Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves is an insightful investigation of classification systems by David Weinberger.

The tree of knowledge was a useful metaphor from Adam's fateful bite until the advent of the computer. It's the structure of Aristotle, Linnaeus, Darwin, Descartes, and Dewey the decimal guy.

This set-up is too rigid to explain today's world. Instead of trees, look at the components of trees. Think of elements of knowledge as leaves instead of branches.

Today a leaf of knowledge may appear on many trees simultaneously. You've got your tree, I've got mine, and the computer can reshuffle the leaves any number of ways. Tags, either formally defined taxonomies or organically generated "folksonomies," are ways to distribute leaves of knowledge into piles.

As our old mechanical view of the world yields to a dynamic systems view, the boundaries between disciplines break down. The "branches of science" become less important than the interactions within the ecosystem.

This brings me back, and I'm sorry to be a broken record on this but I'm exploring myself, to the principles of our new age: Everything's connected, nothing's predictable, and we're all in the same soup.

I fly to New Orleans on Sunday to attend Training 2005.

I'll be staying at the Avenue Garden Hotel in the Garden District. Price through Quickbook is $90/night. It's on the St. Charles streetcar line, about a mile and a half from the Quarter. Built 1897.

The weather will be brisk: 65 high, 43 low.

Most popular restaurants in N'Awlins:

COMMANDER'S PALACE 1403 Washington Ave. (Coliseum St.) (504) 899-8221
GALATOIRE'S 209 Bourbon St. (Iberville St.) (504) 525-2021
BAYONA 430 Dauphine St. (bet. Conti & St. Louis Sts.) (504) 525-4455
Cafe Du Monde 800 Decatur St. (St. Ann St.) (504) 525-4544
BRENNAN'S 417 Royal St. (bet. Conti & St. Louis Sts.) (504) 525-9711
EMERIL'S 800 Tchoupitoulas St. (Julia St.) (504) 528-9393
NOLA 534 St. Louis St. (bet. Chartres & Decatur Sts.) (504) 522-6652

MR. B'S BISTRO 201 Royal St. (Iberville St.) (504) 523-2078
PERISTYLE 1041 Dumaine St. (N. Rampart St.) (504) 593-9535
ACME OYSTER HOUSE
K-PAUL'S LOUISIANA KITCHEN 416 Chartres St. (bet. Conti & St. Louis Sts.) (504) 524-7394
JACQUES-IMO'S CAFE 8324 Oak St. (S. Carrollton Ave.) (504) 861-0886
ARNAUD'S 813 Bienville Ave. (bet. Bourbon & Dauphine Sts.) (504) 523-5433
ANTOINE'S 713 St. Louis St. (bet. Bourbon & Royal Sts.) (504) 581-4422
BRIGTSEN'S 723 Dante St. (Maple St.)

EMERIL'S DELMONICO 1300 St. Charles Ave. (Erato St.) (504) 525-4937
AUGUST 301 Tchoupitoulas St. (Gravier St.) (504) 299-9777
COURT OF TWO SISTERS 613 Royal St. (bet. St. Peter & Toulouse Sts.) (504) 522-7261
CLANCY'S 6100 Annunciation St. (Webster St.) (504) 895-1111
MOTHER'S 401 Poydras St. (bet. Magazine & Tchoupitoulas Sts.) (504) 523-9656
GRILL 300 Gravier St. (bet. S. Peters & Tchoupitoulas Sts.) (504) 522-1992
PALACE CAFE 605 Canal St. (bet. Chartres & Royal Sts.) (504) 523-1661
UGLESICH'S 1238 Baronne St. (Erato St.) (504) 523-8571

IRENE'S CUISINE 539 St. Philip St. (Chartres St.) (504) 529-8811
UPPERLINE 1413 Upperline St. (bet. Prytania St. & St. Charles Ave.) (504) 891-9822
DICKIE BRENNAN'S STEAKHOUSE 716 Iberville St. (Royal St.) (504) 522-2467
RED FISH GRILL 115 Bourbon St. (bet. Canal & Iberville Sts.) (504) 598-1200
GUMBO SHOP 630 St. Peter St. (bet. Chartres & Royal Sts.) (504) 525-1486
RUTH'S CHRIS STEAK HOUSE
GW FINS 808 Bienville Ave. (bet. Bourbon & Dauphine Sts.) (504) 581-3467

