As many of you know, I have been impatient with FRIAM for years because so
much good stuff gets lost. Well, not LOST strictly, but certainly packed down
in the midden. I long for a medium in which the good stuff gets saved, and
built upon, and ultimately perhaps turned into articles or books! [Hey! I am an
Old Media Guy.] About a year ago, several of us in Santa Fe started a
conversation place in PBWIKI. The idea was that each of us would have a
subspace into which he or she would write rants or other promising thoughts for
the others to read and think about. Each person was the owner of his or her own
page in the sense that only the owner could delete stuff, but anybody could ADD
to what was written on another's page and anybody could take the material on a
page, transfer it to a new page with a new owner, and destructively edit to his
or her heart's content. Or just copy the bit to be edited to the bottom of the
same page, and put the edited version there.
Like all such utopian projects, there was a lot of fruitless milling about, but
in the end, some really interesting material got created, including, for
instance, a theoretical glossary of informational thermodynamics speak, a
language that we all sort of share out here, but haven't quite got a handle on.
It ended NOT because it wasn't productive, but because we all got involved in
creating the sfComplex and had to stop.
I am eager now to get that project going again, and this
ComplexityNoodlersCorner is my attempt to do so. I hope many of you will
participate.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE.
Here is the idea: Any time you find yourself writing something to FRIAM that
you think might be a bit too good to be lost to a list, go ahead and finish it.
However, BEFORE you send it to the list, copy it to your clip board and past
into a page on in the ComplexityNoodlersCorner. Then, leave a reference to that
page in your FRIAM contribution, so that others can go to the WIKI and work
with your material. The Noodler's Corner is in MEDIAWIKI on the sfcomplex
website at
http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/ComplexityNoodlersCorner
MediaWiki is the same software that WIKIPEDIA is written in, so it will be real
familiar. However, it has its little traps that the nerds left for us ordinary
folks, so I suggest you have a look at the page
http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/Getting_started
to orient yourself. If you are having problems, please email me any time of
day or night, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you want to start a new page, go to
http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/NoodlersIndex
and make a reference to that page, following the format modeled there and
adding your new page to the top of the list.
It is my fervent prayer that others will see the potential value of this
project and will help me get it started.
A very good way to help me would be to complain about the unclarity of my
instructions and make suggestions concerning how they might be clarified.
The next message will contain The First Noodle.
Thanks,
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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