Robert Holmes wrote ==>"First rule of FRIAM: no one talks about specifics"<===
Nick Thompson replies: BAD Robert; BAD, BAD, BAAAAAD! "Bad" because untrue. Sometimes the list gets mindnumbingly specific, say, about specific softwares and what you use them for. And Bad because we were talking to a Newbie at the time and your irony might in fact be taken for a friam proscription. It's called, "self-fullfilling irony." For me, the list is most exciting when there is tension between the specific and the general, when, for instance, we talk about Rosen, but do so with a specific passge or text in mind, or talk about relativity, with a specific phenomenon or formulation in mind, or, at the other extreme, talk about a specific software development or scientific observation because it raises some general issue or paradox. When we achieve that tension, we are ..... incandescent! I would urge all of us, when we are discussing generalities, to provide examples from texts or from nature, and when when we are talking about specifics, to provide the principles or issues to which they are relevant. That's my two cents. Nick ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
