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The Laundry List in my Brain

Aloof tells us that:

Some things are really just a variation on another thing

In the book Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter spends a lot of time talking about isomorphisms.

"The word 'isomorphism' applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where 'corresponding' means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures." (Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 49)

His interest in isomorphism lies in the hypotheses that meaning is derived from the transformation from one such structure to the other -- the act of transforming one structure to another (made possible by their isomorphic relationship) is where meaning comes from.

The point of Aloof's post seems to be that the real issues (and thus, the things we should really focus on) are political / sociological / anthropological. Nothing new here, but it is the message, so it bears repeating in as many forms as possible, as often as possible.

In that sense, there's nothing startling, but much of worth, in Steve Vinoski's recent conclusion that the arguments about "ESB" that he's been (inadvertently) involved in the last few days aren't really about technology at all.

Steve says "no-light-all-heat". Which is obviously true. Maybe that's because the meaning is in the cracks, in the nonexistent space between isomorphic things.