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Real work and the arguments about of human thinking that engender willingness to work may be usefully separated as rhetoric and logic. Sometimes the rhetorician and the logician find themselves on opposite sides taking the role of the other without ever touching the underlying emotional motives that really motivate their arguments. Logic need be no more based in rationale than rhetoric in witless emotion. Perhaps we should better understand magic. Attention is magic. Where a technology, an initiative, or even a simple email brings attention to a topic, enables that topic to be shared, understood, and become part of the competency of some individual or group, that is magic. Efforts such as HumanML are easy targets for cynicism and critique. They defy the neo-Gothic, the easy pejorative, the all too common laziness of so-called serious intellectual thought. Where some step up to the challenge of making a difference, they enable hope. To clarify the question, to enable the individual or the group to share a belief, an emotion, or even a simple thrill, this enables humanity. We do not create humanity; we humanize. This magic is not reserved to the political process, or the elite who become a core community then shut themselves off from the commons, who consider every moment of their attention so precious that they soon experience only the messages from their self-selected peers, that magic is available to any person that trades attention for learning about others. Note those who are now core decision makers who inform us that they do not subscribe to XML-Dev. Should we therefore listen to what they have to say, or should we consider the opinions of the commons more persuasive? Is consensus less important than the technical opinions of the self-selected elite, who as you say, drink too much of their own kool-aid? Technology is not magic. The effort to create the technology is magic. The artifacts of the HumanML initiative are not magical spells, but the attitudes and emotions of the individuals who will dedicate attention to creating the languages are magic. It is the magic of hope, the willingness to believe and persevere in the the face of the cynical, the pejorative and the emotionally impoverished or frightened that transforms the lot for some large or limited number of individuals. In the end, all magic is attention and all attention is the power of the individual. Whether an effort fails to achieve its goals or is the starting point for other efforts that achieve these goals, the chain of human initiative is linked by the sustaining belief that the goals are worthy of the attention freely given. That belief, that willingness, and that acceptance of the cost of effort, these are the magical powers of individuals whose hope that their effort can bring that hope to others, that the chain of human achievement does create a better world, that simple hope, that willingness, that acceptance of the power of marvelous faith is magic. XML is magic because we made it. What we make of it, where that brings hope, is a greater magic and we are magicians. len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:uche.ogbuji@f...] You described Clark's article precisely: "satire". I don't think there are many people in positions of dangerous influence who ascribe to the described "magical thinking". I certainly wouldn't have thought Alan Kotok to be one of them, given his involvement in the XML-EDI group, and given the long and rancorous debates about inflated XML promises on that group between EDI traditionalists and XML boosters. I'd like to assume Clark quotes Kotok quite out of context, because I have to agree that the excerpts that appear in Clark's article are worthy of satire. However, I think in the real world, where everyone has more work to do than dreams to dispense, that no one really believes in XML as magick. Robin cover wrote about these matters back in 1998 in his paper on Semantic Transparency, and I've written about them more recently in my "Thinking XML" column. coniuratores consilia sua mirabile esse non putant loosely: conspirators shouldn't drink too much of their own Kool-Aid.
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