March 19, 2006 – A brood comb

The nature of the blogs is such that the newest posts are on top, and few older ones are underneath. Whatever is older then that goes to the jedi archives. The reader who happens to stumble on the blog, will probably check the few last items, and not very likely dig through the archives to see if there is something which he will be interested in.
This form of presentation is certainly good for things like fashion, politics, technology, and news in general, because in those areas, the old news is really less worthy then new one, and being such, it is ok to put them into archives. Because of this, such sites as memeorandum, blogniscient or megite work.

Tagging and putting the posts in categories, and providing search field are common practices, and those do help prolonging the life of the post, but it might be argued that if the post need to be searched for by the person who stumbles on the site, the metaphor of the post being on life-support is more suitable.

One possible solution is to provide some kind of maps, which would provide visual hints about the relations between different topics.
Because of this, I added semantic network (kind of), a graph which gives overview and links to the pages connected to inquiry into meanings of the terms, and put it directly accessible from the “Recommended entry pages” list of links in the sidebar.

Note 1:A bad thing is though that it doesn’t work as planned :( . WordPress deletes tags from the posts, so the links directly from the graph don’t work.

The sense in which determining is used here is:

Dictionary.com:

To establish or ascertain definitely, as after consideration, investigation, or calculation. See synonyms at discover.

Houghton Mifflin Thesaurus:

To obtain knowledge or awareness of something not known before, as through observation or study.

WordNet:

Find out, learn, or determine with certainty, usually by making an inquiry or other effort

In this case we are using it in the sense we use when saying to determine something as being somehow.
We can say, “I determined that the apple is green”, “I determined that there are two pears on the picture”, “I determined that the particle moves proportionally to the force I apply on it” etc…

The act of determining is abstracting, it is starting with a given something, and then abstracting from some properties of that thing, and becoming aware of what is left.

There are two significant developments that concept of determining brings into the picture.

There is the new moment in the concept of determining is that the starting thing which is to be determined is already pointed to, focused on, etc… it is abstraction (as a result, though of different abstracting act) to start with.

The determining points to possibility of more complex acts by the subject, in which the focus/attention is just part. We can see this in all of the explanations cited from the dictionaries.

Note 1: We now say that the concept of attention was abstract by itself, as it is isolated from the “more complex” acts in most of the cases. For example in cases where we attend to things size or color, the act of pointing the eyes to certain direction, moving the head, or whole body is often needed first.

Note 2:It is hard to imagine determining which in itself, won’t include attention. For example if we need to determine if a surface is smooth or not, we have to put our hand on it, but without putting attention to the surface (through the touch of the hand), we won’t be able to determine it. Even more complex determining, e.g. which include hitting the thing with certain kind of particles, or any using of aparatus, will still in some point require from us to put our attention to the result.

Here is one other interesting sense of determining: