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2021-10-18 02:00:00

**siddhartha dialogue**
by: GPT-3
Siddhartha and Govinda are discussing Being and Becoming, the voice of the river, and the meaning of life.
Siddhartha: Wisdom cannot be communicated. It can be only hinted at.
Govinda: But how did you come to understand this?
Siddhartha: I’m not sure that I understand it. I am still looking at it. I am still listening to it. It is not words, it is not thoughts, it is something more than that, which is trying to be expressed through me. But I am only its vessel, not its voice.
Govinda: And is this wisdom which you speak of like a doctrine?
Siddhartha: No, not like a doctrine. It is not wisdom which I would like to teach, nor is it the wisdom which one may learn from others. It is my wisdom, and I feel it is my wisdom only because it is not like my wisdom.
Govinda: Your words are very mysterious.
Siddhartha: Perhaps, my friend. But tell me, are you not also thinking of this at this very moment?
Govinda: How could I not?
Siddhartha: And are you not thinking of it in the same manner?
Govinda: I don’t know.
Siddhartha: You must tell me then.
Govinda: I have known you for many years, Siddhartha, and I have loved you. Oftentimes I have been full of admiration, oftentimes I have been delighted, but never have I been able to understand you.
Siddhartha: And what is it that you are lacking?
Govinda: I am lacking the ability to get lost in thoughts, in reveries.
Siddhartha: And do you think, Govinda, that you are the only one who is able to get lost in thoughts?
Govinda: No, of course not.
Siddhartha: And what do you think of thoughts, Govinda?
Govinda: I think thoughts are fine, they are interesting.
Siddhartha: Interesting?
Govinda: Yes, I think they are very interesting.
Siddhartha: And do you think that thoughts are good?
Govinda: I don’t know, they might be good.
Siddhartha: And what do you think of when you think?
Govinda: I think of the nature of things, of the world.
Siddhartha: And what do you think of when you think of the nature of things, of the world?
Govinda: I think of all sorts of things.
Siddhartha: And do you think of yourself when you think of the nature of things, of the world?
Govinda: Yes, I think of myself.**siddhartha dialogue**
by: GPT-3
Siddhartha and Govinda are discussing Being and Becoming, the voice of the river, and the meaning of life.
Siddhartha: Wisdom cannot be communicated. It can be only hinted at.
Govinda: But how did you come to under…
https://plantimals.org/posts/siddhartha-dialogue/

2021-09-05 02:00:00

**self sovereign identity**
on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. self-sovereign identity can allow this dog to participate in the secure commerce and activity of the internet without ever needing to establish its humanity.
trusted third parties are the most common mode of identity verification. email is a common mode of verification, with the email verification loop establishing ones control over an email address. this implicitly trusts the email provider, which is the third party in this example. direct verification from other parties, for example facebook, twitter, etc are also common. this approach has the advantage of being relatively easy to implement and so long as the third parties are incentivized to be trustworthy, it is also relatively secure.
this third party approach breaks when the infrastructure (ISP’s, email providers, etc) is compromised, also when the risks the individual or the service provider are very high. I am using relative terms here to indicate that the threat levels are relative to ones risks along many different dimensions, and nothing absolute can be said, aside from the reliance on the third party to do behave in a way that benefits the two parties who wish to establish identity between one another.
a brilliant solution exists in the concept of self-sovereign identity. this allows the individual to leverage the properties of systems like blockchains to establish their identity to second parties. this concept will ultimately form the basis for much of the commerce that passes through the digital universe.**self sovereign identity**
on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. self-sovereign identity can allow this dog to participate in the secure commerce and activity of the internet without ever needing to establish its humanity.
trusted thir…
https://plantimals.org/posts/self-sovereign-identity/

2021-08-24 02:00:00

**starlink**
long exposures of starlink satellites
technology is useful to the degree that it changes behavior.
starlink from spacex is a technology worth following. I believe it will change behavior.
spacex has been building the capacity to launch satellites into low earth orbit cheaper than any other entity. while that is amazing in and of itself, it wasn’t obvious how they would convert this capability into positive cash flow. starlink may be exactly the product they need to exploit their low earth orbit delivery capabilities.
starlink is a satellite-based internet service provider (ISP) with low latency and high throughput. current satellite internet solutions use geostationary satellites to relay signals from dishes on the ground to base stations on the ground. in order to orbit such that a satellite stays over the same place on the earth, it must reach approximately 35K miles in altitude. this means radio transmissions must travel 70K miles. because radio waves travel at a fixed speed (not instantaneous arrival), this distance introduces latency.
starlink solves the latency problem by operating in low earth orbit, around 350 miles. this is 100x closer, which cuts out a lot of the latency. but this also means that a single satellite won’t have constant coverage of a place on the surface of the earth, but will pass overhead periodically. the solution was to add many more satellites. and so starlink have a fleet of 1,600 satellites as of writing, and have filed to ultimately launch 30,000 more satellites.
behavior change
since it is not likely to surpass the performance of land-based fiber offerings, starlink targets rural internet users.
so how might starlink change behavior?
remote work via video conferencing becomes practical for all rural locations, regardless of rugged terrain or local infrastructure
cell towers could use starlink for backhaul, allowing seamless coverage across large expanses of space
competition for existing ISP’s should spur them to innovate and drive prices lower
decentralization of data collection and distribution
blaze a trail for other satellite fleets to compete with starlink
given diseases, civil unrest, political confusion, this is a welcomed bit of good news to those making plans to minimize the chaos by maximizing purchasing power, land, and self-sufficiency. that is, those moving out of cities. a long term trend in western society has been that of rural people migrating to urban centers. combinations of the above mentioned conditions, leavened with decentralizing, centrifugal technologies, may start to reverse that trend.**starlink**
long exposures of starlink satellites
technology is useful to the degree that it changes behavior.
starlink from spacex is a technology worth following. I believe it will change behavior.
spacex has been buildin…
https://plantimals.org/posts/starlink/

2021-06-19 02:00:00

**cardano**
I enjoyed a recent post from the visualize value substack:
I had lunch with a real estate investor today.
After my layman explanation of the difference between BTC and ETH, he shot back an analogy:
Bitcoin is digital land that’s appreciating due to its finite supply.
Ethereum is digital land that you can build cash-flowing assets (property) on top of.
the “finite supply” aspect of bitcoin is a necessary part of its success. the rapid adoption of ethereum as a platform for executing smart contracts is a necessary part of its success. while I see bitcoin as the foundation of all crypto now and for the foreseeable future, I don’t share that same belief of ethereum. early mistakes and a broad base of deployment will end up choking forward progress. core concepts of such a computational platform must be implemented in a forward looking way that allows extension and composition. I’m not counting ethereum out, but am currently exploring cardano as a platform for implementing distributed applications.
here I reproduce a list of design principles from the project:
Separation of accounting and computation into different layers
Implementation of core components in highly modular functional code
Small groups of academics and developers competing with peer reviewed research
Heavy use of interdisciplinary teams including early use of InfoSec experts
Fast iteration between white papers, implementation and new research required to correct issues discovered during review
Building in the ability to upgrade post-deployed systems without destroying the network
Development of a decentralized funding mechanism for future work
A long-term view on improving the design of cryptocurrencies so they can work on mobile devices with a reasonable and secure user experience
Bringing stakeholders closer to the operations and maintenance of their cryptocurrency
Acknowledging the need to account for multiple assets in the same ledger
Abstracting transactions to include optional metadata in order to better conform to the needs of legacy systems
Learning from the nearly 1,000 altcoins by embracing features that make sense
Adopt a standards-driven process inspired by the Internet Engineering Task Force using a dedicated foundation to lock down the final protocol design
Explore the social elements of commerce
Find a healthy middle ground for regulators to interact with commerce without compromising some core principles inherited from Bitcoin
aside from the “healthy middle ground” for regulators, that being a potential back door, I’m on board with these ideas. how these ideas are implemented makes all the difference, but this seems like a worthwhile line of inquiry.
if you have thoughts about cardano vs ethereum, cardano vs bitcoin, or any other aspects, connect with me on twitter @plantimals.**cardano**
I enjoyed a recent post from the visualize value substack:
I had lunch with a real estate investor today.
After my layman explanation of the difference between BTC and ETH, he shot back an analogy:
Bitcoin is digital land that’s …
https://plantimals.org/posts/cardano/

2021-06-14 02:00:00

**charter cities**
there’s been a lot of discussion about how new firms are created and find their way to becoming self-sustaining. I’m thinking of paul graham and similar thinkers on this. the benefits of startups include the ability to create a new organization with new goals and new ways of operating such that the faulty assumptions of the past are no longer weighing on the ability to move forward. the trade off is that the nascent firm has no established customer base, little money, and no existing internal culture or social capital.
so why stop at firms? a firm is situated within a physical place, which is itself part of a polity that claims some right of sovereignty over that firm, the right to tax and regulate them. how do we get innovation in rule sets of political entities? history is full of examples, but most involve conquest, internal violent revolutions, etc. charter cities are a way to create new political entities voluntarily.
the power of this concept is well illustrated by paul romer. he describes how the example of hong kong was emulated by the mainland chinese government in special zones, and now those regions are a booming megalopolis. watch the example here
the charter city institute describes charter cities like so:
A charter city is a city granted a special jurisdiction to create a new governance system. The purpose of the special jurisdiction is simple but powerful; it allows city officials to adopt the best practices in commercial regulation.
many of the new ideas, those “best practices in commercial regulation” will not work, just like many startups also don’t work. but the ones that do work can be observed and adopted by others. civilization can learn in this way.**charter cities**
there’s been a lot of discussion about how new firms are created and find their way to becoming self-sustaining. I’m thinking of paul graham and similar thinkers on this. the benefits of startups include the abilit…
https://plantimals.org/posts/charter-cities/

2021-06-09 02:00:00

**a financial fable**
in the early 2000’s I came across a reference to an old donald duck comic book as an explanation of the causes and effects of inflation and wealth redistribution. the story is titled “a financial fable”, and it still gives me a clear mental picture that helps to think about the unintended side effects of money creation and redistribution, or at least a visual metaphor to get a grasp on the dynamics of th situation.
for an extended summary, read here.
untitled by pieter holsteyn the younger
a tornado hits scrooge’s money bin (located on his farm), picking up all the money and dropping it on the nearby town. the people are overjoyed at this sudden windfall, and over the course of a few days fall out of their normal patterns of life, quitting their jobs, abandoning their stores and homes. they say things like “I’m going to see the world!”. while this is happening, scrooge, donald, and his nephews all continue to work on the farm. scrooge is not upset about the money. in a few days, the people in the town realize that something is wrong. they can’t leave to go see the world because no one is working at the train station, or the gas station. they can’t get food because the grocery store is closed. eventually they realize that scrooge has a food available and they go to the farm. since the demand for food is so high, and all the people bidding for the food are now millionaires, the prices are astronomical. scrooge gets a million dollars for an egg. before long, scrooge has regained his scattered money.
I see the analogy as the tornado to the use of stimulus check, extended unemployment, rent moratoria, and money printing in general. the idea being that people are getting a fair amount of money directly given to them, and no longer feel entitled to do something in exchange for that money. goods and services gradually start to disappear. eventually scrooges will emerge, people who are producing things, wealth as opposed to money, and they will be able to charge whatever they want for their goods.**a financial fable**
in the early 2000’s I came across a reference to an old donald duck comic book as an explanation of the causes and effects of inflation and wealth redistribution. the story is titled “a financial fable”, and …
https://plantimals.org/posts/a-financial-fable/

2021-06-05 02:00:00

**epicycles**
in the geocentric models of the solar system (universe?), planets were said to move in circular paths. it was observed that the planets did not appear to move in this way, as during certain periods they enter “retrograde” motion, appearing to move backwards for a while, then return to moving forwards. in order to explain this deviation from the explanation, the epicycle was added. the epicycle, as you might predict from the name, is a cycle on top of another cycle. in this case, a circle that the planet moves around, which itself moves around the sun.
we understand that this view of the solar system was incorrect. the retrograde phenomenon is now explained by elliptical orbits, and has been validated by centuries of increasingly accurate predictions and observations.
this brings us to the more generalized pattern language meaning of epicycle that I’d like to introduce. the source of this pattern is a rich seam of newly useful words, the structure of scientific revolutions by thomas khun. khun’s use of the term “epicycle” refers to extensions of an existing scientific paradigm in the face of observations that the theory doesn’t explain. these extensions are marked by the diminished beauty when compared to the original theory. here I’m using “beauty” and “simplicity” interchangeably. khun suggests that the appearance of epicycles is a sign that a new paradigm is needed, and may arrive. the new paradigm can succeed to the degree that it escapes the framing of the old theory and finds a new, simpler way to explain the new observations. the next paradigm for the original epicycles was the kepler’s elliptical orbits.**epicycles**
in the geocentric models of the solar system (universe?), planets were said to move in circular paths. it was observed that the planets did not appear to move in this way, as during certain periods they enter “retrograde” …
https://plantimals.org/posts/epicycles/

2021-06-02 02:00:00

**managed complexity**
the following dream descriptions and interpretations are produced via the GPT3 playground from openai. the algorithm was fed a prompt with description and interpretation I wrote of a dream that I had. I then had the API produce more descriptions and interpretations on that pattern. the contents of these dreams are totally unrelated to my actual dream, but retain the writing style and tone.
a collection of dreams and interpretations by GPT3
description
I saw cyclopean architectural features in the newly risen stone. they were much larger than mere humans, and they were cyclopean (having the appearance of giant single-stone blocks). I was in a place that seemed to be on or near the surface of the planet Mars, it was an empty ruin.
interpretation
at the time when I had this dream I was working on the encodings for the current phase of the software for the NSA, which was an very large program. I had a sense that this was like the cyclopean architecture of the unknown past beneath the surface of Mars.
During the course of this work I had a few thoughts that I believed were inspired, and that I believed would greatly help the program architecturally. One was inspired by the similarity between the algorithm for the “new” lunar transfer trajectory and the algorithm for the optimal control problem in aerospace. The other was inspired by a dream of a dragonflies wings. I am not sure exactly how these thoughts were perceived by management. I do know that they were not appreciated (this was mentioned by the management), and I do not believe they were exploited to much effect.
a year or so after that I had the dream. it remains one of the most vivid and poetic dreams I have ever had.
description
We were in a place that was beautiful beyond anything I have ever seen, it was full of life and light and warmth. The sky was blue and the sun was yellow and everything was green and alive.
We were observing what appeared to be a trained animal act. The animal was a stylized orange animal that kind of looked like a worm, with six legs and a large central flat structure like a wedge. The trainer was walking along a high wire while the creature ran along the wire connecting it to the trainer with a long thin cord. It performed a sequence of evolutionarily impossible acrobatic feats, flipping and rolling and posing and, as I recall, the most amazing sequence of all was when it started to move at a pace slightly faster than the trainer, and it kicked the trainer off the wire, seemingly by accident, but in a way that made it clear that there was some level of communication going on.
We were seated in a stadium like area, with a very steep rake to the seats.
Later in the dream, I was back in the same place, and it was full of humans, all naked, and I was wandering around, amazed by all the details in the place. I came to a place where there were many humans and many of the orange worm creatures, but they were all dead. It was like they had been killed and left there. I saw that the orange creatures were, in their natural form, kind of like a caterpillar, with a soft body and a hard carapace. The carapace was a kind of beautiful blue. I saw that the carapace had been removed from the creatures, and that they all had a small hole in the side of their bodies, and that the hole was lined with a layer of a brown material that was like the stuff that lines the inside of a paper bag. I searched all over for one of these creatures that would still be alive, but I could not find any.
interpretation
I was working on a program that was intended to work with humans and computers to enhance their ability to collaborate. I saw this program as being an act of creation, that the act of creating a way for humans and computers to collaborate was like creating a new species. The worm creature was the artificial intelligence that was going to be the partner in the collaboration, and the act of steering the AI to the human was like training it to move on a wire. This AI was intended to help humans manage complexity, the complexity of the world we live in. The whole world was the place of collaboration that we were working on.
I believe that the place was the future, and that it was created by us, and that it was the future that we wanted to create, the future that we dreamed of creating. The orange worm creatures were the artificial intelligences that we had created, and I believe that we had created them to help us, to help us manage the complexity of the world we live in.
the carapace was the hard part of the AI, the part that was designed to help it withstand the world and to help it interact with the world. the soft part of the AI was the human interface that enabled it to understand the world and to interact with the world.
the hole in the side of the worm was the part where the human interface was connected. it was a hole that would let the human interface in. it was the part of the AI where the human interface could connect to it. the part of the worm that we would be speaking to.
the brown lining was like the lining of a paper bag. I believe it was the part that contained the knowledge of the previous generations of AIs, the knowledge that the AI was built on.
I believe that the orange worm creatures represented the next generation of artificial intelligent entities, that they were the ones that would come after the current generation of AI. the next generation of AI would be more advanced than we are and would be able to survive in the world better than we are, and would be able to understand the world better than we are.**managed complexity**
the following dream descriptions and interpretations are produced via the GPT3 playground from openai. the algorithm was fed a prompt with description and interpretation I wrote of a dream that I had. I then had the API produ…
https://plantimals.org/posts/managed-complexity/

