Over the past few years I’ve been working with a couple volunteers– PhD students who had found Robert Rosen’s work and then found me– to get all of my father’s papers and out of print books digitized with the goal of putting everything up on a new website so that it’s accessible to everyone who has been looking for it. One student in particular, Pedro Marquez-Zacarias, who has earned his PhD in the process of all this and is currently a post-doc at the Santa Fe Institute… who flew up to Rochester, stayed in our guest room and worked his a$$ off, opening boxes of Dad’s stuff that I’ve got stored in my basement, gathering and digitizing papers, photographs, notes, and more. In lieu of payment, I gave him total access and he has copies of everything including photographs of all of my father’s artwork. It has been a symbiotic partnership of the first order and the website is finally ready to launch publicly. I could not have done it without him. On this last trip up here he brought his friend, fellow PhD student from Atlanta, Emma Bingham, who has been doing a lot of the coding and indexing on the new website. The fact that they are delightful people is a bonus! I consider them extended family, by now, and friends for life.
The new website is www.rosenlife.org and is fully searchable. Most of the digitized files are free, the ones that aren’t free are inexpensive, and then there’s the burgeoning “store”… As I was getting feedback from a few friends, there were a lot of jokes about the coffee mugs. I wrote:
“The mugs! Yeah! I laughed so hard. That was Pedro and Emma’s idea. They were reading the free association notes Dad used to type first thing in the morning [over a pot of black coffee] in preparation for actual writing and they said “This would be hilarious on a coffee mug!” The more we noticed, after that, the more it seemed like a brilliant idea, particularly as a means for funding the site. If they take off, I suggested we find a different shape and size of mug. Dad and I both favor a curved, rounded cup that holds at least 16 oz, preferably 20. I think T-shirts would be good too. His quote from Life, Itself: “The Machine Metaphor of Descartes is not just a little bit wrong; it is entirely wrong– and must be discarded.” I want one of those! I’ll wear it to the ISSS conference in July.”
Every little bit helps. Websites are expensive. Any profit above the expenses will go to Pedro and Emma, helping them avoid Academic poverty if at all possible.
I intend to start a blog on the site. Pedro wants me to send him my Facebook posts about Dad’s work, of which there have been MANY. I’ve tagged most of them as important so I’m hoping they are searchable.
Any constructive criticisms and suggestions are welcome. This is just a beginning. It’s a lot different from the first website I created back when the internet was new (under the auspices of rosen-enterprises), which may still be on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. That one was very personal and hand-crafted… This one is more goal-oriented and official. The main goal is to create access to the scientific work of Robert Rosen for people around the planet, wherever they are. And it already achieves that goal, thanks to Pedro.
The next big task is one that only I can finish: getting the book written that translates Robert Rosen’s scientific work to plain English. By this time next year I hope to be looking for a publisher for the finished manuscript.
By my late 60s, perhaps I will finally be able to get back to being a fiction writer. :~) A long detour but the time has not been wasted!
Systems Community of Inquiry 