1. An ontology, a descriptive model of the world
2. An explanation of the world
3. A futurology, answering the question, "Where are we heading?".
4. Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?".
5. A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action: "How should we attain our goals?"
6. An epistemology, or theory of knowledge. "What is true and false?"
7. An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks", its origins and construction.

Thanks! I’ll see if I can get Maggie to scan another picture of it. That’s the first drawing I’ve done in probably a decade… it was fun though.

PS if you want to spend a couple more hours daydreaming on our sites, one of my favorite things is here: 1,000 places to see before you die.

Things that are sitting just outside the perimeter of my task list, if only their value over cost ratio were a tiny bit higher:

• Release the wiki-weblog code that runs this site for anyone to take (I’ve been asked like 5 times in the last month to do this, but I don’t think it’s going to ever make it to the top of my task list)
• Submit my 50 letters to 50 agents for Sister Cities
• Write an article about the intersection of ambiguity and identity
• Figure out how to get spamassassin to work with qmail on my server
• Seek investors for small startup idea that could free me from the rusty shackles of ecommerce once and forever
• Write letter to my mom (instead of just calling her every once in while)
• Finish reading any one of the 5 books I’m in the middle of
• Get a full 8 hours of sleep
• Follow up this list with my actual task list for comparison

I just had an amazing week. It’s good how friends who come up and visit will remind you of things, and momentum can be manufactured so much more successfully when there are multiple people to bounce things off of.

I bought a new domain, which isn’t yet up, but which will be the home for our two newest projects, both of which involve mailing things to people.

Also, I found that if I leave an entry up long enough, I’ll get responses from people. About the problem of proving that 1 exists, I really wasn’t very clear. My voice turns all serious and philosophical whenever I talk about things like this and I don’t like that sound in my voice. At all. And yet, here’s the voice: Okay, so the reason I brought this up was because I was thinking, “Boy, logic sure is neat, you can use it to make connections from one thing to another, and it always works out so nicely.” Then I started thinking, “I wonder who invented logic, who was that lucky primate that said, hey, here’s a concept that can be used to think of other concepts. There’s no precedent in the real world that logic is real, but if you assume that it is, then all kinds of things can be built.” And so I was thinking, maybe I’ll try starting where that primate started, just to see where I can get. If I can create a straight line of logic from nothing, to grammar, to politics, to human behavior, to nurture, to nature, and back. And so I thought, “What’s the first tenet of logic?” and so I thought that the first tenet of logic was that logic exists. All of logic is build on this platform, like a bunch of applications built for Windows 98, but all of these applications assume that Windows 98 exists, and that it’s running on our computer, the same way that we assume that the Logic Operating System is running on this universe.

Have I lost myself already? What was I talking about. Anyway, in order for logic to exist, there has to be a system of comparison, between like things, and between unlike things. Logic is what holds together the sentence: A rose is a rose. And what takes apart the sentence: An apple is an orange. There are a few elements here, there are two different things, and there is the comparison between them. There is the 0, the 1, and the = or != (not equal). We can simplify this by saying that 0 isn’t really anything, it’s just the absense of 1. You don’t need 1 in order to have 0, in fact, 0 is the place from which 1 emerges, assuming that something put 1 there. What put 1 there?

And so we arrive at the all-stumping question of how something can come from nothing. Something cannot just appear from nothing unless something else put it there. This leads to endless circular logic, of which we’ve all thought about, trying to figure out Creation, the Big Bang, etc. Old news, you say. Yes.

The interesting thing is, why do we have to prove that something exists? (This was the voice I was talking about). What if nothing IS something. Or even better for our purposes: something IS nothing. 0 = 1, 1 = 0. There is no difference. It’s just like the back cover of a Mad comic book where you fold it and make two unconnected things connect. Or where time and space are the same thing, and you can bend both of them and create a black whole. These things aren’t logical. And yet almost all of the recent quantum mechanical discoveries have supported it. And if 0 = 1, then orange is apple, and logic is illogical. (note to self: starting to sound sorta buddhisty.) Does that make sense? No? Then I’ve proved my point. (note to self: points are going to be much easier to prove with my new system. this is a good thing.)

Okay, now find the flaw again.