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{Saturday, June 19, 2004}

 
Stigmergy & Systems Science

After Gutenberg » Knowledge Ecosystem Persistence
J.C.Winnie: "I see that Jay Cross, citing George Por, poses an interesting question: How does a community's knowledge ecosystem persist?"

Countercultural Studies: Edward Sanders' 1968: A History in Verse
Alan Gilbert writes: "[...] 1968: A History in Verse is the product of what Sanders has spent over twenty years articulating as an "investigative poetry" (1976) and "a multi-decade research project" (1994). His book Chekhov, a life of the famous Russian writer in verse, is another recent example (1995); currently, Sanders is rumored to be working on a three volume verse history of the United States. This poetic approach to research and historiography involves saturating oneself in a particular topic through the extensive researching and cataloging of information related to it. One method Sanders recommends is the compilation of "data clusters" -- strips of information which can be shuffled around until an ideal configuration is created (1994: 244). 1968 is written this way, as separate strophes present accumulating details until data clusters are formed ..."

Michael Ventura + Michael Ventura + Michael Ventura

Ventura: The psyche is a city like New York or Rome or Calcutta; you'd need a Dante or a Breughel to picture it. It's like having all the TV channels on at once and feeding into each other, late night film noir and afternoon cartoons speaking each other's lines, while epic events like revolutions have the feel of family feuds. It's an inner world that reminds me of something Henry Adams wrote after he had contemplated the gargoyles and saints of Europe's cathedrals for perhaps longer than was good for him, a sentence at the end of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: "Truth, indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sympathy."

A Monster in Repose by Michael Ventura (The Austin Chronicle 3 May 2002)
"When we rhapsodize about the classic European cathedrals we speak mostly of their architecture and their marvelous stained glass. We tend to consider the gargoyles separately, parenthetically -- as though these monsters were merely, somehow, decorative. They are not. They are a part of religion, a part of humanity, even a part of God. You come to be redeemed, but it's possible you'll be devoured.
[...] The cathedral builders were modest and honest. Modest, in that they did not affix their names to the greatest structures of their civilization. Honest, in what they admitted in their building: You cannot have religion without monsters.
Walk into a church, holding your child by the hand ... whatever the doctrine, monsters are crawling upon the walls. They are a part of God -- so warned the cathedral sculptors. You may not see them perched at the top of the cathedral, but they see you."

A Hundred Years of Shadows by Michael Ventura (The Austin Chronicle 7 March 2003)
"[...] Not long before his death in 1910, the writer of War and Peace and Anna Karenina saw his first film. He was about 80 years old, a relic of another era, but he got the movies. He told a journalist: "You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle [the motion-picture camera of that day] will make a revolution in our life -- in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience -- it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness."
[...] Maxim Gorky, saw his first films in 1896: the simple, short, beautifully shot demonstration-movies of the Lumière brothers, who had perfected the motion picture camera the year before. (The first moving pictures on celluloid were taken on the streets of London by William Friese-Greene in 1889.) Gorky captures how strange, enchanting, and utterly disorienting were the first experiences of people watching a screen:
"Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows ..."
[...] Gorky and Tolstoy, in their different ways, understood instantly the same thing: The motion picture, the Kingdom of Shadows, would transform consciousness. We would forget where we are, even who we are, and "strange imaginings" would "invade" us. Tolstoy saw cinema as a powerful entity in its own right, so powerful that it would not adapt to us: "We will have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen." "Entire cities," Gorky said, would be "cast into eternal sleep." We would become sleepwalkers, dreaming with eyes wide shut. The traditional, practical, and down-to-earth, would almost cease to count. Our appearance, our ambitions, our lovemaking, the very timbre of our voices (regional accents are dying out in America), would be dominated by what was manifested on the screen's Kingdom of Shadows. We would reflexively compare ourselves to ... fantasy. Dream life would become our concrete goal. "The pursuit of happiness" would come to mean: I want to live like a movie. (Which isn't exactly what Jefferson had in mind.)
I think of a haunting sentence Josef von Sternberg said late in his life, years after he directed his last film: "I believe the cinema was here from the beginning of the world."
Something there is, hidden in Nature from the beginning, that wants to transform waking life into dream, even into nightmare. Through the motion picture this Merlinesque force would be given a terrific, irresistible power.
The last shot of "The Great Train Robbery" is the same as the first: The cowboy draws his pistol and shoots us ..."

MSNBC - Moore defends incendiary film
Moore: "It [Fahrenheit 9/11] definitely has a point of view, that's absolutely correct. But I'm not a member of the Democratic Party. If you know anything about me, anybody who's followed me, I'm the anti-Democrat. I have railed against the Democrats for a long time. They have been a weak-kneed, wimpy party that hasn't stood up to the Republicans. They let the working people down across this country. I rallied against Clinton when he was in office. I didn't vote for him in '96. I didn't vote for Gore in 2000. This is not a partisan issue with me ..."

Mae-Wan Ho: The Organic Revolution in Science
[...] The universe of organisms
"In the aftermath of quantum theory, English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead declared that physics has to be entirely rewritten in terms of a general theory of the organism. On account of quantum superposition, non-local entanglement, and the mutual entanglement of the observer and observed, Newtonian mechanics is indeed merely a flat projection of organic reality. Inert objects with simple, definite locations in space and time do not exist. Instead, all nature is alive with process and happenings. The totality of all that happens is a pattern of flows and influences, now diverging from one locus, now converging towards another in such a way that "each volume of space, or each lapse of time includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or of all lapses of time."
In Whitehead's organic universe, everything is an organism, from elementary particles such as photons and electrons to human beings and galaxies. An organism senses its environment as a whole because it is itself a coherent whole. More than that, it is a field of coherent activities, which draws on its experience of other organisms to make itself whole.
Think of each organism as an entity that is not really confined within the solid body we see, which just happens to be where its wave-function is most 'dense'. Instead, invisible quantum waves are spreading out from each one of us and permeating into all other organisms. At the same time, each of us has the waves of every other organism entangled within our own make-up. The realization and maintenance of self and other are completely intertwined."

ISSS (Toronto 2000) Roundtable: What are the principles of systems science?
Tom Mandel explores the Principle of Relationship:
[...]
As Ervin Laszlo writes in his latest book, "space does not separate us, it joins us."
[...]
Complexity in a system is a matter of viewpoint. Again a new perspective is at work, just as important is simplicity. Indeed, complexity is relative -- complementary to simplicity. Stewart and Cohen propose a development that goes like so -- from simplicity to complexity to simplexity to complicity (note the spelling). Picture the evolution of an embryo. The process of differentiation/integration develops from simple to complex and back to simple, but now part of something else acting complex.
Murray Gell-Mann, co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute has created a new science he calls Plectics, the study of the simple and complex. Systems do not necessarily unite. In most cases the interaction is integration. Compare epoxy with concrete. Epoxy unifies parts A and B. Concrete integrates parts A and B. [...]
But most interesting of all is the possibility that there is a general scheme which nature has been working with. If nature operates according to a single principle, then this principle would be interpenetrative. It is likely that nature "began" as a simple act, the simplest action, and has reiterated that same principle up till now. We would therefore be able to find it in all aspects of reality.
Bertalanffy thinks so, enough to quote Nicholas of Cusa citing the coincidentia oppositorum, but Bertalanffy wonders if this is an artifact of our "languageing" or [whether it] does in fact have a metaphysical reality. Salk thinks so, he says, "In order to understand anything we must have a sense of the fundamental connections which form the backdrop of all experience."

Edge: The Emergent Self
"Autopoiesis attempts to define the uniqueness of the emergence that produces life in its fundamental cellular form. It's specific to the cellular level. There's a circular or network process that engenders a paradox: a self-organizing network of biochemical reactions produces molecules, which do something specific and unique: they create a boundary, a membrane, which constrains the network that has produced the constituents of the membrane. This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what's unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. It doesn't require an external agent to notice it, or to say, "I'm here." It is, by itself, a self-distinction. It bootstraps itself out of a soup of chemistry and physics.
The idea arose, also at that time, that the local rules of autopoiesis might be simulated with cellular automata. At that time, few people had ever heard of cellular automata, an esoteric idea I picked up from John von Neumann -- one that would be made popular by the artificial-life people. Cellular automata are simple units that receive inputs from immediate neighbors and communicate their internal state to the same immediate neighbors.
In order to deal with the circular nature of the autopoiesis idea, I developed some bits of mathematics of self-reference, in an attempt to make sense out of the bootstrap -- the entity that produces its own boundary. The mathematics of self-reference involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such ideas part of complexity theory.
The more recent wave of work in complexity illuminates my bootstrap idea, in that it's a nice way of talking about this funny, screwy logic where the snake bites its own tail and you can't discern a beginning. Forget the idea of a black box with inputs and outputs. Think in terms of loops. My early work on self-reference and autopoiesis followed from ideas developed by cyberneticists such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener, who were the first scientists to think in those terms. But early cybernetics is essentially concerned with feedback circuits, and the early cyberneticists fell short of recognizing the importance of circularity in the constitution of an identity. Their loops are still inside an input/output box. In several contemporary complex systems, the inputs and outputs are completely dependent on interactions within the system, and their richness comes from their internal connectedness. Give up the boxes, and work with the entire loopiness of the thing. For instance, it's impossible to build a nervous system that has very clear inputs and outputs.
The next area of significant work involves applying the logic of the emergent properties of circular structures to look at the nervous system. The consequence is a radical change in the received view of the brain. The nervous system is not an information-processing system, because, by definition, information-processing systems need clear inputs. The nervous system has internal, or operational, closure. The key question is how, on the basis of its ongoing internal dynamics, the brain configures or constitutes relevance from otherwise nonmeaningful interactions. You can see why I'm not really interested in the classical artificial-intelligence and information-processing metaphors of brain studies. The brain can't be understood as a computer, in any interesting sense, and I part company with the people who think that the brain does rely on symbolic representation."
Francisco Varela

Soft Systems Methodology: Its Origins and Use in Librarianship
"Von Bertalanffy, Vickers, and Checkland all view human organizations as open, hierarchical systems, similar to those found in the life sciences. They assume the validity of the doctrine of emergence; that as systems grow more complex, properties emerge which cannot be explained in terms of simpler forms. To paraphrase Vickers, people in a crowd may behave like raindrops, but raindrops never behave like people. They are process oriented, in their approaches, and may involve several iterations of investigative processes."
Christopher Brown-Syed

Economist.com: Geography and the net (9 August 2001)
"Brewster Kahle unlocks the cellar door of a wooden building in San Francisco's Presidio Park. He steps inside, turns on the fluorescent lights to reveal a solid black wall of humming computers, and throws out his arm theatrically. "This", he says, "is the web." It is a seductive idea, but the web isn't really housed in a single San Francisco basement. Mr Kahle's racks of computers merely store archived copies of many of its pages which Alexa, his company, analyses to spot trends in usage. The real Internet, in contrast, is widely perceived as being everywhere, yet nowhere in particular. It is often likened to a cloud.
This perception has prompted much talk of the Internet's ability to cross borders, break down barriers and destroy distance. On the face of it, the Internet appears to make geography obsolete. But the reality is rather more complicated.
[...] To see just how little the Internet resembles a cloud, it is worth taking a look at where the Internet actually is. The answer, in short, is in cities. This is partly a historical accident, says Anthony Townsend, an urban planner at the Taub Urban Research Centre at New York University. He points out that the Internet's fibre-optic cables often piggyback on old infrastructure where a right-of-way has already been established: they are laid alongside railways and roads, or inside sewers. (Engineers installing fibre-optic cables in a New York building recently unearthed a set of pneumatic tubes, along which telegrams and mail used to be sent in the 19th century.) Building the Internet on top of existing infrastructure in this way merely reinforces real-world geography. Just as cities are often railway and shipping hubs, they are also the logical places to put network hubs and servers, the powerful computers that store and distribute data.
[...]
The signs are that the storage of information is going to become even more physically concentrated.
[...]
Mr Townsend notes that cities are, in a sense, vast information storage and retrieval systems, in which different districts and neighbourhoods are organised by activity or social group. A mobile Internet device, he suggests, will thus become a convenient way to probe local information and services."

MSNBC - Making the Ultimate Map by Steven Levy (Newsweek 7 June 2004)
When digital geography teams up with wireless technology and the Web, the world takes on some new dimensions ...
"Digital mapping is about to change our world by documenting the real world, then integrating that information into our computers, phones and lifestyles. Roll over, Mason and Dixon: spurred by space photography, global satellite positioning, mobile phones, search engines and new ways of marking information for the World Wide Web, the ancient art of cartography is now on the cutting edge."

deconstructor: The Ecology of Texts
"I've been thinking about books today, what they are and aren't, how my relationship to them is changing, etc. Two things sparked my imagination: a post by Jason Kottke contrasting the reading experiences of books vs. the web [Using the Memex (kottke.org)], and some interesting new tidbits I came across today about ... Jorge Luis Borges ...
In contrast with Jason's view of books as essentially discrete units ("self-contained"), here's a quotation from what is for me the definitive work on the nature of discourse in all its forms, especially books: The Archaeology of Knowledge, by Michel Foucault:
"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network..."
[...]
On a related note, difficult-to-classify artist (designer/typographer/musician/performer) Elliott Peter Earls of The Apollo Program has described what he does as "replacing narrative coherence with referential density." For me the phrase referential density holds an abundance of meaning, and goes a long way towards describing the things about life that are most interesting."

The Miseducation of a Designer - Ali Madad et al

"The printed sheet overcomes space and time. The printed sheet, the infinity of the book, has to be overcome." El Lissitzky - The Electro-Library (1923)

A brief history of feedback control - by F.L. Lewis
System Theory:
"It is within the study of systems that feedback control theory has its place in the organization of human knowledge. Thus, the concept of a system as a dynamical entity with definite "inputs" and "outputs" joining it to other systems and to the environment was a key prerequisite for the further development of automatic control theory. The history of system theory requires an entire study on its own, but a brief sketch follows.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of A. Smith in economics [The Wealth of Nations, 1776], the discoveries of C.R. Darwin [On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, 1859], and other developments in politics, sociology, and elsewhere were having a great impact on the human consciousness. The study of Natural Philosophy was an outgrowth of the work of the Greek and Arab philosophers, and contributions were made by Nicholas of Cusa (1463), Leibniz, and others. The developments of the nineteenth century, flavored by the Industrial Revolution and an expanding sense of awareness in global geopolitics and in astronomy had a profound influence on this Natural Philosophy, causing it to change its personality.
By the early 1900's A.N. Whitehead [1925], with his philosophy of "organic mechanism", L. von Bertalanffy [1938], with his hierarchical principles of organization, and others had begun to speak of a "general system theory". In this context, the evolution of control theory could proceed."

headmap: magical associations can inhibit if they lack flexibility
"If it is desirable that an environment evoke rich, vivid images, it is also desirable that these images be communicable and adaptable to changing practical needs, and that there can develop new groupings, new meanings, new poetry. The objective might be an imageable environment which is at the same time open-ended."
Kevin Lynch - The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960, page 139)

The Violets: "A Cosmological Reading of a Cosmology"
"Alfred North Whitehead has an established and central position in the history of American poetry, and the American poet who has made the most profound use of Whitehead's thought is Charles Olson." Robin Blaser

Robert Creeley - Preface to 'Charles Olson' by Tom Clark
"One time at Black Mountain he [Charles Olson] said to me, "I need a college to think with," meaning, I understood, that he wanted the multiplicity of instance, all particular and active, not the discrete or isolating possibilities of a chosen few. "Come into the world," he said, "Take a big bite." It was poetry that could move with the necessary syntax and speed, to 'be here' coincident with recognition, a locating act. Just as Pound's Cantos proved a first time record of human thought so sustained for almost half a century, Olson then moved the art to an exceptional capacity for thinking itself. Given Olson's 'methodology,' a favorite term, poetry had no longer a simply literary or cultural practice. It became, rather, a primary activity and resource for what can be called "historical geography," as Duncan McNaughton notes, adding then with significant emphasis taken from Olson's characteristic friend, the geographer, Carl Sauer, that "nothing whatever is outside the consideration of historical geography."
How needs one say it? A tracking of the earth in time? A place? Olson loved John Smith's curious phrase, "History is the memory of time." Equally he prized the sense of history which he got from Herodotus as against the abstracting Thucydides ..."

in situ: Lived Space in Architecture and Cinema by Juhani Pallasmaa
"Lived space resembles the structures of dream and the unconscious, organized independently of the boundaries of physical space and time. Lived space is always a combination of external space and inner mental space, actuality and mental projection. In experiencing lived space, memory and dream, fear and desire, value and meaning, fuse with the actual perception. Lived space is space that is inseparably integrated with the subject's concurrent life situation. We do not live separately in material and mental worlds; these experiential dimensions are fully intertwined. Neither do we live in an objective world. We live in mental worlds, in which the experienced, remembered and imagined, as well as the past, present and future are inseparably intermixed. 'Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?,' Italo Calvino asks, and continues: 'Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.'"

Jacques Lacan: "The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning."

Lewis Mumford: "In the city, time becomes visible."

"In the world of Charles Darwin, evolution was particulate; it contained and traced the history of fins, claws, wings, and teeth. The Darwinian circle was immersed in the study of the response of the individual organism to its environment, and the selective impact of the environment upon its creatures. By contrast, just as biological evolution had brought the magic of the endlessly new in organic form, so the evolving brain, through speech, had literally created a superorganic structure unimaginable until its emergence.
Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's contemporary, perceived that with the emergence of the human brain, man had, to a previously inconceivable degree, passed out of the domain of the particulate evolution of biological organs and had entered upon what we may call history."
Loren Eiseley - The Invisible Pyramid (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971, pages 18-19)

The Nature of Time by Humberto Maturana

"Evolution and design, the course of nature and man's intervention in it, are notions that seem to clash in the dualistic view taken by Western thought. Human action is usually set off against all other movement in the universe. Or if it is recognized as an expression of life at large, the latter is viewed by conventional Western science as a specific, rare, and, in the end, futile process which pushes uphill against the broad stream washing downhill toward increasing randomness and entropy. In such a dualistic view, human life finds its meaning in the margin left between the attitudes of Promethean rebellion and devout fatalism.
Recent breakthroughs in physical science, in particular in the field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, point the way toward overcoming the duality of older models.
[...] Physical systems, human systems, mind systems ... mutate toward new dynamic regimes whenever they become stifled by the debris of past entropy production."
Erich Jantsch - Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems (George Braziller, 1975, pages xvi-xvii)

Usability News - Excerpt: Toward a Critical Practice in Design
Malcolm McCullough: "Good design is felt to be communicative. Arguments for design as a liberal art assert that it is principally a communication discipline. Arguments for the importance of artifacts assert that much of this communication is tacit. Cultural expression uses genres and their formal types as a means, not an end. Content is participatory; it is something you do, or perceive, and not simply information you receive."

BookBlog: Topic is a pheromone [vide Ants and Jane Jacobs]
Adina Levin: "Topics serve as pheromones -- people are drawn together by the "smell" of a common interest. It takes an entirely different set of skills to shape those interests into shared meanings, to weave the individuals into a group, to build those shared interests into shared artifacts and actions."

Howard S. Becker - Studying the New Media
"[...] The "impact" approach improperly treats the public as an inert mass which doesn't do anything on its own, but rather just reacts to what is presented to it by powerful (usually commercial) organizations and the representatives of dominant social strata. In some ways, this is a very old theoretical position. The studies of the effects of movies treated moviegoers as passive receptacles who, bombarded by the movies' bad messages, would use them as models for their own lives and thus come to a bad end. The position got a theoretical boost from the Frankfurt School, which developed the image of the mass society, whose puppet members reacted to what the rulers of the society gave them, material which supported and justified the ruling social and political regime.
The image of an inert, passive mass audience is a gross empirical error."

Susan Stepney reviews Stewart & Cohen's 'Figments of Reality'
"This extremely well-written book lucidly weaves together themes of self-organising complexity, co-evolution, cultural capital, and an explanation style that takes into account external 'complicity' as well as internal 'reductionist' ideas. It develops some of the authors' earlier ideas, in particular in The Collapse of Chaos. Stewart and Cohen take the view that in order to explain (human) intelligence, we need to understand its co-evolution with culture.
Evolution is explained using the mathematical idea of phase spaces, here the 'phase spaces of the possible'. Evolution progresses in directions constrained by its phase space, much as the behaviour of a dynamical system evolves in accordance with its phase space. The crucial ingredient, though, is that the phase space is determined by the existing system, and as the system evolves, so does the phase space. So the rules of the game change as evolution progresses. Some evolutionary changes make small 'private' changes to the phase space; the more interesting ones make qualitative, 'public' changes, opening up whole new regions of possibility not available before. For example, early bacteria produced a toxic by-product, oxygen; the new oxygen-rich atmosphere allowed whole new kinds of organisms to evolve. But the most interesting change in the rules of the game from our human perspective was the ability to pass on 'cultural capital' to the next generation, so that each new generation does not have to start from scratch: yolk in eggs, a nest as a protected environment, learning survival tricks from the troupe, and, eventually, being able to tap in to all of the 'extelligence' of human culture."

Stuart A. Umpleby - The Cybernetics of Conceptual Systems - July 8, 1994
"The cybernetics of conceptual systems would be compatible with a "second order game theory," which would go beyond developing strategies to win a struggle with groups composed as they are and instead seek to persuade people to change their conceptualization of the game itself. The meta-game is to change conceptions of the game. The assumption would be that the purposes, motivations, and conceptions of both "allies" and "opponents" can change."

Wired 4.07: From Bauhaus to Koolhaas - July 1996
Heron: Where do you see the future of architecture going?
Koolhaas: With globalization, we all have more or less the same future, but Asia and Africa feel much more new. I've been doing research in China recently, investigating cities that emerge suddenly, in eight years or so, seemingly out of nothing. These places are much more vigorous and representative of the future. There, building something new is a daily pleasure and a daily occurence.
Heron: You're doing a big project in China now, aren't you?
Koolhaas: Yes. Its working title is City of Exacerbated Differences. It is in the Pearl River Delta. It's not a single city but a region inhabited by a cluster of very diverse cities such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Guangdong, Zhuhai, and Macau. Together, they may represent a new model of the megalopolis in the sense that their coexistence, their functioning, their legitimacy is determined by their extreme mutual difference.

If in a continuous city a traveler
Rod McLaren: Quotes from and a couple of notes on Calvino's 'Hermit in Paris', in the autobiographic collection of the same name:
"Occasionally I decide spontaneously to set totally imaginary stories in New York, a city in which I have lived only a few months in my life: who knows why, perhaps because New York is the simplest city, at least for me, the epitome of a city, a kind of prototype of a city, as far as its topography, its visual appearance, its society is concerned. Whereas Paris has huge depth, so much behind it, so many meanings."
Paris (and perhaps other old-European cities?) as a sedimentary accretion of so many literary references that it's hard to write anything new without feeling the heavy burden of (literary) history. On the other hand, New York as a template, a machine for generating city-stories (remember that Umberto Eco picked the NYC phone directory as his book on Desert Island Discs for exactly this reason: he could use the list of names as a computer for generating all possible stories)....

Lacan's Baltimore Lecture
"[...] Many people talk nowadays about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand "from the place of the Other."
[...] If thought is a natural process, then the unconscious is without difficulty. But the unconscious has nothing to do with instinct or primitive knowledge or preparation of thought in some underground. It is a thinking with words, with thoughts that escape your vigilance, your state of watchfulness. The question of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your watchfulness."

Invisible Cities: Final Exchange of Marco and the Khan - Italo Calvino
The Great Khan's atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.
Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us."
"For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said."
Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.
He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."
And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Emergent Ontologies: A lecture by Gregory Ulmer (August 2000)
I'm going to begin again with Walter Benjamin, from 'One-Way Street'.
"Fools lament the decay of criticism, for its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing, it was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted, and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. The innocent eye has become a lie, perhaps the naive mode of expression, sheer incompetence. Today, the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes, with things such as a car growing to gigantic proportion, careening at us out of a film screen. Just as the film does not present furniture and facades in completed forms for critical inspection, its insistent jerky nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertisement hurtles things at us with the tempo of a good film. What in the end makes advertisement so superior to criticism is not what the moving red neon sign says, but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt."
So we need to work with the fiery pool.

