Intertwingle
I remember 1975 as clearly as if it happened yesterday. Ted Nelson, the mad genius who invented Hypertext and Hypermedia, spake his Revelation from a waterbed, whereon he had been noddling with an electric banjo.

EVERYTHING IS PROFOUNDLY INTERTWINGLED.

In context, I knew exactly what he meant. But, today, I lightly investigated his neologism.

Eric Raymond's Jargon Database says:
"intertwingled
adj. [Invented by Theodor Holm Nelson, prob. a blend of 'mingled' and 'intertwined'.] Connected together in a complex way; specifically, composed of one another's components."

By blend, of course, ESR means "a portmanteau word" in the sense of Lewis Carroll.

On the other hand, we have the dynamics of the:

Twingle engine on Wikipedia.

It's interesting to think of the Web as a prototype Intertwingle Engine. Several software developers have products in early versions that replicate this vision to some extent.

Life in a TEXTAREA in a blog apparently called "Everything is deeply intertwingled."

"Eric Anderson said to me, 'Relax, Adam, Everything is Deeply Intertwingled.' Good advice, I know I've heard that somewhere before."

"It's hard to relax when you're living in a box. I'd estimate that I spend between 10% and 20% of my life in a browser, and half of that time is spent in a like the one I'm typing in right at this moment to flesh out this post. The reason I cannot relax is that Web forms have not evolved in fifteen years -- there's still so few text editting [sic] features that I find myself manually searching and replacing sometimes. There aren't many activities more useless than eyeballing a <TEXTAREA> looking for text sequences when I know this is what computers were friggin' invented to do." What set me off was that I was squinting in semibaffled concentration at "Superspace: or, One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry" by S. J. Gates et al., Reading MA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1983. On page 363, Supergraph Rules, there are some Feynman Graphs, and the passage: "There are other tricks that one can use to simplify the manipulations. We give the following 'twingling' rule which is often useful...."

(70 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Intertwingled, continued magicdragon2 2005-07-22 05:45 pm UTC (link)

... half of that time is spent in a like the one I'm typing in right at this moment to flesh out this post. The reason I cannot relax is that Web forms have not evolved in fifteen years -- there's still so few text editting [sic] features that I find myself manually searching and replacing sometimes. There aren't many activities more useless than eyeballing a <TEXTAREA> looking for text sequences when I know this is what computers were friggin' invented to do." What set me off was that I was squinting in semibaffled concentration at "Superspace: or, One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry" by S. J. Gates et al., Reading MA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1983. On page 363, Supergraph Rules, there are some Feynman Graphs, and the passage: "There are other tricks that one can use to simplify the manipulations. We give the following 'twingling' rule which is often useful...." (Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Intertwingled, continued magicdragon2 2005-07-22 05:47 pm UTC (link)

... and half of that time is spent in a TEXTAREA like the one I'm typing in right at this moment to flesh out this post. The reason I cannot relax is that Web forms have not evolved in fifteen years -- there's still so few text editting [sic] features that I find myself manually searching and replacing sometimes. There aren't many activities more useless than eyeballing a TEXTAREA looking for text sequences when I know this is what computers were friggin' invented to do." What set me off was that I was squinting in semibaffled concentration at "Superspace: or, One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry" by S. J. Gates et al., Reading MA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1983. On page 363, Supergraph Rules, there are some Feynman Graphs, and the passage: "There are other tricks that one can use to simplify the manipulations. We give the following 'twingling' rule which is often useful...." (Reply to this) (Parent)

	stuff dragonet2 2005-07-22 06:54 pm UTC (link)
	Tried to email, don't recall what link I used. But in the writer's database on your web site, my email is wrong because of oldness. Now it's dragonet@kc.rr.com. Everything is intertwingled, and qni (our very old isp) was last seen floating down the Missouri like a drowned steer, hooves up. Paula Helm Murray in Kansas City, MOO (Reply to this)

	adammaker 2005-07-22 06:59 pm UTC (link)
	och! I'm all aTwingle, now. (Reply to this)

	A Ted Nelson citation: Intertwingularity magicdragon2 2005-07-22 09:40 pm UTC (link)
	from Blue Sky: Miscellaneous, Submitted by Jamie Zawinski <jwz@mozilla.org> to Miscellaneous. ``Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.'' -- Ted Nelson (Reply to this)

