Social consciousness, software, and our future society

Note: Based on my review of 2008 posts, I added more posts, and some introduction for the parts and chapters. I am thinking of publishing this as a book. I haven’t thought a good name yet. “Social consciousness, software, and our future society” is a temporary name for now. To be honest, it is very [...]

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Python Design Philosophy and the Principle of Playing

Read of Python’s Design Philosophy on python Python’s BDFL’s blog.
Below I quote those lines that clearly embodies the principle of playing.
BTW, from that blog post, I can see why python succeeded where abc didn’t.
Do one thing well (The “UNIX philosophy”)–this is exactly the principle of playing.
A large complex system should have multiple levels of extensibility. [...]

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A better way to understand web2.0

Note: there are various definitions of web2.0, with the most quoted one (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html) being provided by Tim O’Reilly. But I feel all those definitions fall short of hitting the true nature of web2.0. I have articulated my understanding of web2.0 in various posts of this blog. Here I want to briefly summarize it and give [...]

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Review of 2008 posts

Note: a newer version of the outline is available.
I just reviewed all the posts I had this past year (2008). Now I summarized them below as an outline of a potential book. Before I have more time to work on this, here is a very rough draft.
The outline of the book:
Part 1: Individual:
ch 1: brain, [...]

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Computer Science is Life Science

Computer Science (CS) is not a science of computers. CS is a science of life. It is a bridge to connect the physical science with human science.
Here I take the word life as what is meant by C.A. (Christopher Alexander) in his book The Nature of Order. And I use his concept Degree of Life [...]

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Software programming for everybody

When software programming is made so easy, it is a revolution. I am referring to python and its web frameworks. Programming with python is like writing articles. Instead of writing things down, I just write them into software directly. In a sense, this is the true writing. The writing is not static, but dynamic, and [...]

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Managing common property is a challenge

In our time, there are a lot of thinking that many resources should be managed as common properties instead of being privatized. For example, I just watched the documentary Flow the other week: http://foodandwaterwatch.org/
As I came from China, a common reflection we had since the start of economic reform (which is 2 years after the [...]

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Where is the frontier

When I was in China, I like to read a lot of things. As China was going through a transformation of modernization, there are a lot of reflection on the traditional social structure and what it means to be modern society. So there are a lot of discussion on material, market, management, urbanism, openness. It [...]

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How to take back our democracy Part 2: Democracy, Money, Social Products, Local Services, the Power of Consciousness

This is to follow up with the part 1
The power of politics is the power to make laws to govern. The law should be minimum. Otherwise it becomes a tool to restrict people’s freedom instead of facilitating it. So by nature, what we can do should be much larger than what should be governed. Thus [...]

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Blogging is like writing software

One thing about blogging is that it is like writing software. I am able to get articles out quickly so readers who want to get an early look can read them. Usually before publishing them, I will proofread twice to get rid of obvious mistakes. For important essays, I will do a lot more revising [...]

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Why I choose New York

When I graduated from school, I was faced with a decision: whether to go to Scillicon Valley or go to New York. Since this is time of Web2.0 Expo at New York, I would like to write a little about why I chose New York.
First of all, I love Silicon Valley. I have been there [...]

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Comments on the Success Of Open Source

Just finished the book the Success Of Open Source by Steven Weber.
I am glad that people start to summarize our experiences in open source and try to understand its general implication for human society. It is about time. And this book tapped into the open source stories and tried to provide some understanding of it. [...]

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Future organizations’ education responsibilities

Note: I was talking with a friend about the future of education tonight. During the conversation, I mentioned a little what I think of future organization’s education responsibilities.  I thought it would be helpful to post these thoughts here.
In my view, we are in the transformation into an open society that is largely based on [...]

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Open cooperation within an organization

Each employee can set up his profile, with information about expertises, past projects (possibly a portfolio),  what kinds of services he can provide, contact (email, messenger, phone, with one of them as preferred), available time slot (for online or off line assistance).
If the person has projects that need people to join, he can also post [...]

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Open organizations

Consciousness flow will have no blockage anymore. Traditionally, it was blocked by military power, or by capital power. But in the web area, in the social domain, we will see that consciousness flow will be more and more natural.
In traditional industry, such as agriculture and manufacturing, there are a lot of physical barriers that can [...]

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Python resources for beginners

Here are some python tutorials:

http://swaroopch.info/text/Byte_of_Python:Main_Page (very simple introduction to python, very good for beginners)
http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/tut.html (a classic tutorial written by python’s author, very well-written tutorial, highly recommended)

Some free books: http://diveintopython.org/

Python is very easy to learn. The best thing of python is that you can play with it. You can play with [...]

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Language, mind, software learning, and liberal arts

5 years of fighting in China, I experienced true love and felt free. 7 years of fighting in US, I am stilling struggling with many basic things. This fight has been so long.
In order to form memory, the mind is trying to reach some more solid ground, some kinds of conclusion. In doing so, it [...]

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Work on the context to provide meaning to the work

If you don’t feel your work is very meaningful, you’d better work more on the context. In the software programming world, it means to merely coding might make you feel boring or tiring. But if you work more on the context (the art of programming, for example, or more general, liberal arts) and be aware [...]

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Software like buildings

Columbia has quite some beautiful buildings. I got inspired by them and felt it quite applies to software as well.
When I look at those buildings, I know instantly that there are a lot of complexity there. But I feel very comfortable looking at the whole. Just a glimpse, I know what is going on [...]

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What is life

While programming, objects emerge from context and circumstance. It is an abstract on a higher level, encapsulating a few lower level functions and is independent and self-complete. A good model of objects emerged from the context have the potential to be very useful in various situations.
Objects live on various layers of abstraction, interfacing with the [...]

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