John Banville - Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday
"[...] Joyce liked to boast that "Ulysses" was so detailed a portrait of Dublin that if the city were to be destroyed -- an eventuality that in his darker moments of Hibernophobia he would probably have welcomed -- it could be rebuilt brick by brick, using his book as a model. In his essay "The Precession of Simulacra," the French savant Jean Baudrillard recalls the story by Jorge Luis Borges in which the Empire's cartographers spend years drawing up a map so detailed that when it is done it covers exactly the territory of the Empire, and imperial decline is plotted by the fraying of the map until only a few shreds remain. If we were to revive the fable today in our media-dominated world, Baudrillard suggests, the map would have engendered the Empire [...]
Dublin, even well into the 1960's, when I came to live there, was in many respects still the city that Joyce had known and that he celebrated with maniacal exactitude in "Ulysses." All now is changed. True, most of the streets and many of the buildings through which Joyce's characters circulate on their way to eternity are still in existence, but the heart of the place is a transplant from Silicon Valley by way of the poppy fields of Afghanistan: Ireland is the world's largest exporter of computer software, and its capital city is a serious importer of the hardest of hard drugs. Where now is the "real" Dublin?"

Howard S. Becker - Calvino as Urbanologist
"The city of Fedora, for instance, preserves its multiple possible futures as tiny crystal globes in a museum. This reminds us that every city will do something with its possible futures."

BBC News Magazine: What the Victorians can teach us about city life
"[...] In his new book Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, historian Tristram Hunt ... celebrates the architects, sewer-constructors and local politicians who transformed Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and Glasgow into "Venices of the north" in the 19th Century. Indeed, he thinks these Victorian characters can teach us a thing or two about civic pride, city life and intellectual creativity.
[...] Hunt doesn't only pay tribute to the architects who left permanent marks on our cityscapes, but also to the unsung developers of the Victorian age. He hails engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who developed a scheme to build an underground network linking together London's 1,000 miles of street-level sewers.
Bazalgette's sewage system took 12 years to complete and it totally transformed London, doing a great deal to combat the spread of disease and allowing Londoners to breathe easier. In 1861, The Observer described it as "the most extensive and wonderful work of modern times".
As Hunt says, developing and building sewers may not be as glamorous as erecting a Gothic-style cathedral, but cities cannot function well without an efficient waste disposal system."
Brendan O'Neill

Big Brother's global controversy - BBC News 18 June 2004
Caroline Westbrook reports: The French equivalent of Big Brother, known as Loft Story, landed in hot water after protestors against the show besieged the location three times in one week and tried to invade the studio. Police had to use tear gas to repel the activists, who complained that "trash TV turns people into idiots".

Book Review: E-topia
"Since new technological systems are complex social constructions, we must understand our emerging options, choose our ends carefully, and build well. Our job is to design the future we want, not to predict its predetermined path."
William J. Mitchell

[City of Bits] 3.7. Brains / Artificial Intelligence
"Long ago the urban theorist Kevin Lynch pointed out the fundamental relationship between human cognition and urban form -- the importance of the learned mental maps that knowledgeable locals carry about inside their skulls. These mental maps, together with the landmarks and edges that provide orientation within the urban fabric, are what make a city seem familiar and comprehensible. But for us artificially intelligent cyborgs, the ability to navigate through the streets and gain access to a city's resources isn't all in our heads. Increasingly, we rely on our electronic extensions -- smart vehicles and hand-held devices, together with the invisible landmarks provided by electronic positioning systems -- to orient us in the urban fabric, to capture and process knowledge of our surroundings, and to get us to where we want to go."

How to recapture cities' civic pride [via cityofsound]
"[Dr Tristram Hunt] ... said the early 19th century industrial revolution sucked millions from the countryside into cities, shattered the human bonds of rural life and caused intolerable squalor. Unpaved streets ran with sewage, rickets and deficiency diseases were rife. The life chances of a slum dweller in early Victorian Glasgow or Liverpool were the lowest since the Black Death. But the cities also forced through religious tolerance, a wider franchise, and repeal of the corn laws. Gradually their nonconformist business elites improved public health and evolved traditions of voluntary activity, local pride and artistic patronage.
The amazing Victorian Gothic of Manchester town hall and magnificent buildings elsewhere celebrated a modern renaissance city state. Later, cities also bred the spirit of municipal socialism, which ran gas, water and electricity more cheaply than private companies ..."
John Ezard

Largest Prime Number discovered - BBC News 7 June 2004
Dr David Whitehouse: "A scientist has used his computer to find the largest prime number found so far -- written out, it would stretch for 25 kilometres. Primes are important to encryption and could lead to uncrackable codes. The new figure, identified by Josh Findley, contains 7,235,733 digits, and would take someone the best part of six weeks to write out longhand. Mr Findley was taking part in a mass computer project known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps).
Mr Findley used his home computer and free software as part of an international grid of 240,000 networked computers."

Man who cracked computer engima - The Scotsman 8 June 2004
Andrew Hodges: "Turing was fascinated by the concept of creating a mathematical machine to represent thought processes, and it was the "Turing Machine" which became the foundation of the modern theories of computer science. He also envisaged a "Universal Turing Machine" - one machine for all possible tasks - which embodied the essential principle of the computer.
Turing's originality lay in seeing the relevance of mathematical logic to a problem originally seen as one of physics. He made a bridge between thought and action, which crossed conventional boundaries."

Primes, the zeta function and 'Li'
A webpage by Matthew Watkins dedicated to the 'Li-ness' of the distribution of primes, and of the (intimately related) Riemann zeta function.

Greatest maths problem 'solved' - BBC News 10 June 2004
Dr David Whitehouse: "A mathematician at Purdue University in the US claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis - called the greatest unsolved problem in maths. The hypothesis concerns prime numbers and has stumped the world's mathematicians for more than 150 years.
Now, Professor Louis De Branges de Bourcia has posted a 23-page paper on the internet detailing his attempt at a proof."

Groups, Graphs, and Erdös Numbers - Ivars Peterson
"In general, mathematical research is a remarkably social process. Colleagues meet constantly to compare notes, discuss problems, look for hints, and work on proofs together. The abundance of conferences, symposia, workshops, colloquia, seminars, and other gatherings devoted to mathematical topics attests to a strong desire for interaction. Electronic communication speeds and facilitates such interaction worldwide.
Perhaps more than any other mathematician in modern times, Paul Erdös (1913–1996) epitomized the strength and breadth of mathematical collaboration. Because he had no permanent home and no particular job, Erdös simply traveled from one mathematical center to another, sometimes seeking new collaborators and sometimes continuing a work in progress. His well-being was the collective responsibility of mathematicians throughout the world.
At the time of his death of a heart attack in 1996, Erdös had more than 1,500 published papers to his credit. His interests were mainly in number theory and combinatorics, though they ranged into topology and other areas of mathematics. He was fascinated by relationships among numbers, and numbers served as raw materials for many of his conjectures, questions, and proofs.
What's astonishing, however, is the extent to which Erdös worked with other mathematicians to produce joint papers. Collaboration on such a scale had never been seen before in mathematics, and it has now entered the folklore of the mathematical community.
Of course, there's a characteristically mathematical way to describe this webbiness -- a quantity called the Erdös number."

Paulos reviews Paul Erdös, John Nash books
"Schechter and Hoffman ably describe a number of Erdös' theorems and ideas but, given his wandering lifestyle and his eclectic mathematical interests, the notions of random graphs and phase transitions might be deemed typical. Imagine a country with thousands of isolated cities and a crazy highway commissioner who picks a pair of cities at random and connects them with a road and then picks another pair at random and builds another road. He repeats this procedure and after a while small clusters of cities form that are interconnected. The size of these clusters grows slowly until the number of roads approaches half the number of cities. Suddenly, with the addition of a few more roads, the isolated clusters become interconnected and coalesce to form an immense cluster that includes almost all the cities. The abrupt way this interconnectedness comes about is an instance of a phase transition. It also hints at another of Erdös' preoccupations, Ramsey theory, one of whose primary lessons is that order of some sort is almost inevitable in large structures."

Ramsey theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ramsey theory, named for Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of mathematics that studies the conditions under which order must appear. Problems in Ramsey theory typically ask a question of the form: how many elements of some structure must there be to guarantee that a particular property will hold? An oft-quoted slogan for the subject is "complete disorder is impossible".

Ramsey Theory -- from MathWorld
"The mathematical study of combinatorial objects in which a certain degree of order must occur as the scale of the object becomes large. Ramsey theory is named after Frank Plumpton Ramsey, who did seminal work in this area before his untimely death at age 26 in 1930. The theory was subsequently developed extensively by Erdös." Eric W. Weisstein

Ramsey Theory
"The idea underlying Ramsey theory is that complete disorder is an impossibility. The appearance of disorder is really a matter of scale. In general, Ramsey theorists seek the smallest "universe" that's guaranteed to contain a certain object." Paul Hoffman

Modelling Selforganization and Innovation Processes in Networks
Abstract: "In this paper we develop a theory to describe innovation processes in a network of interacting units. We introduce a stochastic picture that allows for the clarification of the role of fluctuations for the survival of innovations in such a non-linear system. We refer to the theory of complex networks and introduce the notion of sensitive networks. Sensitive networks are networks in which the introduction or the removal of a node/vertex dramatically changes the dynamic structure of the system. As an application we consider interaction networks of firms and technologies and describe technological innovation as a specific dynamic process. Random graph theory, percolation, master equation formalism and the theory of birth and death processes are the mathematical instruments used in this paper."
Ingrid Hartmann-Sonntag, Andrea Scharnhorst, & Werner Ebeling

Graph theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Graph theory is the branch of mathematics that examines the properties of graphs.
Informally, a graph is a set of objects called vertices (or nodes) connected by links called edges (or arcs). Typically, a graph is depicted as a set of dots (i.e., vertices) connected by lines (i.e., edges).
[...] Structures that can be represented as graphs are ubiquitous, and many problems of practical interest can be formulated as questions about certain graphs. Various networks are conveniently described by means of graphs. For example, the link structure of Wikipedia could be represented by a directed graph: the vertices are the articles in Wikipedia and there's a directed edge from article A to article B if and only if A contains a link to B. Directed graphs are also used to represent finite state machines. The development of algorithms to handle graphs is therefore of major interest in computer science. [...]

"Determinism, like the Queen of England, reigns - but does not govern." Michael Berry

Study of proteins offers insights into organization of biological networks
Research into the many-sided interactions of proteins in yeast cells is revealing that such networks may have something in common with other kinds of systems, from the World Wide Web to the country's electric-power grid.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute investigators report that "hub" proteins – highly connected proteins that bind to many other proteins in the cell – can be divided into two general groups: "party" hubs, which interact with most of their partner proteins all at once, and "date" hubs, which bind to their partners at different times or locations.
[...] Analyzing data generated by gene-chip technology, investigators found that some hubs are active at the same time as their partners – like bulbs in a flashing sign – while others are active at different times – like bulbs blinking on a Christmas tree. They dubbed the first group "party" hubs and the second group "date" hubs.
When party hubs were taken out of the mix, there was very little effect on the number of protein connections within the cell. When date hubs were removed, however, connection length rose sharply, meaning it takes more "hops" to move between nodes.

Connections: Decyphering the Grammar of Mind, Music and Math
"Gradually over repeated hearings, without the use of a dictionary or any reference to the world outside, music shows how it is to be understood. The listener begins to hear patterns, repeated motifs and changes in meter and realizes that something is happening, that sounds have punctuation, that phrases are being manipulated, transformed and recombined.
Gradually, the listener gains a form of knowledge without ever referring to anything outside the music. Sounds create their own context. They begin to make sense. Similar processes with varying richness and power take place in all forms of music, which is why it is much easier to understand another culture's music than another culture's language.
Nothing else is quite like this self-contained, self-teaching world. Music may be the ultimate self-revealing code; it can be comprehended in a locked room. This is one reason that connections with mathematics are so profound. Though math requires reference to the world, it too proceeds by noting similarities and variations in patterns, in contemplating the structure of abstract systems, in finding the ways its elements are manipulated, connected and transformed. Mathematics is done the way music is understood."
Edward Rothstein

New Scientist: AI and A-Life: There's an ant in my phone...
Would you let ants run the digital superhighways of the future? Even if they were smart little programs and getting smarter all the time? Mark Ward wonders ...

Kevin Kelly - The algorithmic genius of ants
"A group of researchers in Milan, Italy, have come up with a few new varieties of evolution and learning. Their methods fill a few holes in Ackley's proposed "space of all possible types of computation." Because they were inspired by the collective behavior of ant colonies, the Milan group call their searches "Ant Algorithms."
Ants have distributed parallel systems all figured out. Ants are the history of social organization and the future of computers. A colony may contain a million workers and hundreds of queens, and the entire mass of them can build a city while only dimly aware of one another. Ants can swarm over a field and find the choicest food in it as if the swarm were a large compound eye. They weave vegetation together in coordinated parallel rows, and collectively keep their nest at a steady temperature, although not a single ant has ever lived who knows how to regulate temperature."

Collective Intelligence in Social Insects
Introduction & Self-Organisation
"It wasn't so long ago that the waggledance of the honey bee, the nest-building of the social wasp, and the construction of the termite mound were considered a somewhat magical aspect of nature. How could these seemingly uncommunicative, certainly very simple creatures be responsible for such epic feats of organisation and creativity? Over the last fifty years biologists have unravelled many of the mysteries surrounding social insects, and the last decade has seen an explosion of research in fields variously referred to as Collective Intelligence, Swarm Intelligence and emergent behaviour. Even more recently the swarm paradigm has been applied to a broader range of studies, opening up new ways of thinking about theoretical biology, economics and philosophy. It turns out that not only might we, as multi-cellular organisms, be composed of swarms, but so could our societies, economies and perhaps even our minds. In this essay I will outline three of the most promising areas of social insect-inspired AI: ant-based search algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimisation and swarm robotics, and hopefully provide an insight into how these studies have grown out of a small niche of A-life research into an all-encompassing new way of thinking."
David Gordon

Google + Blogger = Stigmergy
Matt Webb: Imagine, searching at Google, and then:
* this trail is highly followed
* do you only want to see what people suggest, or where people went?
* here's a worn track in the interweb. Follow the Google Pixie!
* this trail is uncommon, but made by someone we see (by your weblog) that you value
Or, more succinctly, stigmergy.

"It is possible to arrange a series of nodes to form a related structure. They can be linked together by close juxtaposition or by allowing them to be intervisible [...]
They may be put in some common relation to a path or edge, joined by a short linking element, or related by an echo of some characteristic from one to the other."
Kevin Lynch - The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960, page 103)

Stigmergy
"We have already seen the usefulness of what Grassé calls "stigmergy" for the solution of a general type of complex problem by a not-so-complex organism, the Argentine ant. But these ants don't live to solve problems (unlike the numerous robotic and computational ants designed in their image), they solve problems to live -- so what happens after the problem, when the food source is depleted? The articulated path is no longer a solution, but an initial condition; the autocatalytic mechanism no longer a bridge, but a prison. Once again, the answer lies between the ants, in the pheromone-ground. When the food disappears, the ants will not emit pheromone and, over time, the pheromone already on the ground will evaporate, leaving them free to explore.
Stigmergy, in this instance, operates as a kind of distributed memory within the landscape, capable of both remembering and forgetting. It suggests that we should not only speak of the ants in isolation (as individuals) or the colony in abstract (as a group of individuals), but instead, of the ant-pheromone pheromone-ground, as a peculiar kind of organism."

Definitions of stigmergy
Istvan Karsai: "Grassé coined the term stigmergy (previous work directs and triggers new building actions) to describe a mechanism of decentralized pathways of information flow in social insects. In general, all kinds of multi-agent groups require coordination for their effort and it seems that stigmergy is a very powerful means to coordinate activity over great spans of time and space in a wide variety of systems. In a situation in which many individuals contribute to a collective effort, such as building a nest, stimuli provided by the emerging structure itself can provide a rich source of information ..."