CENTRAL GROCERY COMPANY 923 Decatur St. (bet. Dumaine & St. Philip Sts.) (504) 523-1620
BACCO 310 Chartres St. (bet. Bienville Ave. & Conti St.) (504) 522-2426
CUVEE 322 Magazine St. (bet. Gravier & Poydras Sts.) (504) 587-9001
DICK AND JENNY'S 4501 Tchoupitoulas St. (Jena St.) (504) 894-9880
PELICAN CLUB 312 Exchange Pl. (Bienville St.) (504) 523-1504
GABRIELLE 3201 Esplanade Ave. (Ponce de Leon St.) (504) 948-6233

BELLA LUNA 914 N. Peters St. (Dumaine St.) (504) 529-1583
BON TON CAFE 401 Magazine St. (bet. Natchez & Poydras Sts.) (504) 524-3386
HERBSAINT 701 St. Charles Ave. (Girod St.) (504) 524-4114
BISTRO AT MAISON DE VILLE 727 Toulouse St. (bet. Bourbon & Royal Sts.) (504) 528-9206

Jennifer Hofmann is running a concurrent online Training conference. How long before all conferences wise up to running things this way?

Just about anything I tackle these days falls into three pieces: prep, the event, and follow-up. Miss any one of the three and the project misses the mark. It's not that tough to remember:

Paul Mace demonstrates a modular wired
classroom at the Higher College of Technology.


A plaque on the wall shows alternative
furniture configurations. Everything is on wheels.


Entertainment break! Hungarian girls playing
electronic violins at the college.
I told the girl on the left her intensity reminded me
of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. She hadn't seen it.


This is the Marina Mall, seen from the private
beach at the Emirates Palace Hotel.
If you look at the original pic, you can just
make out the sign above the furniture seller: IKEA.


Coffee drinking is an important aspect
of traditional Emerati hospitality.
A coffeepot is featured on the country's coins.
Yet people aren't drinking much coffee
from these ornate pots any more.
Now they go to Starbucks.

Our super-size four-wheel drive
skids and lurches,
following vague tracks
in the endless sand.

Bump! Slide. Spinning wheels.
The giddy feeling of being momentarily out of control.
Moving ahead by sliding right, then left, forever in mid-course correction.

Our LandCruiser, more sure-footed than a dromedary, whisks us right up the side of an immense dune, all the way to the sharp edge of sand at the top, reddish on our side, light yellow on the other.

The sole disturbance on the yellow sand,
the tiny tracks of a dung beetle,
a dotted line on a blank canvas,
make a statement every bit as loud as the two-story dune itself.
Object and ground.

Dung beetles thrive here.
The only thing atop the sand
save scrubby little plants hanging on for dear life are
goat turds the size of large marbles and
camel dung not unlike the droppings of a medium-sized dog.

We alight from the LandCruiser onto the sand, soft underfoot.

It is utterly quiet. Not a sound. The air is still.
We have entered another world.
I am in awe.

I know not how far, I am lousy with distances,
here it would be travesty to reduce the scene to yards or meters anyway,
but across the way are rolling hills of sand,
mounds, blobs, buttocks, thighs, curves,
ripped from a canvas by Georgia O’Keefe,
basic shapes overpowering detail, and
something erotic in the sensuous lines
above the inviting, darker depressions below.



I take heavy steps through the dunes,
stopping frequently to study the ripples on the surface.

For the first time in weeks, there are no signs, no neon, no readouts, no cars, no advertisements, no hovering waiters, no mobile phones bleating, no unfamiliar people asking “Remember me?”, no disco, no McDonald’s, no straight lines of palm trees, no straight lines at all, just sand and curves and more sand and more curves after that.

Calm. A time to reflect, to look at goat shit, to tromp up the next dune, to plant fresh footprints in smooth sand, to unwind, to be in nature, to get back to roots, to escape civilization, to tap into earth rhythms.

The sun sets, colors shift, the full moon rises, stars twinkle.

The drunken monkey of consciousness is struck dumb. Nature is all. Just us and the sand. And Georgia O’Keefe’s soft bodies ducking under the veil of darkness, repeating a ritual people have witnessed here for eight thousand years.

We reboard our ship to navigate the sea of sand, careen along the swells, surf the waves, and join the asphalt channel back to the city.

A convoy of American troops in olive drab trucks and armoured personnel carriers, dozens upon dozens of vehicles, buzz along the highway in cover of darkness in the opposite direction. The armies of the night. Don’t ask; don’t tell.

Paul pulls over at Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee and, naturally, donuts. Soon we’re navigating the wide, tree-lined boulevards of Abu Dhabi, running stop signs at the roundabouts, as is local custom. Paul pulls into the parking lot of the Hilton. Three hours later I’m in a black Mercedes hurtling along to Abu Dhabi Airport at 155 KPH. And now I’m over Greenland.

