Why it’s all philosophy

[Cross-posted from New School Economic Review – original here]

So a few weeks back I was reading xkcd.com and while hovering the mouse over the cartoon (#220) I was told the following:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

I thought that sounded like a good game, and a really nice urban legend so I went ahead and looked at economics… It gave the following string: Economics -> Social sciences -> fields -> academic -> community -> living -> life -> objects -> Philosophy… Admittedly I found a couple of loops, but then someone trumped it all and built a script to check how far this link to philosophy holds…  1,000 iterations later only 11 did not close at Philosophy. ELEVEN!  (check out the mapping here) I think that is pretty good proof that life boils down to philosophy.

Of the 11 left-over they ended in seven ‘sinks’ according to New Scientist: Architecture, gender, German reunification, Grail message, Iraq war, pragmatism and process manufacturing.  Not sure what that that could mean?

getting into the cloud

Hmmm… I had a server backed by moneys and a big university and now plotting a move to this cloud world. Could be good for everyone involved really 🙂