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The meat of the letter is the 2d and 3d grafs on the first page. Here we see an individual, an unwitting pioneer, beginning to think through what would be involved in building an ontology. He came to it bottom-up: he had a local problem to solve. He knows that it is (at least potentially) an instance of a universal problem of supreme importance. There may have been others pursuing the ontology concept from the top down, but he has no way of contacting them or even of becoming aware of their work. Now for the punchline (and a gut punch it is): 68 years on, a human lilfetime, we are still *beginning* to think through what would be involved in defining an ontology. It is still a universal problem, it is still of supreme importance, and it is still intractable. I assert that its intractability is not intrinsic but extrinsic, and I cite this letter in support. Dispute me who will.
On Expanding the Boundaries of Things I Don't Know
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2720 Here's a good example of "where do I go with this puzzle now?" from the daily work that I do. The stages in working with odd material like the following goes from (1) recognizing that this junky-looking bit isn't nothing; (2) identifying the something in the noth...
Everything that you say about PM is true, but you fail to mention that it, and its perspective, and its manifesto (which you quote), were the single-handed brainchildren of its founding editor, Ralph Ingersoll, previously of the New Yorker and the Lucempire.
Fine Map from the Excellent and Seldom Seen "PM" Newspaper, May 8, 1945
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post PM newspaper (active 1940-1948) was a left-leaning newspaper funded by Marshall Field III, and was home to excellent reporting. Among the staff writers was I.F.Stone and staff photographers Margaret Bourke-White. Other contributors included Heywood Hale Broun...
"
Oh, me father was the keeper of the eddystone light
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night
From this union there came three
A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me
Yo ho ho
The wind blows free
Oh for the life on the rolling sea
One day as I was a-trimmin' the glim
Humming a tune from the evening hymn
A voice from the starboard shouted, "Ahoy"
And there was me mother a-sittin' on the buoy
Yo ho ho
The wind blows free
Oh for the life on the rolling sea
Oh what has become of me children three?
Me mother then she asked of me
One was exhibited as a talking fish
The other was served in a chafing dish
Yo ho ho
The wind blows free
Oh for the life on the rolling sea
Then the phosphorus flashed in her seaweed hair
I looked again, but me mother wasn't there
But I heard her voice echoing back through the night
The devil take the keeper of the eddystone light
Yo ho ho
The wind blows free
Oh for the life on the rolling sea
Oh, the moral of the story you'll learn when you find
To leave God's creatures for what nature had in mind
For fishes are for cookin', mermaids are for tales
Seaweed is for sushi and protecting is for whales
Yo ho ho
The wind blows free
Oh for the life on the rolling sea
Yo ho ho
The wind blows free
Oh for the life on the rolling sea"
The Cabinet of Curiosity at Eddystone
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2599 Henry Wenstanley was an artisan and an engineer with a long interest in architecture who rose to sufficiently high rank to be considered and selected to build a lighthouse at Eddystone (14 miles from Plymouth, built on the Eddystone reef, south of Rame Head). He ...
"büro" = "office" (from Fr. bureau)
Any resemblance to any trademarks, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The Big Stuff--Heavy Numbers, 1939
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Mercedes-Buromaschinen* evidently came into existence in 1906 in Berlin before moving on to other cities, including expanding into Zagreb and Beograb, Yugoslavia, which published this ad. It was big and red and covered a half-page in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Le...
So: the tail should cut off the dog?
Last night, the GOP crashed and burned
What a lovely civil war. One Republican strategist denounced Trump-supporters as "Vichy Republicans" and called the combed-over pathogen "a hideous cancer on American political life." Republican senator Ben Sasse belched that "if Donald Trump ends up as the nominee, conservatives will need to fi...
Half the time, I can't quite tell what you are getting at, but I'll stipulate that that must be my fault.
But I am quite sure that devils don't play chess, or do anything else that is connected in any way with the cultivation of the mind.
I am equally sure that those old men playing chess, whose appearance so disquieted you (for reasons that do not seem to be clear to either one of us), were less of a threat to you than any other living thing that was then within a radius of four miles.
Chess men
Tuesday afternoon. December 23, 2014. At Barnes & Noble---Sorry. This isn’t another dog story. It’s not a story at all or even an anecdote. Just a sketch.---the regular cafe tables along the front windows had been taken out and replaced with school cafeteria-style folding tables, four of them, s...
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