The Ants are Blogging
Ross Mayfield: "Perhaps each blog post is a possible path (a meme)."

posted by Andrew 6/19/2004 06:14:00 PM


{Thursday, June 03, 2004}

 
Emergent Internet Operating System

Subject: Emergent Internet Operating System
Clay Shirky: "We never got too far discussing the idea of an emergent Internet Operating System, but there are kinds of thoughts you can have with that frame of reference you can't have in a reductionist framework of assuming that operating systems are merely what runs individual machines. (You could also think of this as an "internet platform", following Winer's "The internet is a platform without a platform vendor" idea.)
Someone said, roughly, "applications don't run across groups of computers, they run on individual computers, while communicating with one another using protocols." Now this is perfectly true, but at a cost of obscuring some important effects. The phrases "Neurons do the chemical work of the brain within their individual cell walls, and communicate with one another using ions" or "Ants do the work of the colony, while communicating with one another using pheromones" are also true in exactly the same way, but whatever the neurons are doing, they are not thinking, and whatever life cycle the ants have, it is not the life cycle of a colony.
The world is rife with membrane+communication channel systems, including games (bridge players communicating with cards) to markets (businesses have all sorts of membranes, from confidentiality agreements to NAT, but use much narrower channels -- vendor contracts, firewalls, NASDAQ -- to interface with the outside world) and so on.
If you want to think systemically, about the mind as opposed to neurons, say, or about the behavior of colonies as opposed to the behavior of ants, you have to take both the membrane-enclosed entities (the classic operating system) and the communication channels (the protocols) as a whole. At that point, some of the behaviors of the system look like the behavior of the individual elements (thoughts, like stimuli, come and go; colonies, like ants, are born, age, and die), but only if you are willing to accept a certain amount of metaphorical translation."

On the Trail of the Memex by Dennis G. Jerz
"Hypertext as mediated by the Web browser has not proved to embody the qualities of the ideal post-structural text longed for by literary theorists such as George Landow; neither has the World Wide Web fulfilled the document-association function of the memex, the hypothetical research tool Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 essay, As We May Think. Bush's memex was not merely a form of photo-mechanical hypertext, but also a means for the full-scale transfer of complex collaborative thought processes, as encoded by individual researchers via their own personal document association schemas. While weblogs, the most influential textual genre truly native to the World Wide Web, do facilitate the exchange of information across the Internet, that information must be carefully filtered in order to be useful. Google's February 2003 purchase of the popular weblogging platform Blogger signals a shift towards content production that may create a conflict of interest; nevertheless, Google's proven ability to mine the data encoded in annotated trails of linked documents may create the synergy necessary to fulfill Vannevar Bush's vision."

Memex construction nearing completion? - McGee's Musings
Jim McGee: "What Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, weblogs, and now Google are all demonstrating is that the boundaries between organizations and disciplines are arbitrary. It's the connections and the trails that matter. It's just taken a lot longer to build it than we would have liked. With a bit of luck we'll find out that we've managed to build it in time."

O'Reilly Network: The Emergent Internet Operating System - 19 August 2001

"In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer

Netvironments : GooBlogger Condensate

"It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web -- build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.
Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."
Larry Page

Don Park's Daily Habit - 23 February 2003
"Bloggers are ants. Blogspace is a massive ant colony. Like ants, bloggers roam the Web in search of information (food) and lay articles and links (pheromone trails) for other bloggers (ants) to follow."

OpenP2P.com: Swarm Intelligence: An Interview with Eric Bonabeau
EB: Human beings suffer from a "centralized mindset"; they would like to assign the coordination of activities to a central command. But the way social insects form highways and other amazing structures such as bridges, chains, nests (by the way, African fungus-growing termites have invented air conditioning) and can perform complex tasks (nest building, defense, cleaning, brood care, foraging, etc) is very different: they self-organize through direct and indirect interactions.
In social insects, errors and randomness are not "bugs"; rather, they contribute very strongly to their success by enabling them to discover and explore in addition to exploiting. Self-organization feeds itself upon errors to provide the colony with flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment) and robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).
With self-organization, the behavior of the group is often unpredictable, emerging from the collective interactions of all of the individuals. The simple rules by which individuals interact can generate complex group behavior. Indeed, the emergence of such collective behavior out of simple rules is one the great lessons of swarm intelligence."

O'Reilly Network: Inventing the Future - 9 April 2002 [via cityofsound]
"[...] While entrepreneurs mired in the previous generation of computing built massive server farms to host downloadable music archives, Shawn Fanning, a young student who'd grown up in the age of the Internet, asked himself, "Why do I need to have all the songs in one place? My friends already have them. All I need is a way for them to point to each other." When everyone is connected, all that needs to be centralized is the knowledge of who has what."
Tim O'Reilly

Tech Talk: Constructing the Memex: Emergic.org [April-May-June 2003]
In a vast-active-lucid-intelligent-systematic-essay Rajesh Jain explores the question: "Do we wait for Google to construct the Memex? Or, can we – lots of us – build it in an emergent fashion?"

Salon.com Technology: Steven Johnson on the Blogbrain - 10 May 2002
"The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed "vanity sites," the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they're not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're challengers to the throne of Google."

Steven Johnson: Google's Memory Upgrade - Slate Magazine - 6 March 2003
"Bush imagined the Memex as a machine of connected documents that from one angle looks a great deal like the modern, Web-enabled computer. But in one crucial respect, Bush's vision differed from today's Web: He placed great importance on the trails created as the user moved through information space, assuming that a record of those trails would be of great use in amplifying the signal of human memory. In many ways, our networked computers have wildly exceeded Bush's vision, but our trail-recording tools are still woefully undernourished."

The Unconscious is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the Project of the Human Sciences - by Peter Caws

"It is beginning to look, given the evidence from deep ocean vents, as if the old cybernetic claim -- that combinatorial possibilities in energy-rich environments lead necessarily to the emergence of ordered structures -- was right. If these structures include transcription mechanisms they may be self-reproducing, and there you are: life.
Where it goes from there will involve some variant on a basic natural-selection scenario -- proliferation, competition, elimination -- and on what Buckminster Fuller used to call the "critical path," the series of chances that mean the difference between survival and extinction as much for organisms as for ideas."
Peter Caws speaking at the first public symposium on ALH 84001
[As cited by Michael Ray Taylor in Dark Life: Martian Nanobacteria, Rock-Eating Cave Bugs, and Other Extreme Organisms of Inner Earth and Outer Space (Bloomsbury, 2000, page 132)]

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (Scribner, September 2001)
Steven Johnson: "Histories of intellectual development - the origin and spread of new ideas - usually come in two types of packages: either the "great man" theory, where a single genius has a eureka moment in the lab or the library and the world is immediately transformed; or the "paradigm shift" theory, where the occupants of the halls of science awake to find an entirely new floor has been built on top of them, and within a few years, everyone is working out of the new offices. Both theories are inadequate: the great-man story ignores the distributed, communal effort that goes into any important intellectual advance, and the paradigm-shift model has a hard time explaining how the new floor actually gets built. I suspect Mitch Resnick's slime mold simulation may be a better metaphor for the way idea revolutions come about: think of those slime mold cells as investigators in the field; think of those trails as a kind of institutional memory. With only a few minds exploring a given problem, the cells remain disconnected, meandering across the screen as isolated units, each pursuing its own desultory course. With pheromone trails that evaporate quickly, the cells leave no trace of their progress - like an essay published in a journal that sits unread on a library shelf for years. But plug more minds into the system and give their work a longer, more durable trail - by publishing their ideas in best-selling books, or founding research centers to explore those ideas - and before long the system arrives at a phase transition: isolated hunches and private obsessions coalesce into a new way of looking at the world, shared by thousands of individuals."

Wladawksy-Berger Unplugged: 'The Net will transform everything' - 15 May 2002
Wladawksy-Berger: "Grid computing is extending the Internet to be able to become a computing platform. Let me explain. The Internet is a great network with TCP/IP supporting all kinds of network accesses. It's a great communications mechanism with e-mail and instant messaging, and of course with the Worldwide Web, it's a fantastic repository of content.
We now want to take it to the next level in which applications can be distributed all over the Internet, and they can access all the resources that they need, and of course are allowed to access with the proper security even though they are distributed over the Internet. To have such distributed applications you need a set of protocols that everybody can use. That's what the grid community has been building, and that is what the grid computing is about."

