An Entrepreneur's Account

-F = -ma, Isaac Newton

You'll never see a physics textbook introduce Newton's law in this way, but mathematically speaking, it is just as valid as "F = ma". The point of this observation is that if you are careful about what assumptions you turn upside down, you can maintain the validity of your equations, though your result may look surprising. I believed that the model of providing commercial support for open-source software was something that looked impossible because people were so excited about the minus signs that they forgot to count and cancel them.

1989, Cygnus, early open source software company

david casacuberta digged deep for the exhibition "hiberiment" and also found agostino ramelli. nice, nice ;)

bill hilf in first mondy on reinventing w's

Before the advent of the printing press, books were made of vellum (lamb or calf skin) because of its durability. The problem was, for print books, vellum was too costly to produce and use for mass distribution. However, at the time there was a large surplus of rag paper. The surplus was from the (literally) tons of clothing left over from the massive numbers of dead caused by the Plague in the mid-15th century. This surplus drove the price of rag paper down significantly (before the Plague, rag paper was an expensive commodity) and therefore provided an affordable, accessible media on which Gutenberg could use his tool to print and distribute information.

just saw a documentation about paul otlet, "l`homme qui voulait classer le monde" from françoise levie, 2002, france - belgium at kosmopolis (hate their website)

another one who thought about a book of "universal science" and a lot more before bush. wondering if bush knew about otlet's work. i guess he must have known: he was president roosevelt's science advisor and otlet was in contact with roosevelt, because he wanted that he safes his mundaneum by "navigating the drifting boat to the usa" (more or less how they quotet him in the movie.) it was the time of the IIww.

Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson would later voice strikingly similar ideas about the notion of associative “trails” between documents. Distinguishing Otlet’s vision from the Bush-Nelson (and Berners-Lee) model is the conviction—long since fallen out of favor—in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship ...(boxes and arrows

cataloge system, classification, microfilm, mundaneum, league of nations ... his biography is impressive.

another source and story on order, "world brain" and information retrieval: wilhelm ostwald

For Ostwald ordering meant concept formulation, a process of abstraction to order the material of our sense organs. A theory of order ("Ordnungswissenschaften", "Mathetik") not his energetics was the basis of his "pyramid of science" and a foundation of his philosophy of nature. Ostwald applied his ideas of order to languages, paper formats, the sciences, colours and forms.

hm, wouldn't have drawn a connection between information retrieval and taylorism, but you can find this connection - at least the text suggests that.

there was more part one