It’s all about the exaptation

December 24, 2006 at 10:53 am · Filed under Uncategorized

As I said the other day, I’m reading.

Things need to get better here. Hell, they need to get better everywhere, for almost everybody.

We need to build a thing. A thing I’ve been discussing quietly, planning, and formulating for nearly six months now — at least during those gaps when life has been winding up its punches and giving me a chance to think.

And, in a strange juxtaposition, I’ve also been diligent in trying to clean out my Inbox. Got it emptied out completely today, by the expedient of deleting lots of things I might have wanted to read someday, and tucking the rest off into a “Do Soon” box. But clean it is.

First new email to appear in my cleaned-out inbox, this gray Christmas Eve morning? I will take it as an omen of deep import, somewhere between a fortune cookie and a confirmation of growing conviction:

A new issue of Industrial and Corporate Change has been made available:

“Special Issue: Information, Appropriability and the Generation of Innovative Knowledge” December 2006; Vol. 15, No. 6

This particular Contents Alert is, indeed, ominous. Ominous in the sense of being an omen, of being fraught; an echo of a pattern of ideas that have been playing off one another in my soul for more than that six months. The time I spent and the scientific lifestyle (good and bad) I experienced at the Santa Fe Institute; my jokey-but-half-serious Erdös Number Auction; the motivation for my recent Return to the Academy after too long spent in Real Life; the future of intellectual property, commerce, and publishing; the echo-chambered frustration emanating from four hundred foiled academic bloggers; the question of who gets to play at science, at engineering, at history, at invention and innovation and scholarship; the growing (and threatening) expense of — and underbudgeting for — basic and applied research; the innumerable smart people I’ve met through 30 years, forced to climb over one another’s bodies to make their way towards an uncertain tenure-track position, or forced to give up on the entirety of the academic mode of life because it’s so “incompatible” with Real Life; the increasing and powerful success of collaborative work; the misunderstood economics of intellectual property, and constrictions pre-emptive secrecy and patens can place on collaboration and innovation. The imminent end of American science and engineering. The ruthless pressure of time, that leaves forever untouched the countless notebooks full of good ideas that every smart reearcher accumulates. The struggle, above all else, that ideas face in coming to light.
What a load of stuff. How does a little esoteric journal issue spark a flood?

Who can say what notions will form the keystone, the hub of a new network? It’s all about the exaptation, baby.

And so, while the world winds up again, I hope to explain it all. Time to move from waiting, to reading, to doing. Time to revive a sentiment I’ve let slumber for too long:

Let’s change the world, and see what happens.

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Journeys to Bagdad

December 20, 2006 at 4:15 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

The charming book by Charles Brooks: bought and scanned by me, proofread by unnumbered souls, and composed and edited by Barbara. It’s in the top 100 books downloaded from Project Gutenberg in the last 7 days, as of this writing.

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Xmas

December 16, 2006 at 8:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

When the Virgin Mary in the local nativity scene tips over in the wind, one can see a mysterious brilliant glow emanating from somewhere down there under her dress. If you think about it, all the other figures have a bit of glow as well, and possibly from a related cause. It may well be that there are religious implications.

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I have read

December 7, 2006 at 11:31 am · Filed under Uncategorized

…for more than a week. Sat, and read, often in what seems like dusklight, and immobile: books, blogs, email, old family memorabilia. Stacks of papers set aside “to do”, dusted with three months’ fluff. I have re-sorted the piles and replaced them where they sat.

Tried to catch up on those important things that have passed us by these last seven or eight weeks. No less to avoid the things that have since loomed large. But there comes a day when you’re exhausted by counting things lost, and stand in the shadow of the new insistent ones that have arrived. Time then to move on from reading.

One’s tendency when a chunk of life falls away is to approach the future as something that must be organized and planned. In this way we can postpone participating for some time, picking just the right step to take back into the present, and then realizing that it isn’t that present any more. Some folks refer to this as “healing”. I don’t know.

My wife’s mother died more than a week ago. I have read all I can stand about iatrogenic mortality, “institutional damage”, “defensive medicine”, and the like.

But I find I’m no better able to plan what to do.

Something, though. Just walking the dog might do. Something.

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