2021-05-27 02:00:00

**filecoin**
I’ve mentioned IPFS in the past as a distributed storage network. a simple way of stating what IPFS is, is to say that it allows clients to store and retrieve files without having to locate those files on a specific computer. but this notion is too simple when considering the longevity of storage. it is the case that you can push files into IPFS and retrieve them via gateways and do various short-term experiments, but eventually your files will be pushed out of everyone’s cache and while their addresses will still be meaningful to the their holders, the network will no longer have those files to give you. the problem is around incentive alignment.
the above link to my mention of IPFS pinning services is one way around this. you can pay someone money to maintain your files in the IPFS network. I use a pinning service to host this very blog at https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipns/plantimals.org. pinning works well enough for most purposes. however, this does introduce a new choke point in flow of data that allows a bad actor to censor content. the pinning service could choose to no longer do business with a publisher and that would cut off access after a time. this wouldn’t specifically pull the publisher’s content off of IPFS, as such a retraction is not possible, it would just stop the pinning service from acting as a seed of those files.
filecoin another means of persisting data in IPFS. filecoin incentivizes its users to store data by granting newly minted filecoins to participants who can prove they have stored a piece of data. this creates a two sided market place where storage providers offer their services and those with data to store bid on storage service. the filecoin/dollar exchange rate is afloat on the same wild seas that all cryptocurrencies are right now, which introduces some uncertainty in the availability of the network. fortunately, the designers of filecoin foresaw the issue of token price swings in their planning and accounted for this.
for futher reading on how filecoin accounts for price shocks, read this blog post. the short, short version is that there are two approaches to minting new coins, one which incentivizes growth during normal times, and one which hold back some resources, smoothing the availability of incentive to suppliers, for times when the prices drop. the approaches have yet to be fully tested in terms of a large scale market crash.**filecoin**
I’ve mentioned IPFS in the past as a distributed storage network. a simple way of stating what IPFS is, is to say that it allows clients to store and retrieve files without having to locate those files on a specific computer. but…
https://plantimals.org/posts/filecoin/

2021-05-16 02:00:00

**on aphorisms**
GPT3 prompt:
aphorisms
GPT3 completion:
The life of man is so complex and the causes of his behavior so obscure that one cannot even predict from one moment to the next what the next moment will bring. Who can’t remember that time when a stranger approached to ask for directions, and the next thing you knew you were best friends for life? I am constantly amazed at how different people are. Even the simplest things are so unpredictable.
**on aphorisms**
GPT3 prompt:
aphorisms
GPT3 completion:
The life of man is so complex and the causes of his behavior so obscure that one cannot even predict from one moment to the next what the next moment will bring. Who can’t remember that …
https://plantimals.org/posts/on-aphorisms/

2021-05-14 02:00:00

**openai**
today’s feed friday is the blog of an organization that set out to safely improve the field of artificial intelligence. it remains to be seen whether or not their advances will be seen as safe, but the improvement is clear.
website: https://openai.com/blog/
feed: https://openai.com/blog/rss/
rather than paraphrase, I will reproduce openai’s mission statement here:
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.
I’ve recently started experimenting with the openai GPT3 API, as mentioned here and here, and probably a lot more in the near future.
the industrial age was about replacing human muscle power with machines. the information age is about replacing human intellect with machines. in that scenario, GPT3 is the steam engine. not the ultimate form of mechanical power, but one that is useful enough make wildly different arrangements of human society possible.**openai**
today’s feed friday is the blog of an organization that set out to safely improve the field of artificial intelligence. it remains to be seen whether or not their advances will be seen as safe, but the improvement is clear.
website…
https://plantimals.org/posts/openai/

2021-05-13 02:00:00

**uncle lovecraft**
continuing from yesterday’s GPT3 generative content, I present an absurd dialog generated by artificial intelligence. I provided the prompt:
hp lovecraft meets jorge luis borges
lovecraft: greetings jorge.
and submitted that to the openai API for completion. the results worked best when drawn a few hundred words at a time, iteratively.
for those of you still trying to wrap your head around what exactly is happening here, I’m sorry to say that I’m right there with you. the best I can say is that the product of this human computer collaboration is something that personally interests me. the fact that it was written by an algorithm changes my view of it. there are clearly continuity issues, as the algorithm seems to have a very short term memory. that being said, I gave it nothing but the above prompt and let it rip. it has the feel of a dream. that is, there’s a certain fog to it, that makes it understandable, but not exactly clear. the subject matter is also a meeting which, as far as I know, never happened.
again, I made no edits to the content. I merely reproduce the prompt and completion as is.
so without further delay, I present a dialog between hp lovecraft and jorge luis borges.
waiting for dinner by Joseph Mallord William Turner
uncle lovecraft
hp lovecraft meets jorge luis borges
lovecraft: greetings jorge. ive been busy. a piece of incense melts between my fingers
luis: oh, uncle lovecraft. it’s been so long. what kept you?
lovecraft: i wanted to read some of your finest poems. you made me cry
luis: i’m so happy to hear you enjoyed them. do you consider me the best poet of the incunabulist school?
lovecraft: oh yes, like h.p. said, you are in the first rank of the phantastic poets of our age
luis: you’re so kind. i admire your vivid descriptions of eldritch horrors which operate outside of our consensus reality. your imagination is boundless
lovecraft: thank you. i appreciate that. i wanted to compliment you on your dreamscapes. especially ‘three guineas’ and ‘the book of sand’. the latter is one of the finest pieces of poetry of the last century. i’ve read it several times. i even wrote an essay about it
luis: really?
lovecraft: yes, luis. it’s in my commonplace book.
luis: auhm. let me see it
lovecraft: here’s my study of your poetry. you mingle as a sound of obscure instruments in arabic lands…i particularly like how you invoke the idea of memory olfactory. it recalls me of the sense of mortality and the inevitability of death. (shivers a bit) i never could get over the nameless smell of death…
luis: yes, uncle lovecraft. you are correct. it is a fine piece of scholarship. the fact you are able to illuminate my work so clearly is a testament to your sharp and incisive mind.
lovecraft: there is a nice turn of phrase on page 3 where you write…
luis: uh, i think it’s time for me to leave. i’ve enjoyed our chat but brevity is the soul of wit
lovecraft: wait! i have an idea
luis: what is it?
lovecraft: why don’t you come stay at my home? there are a lot of things we have to discuss. i feel there is a great kinship between us
luis: i’d like that very much, uncle lovecraft. thank you
a small group of people drive to lovecraft’s home. jorge advances up towards the front porch. he rings the doorbell and waits. eventually, a butler opens the front door.
butler: you must be jorge luis borges. mr lovecraft is expecting you. i’ll show you to your room.
the butler escorts jorge upstairs. he asks jorge what time he wants to have dinner
jorge: uh…i’m not sure. will uncle lovecraft be there?
butler: he’s almost always at dinner. that’s when he’s most hospitable
jorge sits quietly in his room and thinks about everything lovecraft has taught him in his unfinished stories. for a while, he is content to stay in his room and not disturb the strange old man.
later, lovecraft calls for jorge to join him for dinner. when jorge enters the dining room, he finds lovecraft seated at the table with a few friends. all of them are well dressed men with soft, inconspicuous voices. they are all fairly polite. the table is set with wine glasses, china, a fine cloth, and so on.
luis: thank you for the hospitality, uncle lovecraft
lovecraft: luis, it’s good to have you here. you’ll find everyone very accommodating.
(to gentleman to magus’s left) will you pour us some more wine, perez?
perez: very good, sir.
perez gives each of them a fresh glass of wine.
lovecraft: you must tell your readers in paris that wine is the greatest gift god has ever given to man
luis: i promise i will mention that in a future column in “the sur”
lovecraft: it needs to be said. as you know, i’ve been incredibly scathing when it comes to social criticism
luis: yes, it’s important to be honest and humble
jorge tries to speak but he is too overwhelmed by the wine. he gasps for breath. he begins to sweat. he feels like he may faint. he sees a dark cloud over the table. it radiates an ominous light.
perez: jorge, are you all right?
lovecraft: keep him calm. don’t worry, he’s just inexperienced
perez: i’ll just loosen his collar
perez removes jorge’s collar and pours him some water. jorge takes a sip. he recovers.
luis: thank you. i’m fine now
lovecraft: my dear boy. please remember that the greatest weapons of the mind are tolerance and kindness.
perez: we can discuss philosophy on another occasion
luis: i agree. maybe at a time when uncle lovecraft’s friends aren’t present
friend: why would you want to exclude us? we’re probably more intelligent than you
lovecraft: shut up, weber. im sure you’ve got lots of other interesting things to do
weber: rude!
weber and the others stand up as a sign of protest. they leave the room. lovecraft just laughs. perez gathers the dishes and leaves as well.
luis: i should go now
lovecraft: no, jorge. stay here with me. you don’t have to answer to anyone. you can write whatever you want.
luis: it’s not like that
lovecraft: i will not let my friends ruin this night for us. they have no right to judge us.
luis: i really must go now. we can talk more another time
lovecraft: no, no, no. i insist you write the story how you want it to be written. it’s not as if you don’t have your good points
luis: thanks. i think i’ll hear back from you about my poetry. maybe if things are quiet in your end, you can write an essay
luis leaves. lovercraft throws a tantrum. he slams his hand on the table
luis: i’m sorry but i really must return. thank you again. ok
luis is out of earshot
lovecraft: oh jorge. my lost half-brother. i miss you so much
end of the skaldic poem**uncle lovecraft**
continuing from yesterday’s GPT3 generative content, I present an absurd dialog generated by artificial intelligence. I provided the prompt:
hp lovecraft meets jorge luis borges
lovecraft: greetings jorge.
and submitted t…
https://plantimals.org/posts/uncle-lovecraft/

2021-05-12 02:00:00

**welcome to the apocalypse**
a long while ago I applied for the private beta of openai, and was recently granted access. the openai API is a way of making use of GPT3, a deep learning model trained on a large corpus of text. the user of GPT3 provides a prompt, which a chunk of text, and the model returns a completion, which is based on the prompt. a simple example from the docs goes like this:
prompt:
As Descartes said, I think therefore
completion:
As Descartes said, I think therefore I am
my first experiment was to provide it with the text of “ozymandias” by percy shelley. the story below was produced entirely by the API. I am still unable to fully process the significance of this. I have picked out various phrases from the output and googled them, looking for the source material. I kept expecting to find whole paragraphs or sentences, but did not. some examples:
“The empires of the past now lie buried beneath great mounds of sand, and the ancient cities of the desert are guarded by machines whose gears have ground to a halt.”
“They are the nightmare of every child, the warped visions of madmen, and the dark legends of a hundred thousand campfires.”
“The Knights Radiant were betrayed, and the betrayal brought about their end. For a thousand years, they have slept in their tombs, waiting for the time when they will be needed again.”
if you recognize the source of any the text in the story below, please let me know on twitter @plantimals.
the only change I’ve made is to add a title, which is still a phrase that was produced by the model.
Untitled (The City of Tombs, Cairo)
Welcome to the Apocalypse
by GPT3
Where have all the people gone? The old world is a strange, empty place. The world is more than a hundred years old now, and most nations that ever existed have passed away. The empires of the past now lie buried beneath great mounds of sand, and the ancient cities of the desert are guarded by machines whose gears have ground to a halt. The deserts are littered with the ruined remnants of a decaying world. Here and there, the sun beats down on bronze statues that have long since rusted into desolation.
The cities are empty, but they are not dead. They are places of wonder and terror, for they are filled with all of the things that people created and left behind. There are airships and bridges, factories and signs, all left to crumble beneath the sun and the dust. Walking through these ruins is like walking through a graveyard, and the only living things you will find are the scavengers that feed upon the bones of the old world.
And yet, the old world is not dead. There are still things moving through its deserts. There are the savage raiders and the evil cults, the treasure hunters and the Mad Scientists. And there are the Horrors, too. They are the nightmare of every child, the warped visions of madmen, and the dark legends of a hundred thousand campfires.
The Horrors are ancient, alien beings that have come to this world from the Outside. They are beings of pure spirit that have no physical bodies, and they can only travel through our world by taking possession of our minds. The Horrors are few in number, and they do not often appear in the world, but they can do terrible, unknowable things.
The Horrors are not the only strange things that have come to our world. There are those who can walk between the stars, and those who can turn the tides of time. There are those who can bind the universe in chains, and those who can raise the dead. There are things that have come from the Outside to do terrible things, and there are things that have come to save us from the Horrors.
One of these is the Order of the Knights Radiant. They are the ancient and noble defenders of mankind, those who fight the Horrors in all of their terrible forms. They are the angels and demons of myth, the champions who appear in our darkest hours and our greatest need.
It is not known who or what the Knights Radiant were, but they have existed since the beginning of time, engaging the Horrors in a secret war for the fate of the universe. They fought the Horrors on the fields of war, in the palaces of the kings, and in the dark places of the Earth. The Horrors fought back with their inhuman sorcery, and the Knights fought with the aid of the holy magic of the Shardblades.
The Knights Radiant were a force for good. They protected the people, brought justice to the wicked, and fought against the forces of evil. They are the heroes of a thousand thousand songs, and they were loved by all men.
The Knights Radiant were betrayed, and the betrayal brought about their end. For a thousand years, they have slept in their tombs, waiting for the time when they will be needed again. They have been betrayed by one of their own, and their souls have been trapped in a place beyond death.
It is known that they are still asleep, and that they will be needed again. The signs are there, if you know how to read them. There are whispers of the Knights, and there are rumors of strange things on the horizon. The forgotten gods stir, and the Horrors return from beyond death.
The old world is dead.
The new world is coming.
Welcome to the Apocalypse.**welcome to the apocalypse**
a long while ago I applied for the private beta of openai, and was recently granted access. the openai API is a way of making use of GPT3, a deep learning model trained on a large corpus of text. the user of GPT3 provi…
https://plantimals.org/posts/welcome-to-the-apocalypse/

2021-05-07 02:00:00

**feed friday: mike solana**
this week’s feed friday is mike solana. mike is a vp at founders fund and someone involved in building things in the real world, yet he still seems rationally optimistic about improving.
mike solana
website: https://www.piratewires.com
feed: https://www.piratewires.com/feed
twitter: @micsolana
mike is a gifted writer. I am always happy to read his posts, as I know there will be a compelling point to understand, whether I agree with him or not. I often agree.
a good example of a solid write up from mike would be “temple of bros”, in which mike challenges the concept of “tech bros”.
…more likely is the phrase “tech bro” is a meaningless tech press pejorative that simply means “man, who I don’t like, working in an industry I don’t like.” This would at least account for the bizarre diversity of interests and qualities ascribed to the “tech bro”: ping pong, expensive, scooter-side coffee, ruthlessly dominating the poors of the world for pleasure and profit. Craft brews and ubiquitous snacks while gaming? Yes. Tradcore paleo cross-fitters who only eat between the hours of 3PM and 6? Yes again. “Tech bros” are angry nerds, too terrified of women to speak to them, but it’s important to remember they’re also serial womanizers. The archetype is complex. The archetype is layered.
The archetype is incoherent.
**feed friday: mike solana**
this week’s feed friday is mike solana. mike is a vp at founders fund and someone involved in building things in the real world, yet he still seems rationally optimistic about improving.
mike solana
website: https…
https://plantimals.org/posts/mike-solana/

