Menu

miscMeta

The science
and the art
of technology and
knowledge solutions.

About

miscMeta is the digital project
and consulting workspace of
J. Kirby Robinson and his collaborators and co-conspirators. Here you will find, as always,
a collection of various things -- one level of abstraction higher.

How We Think About

What We Do.

"The need of precision in knowledge, adaptability in action, clarity in thought, and always the need to know more, to complete one's understanding."
(from The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein)

"You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express — and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt anymore: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them."
(from Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany)

"Executing a plan can be subcontracted out. Making the plan in the first place, not as much."
(from Nemesis Games by James S. A. Corey)

"You doing it now? Synthesizing?"
I nodded.
"And you do this without any specialized knowledge at all?"
"I'm as much of a specialist as you. I specialize in
processing informational topologies."
"Without understanding their content?"
"Understanding the shapes is enough."
(from Blindsight by Peter Watts)

Always Learning

"The essential activity of the student is to relate the facts learned into a unified, organic whole, to assimilate them as the body assimilates food or as the rose assimilates food from the soil and increases in size, vitality, and beauty. A learner must use mental hooks and eyes to join the facts together to form a significant whole. This makes learning easier, more interesting, and much more valuable. The accumulation of facts is mere information and is not worthy to be called education since it burdens the mind and stultifies it instead of developing, enlightening, and perfecting it."
(from The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph)

Building and Creating

"The best engineers had feel. It was a sensitivity born of experience, of talent, and even of something like love, with which they commanded, not only the mountains, but the machine they rode and directed. For those without fear and the true night-sight of understanding, there was no pleasure like that of wandering some strange and intricate part of that city, until out of shadow rose shapes, and out of shapes, plan, and out of plan — original purpose. Only then, at last with original purpose encompassed and understood, came — perhaps — the greater occupation of putting that knowledge to work in new building.""
(from Necromancer by Gordon R. Dickson)

Playing Infinitely

"Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries."

"Infinite players have rules; they just do not forget that rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement for agreement."
(from Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse)

Working Hard

"One certain path to happiness lies in having the opportunity to work to the utter limit of your strength on some difficult task that you believe to be worth doing.""
Robert A. Heinlein as quoted in
In Dialogue with His Century: The Man Who Learned Better by William H. Patterson, Jr.

Admiration, Inspiration, and Fascination

Ideas, projects, products, and companies with which we are currently fascinated.

PubPub
The Daily Brief
simply.fyi
Bookstack
Knowledge Futures
Nextcloud

Check out some of the

Things we love.

JimmySmith
Jimmy Smith

Hammond Organ

There's nothing like the sound of classic keyboard instruments. Current home inventory include a Hammond M3 and a Rhodes stage piano. Jazz and blues are the house specialties.

JKR on Triumph
Riding

British Motorcycles

Yellow Wall

Current two-wheeled companions in the garage include a Triumph Bonneville T100 and a single-cylinder Royal Enfield Classic 500.

GEB
The book

that started it all

Interested the the mind, the brain, music, mathematics, art, paradoxes, logic, and life? Obtain this book and read, if you haven't. This is the title that started us down a many varied paths years ago.

Tufte
Rethinking

Data and Representation

Edward Tufte is the modern master of data visualization and of using representations to both gain insight into and convey meanings derived from data.

Coffee
Black Coffee

All day. Every day.

Absence of fresh, hot, black coffee = wrong.

What They Say About Us.

  • I can’t think of a single e-product at the company that could have been done without you. And I can certainly remember a lot of discussions with the global HQ in Germany where they expressed their respect (and at times astonishment) about what you were able to do with such limited resources.

    You are so awesome at what you do and so unique in that you understand both the customer needs and the technology to make it happen, your biggest problem will be to select the right option from the many that you will be presented with.

    Senior Vice President and Direct Supervisor Thieme Publishing Group, NYC & Stuttgart

  • I very much admired the way you thought about your work and pursued answers that fit our division's needs and resources and those of our customers while operating within a larger company that was not nimble and swift that did not look as far ahead or understand as fully the new competitive world it had entered. You were a life saver.

    Vice President, Publishing Industry New York, NY

Tools and Technologies of Note

If we were to win a Webby, these are some of the tools we would thank in our acceptance speech.

BBEdit
Xcode
MAMP
Raspberry Pi
Ubuntu

Contact

Get In Touch.

Got a book recommendation, a job of note, a project idea, or just a song you want us to hear? Reach out. We look forward to hearing from you.

contact@miscmeta.com