The Crowdsourced Looking Glass

Posted on March 22, 2010 Written by 16 Comments

We don’t really need a Reason to Be, but it certainly helps to occasionally step back and look at a larger picture.

What is Occam’s RazR?

What do I want it to be?

It’s not what we saw from the first incarnation of the “personal weblog.” I don’t share everything here. I have Facebook, and a Twitter account that I use for short thoughts. (I even started a “My Quotes” category to archive the witty pieces that shouldn’t be so ephemeral.)

I have a Posterous site, “Ike’s Online Scraptacular,” for the pieces that don’t fit in other places.

I occasionally contribute at Media Bullseye and Calling John Galt, so as not to litter this space with thoughts in niches.

So if I am segmenting my online output, what goes here?

Bucket needs a label

I suppose I need to refocus and answer that.

Or I can take the lazy way out and say “It’s whatever the heck I want it to be about, on any given day.” But that doesn’t help the reader develop a consistent expectation. And even if I don’t have a purpose for this audience, it doesn’t mean I ought to waste its time with scattered meanderings.

So, this is what I will try to live up to:

  • Occam’s RazR will be a site about exploration and explanation.
  • Occam’s RazR will be a site about communication and cognition.
  • I want to write about thinking, and how we can strip away assumptions to arrive at truth.
  • I want to write about writing, and how we can more clearly enunciate what we mean.
  • I want to write about process, and how we delineate what we can understand from what we can’t.
  • I may write about football, or politics, or economics, or television, or any of a host of topics that might seem to emerge from nowhere. But I will always aim for the spirit of revealing the hidden truth, the missing link or the unsupported assumption.
  • I will do my best to bridge from knowns to unknowns.

What am I missing?

I know I am missing elements, but I want them to be explicit and not implicit.

I worked for a news manager once who got a lot of mileage out of sending me to places where news was happening, with the gameplan of “Send Ike there, and let Ike be Ike.”

That’s not enough. I want the outsiders’ perspective of what that means.

So tell me…

Filed Under: Personal Tagged: , ,

Symbolic Statements

Posted on February 5, 2010 Written by 3 Comments
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We live in an age where information is too available. We have more facts than we can assimilate or use, and very little context.

One of the ways we manage to transmit all of this information comes from research done in “packing” of information. How much can we compress data, then “unpack” it later without appreciable loss?

I won’t go into that as a deep dive now, don’t worry. But it is something to consider, especially when “packing” of data means that individual pieces now mean multiple things depending upon what is around them.

The other day, I saw a license plate. Maybe it’s indicative that I spend too much time playing with letters and numbers and glyphs in my brain, but almost immediately I saw how close this was to spelling out a word (and a word that I wouldn’t want either of my kids repeating.)

Do you see it? Because the thought that came to mind for me was feeling sorry for the person two places ahead in line. They likely got this plate:

There.

Does that make it easier to see?

Do I have to spell it out now?

What happens is our brains decode the curves and lines based on context. When we expect to see letters, we see letters. When we expect to see numbers, we see numbers.

And when we’re accustomed to looking at words, the quickest glance will force our brains attempt to fit those shapes into the anticipated context.

Here, try this one.

See it now?

I feel sorry for that person.

One of the ironies here is that if you tried to go and get that specific combination as a vanity plate, you would be suspiciously grilled as to your motive. They would want to know exactly what it means.

Yet, through the power of spontaneous decoding, the state of Alabama has inadvertently called an innocent motorist a “sphincter.”

Who knows? Maybe they’re right.

Or maybe ugliness lies in the eye of the beholder.

Filed Under: Language Tagged: , , ,