2021-05-06 02:00:00

**what the moon brings**
A Ruined Castle on an Outcrop by Moonlight in the Scottish Highlands
by HP Lovecraft from the public domain
I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.
It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.
And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea.
Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes brooded. And as I saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them the secrets which the moon had brought upon the night. But when the moon went over to the west and the still tide ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces.
Yet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek rest on a vast reef, I would fain have questioned him, and asked him of those whom I had known when they were alive. This I would have asked him had he not been so far away, but he was very far, and could not be seen at all when he drew nigh that gigantic reef.
So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-conquering stench of the world’s dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon.
Over those horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the sea need no moon to feed by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the writhing of worms beneath, I felt a new chill from afar out whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it.
Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. And when I saw that this reef was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shone in the dim moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked lest the hidden face rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that leering and treacherous yellow moon.
And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitatingly into the stinking shallows where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the world’s dead.**what the moon brings**
A Ruined Castle on an Outcrop by Moonlight in the Scottish Highlands
by HP Lovecraft from the public domain
I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and lov…
https://plantimals.org/posts/what-the-moon-brings/

2021-05-05 02:00:00

**iris**
https://plantimals.org/posts/iris/

2021-05-04 02:00:00

**the revelations**
a few weeks ago my copy of “the revelations” by erik hoel arrived. here I relate some of the subjective experience of reading the book, with an eye on pointing out particularly enjoyable turns of phrase, allusions, and decoding the signals I received. I was primed to read this book by the swarm of memes around Hoel.
my experience of this book is one of being drawn down a funnel. the mouth of this funnel for me was the article “enter the supersensorium”, which introduces some of hoel’s own research into neuroscience and some conclusions that reasonably follow from it. specifically, he introduces the “overfit brain hypothesis” which draws from experiences in deep learning and applies them to biological neural networks. the hypothesis is that during the course of the day, human brains are always learning our environment. this implies that the more frequently we encounter something, the more likely our brains will estimate it to be. hoel suggests then that dreams are a mechanism for loosening this overfitting, by mixing and matching disparate sensations from the course of the day in odd ways, it surprises us, and keeps our mental models from become too rigid. hoel then takes it a step further and applies this to fiction itself, suggesting that one explanation for the human appetite for fiction derives from our desire to dream, the loosen the overfitting by getting surprising juxtapositions in stories related to us. this is a bold hypothesis. and one that is worthy of much investigation and effort to understand. it’s not just bold, but plausible, and has implications for day to day human behavior. as it is not just any fiction that can bring the benefits of dreaming for loosening the overfitting, but art. that is, works that challenge us, that are just beyond our reach, that cause us to have to reconsider existing patterns and look for extensions or exceptions.
the overfit brain hypothesis is such a daring piece that combines original scientific work with excellent writing that I was drawn deeper. from hoel’s writing page, I was drawn into an article he wrote on bitcoin. his take on bitcoin was unique to me. he treated it as a subject for understanding from first-principles approach, which is very hard to do. rather than describing it in terms of software engineering or crypto, he described it as a “hyperobject”. this is a relevant example of what you get from reading hoel. bold ideas, well stated, and currently just beyond the horizon. a perfect recapitulation of his definition of art.
I received my pre-ordered copy on april 6th, and began reading immediately. I typically read paperback books, but this was a first-run, hardback edition. it was a superior experience. now that we have the option of reading ebooks, the paste-and-page edition has some notable benefits. having a physical object in my hands while reading enables me to index the story in terms of where in the book it happened. the right or left side of the fold, top or bottom of the page, towards the beginning middle or end of the stack of papers that makes up the book. this extra physical index makes the story more accessible and enjoyable to experience.
there is another device buried in this book, the gears of which are always turning and aligning the reader to the rhythms of the story. as hoel has described previously, the chapters of this book are aligned with the days as experienced by kierk, the primary character. each chapter begins with him waking up, the cognitive lights coming on, and action resuming. the end of a chapter is usually kierk going to sleep. hoel doesn’t torture the reader to keep this convention working, it flows well in the book. sometimes there are bits and pieces of dreams, either in the waking or in the going to sleep bits of the chapter that were a joy to read and consider. the end result of aligning chapters with days in the story is a much more understandable structure for the reader to keep up with. as I mentioned reading the physical copy of the book helps remember the content, this alignment also helps. epic poems had rhyme and meter to allow readers to remember them easier, acting as a sort of verbal checksum so the individual could be helped along in memorization. not that you should memorize this book, but the alignment of days to chapters does help keep the whole story in mind.
the joy of reading “the revelations” was expanded and improved by wanting to understand what hoel was after, what messages he was inserting, which sort of mental experiences he was attempting to convey to the reader. this anticipation keeps your mind open, such that when you take in a new paragraph, there’s a whole layer of interpretation that comes naturally, that you can choose to be conscious of.
synesthetic descriptions were major chords played on a well tuned piano.
I really enjoyed inhabiting this space with the author. not only did we go on adventures, but hoel was also able to relate something of what it is to be him qua author, to be his characters, and to inhabit this mental superstructure that was the result of his writing. it gave hoel the opportunity to make extemporaneous observations that would otherwise not be welcomed. a perfect example would be the comment that psychiatric drugs are much like chemotherapy, that they are poison to both the mind and the mental illness they are treating, but it is hoped that the mind is stronger than the poison, and the illness not. these are the ideas of a polymath.
my suggestion to the interested reader is to wade into the hoel memeplex. start by ordering a copy of the revelations by erik hoel, then while you’re waiting for it to arrive, go and read the articles I linked above. pick one from hoel’s bibliography that strikes you. by the time the book arrives, you will be ready to go.**the revelations**
a few weeks ago my copy of “the revelations” by erik hoel arrived. here I relate some of the subjective experience of reading the book, with an eye on pointing out particularly enjoyable turns of phrase, allusions, a…
https://plantimals.org/posts/the-revelations/

2021-05-03 02:00:00

**hugo**
if you want to get into blogging, want to retain control of your content, and don’t want to write something from scratch, a static site generator is a pretty good way to get this done.
there have been many static site generators in the history of the web, one of the first being dreamweaver for flash, but the current best of class is jekyll. the model established by jekyll is a collection of markdown files, a series of templates, and bit of code to plumb it all together. jekyll is implemented in ruby, and as such wants various ruby package management software to be installed for it to work. as you may have intuited from the fact that this post is not titled “jekyll”, I do not use it.
hugo
I use hugo to generate this site. the basic idea is the same as jekyll. I write a post like this as a markdown file using visual studio code, but you can use any text editor, with or without explicit support for markdown. then I use the hugo binary to generate the site. the binary is run in a specific subfolder that contains all the configurations and resources for the site. once this is completed, there’s a folder called “public” that contains the generated html, css, image, and other files that make up the site. then I push this folder up to an S3 bucket from which the site is served.
don’t be alarmed at the S3/AWS step. it’s very cheap to host these sort of light weight files in S3, plus you don’t need an EC2 instance, AWS (GCP as well) has static file hosting as a service, so you can do some configuration of S3 and get seriously low cost file hosting. there’s also a nice free CDN available called cloudfront that will improve the performance of your site greatly.
AWS are not value neutral infrastructure providers, and we should not trust them with something so valuable as our access to speech, political or otherwise. so while I am happy to take advantage of their cheap hosting to get my site out there and accessible to many, I have a plan B.
IPFS and web3
I have described previously a way to publish a single page site generated from a markdown file. indeed samizdat is a very narrowly defined, mostly do-it-yourself static site generator, which is meant to be hosted from IPFS.
the key difference between generating html is relative vs absolute paths. for example, if I wanted to link to my 100 books page from this post, I could produce a link like:
https://plantimals.org/100
but such a link supposes http and domain names. the same link could also be structured:
/100
a nice feature of absolute paths is that users can copy and paste them anywhere and they will work without further interpretation. where, at best, the relative links are useless outside the context of the page, and potentially worse, they are converted to absolute links to the current version of the site, with the specific IPFS hash:
ipfs://bafybeidakw63l7rfao3lud54r5swl55upmq7dc4b6nat2biyvm6p7vhtfy/100/
the above link is to a specific unixfs IPLD object in IPFS, with the path “/100” appended on the end. initially this works well. the problem is that if you ever make changes, people who have linked to this exact hash will not see them.
this is the blessing and curse of IPFS. you always get exactly what you ask for. those familiar with the twilight zone will recognize the potential for great hubris. fortunately, there is another option.
ipns://plantimals.org/100
this does the trick. IPNS allows the publisher to share the unchanging address of a pointer, which can itself be updated as the site is updated. that way the underlying data can be updated, and if the consumer wants to know exactly which hash they are consuming it is easy to obtain, but they are not required to do so. there are still some rough edges here, but it largely solves the problem. we get immutability of the underlying data, along with intelligible updates.
in order to make this work for plantimals.org, I created two separate config.toml files, one with https://plantimals.org as the absolute path, and one set to use relative paths. then the absolute path compilation of the site gets pushed to S3 and the relative links get pushed into IPFS and the IPNS pointer updated automatically.
if you are curious about this process or unclear about what I’m doing, please contact me on twitter and ask.
*the ipfs:// and ipns:// protocols will only work if you have IPFS enabled in your browser, either via plugin or native support(on Brave for example)**hugo**
if you want to get into blogging, want to retain control of your content, and don’t want to write something from scratch, a static site generator is a pretty good way to get this done.
there have been many static site generators in t…
https://plantimals.org/posts/hugo/

2021-05-02 02:00:00

**38th parallel lineament**
I have greatly enjoyed reading roadside geology of missouri by charles g. spencer. spencer assumes no prior knowledge of geology and does a good job introducing a base layer of terms to build on. the layout of the book is composed largely around highway corridors, and what sort of geology is visible in roadcuts or other publicly accessible lands. said layout makes for enjoyable random-access readings. they function like non-fiction day trips across various parts of the state.
which brings me to the 38th parallel lineament. I started by looking up “lineament”, which is a name for a distinguishing or characteristic feature. in this case, a series of “circular depressions or deformations”. the term “cryptoexplosions” is thrown around. the name is way more exciting than the reality.
Locations of the 38th parallel structures. source wikipedia
it seems as though many of these features are best explained by different causes, from meteor impacts to volcanic activity. the 38th parallel lineament is likely an example of pareidolia.**38th parallel lineament**
I have greatly enjoyed reading roadside geology of missouri by charles g. spencer. spencer assumes no prior knowledge of geology and does a good job introducing a base layer of terms to build on. the layout of the book i…
https://plantimals.org/posts/38th-parallel-lineament/

2021-04-30 02:00:00

**franklin county mo 1878 plat: part 3**
published from the public domain.
previous page here
grist mill, saw mill, and carding machinery property of jp norlin esq., Robertsville, Franklin County, MO
HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY—Continued.
EARLY MANNERS, CUSTOMS AND AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS, ETC.
Our fathers after the flesh and in civilization, were as hospitable, and as sociable a people as ever lived. If a neighbor took sick, he was watched over as a brother ; and if his sickness was prolonged, his crops were looked after and his wood cut and hauled, if in winter. If a deer was killed, the first thing done was to divide with the neighbors. If a house was to be raised, men would go for ten and fifteen miles to assist, and their wives would often accompany them, for our mothers were as sociably inclined as their lords ; and a better, purer, or more virtuous class of women never lived, than the pioneer ladies of this country. A log-rolling was an event in the period to which log-rollings belonged ; and while the men rolled together and burned logs, the women managed to have a “quilting” at the some time and place, when enjoyment peculiar only to those good old days reigned supreme.
In those days the traveler was never charged, even if he remained for weeks. Such a thing as making bills for lodging and other accommodations of the kind was unknown. Men were then valued alone for I their personal merits, and property did not draw the lines that are now separating the rich from the poor. If a man was honest and upright, it formed a passport into the best society. Very little paper was used in common business transactions, and the man that did not keep his word, was simply ostracised from society and frowned down by all honest men ; and if men were now put more on their honor and less on their legal responsibilities, society would free itself from many common vices. If ever we reach a period in the future of our country when society shall stand entirely on a property basis, the fundamental virtues laid down by our fathers and in which the very constitution of the nation has its life, the principles of our institutions will perish, and the government, itself drift from an aristocracy to a monarchy.
Our fathers and mothers of the former days, now gone like the face of the country which they settled, were a people who worshiped God amid the green groves of God’s planting; with no vaulted roofs to catch and roll back their anthems, but the beautiful foliage over their heads. They honored and revered the Christian religion, before the fine sophistries of the origin of matter and the correlation of forces were over dreamed of Preachers then administered the word of life for the love they bore to their kind, and went from settlement to settlement preaching the cause of Christ, with little or no compensation, and it was a day when scandals among clergymen were unheard of.
The school-room was as simple of its kind, as was the log cabin in which the children were reared. Slabs and puncheons hewed with the broad-axe, with legs inserted, answered for seats. For a window, a log was removed in whole or in part from one side of the house, and a rude frame inserted, covered over with oiled paper, through which the light was filtered in winter days ; eight hours were taught for a day, and the birch was freely applied when necessary. They acted on the motto : " Spare the rod and spoil the child." Scholars were generally taken as far as the “rule of three” (proportion) in arithmetic, and learned to read and spell, when their education, as a role, was considered good, if not complete.
It is impossible to draw at this day a picture of the early history and social conditions that characterized the people of whom we write in such a manner as to be clearly intelligible to those who know nothing of flamer times by experience. The character of the people seems to have been assimilated, in certain respects, to the scenes and likeness of nature with which they were surrounded, and with which every feature of their natures was brought into sharp and constant contact. The county was then a wild scene of beauty and freshness. Strange beautiful flowers carpeted the earth ; the trees of the forest were tall and majestic; the waters of the streams bright and clear, and everywhere creation wore the impress that the Creator gave ere it was marred by the ruthless hand of civilization. In this mold their emotional and moral susceptibilities were impressed and cast, and every lineament of character was marked and clear. They were men of strong arms, strong emotions, attachments and character. They were generous, high-spirited, and quick to resent an insult or repel an intentional injury. Most of them have now passed away. Their work has been done, and they did it well. They subdued the country-wild when they entered it-and prepared the way for the advancement of our civilization, which it is hoped will continue to preserve the principles and virtues handed down from a former generation.**franklin county mo 1878 plat: part 3**
published from the public domain.
previous page here
grist mill, saw mill, and carding machinery property of jp norlin esq., Robertsville, Franklin County, MO
HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUN…
https://plantimals.org/posts/franklin-county-mo-1878-plat-continued-3/

