that abstract linguistic human left-brain thing …

This is my newly re-done, resuscitated blog, which I haven’t used for over a year.

Improvements are:

- A new, better theme (neoclassical). Also created new photo headers for it from my photos.

- Upgraded WordPress (to 2.6 from around 2.2). (see more about this below)

- Got rid of articles I didn’t really like.

- Re-did the Categories from scratch

Regarding the WordPress 2.6 upgrade:
I upgraded because I wanted to make sure I was able to use new features and be compatible with themes, and it sounded like there was something called “widgets” that were part of the new deal. Unfortunately My categories were wiped out in the upgrade process (from I believe 2.2). I tried going into the MySQL tables, as suggested by this post by a programmer at another blog. However, there were more database rows than a Google cached page of my old blog categories showed, and it seemed tricky to sort out. so, I simply deleted all the old categories and started fresh. This turned out to be better anyway, because I was able to come up with better, clearer set of categories

Always aim for the simpler, more beautiful solution.

8/7/0
Update: I created a couple of blogs at Wordpress.com a couple of days ago thinking that would be a way to get more traffic to the site, since it was part of a large pooled domain of subdomains, and I’d noticed that many times my Google searches on various topics took me to www.blogname.wordpress.com sites. Well today I did some actual research in to the topic (using Google and the search terms “blog seo wordpress.com vs. self-hosting”) and discovered that there are good reasons for thinking self-hosting is actually the better solution. For example, this struck me:

“8. Better SEO (Wordpress) - You can use plugins to SEO your blog. You can use plugins like All-in-One SEO to SEO each post, link checker to check for dead links i.e. links that are not working.”
(http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2008/08/self-hosting-your-blog/)

A number of commentators (bloggers) also mention a number of other compelling issues, such as control (e.g., plugins, coding), and the ability to advertise.

So… I deleted all the posts at quantumfrog and thequantumfrog blogs, as well as everything else except the “About” link (which links back to this site).

It was a learning experience (trying out wordpress.com), and not a big deal to create and delete them. I got to learn about export and import
in setting them up. There were only 8 posts, so it was not a big job to delete them and the three (static) pages.

I also renamed this blog to “Blog Sin Nombre”.

Had a little fun with the title of one of the defunct blogs, calling it “This Blog Does Not Exist” with the subtitle “except in your imagination”.

What is the proper, or true relationship between humans, nature, and technology? The other night I scribbled a diagram on a post-it note. I just found the note, and made a cleaner version:

We are embedded in nature, whether we realize it or not. As individuals and as a species, living on a planet, nature is our context, now, and what gave birth to us in the past.

The word “technology” is derived from the Greek word “technos”, which means “art” or “craft”. I am using the word here to mean all things that humans create: tools, weapons, art, language, drugs, cities, civilizations – all artifacts.

Coming up the stairs from our apartment, I spied a couple of palm trees sprouting from the seeds that had dropped. There is a large Date Palm right at the top corner of this walkway. The walkways was recently covered in sand (decomposed granite actually), and apparently it provided proper conditions for the dropped dates to germinate. A few days ago they were just thin little green fingers, plain and straight, sticking up. Now that first vertical leaf is starting to develop the typical palm folds - the ones evolved over millions of years to survive wind and tropical storms.

It hit me: That all the amazing structure, all of a large tree, or any other organism, is contained within molecules within that seed. So much information unfolds, from a molecular scale, into a large creature.

Do we have anything to match this in a computer chip? Nature out shines all our technology, using atomic and molecular machinery. Though it’s not really machinery is it? An atom is captive vibrations, and a molecule is a structured collection of those.