End 2019 I started the blog as a tool for myself, to write down the ideas that appear early in the morning — to prevent them from slipping away again. I am gaining a growing, unruly collection of text fragments this way. With the corona virus fueling its pandemic came the urge to use my brains and intellectual assets to comprehend what is going on. Thus some structure emerged, related to what I know about complex adaptive social systems and agent-based modelling. The knowledge and experience involved are so relevant that I base a consultancy service on it. By now the blog has grown three compartments: fragments, columns and dotLegal.
Fragments & Columns
Because a blog is a stack, it will show first what was added last. If there is a line of
reasoning somewhere it shows in reverse order. Fragments are the results. I tag them with a wild diversity of categories: fiction for dreams and stories, facts for what may serve as data for models (like a collection of USA-president Trump’s tweets), frames for patterns of thoughts and feelings combined (like dogmas), models for theories that can be translated into toy-world simulations, epi for fragments about the blog and code for fragments on NetLogo programs that run the models. Of these only fiction is meant to entertain.
Consistency and coherence (if any) follow from my character. That is why I am the only author. To break through the related monotony, I devide my identity over several fictional authors: Messrs Buddy, Stickler, Winner and Node. I myself participate in their discussions as Mr. Sum, Cogito Sum. These names carry a hint of the characters involved. The whole thing gets a bit messy this way, but that’s intentional. The blog is in two languages. A language is set by clicking on one of 2 flags: Dutch or American
(and here is an example of why I take the trouble.) Finally, every now and then events trigger me to write an opinion. These are small stories with a closure and are made available as columns.
dotLegal
is a one-person company that cooperates with a law firm (SCHMDT advocatuur). Thus, I make many years of knowledge and experience commercially available. dotLegal participates in normative debates on what communication-service architectures and strategies to adopt. We also contribute to providing and processing second opinions on what to do with failing IT services. For such projects dotLegal considers the issues at stake to live in complex adaptive social systems. Here is a form to contact me in my role of dotLegal consultant. (It can also be used for comments on fragments and/or columns.)