Neo-Confucian Critique of Western Values
Don Baker writes: "The universe Thomas Aquinas conceived in Latin consisted of autonomous islands of being, enriched by attributes of appearance and function affixed to those separate substances. In contrast, a network of interrelated events constituted the Neo-Confucian cosmos. As in the modern process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), an object in Neo-Confucianism was interpreted as a focus for activity rather than as a nodule of being. Neo-Confucians identified an entity by those patterns which determined that entity's relationships with other entities. In other words, a Neo-Confucian entity was defined by how it fit into and interacted with its environment. In contrast, Thomistic philosophers formulated definitions based on those static characteristics which distinguished entities from the other entities around them. Thomistics preferred to define an entity by separating it from its environment. This Thomistic conception of substance as independent existence was almost incomprehensible to eighteenth-century Koreans who saw the entire universe as one vast interrelated organism."

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-François Lyotard (1979)
"A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at "nodal points" of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages ..."

Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Korea and the Political Promise of the Net - 19 April 2004
"In December 2002, the Uri party used the Net to go around Korea's traditional political structures and elect Roh Moo-hyun President. Korea's national politics have traditionally been regionally based. However, using the Net, the Uri put together a new political coalition based not on geography, but age, bringing together those under 30. Paradoxically, the Uri also used the Net to involve citizens at local face to face meetings.
The Net was used to begin to break the overwhelming political influence of Korea's giant corporate conglomerates, the chaebols, who funded (both legally and illegitimately) much of Korea's politics. The Uri use the Net to help fund their campaign with tens of thousands of small contributions.
Just as importantly, the Net allowed the Uri to go around Korea's established status quo political media. One Net news organization, Ohmynews, is helping redefine journalism. Founded only four years ago, the online news service can gets as many as 20 million hits a day in a country of 40 million. While Ohmynews has 40 full time employees, it uses over 23,000 "citizen reporters," and editorial policy is voted on by their readership."

Alan Dix: The Ecology of Information

"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place
Ed Casey: "The difference between space and place is one of the best-kept secrets in philosophy. Above all in modern philosophy, where the very distinction came to be questioned and then discredited: one way of understanding modernity, as I shall suggest later on, is by its very neglect of this distinction. The ancient world, however, knew otherwise -- knew better. Indeed, the pre-modern and the post-modern join forces in a common recognition of the importance of place as something essentially other than space, something one cannot afford to ignore in its very difference from space.
[...]
It is my view that, contra Koyré, the advent of the infinity of space was to begin with (and perhaps most enduringly) the creation of the late Neoplatonic period of Hellenistic philosophy. The idea of such infinity was available ever since Philoponus espoused a truly "cosmical extension." In this light, later and more celebrated thinkers such as Giordano Bruno and Nicolas of Cusa only pursued the idea to its bitter end -- for instance, in the extreme notion that there is not just infinite space but an infinite number of worlds in such space. This latter was an idea for which Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, suggesting that the seventeenth century opened with the effort to suppress infinite space. Leading thinkers of this century continued to dispute such space, especially insofar as it entailed the void, concerning which Locke and Newton were supportive, and Descartes and Leibniz virulently opposed: their very variance on this issue exhibiting the uncertain destiny of infinite space during the century.
[...]
If space and place are both utterly relational, a sheer order of co-existing points, then they will not retain any of the inherent properties ascribed to place by ancient and early modern philosophers: properties of encompassing, holding, sustaining, gathering, situating ("situation" in Leibniz does not situate at all; it merely positions in a nexus of relations). So as not to incriminate Leibniz unduly, let me simply say that he brought to its logical term the full implications of the stranglehold of simple location in which so many of his immediate predecessors were also ensnared. As Whitehead himself points out, the direct result of simple location in philosophy as in physics is the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. For our purposes, this means a loss of the concrete particularity of place as well as the abstract absoluteness of infinite space -- and the dissolution of both in the emptiness of sites."

French Theory and Criticism: 1968 and After
"Serres argues that communication is determined by chance and is not, strictly speaking, a reversible process. Meaning is determined by the unpredictable interruption of non-meaning, parasitic intrusions that ultimately become nodal points for new signifying systems." Herman Rapaport

Catastrophe, Chaos, Complexity, Theory
"Must we choose between Wilden's scientific modernism and Deleuze and Guattari's poetic postmodernism? We think not. Depending upon the task at hand, one might like to make use of either of these tools, or perhaps even both of them at the same time, leaving the contradictions in place and not attempting any sort of 'synthesis' that would 'reconcile' them and drain each of its particularity. We see complexity theory, then, as being both modern and postmodern, and would like to see this contradictory position not only maintained, but pushed to its limits, where it might slide over into a chaotic regime and give rise to forms not yet imagined."
Richard Day & Guy Letts

American Scientist Online - Putting Genes in Perspective
David W. Pfennig: "An unfortunate outgrowth of the modern revolution in genetics is the widespread belief that the genes of an individual organism determine its appearance, physiology and behavior. The genome does not, of course, completely determine how an organism is constructed: The environment is an essential partner. Nowhere is this point more clearly illustrated than by the principle of developmental plasticity -- the tendency for genetically identical organisms to differ in response to various environmental stimuli, or for individuals to vary over time as the result of changing conditions in their surroundings. For example, in many reptile species, incubation temperature determines gender. Likewise, certain insects develop wings only if they live in crowded conditions (and hence are likely to run out of adequate food). Indeed, environmentally mediated developmental flexibility is so ubiquitous that it can be regarded as a universal property of living things."

Rethinking Genetic Determinism by Paul H. Silverman
With only 30,000 genes, what is it that makes humans human?
"[...] Mary Jane West-Eberhard explored the potential of combinatorial evolution in a recent, stunningly comprehensive book, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. She summarizes how a combination of exon-shuffling and protein-domain rearrangements can result in the evolution and selection of new patterns without the need for de novo components such as mutations. And she notes that Keese and Gibbs have postulated that a mere 7,000 exons can account for all known proteins."

Mae-Wan Ho: Thinking again of life's miracle
"The organic whole is an ideal democracy of distributed control. It does not work in terms of a hierarchy of controller versus the controlled, but by intercommunication."

The emergence of form by replication - Velarde, Nekorkin, Kazantsev, and Ross
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA - Vol. 94, pp. 5024-5027, May 1997
[Abstract] "It is shown with a simple mathematical model that if a system exhibits a given form (a spatial structure) and is put in contact with another system of the same type but in a state of spatial disorder, then under certain conditions their mutual interaction as they evolve in time allows replication of form in the disordered system with a controllable degree of faithfulness."

Source Code
"I did avoid the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision." William Gibson

Macroscopic and Microscopic Processes of Evolution of Evolutionary Processes

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson

GooOS, the Google Operating System : kottke.org : 6 April 2004
"[Google] have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.
Tim O'Reilly has talked about various bits from the Web morphing into "the emergent Internet operating system"; the small pieces loosely joining, if you will. Google seems to be heading there already, all by themselves. By building and then joining a bunch of the small pieces by themselves, Google can take full advantage of the economies of scale and avoid the difficulties of interop.
[...] Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don't need big, bloated OSes...they'll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS."
Jason Kottke

Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google's Power
"Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?"
Rich Skrenta

Richard Hackathorn: The Link is the Thing - Part 1
"In many physical and social systems, the important characteristic is that it is composed of a loosely coupled network of interacting autonomous elements. It is not a homogeneous mass. The whole system behaves quite differently than that of the individual elements."

Tim O'Reilly - The Software Paradigm Shift
"I really believe we are moving to a very, very different computing paradigm where applications actually live on the network. I mean, where exactly does Google live? It lives obviously on Google's bank of servers, but it also lives in a PC-based application. So we're really starting to see what Dave Stutz famously called "software above the level of a single device" and "software above the level of a single operating system." You have people throwing around words like "pervasive computing" and the like."