He Do the Intertwingled in Different Voices magicdragon2 2005-07-22 09:49 pm UTC (link)

Nice web page with the key word in different fonts: intertwingled intertwingled. Ted Nelson's term for the way he imagined all versions of a single text and all texts could be interconnected via hyperlinks. intertwingled. My term for the way I imagine we are all interconnected. What one does impacts on another in unexpected ways. We are more than intertwined, which suggests we are separate but together. We are more than intermingled, which suggests we are more alike than different. intertwingled. separate, yet together. alike, yet different. intertwoven such that, together, we are more than we are apart. © 2000 by Christine Smith All rights reserved. (Reply to this)

Knots Intertwingled magicdragon2 2005-07-22 09:50 pm UTC (link)

Information Flow blog July 18, 2004 Knots Intertwingled Categories: Design Sam Ruby’s entry Knot Theory really gets at the essence of what he finds interesting. And I’m right there in my own taste and interests. I’ve always admired his “intertwingly” address, though I believe it comes from Ted Nelson’s quote: “Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.” Though I agree with Ted Nelson so far as it goes as a theory of reality, I start to disagree with it as a design stance. The resolution is not to make things only hierarchical, categorized, or sequential, but rather to decide when and where to arrange them in these ways. Therein is the art of placement and composing of systems. Posted by ramana at July 18, 2004 01:25 PM (Reply to this)

"we ourselves are intertwingled" magicdragon2 2005-07-22 09:55 pm UTC (link)

Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Slide 1 Ten years ago, I asked a hypertext conference, "Where are the hypertexts?" That's still a good question. I still don't know the answer. Since 1982, I've been associated with Eastgate, publishers of hypertexts and builders hypertext systems. We have lots more hypertexts today than we did in 1982 or 1989. But our virtual shelves are far too bare. What's taking so long? Slide 2 Ted Nelson once wrote that everything is deeply intertwingled. Slide 3: Where are the hypertexts? The suggestion that hypertexts are unnatural is common. It's sometimes voiced by supporters as well as skeptics. Isn't the book the NATURAL form of writing? Don't stories start at the beginning? In the next few minutes, I want to explore the world as it is. It's a world where everything is intertwingled. In the world as it is, stories don't start at the beginning. I want to say this in several ways. Keep in mind, though, that stories aren't just for fun; the stories I have in mind are about quantum mechanics and geophysics, not just fireside tales. Hypertext critics complain that we ourselves are intertwingled, tangled up in nonlinear obscurity. Reality, they say, is simple and logical. Is hypertext unnatural? (Reply to this)

Intertwingled: Each utopia is a network. magicdragon2 2005-07-22 09:58 pm UTC (link)

This page has intertwingled in it someplace, perhaps as a meta? Utopia-Network Each utopia is a network. There are closed networks (religion, meditation, the aura of classical art, the book as a closed text, mass media...) and open ones (love affairs, social utopias, open artworks that allow participation, ecological cycles, the telephone system and naturally, digitalized telematic nets, open texts, interaction, hypertexts). Social networks can be found in artist groups and communities (Cobra, Flexus, Situationists) as well as in the many initiatives of the counterculture since 1968 (from food co-operatives, communes, neighbourhood groups, neighbourly help, to media co-operatives and socio-cultural centres). Nonetheless, it would be false to think that the Net-Work-Concept as such has an utopian character - the "System" (totalitarian or technocratic state, the bourgeoisie, the family etc.) is after all, also a complex network of dispositions: transmission, storage, distribution, and control mechanisms. Only a very specific use of networks can be utopian: (Network "radio" for example is employed by fascism as the central distribution unit for propaganda, while in the revolutionary struggle of the Tuparamos, it was used as a mobile guerrilla communication system - central "fascist" grouping of transmissions versus rhizomatic, nomadic networks. (Reply to this)

More Knot Theory and Intertwingling magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:01 pm UTC (link)