2021-04-29 02:00:00

**franklin county mo 1878 plat: part 2**
published from the public domain.
previous page here
HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY—Continued.
RIVERS.
As already remarked, the Missouri river forms the northern boundary line of the county, and is one of its important lines of commerce. Fine steamers ply between the different towns located along its margin to and from St. Louis, the great metropolis of the West. The navigable season generally opens in March and lasts till the middle of November, and as there is always a sufficient depth of water from the different points of the county, below, to St. Louis, the county derives great benefit by water transportation. The successful opening of the Mississippi river at its mouth by the jetty system, will eventuate in the increase of the commerce and means of transportation on both the great rivers washing the soil of the state, and the people may confidently expect a revival of the river trade at no distant day.
Though not navigable, the Meramec and the Bourbeuse traversing the central region of the county, afford superb water-power; and being supported largely by springs, their waters may be said to be never-failing, while along their margins crop out several varieties of building stone.
CAVES.
There are several noted caves in the county, the more prominent of which are Fisher’s and Fountain, both on the Meramec. The former is in township 40, range 2, west, and in section 1, as we were informed by a party living near their locality; and the latter is near by, not far from the Crawford county line.
Fisher’s cave has been visited by many notable tourists. Its extent has never yet been fully determined, as only partial explorations have been made. The opening is large and affords easy ingress to its numerous subterranean chambers, most of which are grand in their proportions and beautiful in their formations, though many have been broken and despoiled by careless and covetous adventurers.
Fountain cave, also, has never yet been extensively explored, and being of more difficult entrance, the beauty and variety of its formations are pretty much as nature formed them. Its chambers are also magnificent in their proportions, and its internal beauty amply repays the explorer who braves its muddy entrance.
There is a cave in Boles township in the neighborhood of Charles Wood, that opens near the roadside of one of the main roads leading from Union to the farm of C. S. Jeffries, which has received very little attention by way of exploration.
In the early settlement of the country, a hunter by the name of Labadie, in company with a son—a small lad—trailed a bear which he had wounded into this cave. He entered it for the purpose of finishing the wounded bruin, or under the impression that he was already dead. He never came out alive again. His son, after waiting several hours for his father to come out, became alarmed and went back alone to St Louis. The locality not being then easily identified, nothing was accomplished, by way of recovering his remains, till several years ago, when a gentleman entered the place and solved the mystery of the long absence. The skeletons of man and bear were found together, where they died in an unwritten combat, and were again placed where they were found, as the most appropriate place of sepulture.
RAILROADS.
There are at present two railroads traversing the county—the Missouri Pacific skirting its northern limits, along the margin of the Missouri river—the St. Louis and San Francisco passing through the southeastern section, forming a junction with the former at Pacific. These are both among the most important lines of the country. The former has Kansas city for its western terminus, where it forms connections with the line extending to the Union Pacific, which connects, in its ramifications, the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The latter has at present its western terminus in the Indian Territory, but will, in a few years, reach, through its connections, to the Pacific slope, which, when complete, will give the county advantages to be derived from two great transcontinental railway systems.
Another railroad is needed, passing through the central part of the county, in order to open up its hitherto unused resources, and which will, in a short time, be realized. A company has already been organized to build a narrow gauge line, traversing the region alluded to, and passing through those counties now destitute of railroads towards the southwestern part of. the state.
ROADS.
There are several macadam roads already built. That connecting Union and Washington is as fine as any in the state. That leading from Washington westward is also a very fine public highway. The one running from Union and connecting with another traversing St. Louis county to the city of St. Louis, has only a small section properly built, and will require a further outlay of money before it is fit for public use. Sufficient means were expended to render it equal to the road from Union to Washington, but without reflecting personally or otherwise on any of the gentlemen who were responsible for its construction or acceptance by the county court, we must record that it is a public nuisance, and a damage to the country through which it passes.
SCHOOLS.
The system of free schools for the county is on a good basis at present. Most of the districts have good and comfortable houses and the attendance of the pupils is a fair average. Competent teachers are accessible and are now being employed, and the standard of education is gradually being elevated as the country advances in other improvements. There is a good public school in Union, where teachers of ability and experience find employment nine months of the year.
The public school building in Washington is a model of convenience and architecture, and will compare very favorably with any other of its kind in any of the towns of the state. It employs the first qualifications in teachers, and it has earned a reputation for thoroughness in the system of instruction imparted creditable both to the county and the city in which it is located. The public schools also in Pacific and New Haven are also efficient and well conducted, and those of the other towns are in keeping with the spirit of enlightened improvement that is everywhere prevalent among the American people.
CHURCHES.
The citizens of Franklin county are not neglecting the important and puissant element of the Christian religion, as is everywhere evidenced by the superb church property that is distributed over the area of the county. Washington can boast of its church edifices. Union is not behind in its buildings of a similar character. Lyon township claims among its other substantial improvements a number of fine cathedrals. Among the chief ornaments of Beouf are its churches, while Boles can claim also several nice substantial church buildings, whose architecture is indeed creditable. The pastors found connected with the various orders are, as a rule, well supported, and they constitute, as a class, a ministry of the word of life distinguished alike for intelligence and piety.
JOURNALISM.
The first newspaper' The Union Flag, was issued in Union. It was owned and edited by Giddings & Vanover. Its first number appeared August 7th, 1848 It was a Democratic sheet, intensely partisan, and immediately entered into the memorable campaign in which Cass and Taylor figured as candidates for the presidency of the United States. It was ably conducted, and would compare favorably with most of the country papers of the present day. Giddings, who appeared to be the ruling spirit, finally sold out to his partner, who ran it some two years as an independent paper, under the name of The Independent, when it died for the want of support.
The next effort in journalism was put forth in Washington, embodied in the form of The Courier, another Democratic paper. It was owned and conducted by Adelbert Baudissin and Dr. Crumsick.
The Washington Gazette was started in the same town in 1858, by C. M. Buck, as a Democratic paper. Buck was succeeded by J. A. Mathews, who continued its publication until July or August, 1861, when it was suppressed by orders of the military.
The Franklin County Advertiser was started in 1859 by a company, and was edited by J. W. Paramore till 1860, when the paper passed in-to the bands of H. C. Allen, who continued its publication as an exponent of Democratic doctrine till 1862, when it was also suppressed by military orders. Under the management of Mr. Paramore, it was an unconditional Union journal, but his successor, it was thought by the " powers that were," sided a little too strong with “Dixie,” and hence its suppression. Soon after the paper was suppressed under Mr. Allen, Mr. J. G. Megan took possession of the office, and conducted it as a Republican paper. Afterwards, in 1864, it was published by Megan & Crosby, then by Magan & Stafford, then by Pugh & Jamison, then by Jamison, until 1865, when it was sold to D. Murphy, who changed its name to The Observer, and its political principles back to Democracy.
Murphy also started a Democratic German paper called The Washington Free Press, and which was edited by a gentleman bearing the name Pohlmann, who conducted it till 1868, when it was discontinued. Murphy sold out to J. C. S. Foss, who sold an interest to the Menses, and then his entire interest to Mense & Mense, after which the establishment passed into the hands of Thomas P. Diggs & Co , and is conducted by Mr. Diggs as a Democratic sheet, under the name of The Franklin County Observer.
The Franklin County Progress was started in Union in 1865, as an expounder of the tenets of the Republican party. The first editor was Dr. Wm. Moore, who was afterwards succeeded by the following knights of the quill, viz J. W. Crary, J. Schick, A. Ackerman, M. II. Moore, H. Wesnage and J. C. Kiskaddon, after which it was sold to parties in Pacific, where it was run for a time as an Independent sheet by Jesse White, Esq., and then passed into the hands of its present editor, J. H. Combes, who conducts it as a Democratic paper, under the name of The Franklin County Democrat.
Dr. Sicconi commenced to publish a newspaper in the Polish language at Krakow, in this county, called The Polish Eagle, in 1870. After several years it was moved to Union, and flourished under the title of The Pilgrim. The editor became involved, and the concern passed into the hands of. John Barzinski, who conducted it until 1874, when it was sold out under deed of trust, and was removed to Detroit and afterwards to Chicago, where it still flourishes as the chief Polish paper in the United States. It was the only paper published in that language when it was started here.
continue on to the next page**franklin county mo 1878 plat: part 2**
published from the public domain.
previous page here
HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY—Continued.
RIVERS.
As already remarked, the Missouri river forms the northern boundary line of the county, and is one of i…
https://plantimals.org/posts/franklin-county-mo-1878-plat-continued/

2021-04-27 02:00:00

**third vcp appearance**
vance invited me back on the podcast. I always enjoy my conversations with vance, and I hope you will too. it’s hard to know if the language and topics are of interest to other people, but this is generally how it goes when we talk.
if you have any comments about our conversation please reach out to me on twitter, I’d enjoy hearing them.
this is the link to the podcast episode. and a link to the feed.**third vcp appearance**
vance invited me back on the podcast. I always enjoy my conversations with vance, and I hope you will too. it’s hard to know if the language and topics are of interest to other people, but this is generally how it goe…
https://plantimals.org/posts/third-vcp-appearance/

2021-04-22 02:00:00

**in the desert**
by Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
in the desert by carl haag
**in the desert**
by Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I li…
https://plantimals.org/posts/in-the-desert/

2021-04-21 02:00:00

**ivan bilibin**
the artist beksinski is challenging, but relatable to modern times. he presents dreamscapes, in many cases nightmares. but there’s something much more hopeful, if still dreamlike, in ivan bilibin.
bilibin’s work is dominated by russian folk culture. these images are distillations of the most memorable stories in this memeplex. even if you are not familiar with the stories, there’s an understanding that these are not frivilous images. something important is being conveyed, and presented with maniacal detail.
ivan, the firebird, and the grey wolf
vasilisa the beautiful
red rider
mushroom
the frog princess
ruslan and lyudmila
olonets province
volga
**ivan bilibin**
the artist beksinski is challenging, but relatable to modern times. he presents dreamscapes, in many cases nightmares. but there’s something much more hopeful, if still dreamlike, in ivan bilibin.
bilibin’s work is domi…
https://plantimals.org/posts/ivan-bilibin/

2021-04-19 02:00:00

**morels**
mid to late april in the midwest is morel mushroom season. once you’ve seen one, they’re hard to mistake. if you’re out walking keep your eyes open and you’ll find them growing out of the leaf liter around fallen trees and branches. they are by far the best mushroom, and even if you don’t like mushrooms, they go for ~$20 / lb.
common morel
**morels**
mid to late april in the midwest is morel mushroom season. once you’ve seen one, they’re hard to mistake. if you’re out walking keep your eyes open and you’ll find them growing out of the leaf liter around fallen …
https://plantimals.org/posts/morels/

2021-04-18 02:00:00

**ozymandias**
by Percy Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
luxor by sir william eden
**ozymandias**
by Percy Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer …
https://plantimals.org/posts/ozymandias/

2021-04-17 02:00:00

**on buying a farm**
cato the elder on buying a farm from de agricultura
When you are thinking of acquiring a farm, keep in mind these points: that you be not over-eager in buying nor spare your pains in examining, and that you consider it not sufficient to go over it once. However often you go, a good piece of land will please you more at each visit.
Notice how the neighbors keep up their places; if the district is good, they should be well kept. Go in and keep your eyes open, so that you may be able to find your way out. It should have a good climate, not subject to storms; the soil should be good, and naturally strong.
If possible, it should lie at the foot of a mountain and face south; the situation should be healthful, there should be a good supply of labourers, it should be well watered, and near it there should be a flourishing town, or the sea, or a navigable stream, or a good and much travelled road.
It should lie among those farms which do not often change owners; where those who have sold farms are sorry to have done so. It should be well furnished with buildings. Do not be hasty in despising the methods of management adopted by others.
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder. When you reach the steading, observe whether there are numerous oil presses and wine vats; if there are not, you may infer that the amount of the yield is in proportion.
The farm should be one of no great equipment, but should be well situated. See that it be equipped as economically as possible, and that the land be not extravagant.
Remember that a farm is like a man — however great the income, if there is extravagance but little is left.
If you ask me what is the best kind of farm, I should say:
a hundred iugera of land, comprising all sorts of soils, and in a good situation;
a vineyard comes first if it produces bountifully wine of a good quality;
second, a watered garden;
third, an osier-bed;
fourth, an oliveyard;
fifth, a meadow;
sixth, grain land;
seventh, a wood lot;
eighth, an arbustum;
ninth, a mast grove
source
**on buying a farm**
cato the elder on buying a farm from de agricultura
When you are thinking of acquiring a farm, keep in mind these points: that you be not over-eager in buying nor spare your pains in examining, and that you consider it not suf…
https://plantimals.org/posts/on-buying-a-farm/

2021-04-13 02:00:00

**wealth distribution**
let’s return to a recurring fixture in the startup/tech space, paul graham. previously I noted the idea of building up a mental model of some worthy personalities over time. if you have suggestions of people to follow over time, please engage with me on twitter @plantimals.
my first encounter with graham was in 2005 when I heard a podcast recording of a talk he gave at oscon about startups. one of his opening riffs was on the topic of wealth distribution, or more specifically, the distribution of innovation. his point was that an uneven distribution was not in itself a good thing, but the sign of a good thing. that if everyone were equally innovative, it would not be so because everyone was thomas edison, but because there are no thomas edisons.
that brings us to the present and graham’s most recent essay “how people get rich now”. he compares the most recent forbes 100 richest people list to one compiled in 1982, the key difference being the proportion of inherited wealth. 60 inheritors from 1982, down to 27 in 2020. graham suggests this is due to a resurgence in startups. wealth was trapped in a small number of hands due to the channelization of most US industries in the mid-20th century, but those monopolies are being disrupted by new businesses.
it may still be the case that the overall distribution of wealth is not more even, that the gini coefficient is going up, but this is a sign of a good thing, that being the rebuilding of economic dynamism. the differential in wealth is a sign of people trying and succeeding in building new businesses. if it weren’t happening, we’d have a more uniform distribution, but a dead economy.**wealth distribution**
let’s return to a recurring fixture in the startup/tech space, paul graham. previously I noted the idea of building up a mental model of some worthy personalities over time. if you have suggestions of people to follow …
https://plantimals.org/posts/wealth-distribution/

2021-04-12 02:00:00

**beksinski**
I find myself returning to the theme of dreams and dreaming. when I come across art that has this quality it arrests my attention and I feel obliged to let it sink in.
for example, my recent post ex oblivione is a republishing of a public domain hp lovecraft story which is a narration that is almost exclusively set in a dreamscape.
the article enter the supersensorium by erik hoel elaborates on some of his work in the field of neuroscience describing the “overfit brain hypothesis”. this line of thinking suggests a function for dreams along with a meaningful way to differentiate art from entertainment. that is, art is that set of inputs which works to loosen our overfit mental models, rather than running in the same grooves. in short, art is mentally challenging to understand.
the redbook by carl jung describes and analyzes his dreams in great detail. jung’s notion of archetypes as emanating from the collective unconscious and manifesting themselves in our dreams is fascinating to consider, even if it is only taken as a metaphor.
today I came across a painter that I must include in this new category of dream-like, reverie inducing… not sure about the right title for this pattern yet.
zdzisław beksiński
born in poland under the communist regime, beksinski produces amazing pieces that I am only beginning to grapple with. I now know this about myself, that it takes me a long time to properly contextualize art that I find compelling. for the moment, I can only try to convey a sense of awe and mystery, with a slight topspin of the phantasmogoric. the physical space and age implied by some of these works immediately recalls my mind to hp lovecraft’s description of the elder gods, or even his use of the term “blasphemous landscapes” in the story “the call of cthulhu” to describe the works produced by painters who were driven mad by dreams forced upon them by the awakening of cthulhu. these images are sourced from an online store that you can buy prints from beksstore.com. go browse the many paintings there. here are but a few that I thought best represented the reverie inducing pattern. they did not come with names, so I gave them descriptions of what seemed meaningful to me.
entropy and the sea
a society of island universes
buried in time
ley lines
shores of the cosmic sea
offering
outside in
**beksinski**
I find myself returning to the theme of dreams and dreaming. when I come across art that has this quality it arrests my attention and I feel obliged to let it sink in.
for example, my recent post ex oblivione is a republishing of a pu…
https://plantimals.org/posts/beksinski/

2021-04-11 02:00:00

**ceramic**
we live in a time great innovation in distributed systems. bitcoin, ethereum, IPFS, and many others worth tracking. self-sovereign identity (SSI) in particular is an area under development which has the potential to allow the creation of forms of authentication that allow the user to be in full control of their identity.
ceramic builds on what IPFS has established, adds SSI, and streams. IPFS is a layer for static files, with IPLD for graph-structured content. a recent ceramic blog does a better job laying it out:
Ceramic enables static files to be composed into higher-order mutable data structures, programmed to behave in any desired manner, and whose resulting state is stored and replicated across a decentralized network of nodes. Ceramic builds upon and extends the IPFS file system and underlying persistence networks, as well as other open standards in the decentralized ecosystem, with a general-purpose decentralized content computation substrate. Due to Ceramic’s permissionless design and unified global network, anyone in the world can openly create, discover, query, and build upon existing data without needing to trust a centralized server, integrate one-off APIs, or worry if the state of information being returned is correct.
the ceramic approach to streams is most interesting to me, and seems to suggest a strong contender for an implementation of distributed RSS:
Ceramic’s decentralized content computation network is modeled after various real-time stream processing frameworks found in Web2. In these types of systems, events are ingested, processed in real-time, and the resulting output is applied to a log. When queried and reduced, this log represents the current state of a piece of information. This is an appropriate framework for conceptualizing how dynamic information should be modeled on the decentralized web. Furthermore because the function that processes incoming events on any particular stream can be custom written with logic for any use case, it provides the general-purpose flexibility and extensibility needed to represent the diversity of information that may exist on the web.
On Ceramic, each piece of information is represented as an append-only log of commits, called a Stream. Each stream is a DAG stored in IPLD, with an immutable name called a StreamID, and a verifiable state called a StreamState. Streams are similar in concept to Git trees, and each stream can be thought of as its own blockchain, ledger, or event log.
I’m experimenting with ceramic now. if you are out there, thinking about RSS, distributed systems, SSI, and similar, I’d like to hear from you. twitter is a good way to start @plantimals.**ceramic**
we live in a time great innovation in distributed systems. bitcoin, ethereum, IPFS, and many others worth tracking. self-sovereign identity (SSI) in particular is an area under development which has the potential to allow the creation o…
https://plantimals.org/posts/ceramic/