Emergic.org: Gmail and the Internet OS [17 April 2004]
Rajesh Jain says: Tim O'Reilly puts Google's Gmail in a wider context:
"Gmail is fascinating to me as a watershed event in the evolution of the internet. In a brilliant Copernican stroke, gmail turns everything on its head, rejecting the personal computer as the center of the computing universe, instead recognizing that applications revolve around the network as the planets revolve around the Sun. But Google and gmail go even further, making the network itself disappear into the universal virtual computer, the internet as operating system.
[...] Until I heard about gmail, I was convinced that the future "internet operating system" would have the same characteristics as Linux and the Internet. That is, it would be a network-oriented operating system, consisting of what David Weinberger calls "small pieces loosely joined" (or more recently and more cogently, a "world of ends"). I saw this as an alternative to operating systems that work on the "one ring to rule them all principle" -- a monolithic architecture where the application space is inextricably linked with the operating system control layers. But gmail, in some sense, shows us that once storage and bandwidth become cheap enough, a more tightly coupled, centralized architecture is a real alternative, even on the internet. (I have to confess that was one of the wake up calls to me in Rich Skrenta's piece, linked to above.)
But in the end, I believe that the world we're building is too complex for tight coupling to be the dominant paradigm. It will be a long time, if ever, before any one company is in control of enough programs and enough devices and enough data to start dictating to consumers and competitors what innovations will be allowed. We're entering a period of renewed competition and innovation in the computer industy, a period that will utterly transform the technology world we know today.
I love Dave Stutz's phrase, "software above the level of a single device." We're used to thinking of software as something that runs on the machine in front of us, its complex dance hidden by the blank metal and plastic of the hardware that houses it. But now, computers are everywhere, and each dance has many partners, a whirling exchange of data that will be made visible when and where we want it. It's not the machine or even the software that matters, it's the information and services that travel over the hardware and software "wires." Gmail's introduction of large amounts of free online storage for application data is an important next step in freeing us from the shackles of the desktop.
This isn't to say that there aren't important issues raised by the internet paradigm shift. The big question to me isn't privacy, or control over software APIs, it's who will own the data. What's critical is that gmail makes a commitment to data migration capabilities, so the service isn't a one way door to the future. I want to be able to switch to alternate providers if the competition makes a better offer. The critical enabler is going to be the ability to extract my data and connections so that I can work with them on multiple devices, for example, syncing my laptop or phone with my gmail account rather than having to work only in a tethered fashion. I understand why gmail doesn't offer this feature now, but it's going to be essential in the long term."
Tim O'Reilly

John Battelle's Searchblog: The Database of Intentions [via Google Blogoscoped]
"The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion."
John Battelle (co-founder of Wired and author of upcoming book "The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google" (Penguin/Putnam/Portfolio 2004)

John Battelle's Searchblog: The Web As Platform

"The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work." Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations

Henri Bergson: Creative Evolution: Chapter 2: The Divergent Directions of the Evolution of Life -- Torpor, Intelligence, Instinct
"The instrument constructed intelligently ... reacts on the nature of the being that constructs it; for in calling on him to exercise a new function, it confers on him, so to speak, a richer organization, being an artificial organ by which the natural organism is extended. For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of action within which the animal tends to move automatically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into which it is driven further and further, and made more and more free."

Jim Bassett's Weblog - Tuesday 12 March 2002
"[...] What exactly do you do on the internet? Just why is it so great? I mean for someone who doesn't already think so. It's a hard question to answer.
Here's my first try:
It's not so much that I want the net in order to accomplish some particular activity. Instead, having net access is a way of being. A way of doing things in the real world. And it boils down to this: I used to put off learning. I'd come to some problem and think, "you know, I really should figure this out some day." But I usually wouldn't do it. And once I put off learning something, I usually have to wait for it to come back up as a problem before I think to figure it out again. But with net access the answer is always just a google away. And I really do it. All my "I wonder...." moments are now swiftly met by a "hold on...." click, click, google, click, "...right, here it is."
And the benefit is not so much in finding all this information. It's more in my changing expectations. I expect to be able to find the answer to almost anything, right away, by myself. This is tremendously empowering. Just knowing that I have access to almost all knowledge changes everything about me. It makes me better. More curious. More independent.
But I still have no answer to my friend's question. I don't so much "do" stuff on the net (well, not counting my programming time.) I do things in the real world, and the net is there to back me up. The net is there to let me be my own expert. Even at things I don't know much about. I can't wait until I'm wirelessly connected all the time. My guess is that as this happens the question of "what do you do on the internet?" will make less and less sense. Like asking "what do you do in your long term memory?" Well, nothing, but you use it all the time. And you certainly couldn't get along without it."

Cognitive Complexity vs. Connectivity: efficiency analyses of hypertext networks
"Hypertext networks are in many ways highly similar to human long term memory, structurally as well as functionally. Both hypertext networks and human long term memory store information by coding its meaning in a distributed network of relations between semantic sub-components. Both are used and browsed for retrieval in similar ways. The results from psychological research concerning the relationship between the complexity of stored items and the speed with which they are recovered from human long term memory, might aid in understanding why certain hypertext networks perform better than others."
Johan Bollen

IMA Annual Program: Probability and Statistics in Complex Systems: Genomics, Networks, and Financial Engineering, September 2003 - June 2004

Metaphoric Shift: From causal chain to relational net
"This shift, from "chain" to "net" as working metaphor is, it seems, part of the general shift of figure going on in Western thought and science. Vico in the Scienza Nuova is already rejecting, as a basis for his thinking about history, not merely the familiar "blind concourse of atoms" but also, in his own phrase, the "deaf chain of causes and effects," his metaphor pointing up a lack of necessary organic qualities in such figures. In 1803 the phrase, "the kindling net," is used in Erasmus Darwin's poem, The Temple of Nature, to express the spread of organic life over the globe. Carlyle, in his essay "On History," 1830, says, "Alas for our 'chains,' or chainlets, of 'causes and effects,' which we so assiduously track through certain handbreadths of years and square miles, when the whole is a broad, deep Immensity, and each atom is 'chained' and complected with all!" Once again it is Dr. Needham, in Vol. II [reviewed here] of Science and Civilisation in China (see particularly Section 13, pp. 280 ff.) who draws attention to what is happening in the figurative thinking of Western science, and the contribution that can be made by the characteristic thought-patterns of Chinese science: "A number of modern students ... have named the kind of thinking with which we have here to do, 'coordinative thinking' or 'associative thinking.' This intuitive-associative system has its own causality and its own logic. It is not either superstition or primitive superstition [sic] but a characteristic thought-form of its own.... In coordinative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one another, but placed side by side in a pattern, and things influence one another not by acts of mechanical causation but by a kind of 'inductance' ... The key-word in Chinese thought is Order, and above all Pattern (and if I may whisper it for the first time, Organism) ... Things ... were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance" (Pp. 280-81. Italics in the original). After connecting this type of thinking, in differing ways, with Blake, Lévy-Bruhl, and Whitehead whom he considers the supreme example of it in the West so far, and after introducing the great metaphor of the dance for this moving pattern of relations, Dr. Needham sums up in one sentence: "In such a system causality is reticular and hierarchically fluctuating, not particulate and singly catenarian." Out of which corruscation of Latinity let us extricate our metaphors, for reticulum is a net and catena a chain. That the net, now become a key figure, is to be thought of in terms of organic and not mechanical structure is brought out a little later: "The characteristic Chinese concept of causality in the world of Nature was something like that which the comparative physiologist has to form when he studies the nerve-net of coelenterates, or what has been called the 'endocrine orchestra' of mammals. In these phenomena it is not very easy to find out which element is taking the lead at any given time. The image of an orchestra evokes that of a 'conductor' but we still have no idea what the 'conductor' of the synergistic operations of the endocrine glands in the higher vertebrates may be. Moreover, it is now becoming probable that the higher nervous centres of mammals and man himself constitute a kind of reticular continuum or 'nerve-net' much more flexible in nature than the traditional conceptions of telephone wires and exchanges visualised. At one time one gland or nerve-centre may take the highest place in a hierarchy of causes and effects, at another time another, hence the phrase 'hierarchically fluctuating'. All this is quite a different mode of thought from the simple 'particulate' or 'billiard-ball' view of causality" (p. 289)."
Elizabeth Sewell - The Human Metaphor (University of Notre Dame Press, 1964, pages 121-122)

Wired 3.06: A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain

"And you were successful, Mr. Laney?" Yamazaki asked. "You found the ... nodal points?"

posted by Andrew 6/03/2004 05:21:00 PM

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