Vurt is a novel by Jeff Noon. The eponymous premise is that Vurt is a dream-realm accessed by putting special feathers in one's mouth ( Read more... )

In Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, Ishmael argues that people are powered by stories, mostly implicit stories. In particular, he claims that most of (western) civilization is 'enacting' (a word meaning living-according-to or living-in-order-to-make-true) a story of humans-conquer-world. Ishmael focuses too narrowly on a duality between Leavers and Takers ( Read more... )

If openssl says it's should be installed in /usr/local/ssl for historical reasons, what does 'for historical reasons' actually mean? It means there's a mountain of some sort out there in the world and we don't want to shift that mountain. The explanation for the mountain is a story (history) of "how the mountain got its hump", something like 'it ( Read more... )

Open-Source licenses are based on the existence of source code. Source code is the 'preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program ( Read more... )

Art holds a mirror up to life. If we take a simple truth, that people are scared of the dark/strangers/et cetera, then there is art (scary stories) that reflects that. Art is also inside of life, and sometimes you can see the art/life boundary inside of particular pieces ( Read more... )

The opposite of Connascence
Jim Weirich has written and talked about Connascence, the "if I change that I have to change this" connection between different parts of software. It may be exactly as important, or even more important, to talk about deliberate separation; gaps and walls of various kinds ( Read more... )

First, I have to have a disclaimer. There's a pattern (on the internet) of pompous, ignorant "explanations" that simply echo and confirm the explainer's previous beliefs. This habit is often (though not always) done by males, and so is called mansplaining. I am certainly sometimes guilty of this sin ( Read more... )

Plato invented the idea of an idea. It's very hard, perhaps impossible, to get into a pre-Plato frame of mind. People have, behind their closed eyelids, mental workspaces where we can put various figures, shapes and entities. Let's call those things representations (we could call them ideas, but I want a word that means 'idea necessarily inhabiting ( Read more... )

What is empathy? Empathy is modeling something else as a thing like yourself, with stipulated differences ( Read more... )

Okay, this is an old (Halpin 1986?) discrete event simulation model. There's various entities which together are building something out of concrete ( Read more... )