Informatics (18)

Bookmarks reminders

Take a look at your bookmarks in your web browser. How many of those articles have you actually read? How old are these bookmarks anyway? Do you remember why and when did you bookmark that page so that you can come back to read it “later� ?

Too many unorganized and outdated bookmarks is a problem we all face. I am thinking of a system where one can set a reminder and/or an expiry date for the bookmark when adding it. i.e. You bookmark an article and specify that you want to read it within the coming week or you set a reminder to remind you to read it 2 days from today.

Humans perform activities. I like to think of activities as made of threads, a potent word referring to continuity in time, causality and intentionality.

As our activities become more automated, it is important to keep their thread-like aspect intact in digital form. Project planning and tracking software is a typical example of this approach. But these systems impose too much rigour when entering data, making their use difficult in many setups including small organizations.

What is proposed is to create an unstructured and easily-accessible system to describe group activities in the past or the future. The data model should be generic enough to allow reporting along several dimensions: personal timesheets, resource utilization, progress reporting, chronology, etc.

The Islamic rules of inheritance are primarily laid down in the Quran 4:11-12 and 4:176. Three verses that compress a great number of inheritance cases - at least 512 as we will see in the following exposition. A fascinating example of algorithmic compression.

First, the sources:

• The verses in Arabic (GIF images) and Yusuf Ali English translation at Sacred Texts: 4:11-12 and 4:176.

Perhaps better entitled "Open Source as Jazz, and Linux as its popular standard".

In jazz, each musician improvises his part in the tune's performance. Knowing the skeletal structure of the tune, the musician applies his knowledge of harmony, rhythm and melody, along with some social knowledge of his fellow musicians, to produce meaningful phrases, amounting to intelligible overall statements. In doing so, the jazz band collectively creates a spontaneously original variation on a theme.

A Linux user also participates in the continuous recreation of his system. From writing shell scripts to automating simple tasks, through submitting bug reports and code patches to open source projects, to hacking kernel modules or desktop environments, nothing in Linux is the last word and thus improvisation is always needed.

Here are just notes to help me remember some observations for arguments of a speculative model.

Memory and sensations

Hardly an easy entry point to start with, but a vivid one nonetheless.

Sensations occur to the sensory organs of the human body (its inputs). Interestingly, the external human body is, as a whole, a sensory organ because the sense of touch applies to all of its external cells. Of course, internal organs as well have sense, exemplified by the sense of pain. So we can say that each cell receives sensations.

Furthermore, it is noticeable that when we remember past events, our sensory organs that were involved in the event undergo a soft of re-enactment of the original event, but dampened. For example, remembering eating chocolate. It is thus fair to say that the cells, those sensory organs, keep a record of how they behaved in the past.

NOTE: Please excuse the poor quality of Arabic typography. It is not trivial in the open source world.

By verbal forms I mean the syntactic variations on the 3-letter root verb that generate both new verbs and verb nouns, the Arabic اسماء الفعل - literally "nouns of the verb".

Very quickly: How do you translate "Information"? معلومات ? This plural term more likely refers to "Data" as in more than one "Datum" (معلومة - literally "known" as opposed to "unknown"). "Information" carries more meaning than "Data", specifically the idea that not only are there facts, but they are also structured in some logical network of relationships. Where's the Arabic term for that? Most probably the Arabic computer science, information theory and theoretical physics literatures would contain many terms suitable for information theory. Let's start a glossary!

Music notation defines a choreographed sequence of musical actions to produce a desired physical result, the performance of the piece. The similarities with general process description are plenty but speculative. Instruments/staff lines correspond to roles. Notes correspond to sequential actions performed by each instrument, with its precise occurence and duration in the execution. Same for non-action, rest. The binary subdivision of time is a feature of musical notation and could prove very convenient for expressing more granular process timing. Music notation supports the concept of looping or iterating (via sectioning and those double dots) and of branching (D.C. al Coda). Music notation does not include interactivity with the performance-time output, process description does not provide for such interactivity either.