man, i'm in a grumpy mood and i left my Paul Valery book in next to my dissertation materials(sort of on purpose), over the next few weeks I'll post some nice Valery quotes such as “man is only human in small numbers” and the like for your consideration, primarily because it has nothing to do with my dissertation, but is still well within my understanding of what is 'good stuff'. I'm looking at Valery's work on politics, mainly because, well, no one is stopping me. It has nothing to do with anything other than he is one of the most intriguing authors of the last century. It won't be in my dissertation, it won't be anything prolly other than another one of those things that i do and remember doing, and remember things from, sort of the pursuit of being 'well read' and enjoying it.

I just finished China Mieville's Scar, which follows on his world from Perdido Street Junction. It is fiction, but well done fiction. It is sort of the cyber/steam punk genre, but really it is his own world. It is about 600 pages, and you should read Perdido first. But between the two, you have some very interesting insights into many things embodied in a well written, exciting fantasy world. I suggest it to those who read fantasy, if nothing else then for the experience.

I see that Spider Robinson has a new Callahan's novel coming out. You can't beat that. I'll wait for softbound though. I'm not so big into the whole Calahan's thing, but I think he tells interesting characters and thus interesting stories follow. Its a franchise.

Speaking of franchises, if you are interested in revolutionary politics and haven't read Steve Perry's 'The Man Who Never Missed”, you are really missing out. His “97th step” is also good, though I'm not as fond as the rest of the Matadora stories.

Someone's been ditching their collection of Theodore Roczak books in the used bookstore and I've been picking them up as they show up. He has things to say today that are as appropriate as the day he wrote them, usually, though sometimes the fog of time has scarred his ideas a bit. That happens with contemporary history, i suppose.

I've also been picking up old philosophy texts from the bookstore, i'm looking for good quality ones from 1899 to 1940 and I accept gifts:) Used is preferred, under original copyright…. If i have time I'll copy some of them out to the web. There are alot of interesting opinions and ideas in these texts. I was hunting for opinions on Bergson and Nietzsche primarily, but you know anything is good if it gives context. SO SO much of what has been written before is rewritten today, it always amazes me.

In the July 28 SearchDay, Chris Sherman profiles I …. In the July 28 SearchDay, Chris Sherman profiles ISIHighlyCited, the free search engine of highly cited researchers. ISIHighlyCited lets you find highly cited researchers by name, field, institution, and country. When you find a researcher of interest, you can see an ISI-built resume and bibliography of his/her works, but there are no links to full-texts. Sherman compares the service to Google, because ranking by citation is analogous to the Google's method of ranking by incoming links. He also compares it to ResearchIndex, which offers citation analysis of its contents. The difference, of course, is that ResearchIndex also offers open access to the contents themselves. [Open Access News]

I will state now, and for the record, that due to the nature of the data from which this information is generated, it is highly biased toward certain perspectives. Many more people are just as highly cited in a wide variety of areas, but don't show up in this analysis because it lacks consideration for the immense breadth of journals available and interdisciplinary considerations. In short, it needs more journals, and more comparisons to have any meaning except in narrowly defined fields. Or so sayeth my opinion on the matter.

Wolfowitz Says U.S. Must Act Even on 'Murky' Data.

Reuters: U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Sunday defended the invasion of Iraq as an example of how the United States had to be prepared to act on “murky intelligence” in its war on terrorism…

[The Agonist]

You do not wage war and kill people because you think they did something wrong. You have to know they did something wrong, more and more, this whole war smells of war profiteering to me, completely wrong and immoral, unjustified. I support the troops entirely, I don't support the politics and rhetoric of those that sent them there. Men and women have died because of Murky Evidence, that is in my book not acceptable. There is a place where you are 'sure enough' that is good enough for me, but apparently they weren't sure of anything. The government of the U.S. seems to have systematically misleading the public on this one, there is no tie to Al Queda, no tie to WMD, no other tie at all except the franchise of ones father… I'm happy to be proven wrong on this, but other than to make money on Oil, and the human rights abuses(not mentioned until recently by our apparently similarly abusive regime), I do not see what the justification is.

Jean-Claude Guédon, Open Access Archives: from sci …. Jean-Claude Guédon, Open Access Archives: from scientific plutocracy to the republic of science, IFLA Journal, 29, 2 (2003) pp. 129-140. Excerpt: “The recent history of science has been characterized not only by a transition from science to ÎBig Scienceâ, to use Derek de Solla Priceâs terminology, but also by a deep transformation which, in retrospect, threatens to subvert the original values of modern science. Originally, science appeared as an offspring of the ÎRepublic of Lettersâ, and as such, it belonged to a certain elite: the social structure of Europe in the late Renaissance would have made any other arrangement most unlikely. However, inside the scientific playground, elitism gave way to a peer-to-peer mode of behaviour.” [Open Access News]

This is a good article, it resonates strongly with my work on the republic of letters, commonplace books, and secondary communication channels in science and philosophy/social thought. It also has practical application, and I think that if we could get a few secondary level archives going, the rest will follow. However, they can't be purely disciplinary in nature…. That will crush them under the weight of general disinterest.