Threads

I've always been a fan of the James Burke 'Connections' model for exploring the patterns of history (the name of this blog is (partly) a tribute to Burke's show).

It also motivated me to try my own identity-related thread

• A key piece of SAML 2.0 is its support for pseudonyms, an identifier for a user unique to a pairing of an Identity Provider and a Service Provider.
  


• Nicholas Bourbaki was the group pseudonym under which a group of young French mathematicians wrote a number of books on advanced mathematics. They wanted to rewrite mathematics in terms of set theory.


• George Cantor was a 19th century German mathematician who formulated set theory.
  


• If any one individual can be credited with SAML 2.0, it would be Scott Cantor.
  

Burke's new book Twin Tracks has a number of separate chapters, each starting with a single event in history, and then following two separate threads towards a common endpoint in space-time. If I had been less lazy, I could have pointed to the Venn of Identity as another thread connecting set theory to Scott.