Knot Theory Robert G. Scharein: Knot theory is a branch of algebraic topology where one studies what is known as the placement problem, or the embedding of one topological space into another. In response to a question from Christian Romney: the above web page was the inspiration for my current favicon.ico. When asked to describe my passions, I typically reply "Sam Ruby takes a perverse pleasure in integrating disparate things". PHP and Java. Bean Scripting Framework. Common Language Runtime. SOAP. Protocols and Formats. Placement problems. Embedding of one topological space into another. Intertwingled knotty problems. (Reply to this)

More of Software Tools, re: intertwingled branches magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:03 pm UTC (link)

Guide to Free Software Revision Control decentralization -- This comprises two issues: whether the tool facilitates lines of development being shared across multiple independent repositories, and whether the tool facilitates the development of multiple intertwingled branches. There are many ways a tool could facilitate this usage, and at least five different approaches are represented by the projects listed here. (One of these approaches is "no -- this tool will not help you deal with multiple intertwingled branches"). (Reply to this)

	Intertwingled: Lessons from Hypertext Rhetoric magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:04 pm UTC (link)
	[PPT] LESSONS FROM Hypertext Rhetoric "... everything is intertwingled. Not always desirable. the world is often baffling; to pretend that it’s simple is simply to lie. CLARITY • BREVITY • SINCERITY" (Reply to this)

Natural language, Human language, Intertwinglement magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:07 pm UTC (link)

Link from "Natural Language" Email Dated May 6, 2003 from Diana Slattery: "Natural language, human language, based on causality, subject does something to object. Subject transforms other subject (who to self is self) into object. Subject subjugates. Who is "at cause point" rules, dominates, survives. Instrumental reason. Glide [is] not based on causal, time-based connections. Glide is entanglement (just as you mentioned today, at fundamental level). Intertwinglement. Ted Nelson--"Everything is deeply intertwingled." Already connected, interacting as a fabric, a whole, a resonating network. Every meaning, every meaning-maker, intertwingled, interdependent. Identity of individual (glyph) concurrent with connections to other identities. And not fixed, can transform, always in flux. Can connect (link seeking behavior); can disconnect (detachment, not possession)." (Reply to this)

Wiki, Blog, Intertwingled magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:10 pm UTC (link)

Front Page: wikilogs.com If a wiki is a lot like a weblog, than why shouldn't I just use weblog software? I've been writing this way since February 2002, after various other experiments and 2 years of thinking about it. The key attractors to me were (a) the potential for keeping ideas around and (b) relating them to each other. And the potential for emergence/self-organization as both the content and links can be refined over time. Some people find that even if they want to write a simple linear narrative, developing it in a hypertext fashion lets them play with half-baked ideas and refine them a bit at a time. And many people have broad interests, and recognize that everything is deeply intertwingled. While most weblog software supports some number of "categories", this is too "flat" a way to model thought. You may have your own reasons. :) Who should just stick with "traditional" weblog software? People who want to post pictures of their cat.... (Reply to this)

Science and technology readily “intertwingle” with art magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:12 pm UTC (link)

Art Is Her Universe: Stanford Magazine, July/Aug 2002 COSMIC: Myrrh's works reflect scientific theories and mysteries. TRUDY MYRRH REAGAN creates art inspired by science. Her luminous paintings on clear Plexiglas—described as “stained glass windows for a new age” by UC-Santa Cruz mathematician Ralph Abraham—evoke concepts of nature, physics and cosmology. Science and technology readily “intertwingle” with art, says Myrrh (her professional name). That has certainly been true in her life. Her mother was a poet; her father was a geologist who illustrated his scientific papers with ink drawings instead of photos. At Stanford, Myrrh found a mentor in art professor Matt Kahn, who showed nature slides and aboriginal art in class and encouraged students to explore new media such as plastics. After graduation, Myrrh enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute and married Daryl Reagan, MA ’49, PhD ’55, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In the 1970s, she began to encounter other artists using science and technology in their work, as well as scientists and computer programmers interested in exploring artistic connections. In 1980, Myrrh founded a networking group to bring together these isolated players in what was then an avant-garde arts movement. She named the group YLEM (pronounced eye-lem)—a cosmology term meaning “the primordial matter that flared forth and made the universe,” she explains. Today, the nonprofit has nearly 200 members around the world, holds bimonthly forums at San Francisco’s Exploratorium and displays an electronic gallery on the web. Members’ works include “robotic sculptures,” images incorporating displays of brain activity, abstract paintings on 8-millimeter film, and words hand-painted on a computer, then marred with scratches and blurs. One of the more whimsical creations is a “sound/video/kinetic information event” that changes in real time based on the positions of San Francisco’s Muni trains as they move about the city. The video shows what passengers are seeing, and a “Magic Muni Chair” vibrates in resonance with real train movements.... (Reply to this)

