I had a great conversation with Phil Windley at DIDW last October, which included his touchstone observation that the state has an intense interest in the question of identity: “we have an entire branch of government that is devoted to establishing links between identity and a physical body: the courts. Trials are largely about proving that a particular physical body has a particular identity.” I like him a lot and read his blog regularly — but I never thought I would encounter him discoursing on “self-fashioning” and “technologies of the self.” Maybe next year we can have a good ol’ round table on différance, justice, and undecideability.
And although Clay Shirky has resisted having a blog in favor of publishing a monthly column, his participation in the Corante Many-to-Many collaborative blog (with friend Liz and Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer) ends up with him blogging as much as many people do on their personal pages — which is a good thing.
Posted by AKMA at June 20, 2003 09:19 PM | TrackBackThe courts also seek to establish links of with jurisdiction and context. Both matters of space, wherein the conflict of physical and virtual originate.
Posted by: Ross Mayfield at June 21, 2003 12:14 AMThere's a little bit of dust-up on related issues of anonymity and pseudonymity going on in response to Horst Prilliger's salvos on the topic.
My $.02 can be found here.
Posted by: Pascale Soleil at June 21, 2003 01:12 PMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Faustinus at January 13, 2004 11:54 AMThe most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
Posted by: Ebulus at January 13, 2004 11:55 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Ambrose at January 13, 2004 11:55 AM