meta-roj

this is a very active topic in the front of my little brain, so it’s a bit refreshing to find it at least resonating with some others (so, thanks, crystal flame - is that two words?)

shortly after i made my comments about tools and results, i was visited by a very loud, very disruptive guest. i didn’t have much time to think in my own absence (duty called), and i’m still catching up on things in the electronic world, so you’ll probably notice several updates here as i do.

while weeding out the accumulted spam (and becoming more and more convinced that email is broken, i dropped a few comments in an irc channel. i present, here, the revelevant snippets (with links and edited for brevity):

<rvr> Artificial Development is building CCortex?, a complete 20-billion neuron emulation of the Human Cortex and peripheral systems, on a cluster of 100 computers - the largest neural network created to date.
<_joshua> Sadly most of the advances in neural network stuff was merely reimplementing statistics invented in the 1950’s
<rojisan> how strange that it should take that many years for knowledge to cross communications barriers between fields
<rojisan> it’s as if those poor bastards spent all their time picking each others nits and never noticed the other monkeys across the river
<morphex> somebody should teach more monkeys the game of connect-the-dots
<_joshua> computer science loves reinventing things
<ClosedGL> i think it is true in all fields where people don’t do their research properly. I think the open source movement, or rather the philosphy of code reuse might exactly break the exception; where implemented.
<rojisan> i have too much spam to dig through to really make the point, but there’s a hecklebot implication here, and something about out-of-hand rejection of unfamiliar ideas, or those ideas that are not presented in the preferred terminology
<crysflame> hm, i wonder if that’s a known bug in being strict about terminology, discussion paths, etc. you keep away the ignorant, but you lose the crossbreeding that helps your field, to some extent.
<rojisan> ah. excellent. crysflame can carry the torch for me while i continue my disaster recovery

all i can say is that yes. it’s a known problem.

i hope someone else has done more thinking on this than i have, so i’ll just leave a comment, as it were… or a request…

specialization is a good thing, but please welcome those that come to your specialty with different language, a different set of preconceptions, different applications. maybe i will be that person nosing into your turf someday.

update: fixed bad links.