A Few Thank You Posts

There are some thank yous that are due from this weblog for varying degrees of recognition by other bloggers or web 2.0 residents.

Social Citizen, written by Tera Wozniak of the great city of Grand Rapids, Michigan recognized me as

• A new social entrepreneurship blogger - Social Entrepreneurship a New Path for Many

Even more gratifying was being put in with some pretty respectable company. It is a definite intention of this weblog to continue down that path. The only hesitation is that social-entrepreneurship is not the only focus and I am likely getting more credit than I deserve. I do though, for myself, see all of what I am exploring tying together giving both rationale and optimism for action as change agents.

USpace left a kindly worded comment on the same post.

Another blogger, Senior Solutions included me in their blogroll. Written by Lee Balinas, his blog's "about me" tells us:

I have 30+ years in the caring profession. I have been a counselor, minister, insurance salesman, investment adviser and now radio talk show host. I have a weekly show called Lee's Senior Solutions. This show will examine and discuss ALL areas of our lives that will be affected by the AGE WAVE.

Though being recognized by a blog titled Senior Solutions could put a wrench in my attempts to masquerade as a Generation Jones with Generation X tendencies, covering up my Baby Boomer roots. I am likely going to have to resolve to learn CSS or something.

Mah Saito of the Diigo Community at Diigo HQ bookmarked by post My Pathways to New Paradigms: learning more about diigo. Now they may in fact bookmark everything anybody writes about Diigo, but the recognition is still appreciated. More important, it points to a great deal more to learn.

People are still visiting LaDosisDiaria mobuzz.tv to see here comes another bubble. The latest one being yesterday, keeping my 15 seconds of international fame alive awhile longer. I received a number of hits from Hispanic countries due to being linked to the mobuzz.tv site. One of the greatest pleasures of this weblog was seeing the international reach. Quoting myself from a past post:

It is as if one threw a message in a bottle into the cyber-sea and received answers from all over the world. The level of connection on the web is truly amazing.

The Last Titan, The Only Physics Superhero Still Standing Leaves Us

Today I learned from the Los Angeles Times that John Wheeler had passed away.

OBITUARIES John A. Wheeler, 96; physicist coined the term 'black hole'

The title for this post is from a quote in the New York Times obituary.

My relations to the world of physics is the same as your average couch potato to the New York Giants. I stare fascinated at the exotic worlds envisioned by the minds of physicists and cosmologists though I do not have the formal education, especially math, to fully understand.

I do, however, have a great appreciation for their intelligence and imagination. It was more though with John Wheeler. He knew and discussed with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr the laws of the universe. He was the Princeton thesis supervisor for both Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett. There is little hesitation to title John Wheeler a patriarch of 20th century American physics but what always came across to me was his humanity. One of my favorite books was Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. In those pages he describes John Wheeler's celebration of his own birthday in which he lit a fireworks display beneath his chair at a Physics Seminar. What was most impressive to me was the conciseness of thought combined with wonder.

Paper in white the floor of the room, and rule it off in one-foot squares. Down on one's hands and knees, write in the first square a set of equations conceived as able to govern the physics of the universe. Think more overnight. Next day put a better set of equations into square two. Invite one's most respected colleagues to contribute to other squares. At the end of these labors, one has worked oneself out into the doorway. Stand up, look back on all those equations, some perhaps more hopeful than others, raise one's finger commandingly, and give the order "Fly!" Not one of those equations will put on wings, take off, or fly. Yet the universe "flies".

John Wheeler

Blogging To Connect Writing To Understand

This weblog has always had two aspects, the underlying web 2.0 tools which it uses to create itself, and the narrative which ties ideas together on the page and over time.

I would still hesitate to call this "writing" in any formal sense beyond the first six definitions of the defined word, either for depth or length, but I do still endeavor to make it better. Part of the motivation for bettering my writing is that according to FeedBurner, there have been 39 visits to my weblog site through Paradigm Online Writing Assistant. It seemed a perfect fit in the early stages of developing this weblog, and I have used it to better my writing knowledge. Hopefully, that will show up on the screen at times. I did not expect it though to be a primary gateway, so the need to at least get the sentences right gets stronger.

Now Penelope Trunk of the Brazen Careerist has provided a post back on April 4th, which could provide a ready made excuse for not having the best writing, at least grammatically. According to Ms. Post writing without typos is totally outdated. Now Ms. Post is a professional writer, as in gets paid for it, and has taught writing in college. So she is far more qualified to speak on these matters than I am.

As the world of content and writing shifts, the spelling tyrants will be left behind. Here are five reasons why complaining about typos is totally stupid and outdated.

1. Spellchecker isn't perfect.
2. Spelling has nothing to do with intelligence.
3. You don't have unlimited time, so spend it on ideas, not hyphens.
I am extremely knowledgeable about grammar. I can parse any sentence. I can sign the preposition song in my sleep. So I feel fine telling you that there are great writers who don't know grammar.
This one I thought worth quoting
4. Perfectionism is a disease.
5. Use the comments section for what matters: Intelligent discourse.

So blogging is not an homage to perfectionism but rather an homage to the art of being curious.

I am continuing with the same tact that I have set for myself in writing these posts. First, I am summarizing what somebody else has said with links for myself and others to the more developed piece. So my writings become Spark Notes for other people's writings. Second, since I don't wish to merely parrot in shorthand what somebody else has said better, I am also finding another idea against which to combine, compare or contrast it.

DailyWritingTips, which is another writing toolbox that I use, recently had a post on Funny Images Conjured up by Web Comments reminding us of eternal danger of not being careful enough - paper can burn, the Internet can be forever. Finally, I am linking back to other posts of mine with similar ideas, working to develop a body of knowledge on the web for myself, and for others if they find anything of interest.

Using Web 2.0 tools in my blogging is a method of connecting to other sources of knowledge, the writing of the posts is a method of giving meaning to those connections.