fyi Is technological innovation ying or just yang?

All:

Pointer to blogpost:
http://www.identityblog.com/2005/04/13.html#a189

Kobielus commentary:
You mean “yin or yang,” but who’s paying attention. Cameron is engaged in a ping-pong with others in the identity blogging community, and the number of words and mass of umbrage in this particular post far outweigh the insight content.

The kernel of a point in this piece is that technological innovation (SOA, ESB, Web services, etc.) certainly drives the development of the increasingly integrated global identity environment, but the multi-everything (-jurisdiction, -authority, -organization, -domain, -platform, -protocol, -application, -etc.) federation governance issues require what Cameron calls an “identity metasystem” that can operate as a neutral backplane bridging, brokering, and mediating among these many dimensions, and among legacy, current, and future identity environments. And this “metasystem” is not something that can be laid down by decree, or even planned in any coordinated fashion, or “reformed.” It’ll just form and re-form itself, emerging from the evolutionary goo of the IdM landscape, taking whatever shape the geometry of the identity space-time continuum requires.

You can tell I’ve been reading about non-Euclidean geometry recently. In particular, the pivotal roles of Gauss and Riemann in the 19th century in defining a non-Euclidean geometry built on the notion of “curvature” and “hyperspheres.” A hypersphere is an abstraction that maps points on two 3-dimensional spheres as if those spheres were "hemispheres" of some fourth-dimensional object, so that when you cross the abstract "equator" from one "hemisphere" (aka, a 3-dimensional sphere) to its counterpart, you're moving to the "adjacent" point in the counterpart "hemisphere" (i.e., 3-d sphere). Or you can map from one point on one sphere to its "antipodes" point on the counterpart sphere.

As I said, a hypersphere is an abstraction that maps the sphere concepts--center point, radius, diameter, great circle--from the 3rd to the 4th dimension. Don’t want to bore you with all the details, but it’s clear that, when you look out into the universe, you’re looking at light that issues from both spheres of this all-encompassing hypersphere: the sphere of the deep past and the sphere of the deep future: the sphere of the alpha and the sphere of the omega: the sphere of oldest light that shows our current view of where we originated (the Big Bang), and the sphere of newest light that shows our destiny (ever receding “away” from the Big Bang). Recognizing that these two spheres of light are superimposed on each other, and, in fact, every point in the sky rests on both spheres.

Mind blowing, eh? Think of how flat maps of the earth distort the paths among points on this spherical planet, and how we can plot out a circular azimuthal great-circle-radiating flat map from our current earthly location to any other location on earth, and how our current antipodes—a single point on a sphere--appears on such a map as a full-circle surrounding the entire plot. What I suspect is that the “cosmic background radiation” is simply the all-encompassing, 360-degree smear of oldest light from the Big Bang, splayed all around us like an apparent full-sphere on the alphasphere. When in fact that apparent full-sphere is in reality a single point.

The singularity point. Our singular temporal and spatial antipodes point. The Big Bang.

Ah yes. The wonder of coffee. Yin and yang? Alpha-omega. Antipodes. Where did I start this post? Now I'm disoriented. And I've probably screwed up the spacey higher geometry bigtime. Oh well, I'm nothing if not pretentious and overreaching.

Jim