In a fascinating double-bill of sorts, we watched Werner Herzog's movie Kaspar Hauser last night. I had bought the DVD back in 2005 while at an ILP conference in Germany, and we just never got around to watching it before then. It was my first movie by Herzog, though not my first occupation with the fascinating and heart-wrenching story of Kaspar ( Read more... )

No one wants to be a Nazi, or even a Nazi sympathizer, or even be suspected of being even the little tiniest bit of a Nazi supporter in whatever shape or form. It's like a border to humanity or something ( Read more... )

I spent a good part of the day reading about emminent cybernetics researcher and fellow US-Austrian, Heinz von Foerster; occasionally I am asked why I am not more of his student.

The main problem is that I am a serious sympathizer of constructionism but cannot honestly be more than that. At this point in my research, reality for me is all about ( Read more... )

I am still puzzling over this one, especially now that _MWife_ is thinking about social network analysis: Given that one can abstract a mathematical model from some real life observational data, what is the meaning of the mathematical properties that the model has? For example, if one constructs a social network graph, then one might be able to identify ( Read more... )