"intertwingled" data ... CD-ROMs ... form & content magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:15 pm UTC (link)

The Cedars Demonstrators Report from the Cedars Demonstrators Meeting University of Warwick, 19/20 October 1998 The Warwick Meeting It was agreed within the first few months of the project that one of the most challenging aspects of the project was the link between the strategic work carried out by the Working Groups and the practical implementation of the demonstrators at each lead site. Each site had, for reasons of local expertise and interest, been assigned specific types of material to include in the demonstrator projects. Oxford was to focus on "primary" materials in general but specfically to include the material digitised under the Internet Library of Early Journals Project, the images created through the Celtic Manuscript project (both at Oxford) as well as the Taylor-Schechter Genizah project (based at Cambridge). Oxford will also include experience and material from the Oxford Text Archive. Cambridge accepted responsibility for "dynamic data" including large online databases and electronic journals as well as eLib project material (termed "ephemera"). Leeds’ interest and experience lead them to the "intertwingled" data such as CD-ROMs where form and content were inextricably linked. The degree of overlap between the demonstrator project material (e.g. are dynamic electronic journals not also frequently "intertwingled" with their software environment?) as well as the need for clear communication and divisions of work between the Working Groups made a meeting of the whole project group essential. Although the meeting focused on the demonstrators, discussion was wide ranging and impacted on various areas of the project work.... (Reply to this)

"intertwingled communities of interest" magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:17 pm UTC (link)

A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator (12 May 2004) We have a vision of a universal information management system built on a hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today's blogs to structure, search and share personal information as well as to participate in shared discussion. Just as Nelson (1990) envisioned a network where everything is deeply intertwingled, we propose that not only everything, but everyone can belong to several, possibly overlapping and discordant, intertwingled communities of interest. These communities will form dense networks of information linkage, allowing many types of structured and unstructured content to continually expand and weave even more interconnected webs of relationships. People are motivated to communicate many aspects of their lives to many different audiences. The rapid growth of Weblogging has affirmed the appeal of hypertext and validated the notion of individuals as content producers. The availability of personal hypertext systems, with support for granular control over sharing nodes, will increase this adoption for both Weblog authors and readers. The growth in the amount of digitally captured and hypertextualized information in the coming years will be even more astounding than the growth of the Web over the past ten years. There are significant technical challenges to overcome, but the standards-based organic growth of Weblogs and the Internet shows methods by which these challenges might be overcome. Rejecting the Web as not-hypertext is missing the point. The Web is an incubator for a continuously evolving system of content, user interests and supporting technologies. (Reply to this)

"intertwingled" ... another fine word ... one might hope magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:20 pm UTC (link)

Words & Stuff: kk: Englishizing (16 March 1998) ... So why not take this process a step further and intentionally Englishize certain foreign words and phrases? And why not adapt the spellings as well as the pronunciations? Perhaps it could return a certain joy dee veev to the language, a certain jenny say kwa. When confronted with a choice between two equal possibilities, for instance, I often shrug and say "mox nix," rather than trying to remember whether the German phrase for "(it) matters not" is "macht nichts" or "machts nicht." It sounds kind of debonair and stylish, ness-pah? Kind of Alamo'd, nick far? We could even re-spell some existing Englishized words, allowing us to talk about "Commie cozzies" committing "hairy Carey." While we're at it, we could introduce some less common foreign phrases. I've long been partial to "mutatis mutandis" (Latin for "with the necessary changes being made"); perhaps this could best be rendered in English as "mutate mutants." People say "time flies" all the time, but rarely does anyone exclaim "tempis fuggit!" (particularly appropriate when all of one's time has flown and one is now late). To find out how a friend is doing, you could ask "V gates?" The gang slang language Nadsat from Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is a rich source of such terms (mostly adapted from Russian), from "horrorshow" (for "good") to "droog" ("friend"). For our peace day resistance, we could add some words that aren't direct steals from other languages. There are some wonderful old words that deserve a comeback: "zounds," for instance, is a great all-purpose exclamation, and "swive" is a much more usable-in-polite-company verb for sexual congress than most of the available alternatives. (And people enjoy using the term. In a Chaucer class in college, one of my classmates once said, with gusto, "So there they are up in the tree, swiving away...") Perhaps a few neologisms would round out our stew: hypertext guru Ted Nelson's term "intertwingled" (as in "Everything is deeply intertwingled"), for instance, is another fine word that hasn't come nearly as far into common usage as one might hope. (Reply to this)

