Having read Sam Harris book Free Will I feel like returning just a little bit to that very topic. I wrote a few posts about it back in 2008, posts that go along the same lines as Mr. Harris. Seems like I wasn’t alone holding those particular views but as Continue Reading
Arto
The return of the slow blogger – maybe
My last post here was from around three years ago. I have already admitted to being a slow blogger but three years is perhaps stretching even that epithet a bit. Facebook is mostly too superficial for the kind of writing that I’m thinking about. I can’t come up with witty Continue Reading
Innovation is a team sport
As a consultant I’ve been working for a large number of companies doing system development. Many of them have had reasonably well defined processes for development, customer support and so on. Of various reasons I had recently reason to try to recollect how the companies did innovation. Somewhat to my Continue Reading
Seeing the pattern – or not
My late roommate from Stanford, John Vlissides (he passed away much too early), went on to co-author a book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software that has had quite an impact on the software development community. According to Wikipedia it was in its 39th printing in 2011. I read Continue Reading
Meticuously matching metamodels
Many commonly used tools assume a very specific conceptual model of the world. The tools might be geared to manage classes, operations, attributes, and relations (UML editors), fields, projects, screens, and roles (Jira), inputs, outputs, controls, and mechanisms (IDEF0 editors), or filters, pins, and connectors (DirectShow GraphEdit). The chosen concepts Continue Reading
Of memes, machines and modified behavior
I’m reading Susans Blackmores book “The Meme Machine”. It starts where Richard Dawkins left off at the end of his seminal book “The Selfish Gene”. Dawkins of course talked mostly about the gene as the “thing” that evolution revolves around but towards the end of his book he speculated about Continue Reading
Do the things we model exist?
When describing a metamodel it is often difficult to keep apart the description (model) of something and the thing itself. If I want to describe a metaclass representing a system function for instance I find it easy to slip and start talking about the real-world function when the intention was Continue Reading
Everything is model-based
Engineers tend to think in terms of mental models. To describe a problem in terms of a model to start with improves the consistency and quality of the mental models.
A false dichotomy
It is not so easy to divide a problem into the often used categories “what” and “how”.
What is the meaning of semantics?
“Semantics” is an abstract sounding word that is usually translated to “meaning”. But what is the meaning of “meaning”?