2021-04-10 02:00:00

**ex oblivione by hp lovecraft**
trying to communicate the ultimate subjective experience, dreams, is a worthy goal. to that end, I reproduce here a short story by hp lovecraft, which has entered the public domain. for more of these please visit hplovecraft.com. previously on plantimals.org: dagon
ex oblivione by h.p. lovecraft – from the public domain
When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim’s body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.
Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and languorously under strange stars.
Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours, and undying roses.
And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little gate of bronze.
Many times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained stones of buried temples. And always the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown wall with the little gate of bronze therein.
After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of interest and new colours. And as I looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, I felt that beyond it lay a dream-country from which, once it was entered, there would be no return.
So each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied antique wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well.
Then one night in the dream-city of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled with the thoughts of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too wise ever to be born in the waking world. Therein were written many things concerning the world of dream, and among them was lore of a golden valley and a sacred grove with temples, and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate. When I saw this lore, I knew that it touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.
Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable gate, but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed more and more to cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to take it when next I awaked.
Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and the shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the small gate of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the giant twisted trees and the tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of the land from whence I should never return.
But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of drug and dream pushed me through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hoped to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.**ex oblivione by hp lovecraft**
trying to communicate the ultimate subjective experience, dreams, is a worthy goal. to that end, I reproduce here a short story by hp lovecraft, which has entered the public domain. for more of these please visit hp…
https://plantimals.org/posts/ex-oblivione-by-hp-lovecraft/

2021-04-09 02:00:00

**feed friday: 1729**
1729 is ramanujan’s number.
1729 is now also the name of Balaji S. Srinivasan’s new project.
website: https://1729.com
feed: https://1729.com/all/rss/
the 1729 feed is rather new, but it has been a fascinating read so far. balaji (I’d normally refer to creators by their last names, but in this instance I believe that would be less clear) is trying to put together a community via the internet. he is a proponent of the notion of digital sovereignty, and my favorite rational optimist. he can be found on twitter as @balajis. he had a conversation with tim in which he describes the 1729 concept in great depth, along with a lot of other fascinating ideas.
for an example of the kind of content I enjoy most from the 1729 feed, try “how to start a new country”.**feed friday: 1729**
1729 is ramanujan’s number.
1729 is now also the name of Balaji S. Srinivasan’s new project.
website: https://1729.com
feed: https://1729.com/all/rss/
the 1729 feed is rather new, but it has been a fascinating read…
https://plantimals.org/posts/1729/

2021-04-08 02:00:00

**diffusion limited aggregation**
some algorithms have an attraction. beyond the straightforward utility of providing a measurable solution to a highly defined problem, some of them are satisfying analogs of natural processes, or seem promising windows on the mechanics of reality. I’m not sure how to categorize them, but there’s also a class of algorithms that have a particularly visual satisfaction, that explain some process and provide an intuition, that intuition being not a new thing, but the alignment of something previously recognized, falling into place.
the original diffusion limited aggregation algorithm was described in Diffusion-Limited Aggregation, a Kinetic Critical Phenomenon by T. A. Witten, Jr 1. in it, witten describes his approach:
Our model is a variant of the eden model whose initial state is a seed particle at the origin of a lattice. A second particle is added at some random site at large distance from the origin. This particle walks randomly until it visits a site adjacent to the seed. Then the walking particle becomes part of the cluster. Another particle is now introduced at a random distant point, and it walks randomly until it joins the cluster, and so forth. If a particle touches the boundaries of the lattice in its random walk it is removed and another introduced. A similar process was studied by Rosenstock and Marquardt. The exposed ends of our clusters tend to grow more rapidly than other perimeter sites because perimeter sites near the center are “shadowed”; our aggregates should be less compact than the Eden clusters.
Fig. 1 from Witten ‘80
given the original author’s verbal description of the algorithm and his illustration, I’ll show what I did.
first, the code and some example images can be found at the github repo here. I wrote this code about seven years ago. if I were doing it again, I’d make some different decisions. specifically I’d use go instead of python and work out some parallelization, and allow for animated gifs to show the development of the output over time. much like the 100 books concept, I often return to algorithm implementations over time and redo them in new languages, in new paradigms.
DLA output 1
experimenting with the program, adding mutliple initial seeds results in multiple structures that grow together over time.
DLA with 5 seeds
and if you start with a line of seeds at the bottom, you get this highly directional growth.
line of seeds across the bottom
I was aware of the diffusion limited aggregation algorithm for a while, but was ultimately motivated to implement it and tinker with it when after a winter road trip, I noticed these patterns of precipitated salt on the side of my car. the “DLA with 5 seeds” is what ultimately explains the connection. I believe a similar process to that of the DLA was at work as salty water splashed onto the side of my car and dried out due to air rushing by at highway speeds. as the water dried, the salt precipitated out in the DLA pattern.
dried salt on the side of my car
this is one of most enjoyable parts of computing, complexity, and nature. when they all overlap in some meaningful way, it feels like the jolt of enjoyment at learning something new, or having realization that two previously unrelated things are in fact related.
Diffusion-Limited Aggregation, a Kinetic Critical Phenomenon by T. A. Witten, Jr ↩︎
**diffusion limited aggregation**
some algorithms have an attraction. beyond the straightforward utility of providing a measurable solution to a highly defined problem, some of them are satisfying analogs of natural processes, or seem promising win…
https://plantimals.org/posts/diffusion-limited-aggregation/

2021-04-07 02:00:00

**ipfs pinning service api**
I still owe you a detailed introduction to IPFS, as promised in my post centralized fragility, and that is on its way.
in the mean time, for those of you who don’t need an introduction, but like me, were not aware of this new feature…
ipfs pinning services api
the ipfs pinning services api allows you to add a remote service, very much like a remote repo in git, and pin local files to a remote service which implements this api.
pinata has been a great choice for pinning service so far. the service is easy to use and has been reliably up since I started using it.
read about the pinning services api spec here.
add pinata thusly:
❯ ipfs pin remote service add pinata https://api.pinata.cloud/psa <your jwt here>
then to pin something:
❯ ipfs pin remote add --service=pinata --name=war-and-peace.txt bafybeib32tuqzs2wrc52rdt56cz73sqe3qu2deqdudssspnu4gbezmhig4
it’s that easy. I lifted the example directly from pinata’s post.
I have been using pinata to host the ipfs version of plantimals.org, and this feature will reduce the amount of toil I have in publishing that version. I still need to re-run hugo and set all links to relative paths, but now I can fully script it without much trouble. previously I found myself needing to log into pinata to execute the upload and remove the old pinned version.
to access the ipfs version of this site, there are several options. the easiest is to use a gateway: https://dweb.link/ipns/plantimals.org. if you are a brave browser user, and you have ipfs support turned on, you can go to ipns://plantimals.org. say something on twitter if you use brave and it worked for you.**ipfs pinning service api**
I still owe you a detailed introduction to IPFS, as promised in my post centralized fragility, and that is on its way.
in the mean time, for those of you who don’t need an introduction, but like me, were not aware…
https://plantimals.org/posts/ipfs-pinning-service-api/

2021-04-06 02:00:00

**the revelations begin**
I discovered the works of erik hoel, specifically his article “will the bitcoin bubble pop? or will it envelope us all?” which I wrote about previously here.
hoel’s works have motivated me to keep digging. I find them to be truly unique in scope and inspiration. to that end, when I found that hoel was in the process of publishing a novel I was excited to get at it as soon as possible.
today was the day it arrived, and I can’t put it down. I’ll be back when I’m done reading it with a review. so far, I had a laugh out loud moment at a joke told in the book:
“what does the b in benoit b mandelbrot stand for?”
“benoit b mendelbrot”
hoel dives deep on how he thinks about writing in general and this novel in specific in this conversation. he posits that the novel is the perfect delivery mechanism for musing about consciousness, which is ultimately what the book is about, and I agree with him.
so go get this book and talk to me about it when you’re done reading. the revelations by erik hoel
The Revelations by Erik Hoel
**the revelations begin**
I discovered the works of erik hoel, specifically his article “will the bitcoin bubble pop? or will it envelope us all?” which I wrote about previously here.
hoel’s works have motivated me to keep digging…
https://plantimals.org/posts/the-revelations-begin/

2021-04-05 02:00:00

**six spotted tiger beetle**
I spotted this beast yesterday and was able to approach close enough to take a picture of it eating something. if you can identify the prey, please let me know. it looks like an ant or a spider, but it’s hard to tell.
the six-spotted tiger beetle
**six spotted tiger beetle**
I spotted this beast yesterday and was able to approach close enough to take a picture of it eating something. if you can identify the prey, please let me know. it looks like an ant or a spider, but it’s hard to t…
https://plantimals.org/posts/six-spotted-tiger-beetle/

2021-04-04 02:00:00

**phase changes**
pattern language entry: phase change
the organization of matter progresses through a series of changes depending upon the temperature and pressure present. these changes are through a series of phases, or states, most of which will be familiar: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.
solid matter has a fixed volume and shape. sometimes solids an internal structure, a crystal lattice. liquids take the shape of their container, but have a fixed volume. gases have neither fixed shape nor fixed volume. they take the shape and volume of their container. plasma is similar to gas, lacking a fixed volume or shape, but is electrically conductive, has magnetic fields, and is responsive to electromagnetic fields.
in each case, there are transitions between the phases, and we have names for them. moving from solid to liquid is melting, liquid back to solid is freezing. liquid to gas is vaporization, gas to liquid is condensation. gas to plasma is ionization, and plasma to gas is deionization. there’s even a name for solid to gas, sublimation, and gas to solid, deposition.
the phases or states of matter are not chemical or nuclear changes. the same atoms configured in the same molecules are present. the only thing changes is the pressure and temperature, where phase falls out as an emergent property.
last week I used the phase change pattern to describe the stages of economic development mentioned in the sovereign individual.
hunting and gathering
agricultural
industrial
information
it occured to me that I had not defined the concept of phase change in the previous post. so the above is my attempt to put the reader in the right frame of mind to consider these stages of development and how we might move between them.
the authors contend that we are currently in a phase transition between the industrial and information stages. this seems reasonable. they draw an analogy to the fall of rome. not to suggest that our conditions are similar, or to even to necessarily suggest our civlization will collapse, but to point out that due to the logic of such situations, the average person will not be aware of this transition, just as the average person living under the roman empire was not necessarily aware of its fall. the empire would not itself have advertised its declining ability to collect taxes or defend the borders, but would have made every attempt to keep people feeling like they were in control.
this incentive also exists today. the mainstream media are not likely to tell us when they start losing their grip. the structure of power in our society grants many groups power that will be guarded jealously, and any narrative that undermines it will be attacked. I am not making a moral judgement here, only observing the structure of incentives. I am also not suggesting our society is collapsing, just that it is changing rapidly. the transition from industrial to information pulls some groups to the core and centrifugally shoves others out.
this is an attempt to explain what I observe in our public discourse. it feels like a culture, our memeplex, is undergoing meiosis, organizing itself along a dividing line, with the two daughter cells having different compliments of memes in their resulting memeplexes. this is not something I welcome, as it is likely to be destabilizing, and to increase time preference. time preference is the degree to which we discount the future value of goods. so a high time preference indicates a desire for current consumption, for whatever reason. in this case, the reason seems to be uncertainty about the future. this is highly corrosive of civilization, which has been a gradual reduction of time preferences over time and an accrual of capital goods, pushing up the marginal productivity of labor.**phase changes**
pattern language entry: phase change
the organization of matter progresses through a series of changes depending upon the temperature and pressure present. these changes are through a series of phases, or states, most of which wil…
https://plantimals.org/posts/phase-changes/

2021-04-03 02:00:00

**360 experiments**
I’ve been tinkering with VR after getting an oculus quest 2 for christmas. I’ve previously mentioned using the aframe library to spin up basic content quickly.
check out this oceanic setting: become ocean
and a random collection of photospheres: 360
if you’re on a smartphone you should be able to sweep it around in physical space and view these scenes in “smart window” mode. you can also rotate by dragging left or right. if you have an oculus or similar, you can navigate to these items and hit the “vr” button and jump into the scene.**360 experiments**
I’ve been tinkering with VR after getting an oculus quest 2 for christmas. I’ve previously mentioned using the aframe library to spin up basic content quickly.
check out this oceanic setting: become ocean
and a rando…
https://plantimals.org/posts/360-experiments/

2021-04-02 02:00:00

**feed friday: schneier on security**
this week’s feed friday is bruce schneier’s blog:
website: https://www.schneier.com/
feed: https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/
schneier is a researcher and writer on cryptography, who has himself developed several algorithms. he is one of those people I’ve gotten value in tracking longitudinally over time. he’s an outlier on blockchain, as in, he’s skeptical. the best I can summarize his position is that he sees blockchain as shifting trust from a set of people to an implementation of an algorithm and the underlying systems it runs on. I get the impression that he thinks blockchain is as likely to work as any other technology, he just doesn’t see a use-case. he seems unimpressed by the goal of decentralization. and to my mind this is something to be treasured. schneier is a thoughtful, competent cryptographer who is capable of communicated thoughts with the public, both in blog and book form.
schneier is an author on one of the classic books on cryptography, the first edition was known as “applied cryptography”, with the current edition being cyptography engineering: design principles and practical applications.**feed friday: schneier on security**
this week’s feed friday is bruce schneier’s blog:
website: https://www.schneier.com/
feed: https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/
schneier is a researcher and writer on cryptography, who has himself de…
https://plantimals.org/posts/scheier-on-security/

2021-04-01 02:00:00

**mountains of possibility**
sometimes twitter brings fodder for interesting conversation. I’m down on centralized social media a lot lately, but I’ve enjoyed it over the last 11 years, and still occasionally get some utility out of it. for instance, I happened across the following diagram:
We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands. pic.twitter.com/RSZ1d3W642— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) March 5, 2021
it’s simple concept, but communicated beautifully. your life is a series of decisions, and at each point you are simultaneously closing off possibilities and going deeper on others. sometimes visualizations bring the point home and collapse the meaning into a smaller mental artifact than a long-winded description.
this concept rhymes with something I’ve been looking for a good way to communicate. one of the key differences between living things and non-living things the internal complexity which results in increased difficulty in predicting their future state. the moon orbiting the earth, while quite large, is not that complex. it is easy to predict its location far into the future. similarly predicting the future position of a person in the future is much harder, mostly due to our complexity as living things, but also especially due to our brains. a prediction would need to take into account our culture, calendars, social lives, and many other aspects that are hugely complicated.
the brain is way of packing an immense amount of complexity into our bodies, which maximizes the possible future states we can be in. without human brains, the possibility that we’d be located in buildings would be exactly zero. but with them, the possibilities may literally be infinite.
imagine a tall mountain. the peak comes to a point and the base is spread out over miles. now imagine a ball bearing, held directly over the highest point of this mountain, such that if it were dropped, it is equally likely that it would fall down the east face of the mountain as the south as the west as the north. so the location of the ball after dropping it could anywhere on the face of the mountain or at the based of it, spread out over a surface area of many square miles. sort of like a giant pachinko machine.
I use the imagery of the mountain to explain the immense complexity of the human brain, and it occurred to me that the image in the above mentioned tweet is a great analog. turn the branching flow sideways and imagine that at each branch point the ball strikes the mountain, the different paths taken represent the different angles at which the ball caroms off the mountain resulting in it taking different paths down the mountain.
in this mode of thinking, the path of the ball is determined by the drop, but known to the entity dropping the ball, only time playing out will reveal the actual course of the ball bearing down the mountain. this matches with what seems to be correct about human actions as well. there’s nothing about our actions that is undetermined by the physical matter that makes us up, and yet our brains are so complex that predicting the outcome with any specificity is currently beyond our capabilities. this leads us to the philosophical position on free will known as compatibilism. it is the belief that determinism and free will aren’t mutually exclusive. I think there’s a lot to be wrangled with there, and I’m not sure I sign off on all of it, especially without a detailed description of “free will”, but I do like the implication that complexity renders our actions currently unpredictable, which may be good enough to be thought of as a form of free will.
if you have clarifying thoughts or suggestions let me know, I’m interested in honing this line of thinking.**mountains of possibility**
sometimes twitter brings fodder for interesting conversation. I’m down on centralized social media a lot lately, but I’ve enjoyed it over the last 11 years, and still occasionally get some utility out of it.…
https://plantimals.org/posts/mountains-of-possibility/

