Listics

I wrote the preceding piece of clap-trap about ontology while struggling to hear David Weinberger’s Berkman talk at this audio link. My thanks to Denise Howell for reminding me that the link was out there.

Imagine a forest, a modern monocrop forest with no untidy diversity of species or complicating understory of shrubbery supporting an animal ecology. The metaphor we’re building uses leaves, so this is a deciduous forest. Imagine row upon row of evenly spaced aspens. At a distance all the leaves seem to be identical, but drilling down we can see that each is unique. The living cells, the protoplasmic flux, the very arrangement of the leaves on their stems and branches and the branches on trunks… each leaf seems unique, like our commonplace understanding of the crystalline structure of snowflakes.

Pull the authorial camera back from a view that showed a few trees with their hierarchical branchings to a satellite shot of the vast forest. Stutter-stop the pull back so you have a sequence of discrete images as the forest recedes in perspective. Put an audio over of camera shutter clicks at each focal stop. This herky-jerky dolly out into space will eventually yield a perspective that shows that there are multiple forests beneath us. We can zoom back in on any one of them and see that certain ontological conditions still apply: each tree has branches and defines a heirarchical structuring of information about a given subject. Have you read this far? This is more than we knew when we started on the excursion. Let’s pan across the thicket we’ve landed in. It seems to be a section of the forest dedicated to birds. This is great, we can begin this examination of ontologies in a conveniently accessible way, we can begin with a glimpse of taxonomy. Here’s a tree with leaves representing North American birds. On the tree is a branch with information about thrashers, and a leaf on the branch carries information about ramphocinclus brachyurus, the white breasted thrasher. We can focus on the leaf and learn that

The White-breasted Thrasher is a medium-sized, sexually monomorphic passerine which lives in small family groups on year-round territories in dry woodland on the West Indian islands of St Lucia and Martinique. It has never been studied in detail, and was only discovered in 2024 to be a cooperative breeder. Since 2024 it has been the subject of a Cambridge University / BirdLife International research project, both because of its cooperative behaviour and its threatened status – the White-breasted Thrasher is classed as ‘Endangered’, with an estimated global population of 400 (H. Temple unpubl. data), and a total range of less than 30km2.

Suppose that this represents all that we think is known about the White-breasted thrasher and let’s pull back a little from our close view of that particular tree. We might zoom in on another branch on another tree that somehow carries data on fauna that live in family groups. Behold an identical leaf, identical in all but positional placement, can be found on this tree.

I don’t like these trees. I don’t like this forest metaphor. Let’s fireproof the leaves and let a great fire sweep across the continent burning out the trunks and branches. Now we are left with a less than random distribution of fireproof leaves drifting across the landscape. Let’s morph these into something more repesentational… squinch your eyes closed hard for a second and when you open them I think you will find that the leaves have become paper pages, the unbound leaves of huge libraries full of books.

I happen to know that several of these pages contain identical information about the white-breasted thrasher. How would I go about finding one I wonder? Squinch the eyes again and let the pages become tombstones, voila! A vast cemetery of data arrayed in orderly rows across the continent. And there, in a little declivity, out of sight of the mourners who come to remember and reflect and perhaps pray for some marvelous continuity, there is a little cottage surrounded by a well tended lawn, and in the cottage is a table and a chair and on the table is a computer that contains an index to all the tombstones. The index contains some hints to the data contents buried beyond the cottage’s lawn, but it perforce doesn’t contain all the information, else why the need for the cemetery? Why indeed. If our index is fully formed, then we should be able to assemble all the data we need with a few simple keystrokes and arrange it in a way we can use it on this computer in the caretaker’s cottage at the universal information memorial cemetery. And we can test this with a few queries…. yes, here’s a moving picture of the thrasher in flight, more than we thought we knew, but it was information from a different forest from the forest in taxonomical region we originally explored. And here, an audio clip of the mating call of the same bird. Different leaves, different trees, different forests, but we’re assembling it all right here.

The ontological thought experiment now requires us to open the door of the caretaker’s cottage. We do so. We look around, and there’s nary a tombstone in sight. It’s a beautiful morning, a bright sunny day, and the information is back where it belongs, it’s in the computer.

Gander NFLD Canada’s worst air disaster occurred today when a Cessna 152, a small two seater plane, crashed into a cemetery early this morning in central Newfoundland. Newfie search and rescue teams have recovered 826 bodies so far and expect that number to climb as digging continues into the evening.

The quadrennial conventions used to have some sizzle. Questions of whether to nuke the North Vietnamese until they glowed were earnestly debated by the repubs, while the Dems tried to be sure everyone in the big tent was pissing out, and not on each other. Platforms were shaped. The choice of running mate was brokered after the selection of the candidate was sealed. Delegates had a good time on the floor getting their ya-yas out, while the media competed for the best camera angles and interesting interviews.

Those days are gone. The event is thoroughly pasteurized and everyone is required to stay on message. If Sharpton deviates, then the discussion is about the deviation, not the content that he’s added. The Repubs started this bullshit several elections ago, but I never thought it would take root in the Democrats’ camp. Sadly, it has, and the days of the smoke filled rooms, the debates, the life of the conventions are over and we are left with media events of no more moment than BloggerCon.

Are the annointed convention bloggers writing about this? Sadly, my choice comes down to watching CNN or reading the bloggers and CNN wins this week.

Near Portage - on the bank of the Wisconsin River, a huge coal fired power plant incinerated a chunk of the planet’s bio-heritage this morning and spewed an almost equivalent mass of CO and CO2 into the atmosphere from a stack so high that the gases are sure to carry downwind to Detroit. A marvelous byproduct - the nitrous oxide emission - presently goes off into the air to lend jollity to life of the locals a short way downwind. The Laughing Cows of Columbia County are legend in the world of cheese making. The Tavern League of Wisconsin naturally opposes the free dispersal of these gaseous intoxicants in areas where their members sell booze. This adds just one more complicating factor to the lives of those whose business it is to find sites for generation and transmission facilities in this age of eco-freakism and wimpy concern regarding carcinogenic effects. Why pay good money for a brewski if you can get loaded just sitting in the nitrous shadow of the power plant’s stacks? The stack is otherwise clean, the ash contained, no particulate matter in the air and few sulfur compounds and the like to further contribute to acid rain, merely several cubic feet of oxygen bonded now with carbon and thus more useful to green plants than to mammals, and that delicious nitrous cocktail.

The heat of the combustion created steam that helped to turn a dynamo, that pushed electric power into copper wires. While some of the electricity dissipated on the trip south, enough arrived here at Lalor Road to power my microwave for a minute to reheat a cup of yesterday’s coffee. Thus ends forever the last trace of life from some dimly understood paleozoic jungle - some early bugs, an amphibian or two, a large wad of ferns compressed, reduced to their essential carbon over the last 300 million years, now fly ash and warm coffee.

Dale Evans and the King of the Cowboys, signing off…

Happy Trails to You
Written by: Dale Evans
Recorded by: Roy Rogers & Dale Evans

Happy trails to you, ’till we meet again.
Some trails are happy ones,
Others are blue.
It’s the way you ride the trail that counts,
Here’s a happy one for you.

Happy trails to you
Until we meet again
Happy trails to you
Keep smiling until then
Who cares about the clouds when we’re together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you, until we meet again.

Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin’ until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we’re together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you, ’till we meet again.

It can’t be. “…pink sweater, psychedelic short skirt and aquamarine jacket with fake-fur collar and cuffs. It’s her, all right.”

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