Perl 6 was already very interesting even before Larry Wall's Apoclypse 5 brought us regexes we can build grammars on and that has sure stirred up the excitement level, as evidenced by this week's Perl 6 Digest (from which there doesn't seem to be a link to other recent P6P Digests, not that I could afford the time if there was).

To me, Perl 6 with it's strong linguistic roots has emerged as the great hope for tackling two major development objectives:

• integrating open ended functionality definition within a content management framework (and here I need to also keep in mind the need for CVS or Subversion equivalent functionality)
• enough analysis of natural (and other) language to make serious inroads on redundancy problems including both deliberate and inadvertent resubmission

If only there was time to draw an updated road map.

Arguably a bit more substantive than Mathematica co-developer Theo Gray's Periodic Table Table, Stephen Wolfram has invested much of his returns from Mathematica and his considerable intellectual ability into a long anticipated 1197 page tome that provides theoretical underpinnings for the notion that seemingly complex systems may be best understood by seeing the universe as an irreducable super massively parallel computer for which the cellular automata Wolfram has long been an authority on are a useful model.

The New York Times has an article on A New Kind of Science which I received links to from two unconnected directions within hours of its publication.

I am reminded by one of them that it 'hits the bookstores on Tuesday, May 14'.

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.