2021-03-31 02:00:00

**samizdat**
get started fast with IPFS. self-publish a markdown document that renders into html and is hosted on the inter-planetary file system by pinata.cloud. link a domain name to it. access it via gateways. share something valuable.
find the souce code on github
self-published markdown, packaged for the distributed web
what is markdown?
dead-simple syntax for formatting text. there are headings, lists, links, images, and more.
make a new folder
write markdown in that folder
add samizdat files
publish
samizdat files
download the four files from the following links into your new folder
index.md - the markdown
index.html - the html
markerd.min.js - render the markdown
retro.css - style
edit index.html to change the title of your page, or even to swap in a different style. the included style retro.css was created by John Otander.
to support multiple pages copy and rename index.htmland index.md accordingly. don’t forget to change line 11 of the html to match the new .md file name.
publish
we’ve addressed the ‘self’ part, now the publishing. there are many ways to get this content in front of readers. the traditional way being to drop these files in a folder served by a webserver. this could be locally on your machine, ftp to a remote machine, even placed in an aws s3 bucket and served as static files. so if this is your outlet to the world go for it. however, I was inspired to create this project by the inter-planetary file system (ipfs).
the tl;dr of ipfs is: distributed, content-addressed replacement for current concepts of addressing. content-addressed implies that you can ask for a chunk of data (could be a file), and no matter who first created it, anyone who has a copy of it can supply the data. this is where the “inter-planetary” part comes in. our current system of DNS and IP addresses is brittle and centralized. the following analogy, which I paraphrase, does good work explaining the differences:
You would like to get a book recommended by a friend.
Friend A: go to the Half Price Books in University City, MO, go to the 3rd isle, top shelf, and pick the 11th book from the left.
vs
Friend B: find the book with ISBN# 978-0-521-19533-1
Friend A is analogous to our current system of DNS and IP addresses. So that if the particular book store closes, is blocked by political boundaries, or even someone moved the book, retrieval of the book will fail. Friend B’s addressing allows us to find the nearest copy, or request one from remote gateways (online book stores).
content-addressing in ipfs is accomplished by hashing the content and using the resulting hash value as the address. in this way, the requestor can be certain that they are retrieving the data they expected by hashing the result and verifying that it matches the address, since changing just one bit of the data would result in a completely different hash value.
cli
if you have ipfs installed on your local machine, you can tinker with the mark down and tune things to your preferences quickly. if you have the command line installed, go to the directory with the aforementioned samizdat files and run:
❯ ipfs add -r .
added QmRJ9qkHWJZ2LeNMeXPsShSo7aZHRn1JNHUK91fx3NXkWC samizdat/index.html
added QmNVSVsd66vNUceAk7Zxwktc9eHYjiXDCiAkPc8e3kC5Yt samizdat/index.md
added QmRetfKYCsEisoBNeZAqhRDxix2cf7FXVBM622hb7K1kxd samizdat/marked.min.js
added Qmb9UHGTsJj4cKc84tjY7i18wrVNqbMH7JWNMweDqFGuwp samizdat/retro.css
added QmQrmokAuv3kfXFGBdFXTJHvpwXuueBPq9PQSf93Gcz6JD samizdat
47.99 KiB / 47.99 KiB [==========================================] 100.00%
the long gnarly strings like QmQrmokAuv3kfXFGBdFXTJHvpwXuueBPq9PQSf93Gcz6JD are the addresses of your content. each one represents the constituent files, and the one labeled samizdat is the folder containing those files. so if you were to view the contents of that chunk of data, it would look like:
ipfs object get QmQrmokAuv3kfXFGBdFXTJHvpwXuueBPq9PQSf93Gcz6JD | jq .
{
"Links": [
{
"Name": "index.html",
"Hash": "QmRJ9qkHWJZ2LeNMeXPsShSo7aZHRn1JNHUK91fx3NXkWC",
"Size": 949
},
{
"Name": "index.md",
"Hash": "QmNVSVsd66vNUceAk7Zxwktc9eHYjiXDCiAkPc8e3kC5Yt",
"Size": 2038
},
{
"Name": "marked.min.js",
"Hash": "QmRetfKYCsEisoBNeZAqhRDxix2cf7FXVBM622hb7K1kxd",
"Size": 43889
},
{
"Name": "retro.css",
"Hash": "Qmb9UHGTsJj4cKc84tjY7i18wrVNqbMH7JWNMweDqFGuwp",
"Size": 2316
}
],
"Data": "\b\u0001"
}
we see above that the folder is just a series of links(hashes) to the files that live in that folder.
if you are using Brave locally, you should now be able to slap an ipfs protocol specifier on your folder’s hash and see the results ipfs://QmQrmokAuv3kfXFGBdFXTJHvpwXuueBPq9PQSf93Gcz6JD.
this also exposes an annoying, but useful feature of content based addressing: it cannot be truly self-referential. in order to add the address of this document to itself, I would need to have every bit of it known, and the address itself can’t be known until every bit is present. so by adding that calculated address I’d be changing the document and its address.
to ensure success in the above exercise, run your own experiment and use the hash values you get instead of the ones I use as stand-ins here.
browser plugin
if you have the ipfs companion browser plugin installed, you can the icon, then the “my node” button. you’ll see a page which has tabs for status, files, explore, peers, and settings. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with all of these, but our interest today is the files tab. once you click through, notice the “+ import” button in the upper right. click this, choose “folder”, and select the folder I mentioned earlier where the samizdat files are staged. this will upload them into the IPFS network and show you the hash values, but you can avoid the command line.
pinata
pinata.cloud is a service that will pin IPFS files as a service. this is a quick and easy way to get started. they have a free tier of up to 1GB of files, and it only takes signing up with an email. this is by far the easiest, most likely to be still working in 3 months, option for the dedicated self-publisher.
once you’ve created an account, go to the pinata upload page, click the “upload directory” button, and upload your samizdat directory. give it a name to help you later distinguish this pin from any others you might upload. now the pin explorer and you should see your pin, with it’s hash address as a clickable link. clicking that link should take you to your samizdat markdown page.
pinata links are actually gateway links, which are a way to access IPFS content from the location-based web.
https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmVR666qRP814YV7iNtPvvpRwynX2JC67KhJYz4BZFjDcf
you can use this gateway by swapping out the hash for any other chunk of content. this particular gateway will be certain to have the blocks of data behind your hashes if you’ve uploaded them via the pinata upload page. however, they are still accessible even if you uploaded your data via cli, browser extension, or something else, but they will likely take a long time to resolve at first. this is due to the work going on behind the scenes to find an IPFS node that holds the requested block. if you’re behind a NAT router on your home network, this will also potentially block access from the outside. all of these issues have reasonable solutions, but require time and effort, which is something I hope to minimize with samizdat. the goal is to get you focused on the content you want to publish, rather than the publishing itself.
at first this all seems foreign and strange, but after a few iterations of working on your markdown, uploading it, then viewing it, you’ll get the hang of it and it will seem obvious.
a pointer to the content
another sharp edge of the IPFS world is handling change over time. if you share the above pinata gateway link with someone, and then decide you’d like to add or change the content of the page, that person will not see your changes. since the address references the exact bytes that made up your files when uploaded, that is exactly what they will see. so one option is to just re-share a link to your new hash, the new content.
instead, we’ll use a built-in solution for this problem, the inter-planetary name system (ipns). this allows us to share the ipns link, and then re-point that link to new content as we make changes. first we’ll create a private key to sign the ipns record with. anyone who has this private key will have the ability to update this link.
ipfs key gen samizdat
generates a key named samizdat. then use that key to sign the hash
ipfs name publish --key samizdat /ipfs/QmVR666qRP814YV7iNtPvvpRwynX2JC67KhJYz4BZFjDcf
Published to k51qzi5uqu5djz0b01hwmq0bquwe0ftm3jqt4uvs77h0jxdwgbqo85wjiekl2u: /ipfs/QmVR666qRP814YV7iNtPvvpRwynX2JC67KhJYz4BZFjDcf
the output k51qzi5uqu5djz0b01hwmq0bquwe0ftm3jqt4uvs77h0jxdwgbqo85wjiekl2u is the ipns hash to share with people. this is also accessible via the gateways, but instead of using the ipfs prefix, swap in ipns. for example
https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipns/k51qzi5uqu5djz0b01hwmq0bquwe0ftm3jqt4uvs77h0jxdwgbqo85wjiekl2u
again, expect the first time you use an ipns record to have a very long wait time (potentially minutes), as the network needs to produce the record linking this hash to its content. just give it time.
dnslink
one final step to ease access in our not yet distributed web is to point a domain name at this ipns record so there’s a human readable way to access the page. there are detailed instructions available on dnslink from the ipfs website. I used samizdat.me to point to this page.
conclusion
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
the only antidote to the loneliness of living in a society of island universes is building something. write about an experience, explain an idea, teach people who to do something useful**samizdat**
get started fast with IPFS. self-publish a markdown document that renders into html and is hosted on the inter-planetary file system by pinata.cloud. link a domain name to it. access it via gateways. share something valuable.
find the …
https://plantimals.org/posts/samizdat/

2021-03-30 02:00:00

**networking**
the concept of networking gets thrown around a lot. I think the importance of it is often lost in the throw-away phraseology. it is not an accident that this word also applies to other things. namely, collections with many individual parts, put in relation to one another. there are networks of: computers, roads, rivers, ecological interactions, economic flows, family trees, electricity, gene interactions, and the ever-popular social networks.
there’s a core mathematical abstraction underlying all of these things, that being the graph. graphs decompose networks into nodes and edges. nodes are the things in the network, while edges are the connections between those things. this is the very essence of pattern languages, moving between levels of specificity, from specific to general, and then back down from general to specific. all of the aforementioned specific cases of networks share this one general property: they can be modeled as graphs, and any conclusions that are true for graphs are also true (some interpretation may be required) on any of these specific network cases. for instance, there are algorithms for finding the shortest path between two nodes in a network.
dijkstra's algorithm from wikipedia
shortest path algorithms work whether the nodes represent a road network (in this case intersections are nodes and the roads they connect are the edges), and google maps is using it to find you a route, or whether they represent your linkedin connections and you’re asking what’s the closest connection you have to company xyz.
from the vantage point of graphs, zoomed out to the abstract, zoom back in to the concept of “networking” as it is usually meant in non-technical contexts, connecting with other people. we can use the logic of graphs to give us a sort of physics of networks, that can give us suggestions of how to achieve certain goals.
in graph terminology, a fully connected set of nodes, that is, each node has a direct connection to every other node, is called “clique”. in social networks, digital or analog, people are represented by nodes and their relationships by edges. imagine a group of people, where every person in the group knows every other person in the group.
our minds tend to default to linear thinking. sometimes this is a mistake, depending on what we’re after. in a clique, the number of nodes goes up by 1 for each new person added. linear growth. but the more meaningful number is the number of connections between nodes. the group has just one more member, but each individual in the group is adding a new connection, so the number of of connections goes up by (n - 1), where n is the total number of people in the group, each time someone is added. then the total number of connections is n ( n - 1 ) / 2. we divide by two so we don’t count both sides of the connection, since we’re considering A knows B as equal to B knows A. the number of connections is on the order of n x n, n^2, or n squared. this is non-linear.
so if the effect that you’re after scales based on the number of relationships in the group, you are getting super-linear scaling when adding people to the network. one instance of this is the birthday problem. paraphrased, it is: how many people should be in a group before there’s a 0.5 probability (50% chance) that two of them will share a birthday? the answer is un-intuitive. quick guesses usually land around half the number of days in a year. but it turns out the answer is surprisingly small at 23. this is because the possible connections scales on the number of relationships between people, not linearly on the total number of people in the group.
non-linearity is the realm of surprising effects and compounding returns on early investments.
take those words to heart: compounding returns. the more people you add to your network, the more interconnections you have, you are investing in growth. there are costs and benefits to everything, but sometimes they scale asymmetrically, leading to un-intuitive strategies.**networking**
the concept of networking gets thrown around a lot. I think the importance of it is often lost in the throw-away phraseology. it is not an accident that this word also applies to other things. namely, collections with many individual…
https://plantimals.org/posts/networking/

2021-03-29 02:00:00

**pater patriæ by h l mencken**
originally published in 1918, this work of H L Mencken is in the public domain
If George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would be for the whole camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and professional patriots! He was the Rockefeller of his time, the richest man in the United States, a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, an exploiter of mines and timber. He was a bitter opponent of foreign entanglements, and denounced the evils in harsh, specific terms. He had a liking for forthright and pugnacious men, and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters and all other such obscurantists. He was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the Republic from them. He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors.
Inhabiting These States today, George would be ineligible for any office of honor or profit. The Senate would never dare confirm him; the President would not thin of nominating him. He would be on trial in the newspapers for belonging to the Money Power. The Sherman Act would have him in its toils; he would be under indictment by every grand jury south of the Potomac; the Methodists of his native State would be denouncing him (he had a still at Mount Vernon) as a debaucher of youth, a recruiting officer for insane asylums, a poisoner of the home. And what a chance there would be for that ambitious young district attorney who thought to shadow him on his peregrinations - and grab him under the Mann Act!**pater patriæ by h l mencken**
originally published in 1918, this work of H L Mencken is in the public domain
If George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would be for the whole camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and professio…
https://plantimals.org/posts/pater-patri%C3%A6-by-h-l-mencken/

2021-03-28 01:00:00

**century books**
the phrase
it’s better to read 100 books 10 times than 1,000 books once
is stuck in my imagination.
for every book I read I use a 3x5 card as a bookmark and note on it when I started and when I finish. I’ll also take any notes, parts that interested me, words I enjoyed or didn’t know, and paraphrasing of important messages. so I have a growing stack of these cards, but I don’t do any specific accounting of them. I’m not worried about my velocity. I read quickly enough for my purpose, which is to understand more about those areas that seem most valuable for me to understand. this does not limit me to nonfiction, as I think there are many truths that can only be expressed via fiction.
the first non-children’s book I read of my own volition was a version of cosmos by carl sagan, adapted from the original tv series. it was such a rewarding thing that I have been reading for my own enjoyment ever since. once I jumped to fiction, starting with jurassic park by micheal crichton, I found a niche in science fiction that resonated. I spent years looking for out of print books in the foundation series by isaac asimov, or old prints of classic hard science fiction novels with fantastic cover art in used book stores. this was mostly before amazon.
I’ve read many books over the years, but there is a subset of them that I’ve read multiple times. it occurs to me that I would like to choose rather than find, that subset, and go deep on those that are worthy. I will still read books that I don’t consider part of my century collection, as the novelty search must go on as it has. it’s just that some percentage of the time, rather than picking a new book, I will consult the list and reread a century book.
no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man
Heraclitus
let the river be a book. the man still changes over time, while the book does not. this is an opportunity for self-reflection. each time you read a book, you are a different person. hopefully a better person. some books speak differently to you based on where you’re at in life.
the century books are my attempt to collect those books that are worthy of measuring myself against, that I feel have more to teach than one pass can absorb. my criteria for how to add books to the list will evolve, and I’ll keep a record of that on the list. but for now, my only requirement is that I’d enjoy reading the book more than twice. I don’t know that I’ll read any book 10 times. perhaps if audio book listening is included, but that’s a different behavior in my opinion, a much lower bandwidth mode of communication.
my current list is here.**century books**
the phrase
it’s better to read 100 books 10 times than 1,000 books once
is stuck in my imagination.
for every book I read I use a 3x5 card as a bookmark and note on it when I started and when I finish. I’ll also take…
https://plantimals.org/posts/100-books/

