I remember the exact moment I first heard 'the map is not the territory': going past Nuneaton town centre, of all places, in my brother's car, probably twenty years ago now.

The term seems to have originated with Alfred Korzybski, a 19th / 20th century straddler, a Polish scientist and founder of 'general semantics'. He seems to share some common ground with Hayek's 'Sensory Order' - that our nervous systems and language structure are the maps we must navigate by. The Wikipedia article above suggests he'd thought a great deal about what this meant for how we should act personally.

There's an hour and a half before my first Java practical, so let's see if I can't fit in a little lump of blog...

So! My gosh. First week of the Geography and Geographical Information Systems MA before the PhD. Tsk. Pff! Sampled all the modules I'm going to sample this semester. Beginning again - another little floating blob in a sea of Brownian-motion students all bouncing seemingly without purpose around the campus of Leeds Uni.

Done a first bit of reading in the Bodington Library - a smaller simulacra of the British Library, from what I remember of that. A damn fine place to read. Oh my God, libraries are wonderful things.

I hope I always remember to go there and work sometimes. Libraries are wonderful things; librarians, as in Michael Moore's book, noble defenders of knowledge. (Think really bad swords and sorcerors film staring an entire cast of magic-wielding, and probably scantily clad & nubile defenders of knowledge. Wearing glasses. The only force standing between the total blackness of oblivion and the light of our accumulated wisdom. I worry about me sometimes.) Students - ants re-creating that knowledge, altering it, giving up our puny little minds to act as agents of its evolution.

This blog doesn't even have a name yet. That doesn't seem natural, somehow, to be writing its first entry before the poor thing even knows what its called. But its OK: given that a lot of it is going to be about emergence, I'm sure I can say something like: “the name will emerge from the interactions of the writings,” or some such nonsense. Actually, maybe I won't say that.

What kind of a blog is it? Well, its Drupal – an open source content management system, that has a much more flexible approach to categorising content than most things around, and has a very organic feel to it. Its also able to be very simple, but expand to whatever one might want it to be.

"No – what kind of blog is it?"

Oh. In September, I'm going to be starting four years of study, into a set of questions that has vexed me for many a year. In one way or another its been a theme running through all the stuff I've done. If I was forced to choose one question, it would be:

What is the correct balance between human order and natural order?