Dave Rogers adds some useful comments in our conversation about corporate entities and their attributes. I see his point about ways that corporate entities differ from human individuals (though I wonder how individual we look to our mitochondria?). I don’t by any means want to assimilate corporate groups to the model of a single (rational) individual, and we individuals must resist corporate behavior that contravenes our sense of what’s coherent and liveable. Frank is headed in this direction too (in the same comments); he specifies corporate business entities, and I share his suspicion of businesses. When I talk about corporate groups, I’m thinking about any time people get together to pool their capacities (thus including unions, peace movements, and churches). It’s easy to think of examples in which people live less admirably under the influence of a lowest-common denominator group mind. I don’t want to make any blanket assumptions about group thinking or balance-sheet thinking, though; I want to observe carefully various ways in which groups reflect characteristics distinguishable from their constituent individuals. To that end, I will sometimes speak of the corporate entity as a person; that trope has signficant limitations, so I’ll need to deploy it more carefully than I have in the past.
And as Dave and Pem and Steve (does it seem to anyone else that now that hes a student, he blogs a lot more?) that “authority” isn’t a simple notion. There’s authority, and then there’s authority. This is a major interst of Margaret’s, and I want to consult her before I say much about it—but that’ll mean waiting till tomorrow.
Posted by AKMA at October 30, 2002 11:16 PM | TrackBackHm, have you noticed that? I guess I'm just doing more of my thinking while sitting at or near my desk these days: less thought-to-blog fade happening.
I think I'll coin a phrase:
blogennui--what occurs when you think of something that would be exciting to post, but by the time you reach a computer it doesn't seem so worthwhile
Aside from the fact that AKMA has evolved a cool site...Nice topic.
I chimed in here
http://www.stretchingthought.com/2002/11/02#a275
Posted by: Jonathon at November 2, 2002 09:45 PMNice scratch...
Yo what about authority based on trust?
http://www.stretchingthought.com/2002/11/02#a275
When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Hamond at January 13, 2004 08:40 AMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Edwin at January 13, 2004 08:41 AMSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Guy at January 13, 2004 08:41 AM