My friend Dan recently asked me what philosophical questions interested me. Here is my answer.

What is knowledge, what is information? Can knowledge be captured and represented formally? Why is English (or other languages) not evolving
toward greater formalism, but rather evolving toward greater flexibility, fluidity?

Are we living inside a Turing machine?

How do you know that a duck is a duck? Do you have mentally a formal definition that you apply? Do you check successively for some characteristics, applying some kind of algorithm? If you do apply an algorithm, does it terminate? That is, do you ever know for sure it is a duck?

It looks like Value Investing News has turned to Slope One for its recommender system. Here are the features they support:

• You can spot the recommendations engine in action when you click on the Recommendations tab at the top of the page.
• You can also find it in action when you click on other user’s names, such as George. The top of the right hand column will show you a list of Recommended Users.
• Finally, you can find a list of users that liked a particular article by clicking on the Full story links. At the bottom of the each story link discussion you will find a Those that like this also liked section.

eWeek has an audio podcast on the Challenges of the Semantic Web. There is quite a lot of content. Stephen Downes is also part of the podcast and he makes an interesting point: proprietary data and its protection will prevent the Semantic Web from taking off. I am not sure I agree with Stephen on this one. After all, companies like Amazon already give you access to all of their metadata for free. However, I agree with Stephen on the fact that Tim Berners-Lee comes across as a bit hopeful. Proponents of the Semantic Web have a strong tendency to answer objections with the help of technobabble. “We wil XSLTize the problem away!” No, you won’t. You can’t resort to technobabble for ten years. Not unless you are a Star Trek writer.

I find it amazing how we have exactly the same problem at two ends. From SOAP to Semantic Web. Both are plagued by fundamental overestimates of the power of knowledge representation in IT.

I am looking for the coolest Lemur picture I can find (and reuse). Here’s the best I could find so far:

(Source: guppiecat)

Andre pointed me to Weinberger’s talk on his book “Everything is Miscellaneous.” It is really worth watching.