Peter Saint-Andre http://stpeter.im/ The journal of Peter Saint-Andre - technologist, musician, philosopher. http://stpeter.im/journal/ http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ 2017-04-27 tag:stpeter.im,1586 2017-04-27 2017-04-27

Long, long ago on an Internet far, far away, some forward-thinking technologists defined several different types of identifiers called Uniform Resource Locators or URLs (for locating things - say, an article published online) and Uniform Resource Names or URNs (for permanently naming things without necessarily locating them - say, identifying a book by its ISBN no matter where a physical or electronic copy might be located). Some years later, a grand unified theory of identifiers was formulated, leading to the creation of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) including both URLs and URNs (and URCs, but who's ever heard of those?). Even though most URIs that we use today are URLs, URNs as specified in RFC 2141 have continued to be widely deployed, especially for bibliographic purposes and as XML namespace names. Because the communities that use URNs have felt the need to make some slight adjustments to the syntax and to align URNs with the formal definition of URIs, back in 2010 folks at the IETF decided to start work on a new document to obsolete RFC 2141. It took us 7 years (!), but here we are today with RFC 8141 to bring URNs into the modern age (almost exactly 20 years after the publication of RFC 2141 in 1997). Special thanks to John Klensin for co-editing this specification with me!...

tag:stpeter.im,1585 2017-04-02 2017-04-02

While dipping back into Baltasar Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom recently, I got curious about the author, who it turns out was both a practitioner and a theoretician of a 17th-century Iberian literary style called conceptism. My interest was further piqued when I learned that conceptist writers attempted to express intricate conceptual meanings in a very concise form, and that both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were great admirers of Gracián (in Nietzsche's case perhaps reflected in his aphoristic style). I'm reminded also of Yevgeny Zamyatin's essay Theme and Plot, in which he espoused a concentrated brevity that he called "the art of writing with ninety-proof ink" (Zamyatin, in turn, was a great admirer of Nietzsche). These stylistic currents strike a deep chord with me, given my project of writing six extremely compressed books on eudaimonia. Speaking of which, now that I'm almost done with the book about Thoreau I'm making fast progress on a cycle of philosophical poems about Nietzsche....

tag:stpeter.im,1584 2017-03-26 2017-03-26

Reports and allegations continue to surface regarding widespread sexual misconduct by male philosophy professors, including "stars" such as John Searle and Thomas Pogge (as well as several professors here in Colorado). The sad irony and arrogant hypocrisy of professors of philosophy engaging in such despicable and deeply unethical behavior cannot be passed by in silence. We witness here in a particularly painful form the truth of Thoreau's observation that "There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers." According to Thoreau and the ancients, "to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates" - which these piddling professors clearly fail to do....

tag:stpeter.im,1583 2017-02-19 2017-02-19

Three months ago, in a post entitled "Below the Surface", I started a habit of posting in my weblog at least once a week. Although it's been a good run, I've cleared out my backlog of topics to write about. More importantly, I have a big project to finish (The Upland Farm, my forthcoming book on Thoreau) and another one to restart (more on that in the coming weeks), not to mention the need to focus intently on building the team at Filament and bringing our products to market. Because all of these initiatives will require a lot of deep work, my weblog will likely be fairly quiet until mid-summer. See you then....

tag:stpeter.im,1582 2017-02-12 2017-02-12

Someone I know who is an avowed socialist told me he'd be much more sympathetic to libertarian views if we didn't need big government to protect us from big business....

tag:stpeter.im,1581 2017-02-12 2017-02-12

Recently I got to talking with a friend about personality assessments, especially in relation to hiring and talent development. It took me awhile to figure out why we were not in agreement: he was thinking about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) whereas I was thinking about assessments based on the five-factor model (also called the "big five") of personality traits....