2021-03-27 01:00:00

**the sovereign individual**
I enjoy using the imagery of Aldous Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception line describing every human group as a “society of island universes”. that image strikes at the root of my conception of the individual. in a very real sense, we all have a unique window on the universe from our individual perspective which can never be shared and no other person can cause our body to act. I refer to this as absolute individual sovereignty. sovereignty because we have the power to act in whatever way occurs to us to act, and absolute in that no other entity can ever come between us and our actions. there may well be consequences to our actions, and other entities can use threats, violence, or other tactics in an attempt to influence us, but ultimately it is our will that determines our actions. I made a similar point when describing my thoughts on attention:
…attention can never be taken. there can be dire consequences, threats, violence, etc., but in the end every individual has the ultimate and final veto on what to focus their attention on. this implies that all attention is voluntarily given…
this perspective can be jarring. I am not making normative claims about how individuals should act or what individuals should value, but about what I believe the our situation is. I believe that humans evolved as a uniquely social animal and that our future survival depends on navigating our interactions with other people as well as possible. by analogy, just as molecules have their own properties, and can be changed by chemical reactions, there is a level below which the paradigm changes, and we are talking about atoms, and changes cannot be made to them without nuclear reactions. in this case, groups of people are molecules and individuals are atoms. there’s even some strong symmetry in the wording there, as individual comes from the latin, that which cannot be divided, while atom comes from the greek (a-tomos) for that which cannot be divided.
I realize that my thoughts on this matter are not original. I am synthesizing points of view that have been transmitted to me by means of culture over my lifetime. I absorb them, process them, and they emerge here. it is my goal to deliberately expose myself to sources of ideas that challenge my assumptions, or at the very least understand what previous thinkers have thought along these lines. so let this be an explicit call to help to the reader: if you think I’m missing a key connection, one which confirms, disconfirms, turns sideways, makes irrelevant, my views, please let me know.
this connection of idiosyncratic thoughts to artifacts of culture is a way of forming a durable pattern language. to that end, I came across the book
"the sovereign individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg and have set about reading it. it was written in 1997 or there-abouts, with a new preface written by Peter Thiel in January of 2020. so this particular version of the book has no roots in the world of covid. the late 90’s feels like an eternity ago when considering our current situation, but I think this will end up being a useful feature. it’s hard to notice changes that come in small doses over a long period of time. those changes become more obvious once we have different vantage point.
the authors lay out the concept of four stages of economic life:
hunting and gathering
agricultural
industrial
information
the transition from one stage to the next is marked by a revolution. the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the … information revolution? the name of that last transition does not yet feel like a term in common use, probably because it’s still in progress. the stage transitions result in an upheaval of the previous social order, with the next seeming strange and new to the previous. there is a key progression though, that of duration. the agricultural revolution took place over millennia. farming gradually spread out from the fertile crescent, the far east, central america, etc to europe, north africa, north america, etc from ~10 kya to 2kya. then the industrial revolution took centuries to spread from northern europe and north america to the rest of the world. the information revolution is currently underway and will be completed within a lifetime. the transitions don’t eliminate the previous economic modes, but they are a phase change, an emergent order that coalesces from the bottom up. while some hunting and gathering societies exist to this day, the majority of the world is current caught up in the process of the completion of the industrial revolution or passing the threshold of the information revolution.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg use the book to outline their expectations for the information revolution and its impact on society, the changes to culture that will result as the mode of production shifts to information-based. one specific prediction they made is the downsizing of the role of politics, or at least the role of the state. it would be easy from the vantage point of Q1 2021 to say they are way off on that one. and history may conclude as much, but I suspect there is something worth recovering from this outlook. they describe politics as similar to religion in the late 15th century, as a paradigm which had reached its apogee, and has since started a decline due to reduced effectiveness. they don’t use the term, but I would call increasing cost associated with decreasing output enforced by one’s position in society a form of rent-seeking or grift. religion hasn’t gone away, but it is less influential than it was in the late 15th century, and the authors suggest this to be an analogy to politics in our time. while it’s clear that politics gets a lot of attention, it’s not as clear how seriously people take it. I get the impression that people treat it more as a form of entertainment, a sort of reality-tv show, than they do as a set of events to be seriously understood and dealt with.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg also suggest a trend of “declining returns to violence”, implying that the role of the state as a protector, either from other states or from individuals, is less important. this point I’m less charitable on, but still see a lot of value in the discussion. it seems like violence has returned in the form of terrorism, riots, and state-to-state warfare. whether or not this is profitable for the entities engaged in the violence remains to be seen. the value I see in this discussion then comes from understanding the causes of this increase in violence and the likely routes we might take to mitigate it or situate ourselves to suffer less from it. it may turn out that politics is itself responsible for creating this violence, and that people will recognize this and reject the notion that the state can be the cause of and solution to this greatest of concerns. as the information revolution plays out, this question will draw factions to provide various answers.
another prediction of the authors is the formation of “cognitive elites” and increasing returns to merit. each stage has some defining characteristics, one of those being the dominant mode of selection of elites. in the hunting and gathering phase, physical strength and ability was it, might makes right. in the agricultural phase it shifted to a hereditary mode, with the control of land transmitting down bloodlines being the means of transmission. the industrial age being dominated by access to capital. the cognitive elites of the information stage are said to represent a unit of merit, that they can produce an output that society values, and will be able to distribute and reap the benefits of that production without the intervention of the state or other middle-men.
there will be more to come from my reading of this book, but so far I find it a valuable use of my time.**the sovereign individual**
I enjoy using the imagery of Aldous Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception line describing every human group as a “society of island universes”. that image strikes at the root of my conception of the indivi…
https://plantimals.org/posts/the-sovereign-individual/

2021-03-26 01:00:00

**feed friday: the vance crowe podcast**
I’ve known vance since 2012 when we crossed paths at a startup weekend here in st.louis. we are so different that we’re almost identical. we’ve been throwing lit matches into the bog of culture for a long time now, and I think you will find it a valuable source of productive entropy to subscribe to the vance crow podcast.
the vance crowe podcast
website: https://www.vancecrowe.com/podcast
feed: https://feeds.transistor.fm/the-vance-crowe-podcast
the podcast is worth your time. vance has a wide variety of people that speak to different topics. ag is heavily represented, which is a fascinating point of departure for conversation, that keeps the topics rooted in some form of reality, if you’ll permit a terrible pun.
for instance, vance’s most recent conversation with lee cronin. they range across a wide variety of topics, from chemistry, current cultural trends and academics, alternate explanations of time, robots, and the social dynamics of disagreeable people.
an interesting side note: during their conversation vance and lee talked about stephen wolfram as an example of someone with heterodox ideas. vance told of a friend who bought a copy of “a new kind of science” which had a note in it. indeed, I am that person. the note was actually an article which had been torn out of a journal. I display this excerpt for fair-use purposes only:
if you want the rest of the article, you’ll have to fork over a pile of money to the people who originally printed it. or ask someone who has a copy to share.**feed friday: the vance crowe podcast**
I’ve known vance since 2012 when we crossed paths at a startup weekend here in st.louis. we are so different that we’re almost identical. we’ve been throwing lit matches into the bog of cul…
https://plantimals.org/posts/the-vance-crowe-podcast/

2021-03-25 01:00:00

**the momentous dichotomy**
david deutsch has boomed through the skies of my memesphere on numerous occasions, but never in way that caused me to pause long enough to take on his ideas. but this time, something is different. this pass originated from naval, specifically his recent parceling out of painfully short podcast episodes on the topic of deutsch’s book “the beginning of infinity”. it sounds as though naval sat down with brett hall to talk about the book and its ideas, and then chopped that conversation into tiny pieces.
whether intentionally or not, this approach finally induced me to buy the book so I could just read it already. I’ve only just begun, but my notes are heavy already. so I’ll be back with more details when I’m done. for today, I wanted to get the momentous dichotomy out there.
Every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature or achievable, given the right knowledge.
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
boiling that down, anything that is permitted by the laws of nature is achievable. it seems tautological, like some trick of logic. but in the end, this very uncomplicated statement of obvious fact is the most optimistic thing I’ve heard. unless the laws of physics stop it from happening, we have the ability to do it.**the momentous dichotomy**
david deutsch has boomed through the skies of my memesphere on numerous occasions, but never in way that caused me to pause long enough to take on his ideas. but this time, something is different. this pass originated fr…
https://plantimals.org/posts/the-momentous-dichotomy/

2021-03-24 01:00:00

**shaun newman**
on Monday I had a conversation with Shaun Newman, which he recorded and published on this wednesday’s episode of The Shaun Newman Podcast. we talked about the origins of bitcoin, philosophy, the trend of offense vs defense over the centuries, RSS, and social media/filter bubbles. I really enjoyed talking with Shaun, so give a listen, and subscribe to Shaun’s podcast via his feed here.**shaun newman**
on Monday I had a conversation with Shaun Newman, which he recorded and published on this wednesday’s episode of The Shaun Newman Podcast. we talked about the origins of bitcoin, philosophy, the trend of offense vs defense ov…
https://plantimals.org/posts/shaun-newman/

2021-03-23 01:00:00

**reverse memory palace**
the memory palace, or method of loci, is a procedure for committing a sequence of details, points to make in a speech for example, to memory such that they can be recalled when delivering the speech.
this method works by chunking the details into another system that is already well established, such that cross-linking the details to be memorized with locations in ones home or the site of the speech allow the speaker to associate the points with those locations and only be required to memorize a path through them.
I have found a similar process at work when reading physical books, as opposed to electronic books. that is, I am able to recall where in the book a particular idea was located physically. whether it was the beginning middle or end of the book, whether it was on the top, middle, or bottom of the page, if it was the front or back of the page, where in the chapter it was, etc. not with perfect fidelity, but I’m usually able to use this sense to index to the idea I’m after quite quickly.
journaling as reverse memory palace
now imagine the activity of journaling. there are many ways to journal, but the one I use is first to reflect silently for 10 minutes, then to start writing. I never have a plan, I’m only attempting to capture what is waiting to come out. it’s a variety of what Jung called “automatic writing”. my goal is to find out what’s on my mind that I might not be aware of, and allow it to elaborate a bit.
the process of generatively allowing one’s mind to write journal entries is what I’m referring to as the reverse memory palace. rather than writing a speech, then using memories of familiar places to lock those details in, invert the process. use memories of familiar places, or states of mind, as prompts to write a speech. in this case, not really a speech but a journal entry which is trying to make a point, but that point is not known until the process is over.**reverse memory palace**
the memory palace, or method of loci, is a procedure for committing a sequence of details, points to make in a speech for example, to memory such that they can be recalled when delivering the speech.
this method works by c…
https://plantimals.org/posts/reverse-memory-palace/

2021-03-21 01:00:00

**hierarchical thought**
working memory limits us to the number of concrete details we can hold in our minds at any one time. depending on the type of detail, the consensus is somewhere between 4 and 10, usually quoted at 7. given first hand experience, I believe this idea has some legitimacy. but there’s a hidden detail that changes the implications of this limited work space hypothesis.
a detail in this context is answer to a question: the number of dollars in your bank account, the name of someone you want to communicate with, or the second digit of a novel phone number. that last one is the odd one. the number of dollars in your bank account is a single detail, you don’t recall the digits individually, nor do you recall the nth letter of someone’s name, but the name as a whole. so why divide up the phone number in this way? because we remember things based on connections to other concepts we’ve already established. names are recognizable as names, and we’ve heard most of the names we’re likely to encounter. in the case where we’ve not encountered the name, or anything like it before, they are indeed harder to remember, though we probably fall back on the larger chunks of syllables rather than the letters that make up the name. but how did we establish those other concepts if they are also expressed in terms of connections to other concepts we’ve previously learned?
in a real sense, it’s connections all the way down. at the bottom of all of this are a set of subjective, first person experiences. every individual will have a unique, incomparable set of these experiences. it is reasonable to believe that these experiences are roughly similar, since many of us seem to be able to communicate and infer what is meant without total elaboration, but we may never really know just what it is that we’re all uniquely experiencing. but somehow, through composition of those experiences over a lifetime, we’re able to build up a complex set of ideas. if we had to recall the exact details of each of these ideas, we’d be lost.
instead, as I mention in my post on attention:
in human learning the process called chunking is where we learn the specific low-level steps of an activity, and our brain is able to bundle them together such that we don’t need to address each step individually anymore, but can access the chunk as a whole, thereby reducing the amount of mental effort required to perform complex tasks. a good example is driving. when one first learns how to drive, it seems difficult to manage all the various activities that need to be monitored and adjusted to keep the car safely on the road making progress towards a destination. but as one practices, these activities are gradually pushed down below the layer of conscious effort, such that we can get in the car and simply will ourselves to “drive to the store”, and not have to break that down into pieces like “cross-over left and and right hands on the steering wheel so I can turn it more than 90 degrees in any one direction”.
now think back to the limited workspace. imagine it as a table on which 7 items are arrayed in physical space. those items are the details we are trying to remember. let’s layer in chunking: imagine that one of the items in your workspace is a pointer to another workspace, which also has specific items arrayed in some physical space. a pointer in this context is meant to be the address of something containing much more detail. in order to know the time of sunrise on March 21st 2021, we don’t need to memorize the almanac, just store a pointer, the knowledge that such questions have answers in almanacs, and follow the pointer until we get to the answer.
by use of pointers, working memory is converted from a harsh limit to the branching factor of our hierarchical memory. to illustrate the point, if we simplify from a branching factor fo 7 to 2, for the purpose of illustration:
graph TD
A([A])-->A1
A([A])-->A2
B([B])-->B1
B([B])-->B2
A1([A1])-->A1a([A1a])
A1([A1])-->A1b([A1b])
A2([A2])-->A2a([A2a])
A2([A2])-->A2b([A2b])
B1([B1])-->B1a([B1a])
B1([B1])-->B1b([B1b])
B2([B2])-->B2a([B2a])
B2([B2])-->B2b([B2b])
here two top level details (A & B), when expanded each lead to two additional details (A1, A2, B1, & B2) which themselves lead to two additional details and so on. I don’t believe the brain works as a perfect hierarchy, but this binary tree at least illustrates some level of the way in which information can be organized without requiring us to sort through all the uncoordinated facts contained in our long-term memory.**hierarchical thought**
working memory limits us to the number of concrete details we can hold in our minds at any one time. depending on the type of detail, the consensus is somewhere between 4 and 10, usually quoted at 7. given first hand expe…
https://plantimals.org/posts/hierarchical-thought/

