Seeing Forests

I’ve been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a slightly maniacal take about thinking correctly in a seemingly well-ordered but in reality utterly chaotic existence. At some level it’s about applying the scientific method to living. It’s well worth reading. At any rate, there’s a book he talks about in the book called The Tartar Steppes. It’s about this guy who gets assigned to this outpost in the steppes of Russia to defend against an attack by the Tartars. He starts out wanting to get out of there in few months but slowly but surely he falls in love with the place and starts to believe in his mission. He has hope that one day the Tartars will actually come and he will fight that epic battle. He stays for 35 years. One day, the Tartars do come, sweeping over the Steppes of Mother Russia. He’s apparently in a bar at the time.

I swear, I feel that way about AI, Knowledge Based Systems, and the Semantic Web. Apparently Yahoo has announced plans to start indexing the Semantic Web. Of course, the boys at Read/Write Web are besides themselves. I see all the potential for YP to sieze the day and start marking up their content with microformats and layering on an ontology capable of rudimentary inferencing.  This would be the reverse of Pandora’s Box.  I know I have the key to opening that box somewhere…

Oh, right.  I remember.  I left it in the bar.

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