A lateral though: time to proclaim the study of "paesthetics" being the destructive effects of ubiquity on human sensibilities.

PowerPoint, Excel, Word and other Micro$oft-ware aren't the only paesthetic topics, just some of the more relevant at /.

Another notable is the monospaced type written page and its infected brethered: e-mail, Usenet and IRC. (Monospaced is more sensible in a code intensive environement but the antithesis of readability when used for natural language.)

Moving further afield, students of paesthetics might interest themselves in money as a measure of value, or cream bricks, red roofing tiles and near white plaster walls as corrupters of architecture.
 

My mind is mostly scrambled between issues of community, of praxis and of theoria.

Slashdot provides a powerful exemplar of community and praxis, by which I here mean my 20 year old ideas for a Public Information Communications and Access system, which has morphed into my current efforts to pull together TransForum version 2.

Slashdot's Science section adds one more temptation to the range of sources which add data to my theoretical explorations of what in 2002 in Oz it has again become accepted to label "complex systems" but which I see more and more as part of the Big Picture.

My experience of community has been the best antidote for flawed notions of control and largely become something to be escaped from so I can focus more of my aging energies on the theoria and the praxis.

Maybe I should try to use this little corner of cyberspace to expose a few thoughts on subjects that might be better suited to this audience than to the handful of aging and mostly private TransForums which I sometimes use as sounding boards.

That might also depend on whether anybody else wants to join such an obscure discussion.