Deeply Intertwingled Hypertext: The Navigation Problem magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:22 pm UTC (link)

Review of Articles: Link Density Introduction Guidelines for Creating Hypertext Links References In the article, "Deeply Intertwingled Hypertext: The Navigation Problem Reconsidered," Bernstein validates widespread concerns of confusing the reader through hypertext linking. Nonetheless, he disagrees with the strategy of restricting the role of links in documents, as others have advocated. In his view, hypertext disorientation arises from bad writing, not from interlinking information, stating that, as in any medium, "hypertext may prove unwieldy and inexpressive when used without care and thought" (42). In addition, Bernstein claims that no convincing evidence exists that interlinked information necessarily disorients the reader or that a sequential presentation prevents readers from getting lost. Thus, he advocates a form of hypertext that depends on "the tension between regimentation and richness, between predictability and excitement" (41). To guide decisions about the number of links to provide and their placement, Bernstein recommends letting the rhetorical situation dictate one's choices. When the author's objectives are best achieved by constraining the reader's path, the availability of links should be reduced. Contrarily, when the author's objectives are best achieved by enticing the reader to pursue particular subjects more deeply, certain links should be advertised more often and more prominently than others. Though Bernstein's advice is helpful, it is vague. I am left wondering: which specific objectives lead to more or to fewer hypertext links? Some examples are warranted here. In their article, "Searching through Cyberspace: The Effects of Link Display and Link Density on Information Retrieval from Hypertext on the World Wide Web," Kahn and Locatis present their study on hypertext links. Using actual users, they show that low-link densities displayed in a list format produced the best overall search performance, in terms of search accuracy, search time, number of links explored, and search task prioritization.... (Reply to this)

'Intertwingled' : a very Buddhist concept magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:25 pm UTC (link)

NEW TIMES, new technology, new frontiers require new visions, new thinking and new language. Today we must try to understand our world of flowing interconnections, of accelerated impermanence and indeterminism. Paradoxically, we are finding that some of the richest mines of concepts and language to help us comprehend and describe these postmodern phenomena are found in the timeless, ancient wisdom traditions of the East. On a very deep level the Net and the great spiritual traditions of the East have some significant common ground: interconnectedness, interdependency, ultimately, interbeing. Ted Nelson, one of the first people to think seriously about hypermedia, once emphasized that "everything is deeply intertwingled." This is a very Buddhist concept -- nothing exists independently. 'Intertwingled' -- I love it. Buddhists call it interconnectedness, or interbeing. For spirituality is about union, and communion, too. Communication between ourselves and our true spiritual selves, and between self and others. One day I awoke to the endless possibilities presented by the Indra's-Net-like World Wide Web. I have personally experienced a wonderfully reinforcing symbiosis between the Net and Buddhism. On my website I have an "Ask the Lama" feature, where people can ask me questions about Buddhist teachings, meditation, ethics, their lives, anything. This furthers the interconnectedness between me and people I would otherwise never be able to reach, who could not reach me. I feel more and more intertwinkled every day. In shaping a Western Buddhism, we are moving from monasteries of stone to monasteries without walls, spiritual communities that are both physical and virtual, spiritual activists in the world but not of it, yet deeply engaged with it. The Net is an enormously important tool in this effort.... (Reply to this)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:27 pm UTC (link)

