Well, I am having a fun evening! Started the day happily making some relatively coherent-sounding plans for the PhD, and reading about the jolly arguments the Austrian and Historical schools were having about 'the economic calculation problem'... but then, then, I took a look at this Three Toed Sloth post, via its Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts tag. This led onto all sorts of terrifying things, such as this little outline of a conference from five years back now. Here's a lovely chunk:

Hayek famously argued that competitive markets effectively calculate an adaptive allocation of resources that could not be calculated by any individual market-participant. Hitherto the study of collective cognition has been qualitative, philosophical, even at times anecdotal. Only recently, we believe, have the tools fallen into place to initiate a rigorous, quantitative science of collective cognition. Moreover, it appears that soon there will be a real practical need for such a science.

That's, in essence, a summary of my own PhD proposal, except much more intelligent and concise. From five years back. At the Santa Fe Institute. Eek.

Aaaanyway, as I say: more to be written on that. (It certainly makes finding a novel angle considerably more challenging.)

The next vitally important aspect of my Monday's work was planning how best to procrastinate. Every PhD student needs a whole panoply of procrastination tools and projects; it even says so in my induction pack. Honest. (Not really.) So I figure I might as well tie mine into the PhD - y'know, along the lines of -

Aim: create an online information storage and categorisation system of such sophistication that, after three years, I'll just be able to click 'make PhD' and it'll pop out of some virtual version of that machine in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that made the three meal gum. And it'll taste better. But also probably turn you purple and bulbous.

I have in my head a three-pronged approach: Drupal as the back-end, Firefox as one way into that, and a cunning Java program that will display sent data in a variety of shockingly futuristic, interactive ways reminiscent of something from minority report. Maybe even with the gloves (though they may take, oo, another month or two to get working.)

Well, I'm already some of the way there. This 'ere post is a first test for using Scribefire, a Firefox blogging tool. It's a bit clunky, but kinda potentially enormously useful. I can post to any particular node in Drupal (wot my blog runs on), attaching any category or tag that I've defined there. So why, why, I ask you, should I not experiment further with stuffing all my PhD notes, queries, links and tasks onto a website? Er, coz it'll get hacked? Coz I won't be able to get them out again into a useable form? Well, as long as there's cron tasks set up that'll scuttle all the precious data off to safety every night, where's the downside? The content becomes google-searchable, as Dani Rodrik points out:

One of the unexpected scholarly benefits of having a blog is that it is like keeping an intellectual journal. You get an idea, you jot it down in your blog. Some months later, you vaguely remember having had the idea and you Google your own blog to recover it. I am not kidding: I google my own blog all the time...

I've done the same thing; did today. It's great! Filing schmiling. Also, one's tagging allows an extremely fluid method of storage more fitting to these liquid modern times.

Drupal itself is a thing of wonder and beauty; the more I learn about it, the more it fills me with joy. I find in me a splendid anticipation: the notion of making bespoke modules that display random snippets of certain categories of information; juxtaposing notes that otherwise might never have seen each other.

All nonsense, of course. But sorely tempting nonsense. I should get a decent filing system and get on with it, probably.