ABOUT INFINITE INK

	News
	The Infinite Ink web site is in the midst of being restructured and moved from www.jazzie.com/ii/ to www.ii.com and then mirrored at www.best.com/~ii/. Since the Infinite Ink documents are quite a tangled web, it's a mess during this transition! Feedback about the new design and directory structure, which you can see at the Infinite Ink Directory, is welcome. After I've finished moving all the pages, I'll go back and update the pages, many of which desperately need to be updated!
	Who
	Nancy McGough created Infinite Ink in 1992. It is a one-person business with lots of help from family, friends, friends of friends, friends (of friends)n, and people all over the Net.
	What
	Infinite Ink focuses on writing, teaching, and promoting public discussion about: Foundations of Mathematics and Science including logic, set theory, physics, and the uses of infinity. Computing including the Internet, intranets, group work, groupware, Unix, and Unix philosophy. Philosophy of science, mathematics, religion, and the infinite. I want to do philosophy that is careful but more accessible than most of what is published in academic philosophy journals these days. I agree with Charles Daniels – as quoted by Bas van Fraassen in The Scientific Image – who said: It is always easy to tell whether people are doing good philosophy: they are if they are laughing.
	Where
	Infinite Ink has always been a Net business and so it is located everywhere the Net is – its ``ink'' is infinitely distributed! Infinite Ink began in Seattle, Washington and uses a number of Internet service providers around the United States. I now live and work in one of the most vibrant, intense, stimulating, diverse cities on the planet: New York City.
	Why
	The most frequently asked question I get is: Why are you doing this? Well, first of all, this is not a nonprofit so I do make money from it, mainly from people seeing my work here and then asking me to do work for them. Eventually I plan to get paid for the writing I put on the Net. I like the shareware/sharedoc model so that's probably what I'll do, i.e., everyone can read my material and, if it's useful, the reader pays me, either with money, a postcard, movie tickets, vegetarian meals, yoga classes, design suggestions and graphics for my Web pages, leads on New York apartments, or whatever! Please let me know what you think of this plan. Other reasons that I do this are 1) it's what I really want to be doing, 2) I meet fascinating people through these pages and through the discussion groups I participate in, and 3) I want to promote these things I believe in: Making the Web accessible to all and low in flashing and other noise. In keeping with these goals, these pages use the HTML 3.2 or Cougar DTD and are Lynx 2.7.1 friendly; contain only an infinitesimal amount of blinking text, animated graphics, under-construction graphics, frames, and background images; and are free of back buttons (because you never know where someone came from and browsers have back buttons anyways), image maps, counters, cookies and other invasions of privacy, ads, and ads masquerading as awards. (I am anti-awards in general because of reasons discussed in Punished by Rewards : The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A'S, Praise, and Other Bribes .) Open computer systems and the use of open standards including those specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force. I am a big fan and promoter of the IETF-standards-track Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), the ``best kept secret in email.'' The production and support of shareware, sharedocs, freeware (such as Pine – a program for Internet news and email), freedocs, and collaborative work. Usenet FAQs are an excellent example of documents that are both collaborative and free. Using the Net to help decentralize power in technology, publishing, and society in general. Non-traditional education such as what is provided by one of my alma maters, The Evergreen State College.