Pioneers: Ted Nelson | Hypertext <1963> As a graduate student in philosophy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ted Nelson had two critical intellectual encounters that led him to become one of the most influential figures in computing. One was with Vannevar Bush's article As We May Think, which convinced him that emerging information technologies could extend the power of human memory. The second was with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Xanadu, "a magic place of literary memory," in Nelson's words, that provided him with the image of a vast storehouse of memories, and which served as the inspiration for his life's work. From these influences, Nelson began his quest to build creative tools that would transform the way we read and write, and in 1963 he coined the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" to describe the new paradigms that these tools would make possible. Nelson was particularly concerned with the complex nature of the creative impulse, and he saw the computer as the tool that would make explicit the interdependence of ideas, drawing out connections between literature, art, music and science, since, as he put it, everything is "deeply intertwingled." Nelson's critical breakthrough was to call for a system of non-sequential writing that would allow the reader to aggregate meaning in snippets, in the order of his or her choosing, rather than according to a pre-established structure fixed by the author. Legal Information © 2000 Artmuseum.net (Reply to this)

Intertwingled ... Social Physics of the New Weblog magicdragon2 2005-07-22 10:31 pm UTC (link)

Mark Bernstein: Chief Scientist, Eastgate Systems Has several papers and talks with "intertwingled" in title. Another example (besides the previously mentioned: Mark Bernstein "Deeply Intertwingled Hypertext: The Navigation Problem Reconsidered." Technical Communication 41-47.): BlogTalk 2: July 5-6, 2004. Vienna, Austria. keynote: "Deeply Intertwingled: The Social Physics of the New Weblog" (Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: Intertwingled ... Social Physics of the New Weblog (Anonymous) 2005-07-23 10:07 pm UTC (link)
	Intertwingled: "tout est dans tout et réciproquement" as used to say Pierre Dac. (I'd propose "anything is in everything and vice-versa" as a translation, though the sentence becomes less elegant "tout" being both "everything" and "anything" at the same time) MD² Yet another blog added to my list. ^_^ (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Budhism, Re: Intertwingled ... Social Physics ... Weblog - magicdragon2, 2005-07-23 11:09 pm UTC

Re: Budhism, Re: Intertwingled ... Social Physics ... Weblog - (Anonymous), 2005-07-29 11:03 pm UTC

Intertwingularity at the Singularity magicdragon2 2005-07-27 04:24 pm UTC (link)

Come the Singularity, the fact that everything is deeply intertwingled in cyberspace will mean that everything becomes deeply intertwingled in "The Real World." As I posted on Charles Stross' blog this morning, [in reply to Carlos Yu in a subthread about Didactic in Science Fiction "Charlie, compare Asimov and Egan. Both were/are atheists, and Asimov despised the religious right when Egan was still *in* it. Yet Asimov let his atheism inform his stories, while Egan uses it to subordinate them."]: 07-27-2005 12:18 PM ET (US) There is almost always a didactic component to Science Fiction. As a common aspect of the genre, there is an empiricist, rationalist, engineering/science metaphysics (not necessarily Logical Positivism). H. G. Wells, Ph.D., was trying to proselytize BOTH Socialism and Science. Jules Verne was trying to show that technology leads to new forms of Adventure. Hugo Gernsback explicitly spread electrical/radio hacking, as well as scientifiction about it. John Campbell put an American imperialist spin on it. Robert Heinlein explicitly wrote Young Adult science fiction (then called Juvenile) to valorize Engineering, Science, and Space Travel in particular. A thread in Making Light debated this in depth, about a year ago. Greg Egan didactically shows (similarly to Rudy Rucker, Ian Stewart, and other Mathematician SF authors such as myself) that Mathematics is surrealist. Vernor Vinge (a Mathematician) and Charles Stross are not trying to CAUSE to Singularity, but they are didactically exhorting us to think hard about it. Isaac Asimov was not precisely an atheist; he told me that he was a Secular Humanist who felt guilty about not being a good Jew. (Reply to this)

Intertwingled Good and Evil: Jakob Boehme magicdragon2 2005-08-01 06:02 pm UTC (link)

