Announcing the Complexity Noodlers Corner

[Nick Thompson]

As  many of you know, I have been impatient with FRIAM for years because so much good stuff gets lost. Well, not LOST strictly, but certainly packed down in the midden. I long for a medium in which the good stuff gets saved, and built upon, and ultimately perhaps turned into articles or books! [Hey! I am an Old Media Guy.] About a year ago, several of us in Santa Fe started a conversation place in PBWIKI. The idea was that each of us would have a subspace into which he or she would write rants or other promising thoughts for the others to read and think about. Each person was the owner of his or her own page in the sense that only the owner could delete stuff, but anybody could ADD to what was written on another's page and anybody could take the material on a page, transfer it to a new page with a new owner, and destructively edit to his or her heart's content. Or just copy the bit to be edited to the bottom of the same page, and put the edited version there.
Like all such utopian projects, there was a lot of fruitless milling about, but in the end, some really interesting material got created, including, for instance, a theoretical glossary of informational thermodynamics speak,  a language that we all sort of share out here, but haven't quite got a handle on. It ended NOT because it wasn't productive, but because we all got involved in creating the sfComplex and had to stop.
I am eager now to get that project going again, and this ComplexityNoodlersCorner is my attempt to do so. I hope many of you will participate.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE.
Here is the idea: Any time you find yourself writing something to FRIAM that you think might be a bit too good to be lost to a list, go ahead and finish it. However, BEFORE you send it to the list, copy it to your clip board and past into a page on in the ComplexityNoodlersCorner. Then, leave a reference to that page in your FRIAM contribution, so that others can go to the WIKI and work with your material. The Noodler's Corner is in MEDIAWIKI on the sfcomplex website at
http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/ComplexityNoodlersCorner 

MediaWiki is the same software that WIKIPEDIA is written in, so it will be real familiar. However, it has its little traps that the nerds left for us ordinary folks, so I suggest you have a look at the page
http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/Getting_started
 to orient yourself. If you are having problems, please email me any time of day or night, nthompson at clarku.edu.
If you want to start a new page, go to
 http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/NoodlersIndex 
and make a reference to that page, following the format modeled there and adding your new page to the top of the list.
It is my fervent prayer that others will see the potential value of this project and will help me get it started.
A very good way to help me would be to complain about the unclarity of my instructions and make suggestions concerning how they might be clarified.  
The next message will contain The First Noodle.  
Thanks,
Nick


Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthompson at clarku.edu)
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[Steve Smith]

Nick!

Peanut Butter and Noodles! MMMmmmMMM!

Good on ya for trying this... I'll give it a shot... best I can... I
like the concept and have my own Wiki in LAVA for my folks to do
something similar.  Can't say it's a success, but it isn't a failure (yet)!

- Steve

[Steve Smith]

In the spirit of helping to nurture a new form of discourse (or a new embodiment of a fairly familiar form, the "evolving discussion"), I have been trying to participate in Nick's "Noodlers Corner".  

http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/NoodlersIndex

I normally experience FRIAM mail as a series of interrupts.  Every time I read my e-mail, I get one or more e-mails from the FRIAM list which I choose to read or not based on the subject, the author, my mood, other distractions.   Again, based on the same things and on the content of the posting/mail, I choose to respond (or not).  

As I traced through the archives by thread, the image of a huge tassle of threads hanging from the present into the past overcame me.  In the spirit of noodling, I tried to think about these threads (noodles) a different way.   Since noodles tend to be all piled up in a bowl or on a plate, sometimes floating in broth, I tried to imagine how these threads might really be proto-noodles. 

What I came up with intuitively was that each thread is a noodle, but everytime a thread refers to another thread, said noodle crosses the other noodle, and everytime a thread refers back to itself (other than in the mundane sense of a full quote of the earlier text) said noodle has curled back and overlapped itself.  

The wiki form explicitely allows for references between "threads" (noodles in this case) and within a single thread (noodle) and outside the bowl (URLs referencing documents in the grand hypertext metaverse of the web itself).

I will include this e-mail (or most of it) in a new noodle, and encourage FRAIMers to give Nick's Noodler's Corner another look, maybe dive in and squirm around in the noodles forming there!

- Steve


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Stephen Guerin]

I wonder if Google's Knol project may be useful to publish some of the FRIAM and
sfComplex writings under a group authorship. See:
 http://tinyurl.com/56eynp
   and
 http://knol.google.com/k#

-Stephen

--- -. .   ..-. .. ... ....   - .-- ---   ..-. .. ... ....
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 10:40 PM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: [FRIAM] Announcing the Complexity Noodlers Corner
>
> As  many of you know, I have been impatient with FRIAM for
> years because so much good stuff gets lost. Well, not LOST
> strictly, but certainly packed down in the midden. I long for
> a medium in which the good stuff gets saved, and built upon,
> and ultimately perhaps turned into articles or books! [Hey! I
> am an Old Media Guy.] About a year ago, several of us in
> Santa Fe started a conversation place in PBWIKI. The idea was
> that each of us would have a subspace into which he or she
> would write rants or other promising thoughts for the others
> to read and think about. Each person was the owner of his or
> her own page in the sense that only the owner could delete
> stuff, but anybody could ADD to what was written on another's
> page and anybody could take the material on a page, transfer
> it to a new page with a new owner, and destructively edit to
> his or her heart's content. Or just copy the bit to be edited
> to the bottom of the same page, and put the edited version there.
>
> Like all such utopian projects, there was a lot of fruitless
> milling about, but in the end, some really interesting
> material got created, including, for instance, a theoretical
> glossary of informational thermodynamics speak,  a language
> that we all sort of share out here, but haven't quite got a
> handle on. It ended NOT because it wasn't productive, but
> because we all got involved in creating the sfComplex and had
> to stop.
>
> I am eager now to get that project going again, and this
> ComplexityNoodlersCorner is my attempt to do so. I hope many
> of you will participate.
>
> HOW TO PARTICIPATE.
>
> Here is the idea: Any time you find yourself writing
> something to FRIAM that you think might be a bit too good to
> be lost to a list, go ahead and finish it. However, BEFORE
> you send it to the list, copy it to your clip board and past
> into a page on in the ComplexityNoodlersCorner. Then, leave a
> reference to that page in your FRIAM contribution, so that
> others can go to the WIKI and work with your material. The
> Noodler's Corner is in MEDIAWIKI on the sfcomplex website at
>
> http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/ComplexityNoodlersCorner 
> <http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/ComplexityNoodlersCorner>  
>
>
> MediaWiki is the same software that WIKIPEDIA is written in,
> so it will be real familiar. However, it has its little traps
> that the nerds left for us ordinary folks, so I suggest you
> have a look at the page
>
> http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/Getting_started 
> <http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/Getting_started>
>
>  to orient yourself. If you are having problems, please email
> me any time of day or night, [hidden email].
>
> If you want to start a new page, go to
>
>  http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/NoodlersIndex 
> <http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/NoodlersIndex>  
>
> and make a reference to that page, following the format
> modeled there and adding your new page to the top of the list.
>
> It is my fervent prayer that others will see the potential
> value of this project and will help me get it started.
>
> A very good way to help me would be to complain about the
> unclarity of my instructions and make suggestions concerning
> how they might be clarified.  
>
> The next message will contain The First Noodle.  
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nick
>
>  
>  
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark
> University ([hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]> )
>  
>  
>  
>
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org