I’ve got to get back to the dunes. With friends and colleagues. Spend the night. Reconnect. Reflect. Take a run at solving the world’s problems. Enter the Samadhi tank. Revision. Rethink. Revitalize.

Perhaps we could borrow the Rainbow Sheik's rolling globe for our foray into the dunes. This baby contains ten air-conditioned bedrooms. For scale: that's me standing by a wheel.

Recovering from surgery in the mid-sixties by taking daily sitz-baths in my neighbor's tub, I read a book Linda had checked out of the library: Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. I remember thinking to myself, "This guy is dangerously crazy."

I forgot about HST for five years. Until the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book so immediate, stream-of-consciousness, unfettered, wigged-out, and fearless that I wandered around for a week after reading it feeling obliviously mad and rebellious, even though I'd never tried any of Thompson's drugs. The New York Times said it well: "Mr. Thompson managed to live and write his own version of the Heisenberg principle: That the observer not only changes events by his presence, but his presence also frequently surpasses the event in terms of importance."

Gonzo! Some say that Hunter abandoned all pretense of objectivity. I'm not so sure about that. Hunter told you up front that he was full of crap. Every writer is part of his story; Hunter was up-front about it. He told a story, and he told his story, and you constructed your story. Reality is like that.



Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screaching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles per hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamned animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats. The poor bastard would see them soon enough.

You never know what's coming next. Two days ago I was talking with Murray Gell-Mann about whether the breakdown of barriers between traditional disciplines wasn't part of a larger shift away from the Newtonian certainty and into the unpredictable chaos where any answer might be the right one, even if it's borrowed from someone else's cognitive toolkit. Have a seat next to Murray? No, I've got a spot at a table full of Italian entrepreneurship professors on the other side of the fountain. On my way back, who was in my path but the chairman of Boeing. Alone. "Lew, Abu Dhabi's a good place to sell airplanes, eh?" He replied that this is a GREAT place to sell airplanes. I joked "If Carly only knew what HP knew," and Lew related what he thought of Carly's performance but I won't go into it because some day a child might read this post. In the next hour we were buzzed by motorized parasails, entertained by dancers in 12' wide plastic bubbles, treated to stories from a former astronaut, and bored nearly to the breaking point by the beknighted CEO of Mitel and his tales of making oodles of money. Natural high is the best high of them all. Thanks for the vantagepoint, Hunter.

Sheikh Nahayan Ben Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister for Higher Education and Chancellor of Higher Colleges of Technology, welcomed hundreds of college students from around the world to the third E-ducation without Borders conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this week. Speakers included Nobel laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Carlo Rubbia, Boeing chairman Lew Platt, the BBC's Tim Sebastian, Frank Fahey, Gilly Salmon, Sam Pitroda, David Ignatius of the Washington Post...and me.

The real stars of the show were the students, who earned the right to attend by submitting papers on e-ducation without borders and related subjects. I talked with students from Italy, the Czech Republic, China, India, the U.S., Australia, Canada, Brazil, Peru, and many other lands. Sheikh Nahayan set three objectives for the conference: build new strategies for e-ducation, reflect on strategies developed for the 2001 and 2003 conferences, and continue to grow the Global Student Forum.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was founded only 35 years ago, although its people have lived here since 5500 BC. The UAE has a population of 4 million on 83,600 square kilometers. Abu Dhabi is far and away the largest and richest of the sevent emirates of the UAE.

One man, Sheikh Zayed ben Sultan al Nahyan, heir to a 350-year dynasty, founded the country and inspired its growth from sand dunes to skyscrapers. A thoroughly enlightened man, Sheikh Zayed championed education as the pathway to success. Sheikh Zayed passed away last year, an almost unimaginable tragedy. In American terms, it was as if George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, FDR, Ben Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln had all perished on the same day. Memories of Sheikh Zayed are everywhere. An Austrian folk-rock group, Paper Moon, sang a tribute ballad, Zayed, that became the unofficial anthem of the conference.

For seven thousand years, the people here have welcomed travelers into their tents. Today's tent may be the brand-new Emirates Palace Hotel, awe-inspiring in scale and beauty. Where most hotels would have signs, the Emirates Palace has beautiful people from around the globe in stylish waistcoats, welcoming guests and pointing the way. On the first evening of the conference, a thousand of us sat at tables alongside the Gulf to listen to an inspirational talk from an astronaut and watch a fireworks extravaganza before feasting on endless heaps of exotic food.

The next evening we ventured 90 minutes into the desert to put on native costume, watch traditional dances, roam the dunes in over-powered four-wheel drives, ride camels, witness a mock-wedding procession, chow down on goat and baby camel, listen to an orchestra flown in from Vienna, and once more listen to Paper Moon sing Zayed.