Jakob Boehme [1575-1624], also spelled Boehm or Behmen. German theosophist and mystic, born in Altseidenberg, Silesia; indirectly a disciple of Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus. His English followers called themselves Behmenists (many later absorbed into the Quaker movement). Boehme wrote that everything exists and is intelligible only through its opposite. By this antithetical intertwingularity, evil is a necessary element in goodness, for without evil the will would become inert and progress would be impossible. God himself, wrote Boehme, contains conflicting elements in his nature. These religious views, on the fuzzy boundary of heresy, influenced modern Western Philosophy and Theology. (Reply to this)

Boehme intertwingling Newton, Blake, Allen Ginsberg... magicdragon2 2005-08-01 06:08 pm UTC (link)

Excerpt from my post August 1, 2005 01:38 PM on Kathryn Cramer's blog. My favorite Clearwater festival was in 1977 or 1978, when I was an underground music newspaper publisher with backstage passes all over the tri-state area. I was backstage with Pete Seeger (Captain of the Clearwater) and Allen Ginseberg (cf. ALLEN GINSBERG MEMORIAL CELEBRATION). On stage, Pete Seeger sang a song about garbage. For the rest of the night, Allen's companion Peter Orlovsky would, at unexpected moments, scream from the balcony "garbage, garbage, garbage!" Allen Ginseberg continued our longstanding argument about Science versus Art in a Leftist Jewish Buddhist hipster context. This time the conversation included Dr. George Wald, Biology Chair at Harvard, Nobel Laureate, who was particularly interested in the feud between Newton and Blake, given that they were both fans of the German religious mystic Jacob Boehm. Ginsberg gave an instant postgrad lecture on Blake and technology, with Wald interlineating commentary on the nonlinear optics of the human eye. Those who know me know how rare this is -- I shut up and just listened for half an hour. (Reply to this)

Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson magicdragon2 2005-08-01 11:27 pm UTC (link)

Excerpted from "We Are the Web", by Kevin Kelly, Wired, Vol.13, No.8, August 2005, pp.93ff: "... Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine." "At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty." "Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "INTERTWINGULARITY" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity." "I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history...." (Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson (Anonymous) 2005-08-03 11:01 pm UTC (link)

"It was going to save the world from stupidity." I've often wondered at that apparent inability of scientific positivism to recognise that stupidity's greater speed of adaptivity may not be it's only advantage over intelligence... Let's face it, stupidity has survived countless attempt at removal from people as much honorable as they were unsucessful in their deed; one (ok, two) awful question we'll have to face sooner or later: is stupidity an inherent part of our socio-psychological self-construct, and if yes, then, what does it justify ? Though I don't like the mediocratic self-justification road that those question could lead to, I'm sure they could give potent poisons to send the mind off-track. MD² (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - magicdragon2, 2005-08-10 09:34 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - (Anonymous), 2005-08-14 11:18 am UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - magicdragon2, 2005-08-14 02:56 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - (Anonymous), 2005-08-17 02:26 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - magicdragon2, 2005-08-17 03:50 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - (Anonymous), 2005-08-17 07:39 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - magicdragon2, 2005-08-17 10:27 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - (Anonymous), 2005-08-18 01:05 am UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - magicdragon2, 2005-08-18 03:06 am UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - (Anonymous), 2005-08-24 05:06 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - magicdragon2, 2005-08-24 05:22 pm UTC

Re: Kevin Kelly, Wired, on Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - (Anonymous), 2005-08-26 08:18 pm UTC

Aslan in 2008; Re: Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - magicdragon2, 2005-08-27 05:44 am UTC

Re: Aslan in 2008; Re: Intertwingularity and Ted Nelson - (Anonymous), 2005-09-17 10:07 pm UTC

Aristotle, Cavemen, Lolita, and Re: Aslan in 2008 - magicdragon2, 2005-09-19 03:29 am UTC

Re: Aristotle, Cavemen, Lolita, and Re: Aslan in 2008 - (Anonymous), 2005-09-30 04:49 pm UTC

Re: Aristotle, Cavemen, Lolita, and Re: Aslan in 2008 - magicdragon2, 2005-09-30 05:21 pm UTC

Re: Aristotle, Cavemen, Lolita, and Re: Aslan in 2008 - (Anonymous), 2005-10-11 07:49 pm UTC

Re: Aristotle, Cavemen, Lolita, and Re: Aslan in 2008 - magicdragon2, 2005-10-15 04:40 pm UTC

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