by Dave McComb | Jan 19, 2015 | Semantics and Ontology
Fractal geometry creates beautiful patterns from simple recursive algorithms. One of the things we find so appealing is their “self-similarity” at different scales. That is, as you zoom in to look at a detail under more magnification you see many of the same patterns...
by Dave McComb | Dec 23, 2014 | The Whiteboard
As the Season to be Jolly gets into full swing, I reflect one of my favorite ways to be jolly: laughter. What makes us laugh (or not) in a given situation? Some people just laugh, like my mother, who regularly burst into gales of laughter, for no apparent...
by Dave McComb | Nov 24, 2014 | The Whiteboard
I wrote the following last year, and am inspired to share this more publicly, today, the Monday of Thanksgiving week, 2014. It is Thanksgiving Day, 2013 and I just came across an article describing how science has tied gratitude to “the tendency to feel more...
by Dave McComb | Nov 18, 2014 | The Whiteboard
We humans are categorizing machines, which is to say, we like to create metaphorical buckets, and put things inside. But there are different kinds of buckets, and different ways to model them in OWL and gist. The most common bucket represents a kind of thing, such as...
by Dave McComb | Nov 3, 2014 | Semantics and Ontology
Many taxonomies, especially well designed taxonomies with many facets, have dimensions that consist of very few, often just two categories, however this may cause more harm than it's worth. It is tempting to give these Boolean like tags, such as "Yes"/"No" or "Y"/"N"...
