November 03, 1999

Live James Burke Scraps from OOPSLA '99

77 Tutorials
25 Workshops

30 of 152 papers
2136 or so people...



James Burke from Oxford, alas...

Excruciatingly boring... He opens with a joke about a millipede...

Knowledge manufacturing, a.k.a. innovation...

Oh no, not The Box...

Carburetor: perfume spray, gasoline... A Frenchman...

A paean to serendipity and bisociation...

Descarte and reductionism... A world of noodlers. Specialization vs. holistic hippies.

Planning the Hunt: delegation of labor, hierarchy, standard mammoth catching practice.

Flint and language to convey skill. A precise linear sequence, he claims...

More than one meaning in more than one context... Break the reductionist/specialized rules (yawn).

Why does he call reductionists noodlers?

Looms and putting people out of work...

Riots and change in the apparel chain...

Linen rags are free. You can make paper...

Since 1991, the Americans have been able to turn their first stringers from building bombs to building toys. I has turned out to matter, it seems. No one expected this. Not even us. Cold war demobilization has given us a windfall technology dividend...

Graduate vocabulary 12,000 418,424 words in English

He praises reductionism as he belittles it. Cheap talk about creativity is really a fig leaf for mobilizing the masses of dullards to step into line with enthusiasm. Mr.Smith goes to Oxford. His is a soothingly egalitarian message, so much so that I don't trust it.

Standards and information scarcity: he is going to claim that intelligence is not scarce. He claims there were only a few niches for clever folk to act like wizards. He is going to claim this is changing.

Novel juxtaposition: it can be more plentiful...

Even Burke is hanging out his red light. A Knowledge Web. Form being more important than content...

He beats on one and one is there...

Jim Burke's Everybody Gets a Trophy Day

Foreseeing patterns of innovation... Weave a few patterns...

He's an optimist... We went to the moon... Several times...

Posted by foote at November 3, 1999 09:12 AM