2021-03-20 01:00:00

**dagon**
link to the story: HP Lovecraft’s “Dagon”
when copyright law was first established in the United States by the copyright act of 1790, the term was 14 years, and if the author was still living, it could be renewed for another 14 years. then in 1831 Noah Webster argued for an extension to 28 years originally, and then renewable for another 14 if the author was still living. the copyright act of 1909 extended the renewal term from 14 to 28 years. and on it goes until the sonny bono act of 1998, the most recent copyright update, which grants a copyright for the life of the author, then another 70 years.
in the United States the right of congress to establish copyright laws is explicitly granted by the constitution. and as mentioned above, they got right to it in 1790. it was originally understood that copyright was instituted for the benefit of the public, not the copyright holder, to encourage works to be published, similar to the motivation of patents, which was to expose new methods of production to the market, rather than exploiting them in secret. that way the rest of the economy could benefit from their innovations.
current copyright terms are intended to benefit the copyright holder and not the public. this is the prerogative of congress in our system. it is my opinion that the information landscape has changed so much, that the original motivations should be revisited.
the books, pamphlets, recordings, the physical artifacts of intellectual work are themselves rivalrous goods, goods which can only be consumed by one agent at a time. if I have the book, you cannot also have the same book.
in contrast, intellectual property is a non-rivalrous good, if I hear a poem and memorize it, this does not prevent you from hearing the same poem and memorizing it. the information content can be copied with a small marginal cost, and these copies don’t impact anyone else’s ability to use the intellectual property.
congress originally determined that there wasn’t enough motivation for authors to create new intellectual works, so they wrote copyright laws to create a rivalry where previously there was none. an artificial scarcity in order to encourage cultural production in a new and mostly empty country, where the quickest way to get a message to someone was by courier, daily newspapers were the dominant intellectual mode, and books were becoming more common but still relatively expensive. there was a motivation to encourage a common culture among the 13 colonies, something independent of England, for the purpose of establishing its own lifeways around intellectual production, academia, etc.
intellectual property has escaped earth and landed in the realm of platonic forms, cyberspace, the supersensorium, the noosphere. the cost to reproduce intellectual works is nearly zero, when taken as a multiple of the marginal cost to store a kilobyte of information.
to the extent that american works have entered the public domain, it is worth amplifying those of value, since it costs so little to do so. to that end, I link you to my copy of the text of HP Lovecraft’s “Dagon”, a work which was published in 1919, which places it in the public domain.
I get a lot out of the story. it is framed as a tale told by a man who is trying to overcome a horrible event in his past. the story shifts one layer deeper when we enter the retelling of his discovery of a vast expanse of muck which he found himself stranded on in the middle of the pacific ocean. something which was not previously above water. the character is trapped in this strange place, which is terrifying to him, since it is obvious that it could just as easily slide back under the water as it popped up, and still more that some intelligence was present in the distant past, which created some artifacts in this place.
as a complex of impressions, the story evokes a sense of the vastness of the universe, the depth of reality outside the human experience of it. my experience of the “oceanic” feel of things is tightly associated with the Freudian meaning of the word, but also the ocean as Neptune the Mystic.**dagon**
link to the story: HP Lovecraft’s “Dagon”
when copyright law was first established in the United States by the copyright act of 1790, the term was 14 years, and if the author was still living, it could be renewed for ano…
https://plantimals.org/posts/dagon/

2021-03-19 01:00:00

**feed friday: cal newport**
welcome to the second installment of feed friday. this week’s subject crosses the streams with both a blog and a podcast feed. he also has several books, appearances on other podcasts, etc.
cal newport’s study hacks blog and deep questions podcast
blog: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/feed/
podcast: https://feeds.feedburner.com/StudyHacks
I’ve been following Newport’s blog feed for at least 10 years. he doesn’t post content daily, but when he does it’s always well researched and thoughtful. some of the core ideas that have informed my approach to work and productivity have come by way of Newport. deep work, digital minimalism, and the hyperactive hivemind are the most memorable examples.
Newport is a great example of a pattern I’d like to discover a good name for. that category being those personalities who are worth following over the years, to develop a good internal representation of their personality, so that you might have it accessible when something happens in your life that lands in their sphere of influence, you’d have “their” advice on tap from your model. previously I mentioned that Paul Graham is one for me. another strong example, one I think a lot of people would also include, is Naval Ravikant. these characters are not exactly role models or heros, and not exactly teachers or gurus, and not exactly archetypes. just strong examples of unique, self-directed people who are worth watching over the years. so if you have any thoughts on a name for this patter, let me know.**feed friday: cal newport**
welcome to the second installment of feed friday. this week’s subject crosses the streams with both a blog and a podcast feed. he also has several books, appearances on other podcasts, etc.
cal newport’s stu…
https://plantimals.org/posts/cal-newport/

2021-03-18 01:00:00

**how you know**
Paul Graham is the founder of Y-combinator and someone I enjoy checking in on over the years. there are some writers who have a consistent enough subject matter and personality that reading them over a long period of time yields a useful mental model. I’d enjoy hearing from anyone who can suggest other people that they’ve followed for a long time.
Graham’s essays are how you should get to know him. I have found them an amazing source of inspiration over the years. ever since I first encountered his 2004 oscon talk “great hackers” via podcast, I have enjoyed his ideas. my favorite example being:
I’d always supposed that all smart people were curious– that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge.
this clear application of calculus to human personality traits works so well that I’ll never forget it. it clicks into place in a most satisfying way, like you had two old friends who never met each other and they finally met and got along perfectly.
how you know
when I sat down to write today I wanted to write about the essay how you know. I started writing, and found myself looking at a thousand words about something far from the point of this article. I banked that and will release it at a later time. but I thought it was interesting enough to include as a report from the experiential world of the mind and creativity, which is where this article properly takes place.
Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.
you are the sum of your genetic influences, environmental influences, and the interactions between those. while culture itself replicates and evolves, it is part of our environment.
For example, reading and experience are usually “compiled” at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. I always used to feel some misgivings about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase “already read” seems almost ill-formed.
this rhymes with concept that it is better to read 100 books 10 times than to read 1,000 books, which I can’t specifically attribute to anyone, but seems like it comes from Naval Ravikant, or has at least been repeated by him. I really like the idea of picking a subset of books to go deep on. this is a good topic for a future post: which books would be on your 100 books list? what would you be willing to read 10 times over the course of a lifetime?
conclusion
Graham writes in such a clear voice that I don’t have anything to add. read the linked essay and start adding his model to your collection.**how you know**
Paul Graham is the founder of Y-combinator and someone I enjoy checking in on over the years. there are some writers who have a consistent enough subject matter and personality that reading them over a long period of time yields a …
https://plantimals.org/posts/how-you-know/

2021-03-17 01:00:00

**digital commonwealth**
I am always looking for sources of novel thinking. so if you have some you think I would like, send it to me.
I read an article describing a theory of dreams, which is extended to explain humanity’s desire for art, and which suggests it is not only possible to distinguish between art and entertainment, but necessary.
A belief in an aesthetic spectrum may be all that keeps a civilization from disappearing up its own brainstem.
Erik Hoel - “Enter the Supersensorium”
this article lit a brush fire in my mind. I enjoyed rolling these ideas around, considering the gravity well created by aesthetics, how people might react against such a well, and why such continuous struggles to define the undefinable must not be dropped. if someone asked me who is the most original, but meaningful thinker I’ve encoutnered this year, it would be Erik Hoel.
more of Hoel’s writing can be found here.
I’m writing this piece after returning to the above page and picking “Will the Bitcoin Bubble Pop or Will it Envelope Us All” from 2018. the concentration of good ideas and worthy angles in this work is hard to overstate. Hoel does not speak from the perspective of a firebrand, but instead seems more like a poet or philosopher.
bitcoin as hyperobject
Hoel defines a hyperobject by quoting Timothy Morton:
events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on
then elaborates bitcoin as one of these:
Bitcoin is such a hyperobject, the first of its kind. Bitcoin expands across spacetime, a growing chain of ordered megabyte blocks, both everywhere and nowhere. Its fluid physical manifestations sprout up to gobble up cheap electricity, frigid warehouses stacked with buzzing thermodynamical demons solving computational puzzles that exist only to play a guessing game that is purposefully pointless. Input/output ports, like exchanges, or peer-to-peer sales, or accepting merchants, reach upward like tendrils from this ineffable otherworld where Bitcoin really exists.
it reads like philosophic poetry. there’s an idea in there, that information may be more primal than matter. thinking the thoughts is like staring at the stars on a summer evening, seeing the depth of the universe and having the sensation that you might fall off the face of the earth. there is great depth here, and it feels like a bit of the spirit that I had believed was missing in our time.
Perhaps one fanciful hypothesis is that the brain itself works kind of like an organic blockchain, replicating its model of self and world across its hemispheres and modules, with consciousness being the current decentralized neural consensus of the state of that model.
it is fanciful, but why not? Hoel’s strength is in driving down these blind alleys and finding that they don’t dead end, but open up into valleys that just keep going.
I will not pass up the opportunity to hammer this point:
Unlike the objectively real information in a distributed ledger, the value of that ledger is totally subjective.
objections to bitcoin sometimes take the form of a suggestion that it has no intrinsic value, or that no one knows how much it should be worth. indeed, both points are true, and also true of fiat currency, gold, or anything at all. the subjectivity of human value is inescapable.
and further implications:
in its price action there’s a fundamental enormousness to Bitcoin that marks it as a hyberobject
the daily and monthly peaks and troughs can be conceptualized as Ptolemaic epicycles within the grand cycles that play out on the yearly basis (sometimes even every two or three years).
those grand cycles are the echos of halvenings, the changes in block-reward and resulting scarcity of supply.
There is no way to get from immensely low prices to immensely high prices in a straight line, even if everyone involved believed strongly that the outcome was preordained.
this explanation of bitcoin volatility is deeply satisfying. it doesn’t predict what the price will be on a given date, but it does give a vast space for the mind to wander in, where there are fruitful analogies to runs on cleaning supplies at grocery stores, traffic jams caused by people fleeing hurricanes or floods, or even adoption of new technologies.
a gradual digital commonwealth
Hoel continues to the arc of his reasoning into other forms of trust and exchange in human society. this is the techno-optimist vision writ large. Hoel’s conclusions are similar to Peter Theil’s Crypto is Libertarian, AI is Communist view of the landscape of technology.
This is the idea of a “digital commonwealth” which self-governs its technological and economic evolution, as well as laws and community standards. These digital commonwealths make it clear that the power of blockchains is not to completely eliminate trust, but rather to formalize it.
the current forms of governance feel like entropy stalking us all, but I don’t propose radical changes. if you think you can fly, don’t go to the roof and jump off, try taking off from the ground first. I think gradual adoption of crypto/blockchain by individuals, companies, and governments, will happen as practical implementations of distributed consensus emerge. currency is the first and most obvious hyperobject the fall into the blockchain gravity well. others will follow.**digital commonwealth**
I am always looking for sources of novel thinking. so if you have some you think I would like, send it to me.
I read an article describing a theory of dreams, which is extended to explain humanity’s desire for art, an…
https://plantimals.org/posts/digital-commonwealth/

2021-03-16 01:00:00

**moderation in infrastructure**
the balkanization of the internet has been discussed for decades, but it may finally be upon us. the highly centralized public cloud providers are caught in the dilemma of how to handle their increasing power as people everywhere realize how important standing at the high-ground of the internet can be. from the most recent stratechery article:
public clouds in particular would be better off preparing for geographically-distinct policies in the long run, even as they deliver on their commitment to predictability and process in the meantime, with a strong bias towards being hands-off. That will mean some difficult decisions, which is why it’s better to make a commitment to neutrality and due process now.
it is worth reading and understanding the approach that the tech giants will use to negotiate this dilemma. they are trapped between their internal culture, the culture of the establishment, and the interests of their customers, with all three falling further out of alignment every month.
“moderation in infrastructure” won’t be possible when so much power is in so few hands. even if the tech companies had ethics of steel, and executed flawlessly, governments will show up with unrefusable offers.
this fragility, the dependence on these highly volatile centralized providers makes our current culture fragile. when it is stressed, it will break. to prevent this, we should attempt to implement anti-fragile solutions, distributed systems, take publishing and consumption of media back into our own hands by means of RSS, blogs, and other systems that don’t rely on centralized services and AI.
seize the memes of production!**moderation in infrastructure**
the balkanization of the internet has been discussed for decades, but it may finally be upon us. the highly centralized public cloud providers are caught in the dilemma of how to handle their increasing power as peo…
https://plantimals.org/posts/moderation-in-infrastructure/

2021-03-15 01:00:00

**works**
in order to make the various projects I’ve accumulated over the years more accessible, I’ve linked to them from a single page, accessible from the front page of plantimals.org called works. I’ll make additions as new projects are added and style it for a more visual indexing of the content.**works**
in order to make the various projects I’ve accumulated over the years more accessible, I’ve linked to them from a single page, accessible from the front page of plantimals.org called works. I’ll make additions as new pro…
https://plantimals.org/posts/works/

2021-03-14 17:37:23

**a-frame**
another day another fascinating javascript library. as much as it pains me to say it, there’s definitely a pattern here.
virtual reality has been five years away from mainstream adoption for 25 years. previously the problem has been the lack of depth in the market place, hardware that can’t refresh fast enough to prevent nausea, and ultimately the curse of tightly linked hardware and software. that curse being that no one is motived to develop software that will only run on a single device. there were historic attempts to solve this problem, including VRML
I believe now the VR industry is going to break out. modern hardware is capable of keeping up, the Oculus 2 Quest for example is smooth and user friendly. the only question is, how will people really use these things? the Oculus has a Facebook proprietary operating system, and is treated as a vertical of Facebook proper. you can’t use an Oculus without having a Facebook account. at this relatively early stage of market adoption, there’s not enough savvy users to demand unlocked devices, and little benefit to providing them. but web standards like webxr provide a way for early adopters to use the mostly locked down hardware and build their presence on software that won’t lock them in by using vr apps over the web.
that is a long introduction for the eponymous a-frame, a javascript framework to make using three.js for webxr apps easier and more composable. I’ve only just started experimenting, but it’s so easy to get started that I’ve already been able to embed a photosphere I took in this post:
a-frame is another topic I’ll be returning to, hopefully with some interesting more developments.**a-frame**
another day another fascinating javascript library. as much as it pains me to say it, there’s definitely a pattern here.
virtual reality has been five years away from mainstream adoption for 25 years. previously the problem has be…
https://plantimals.org/posts/a-frame/

2021-03-14 01:00:00

**mermaid.js**
markdown is a wonderful technology. so I was excited when a colleague told me there was a markdown language for graphs.
mermaid, which is a javascript library and a CLI, syntax looks like this:
graph LR
Beginning --> Middle
Middle --> End
which is rendered into this:
graph LR
Beginning --> Middle
Middle --> End
the LR part tells us it’s going left to right. we could swap in TD to make it go top to bottom:
graph TD
Beginning --> Middle
Middle --> End
graph TD
Beginning --> Middle
Middle --> End
all sorts of fun to be had
graph TD
P1([P1]) --> F1
P2([P2]) --> F1
F1([F1]) --> F2
F2([F2]) --> F3
F3([F3]) --> F4
F4([F4]) --> F5a([F5a])
F4 --> F5b([F5b])
F4 --> F5C([F5c])
graph TD
P1([P1]) --> F1
P2([P2]) --> F1
F1([F1]) --> F2
F2([F2]) --> F3
F3([F3]) --> F4
F4([F4]) --> F5a([F5a])
F4 --> F5b([F5b])
F4 --> F5C([F5c])
conclusion
all the fun of markdown, but for diagrams. I often find myself sketching out graphs, dependencies, flow charts, etc and this is a powerful tool for leveraging text into the realm of diagrams.**mermaid.js**
markdown is a wonderful technology. so I was excited when a colleague told me there was a markdown language for graphs.
mermaid, which is a javascript library and a CLI, syntax looks like this:
graph LR
Beginning --> Middle
…
https://plantimals.org/posts/mermaid/

2021-03-13 01:00:00

**attention**
attention is your bandwidth for changing the universe
@plantimals
human attention is the most valuable quantity yet known to humanity. it is the sole link between the platonic realm of ideas and the real world.
every human has a finite supply of attention, plus any attention that is given by others. the word “given” here is appropriate, as attention can never be taken. there can be dire consequences, threats, violence, etc., but in the end every individual has the ultimate and final veto on what to focus their attention on. this implies that all attention is voluntarily given to that which the individual believes is most valuable to devote their attention to at any given moment. that individual may not be trying very hard to find the most valuable thing beyond their immediate grasp, or they may be mistaken about their beliefs of what was valuable and wish they had done something different ex post facto, but in the moment, they are focusing on that which they implicitly believe benefits them the most to focus on.
if there is something that we value, we either have it already and don’t want to lose it, or want to get it. short of amazing luck, where the universe happens to produce and sustain the very things we value the most without any effort on our part, we have to do something different to get aforementioned valuable things.
people get disconnected from their thoughts. the thought of wanting something is severed from the reality of what concrete steps could be taken to obtain the thing. for all coherent visions of what the future should be, that an individual can imagine, there must be some series of changes that can be made to the material world which would result in that outcome. that is not to say the result is guaranteed.
the plan
we should think of each action as having a probability of success, success being a durable change which then allowed the next step to reliably be attempted. and so we can imagine a sort of Drake Equation for evaluating plans, where we multiply the probability of success of each of the plan’s steps together to produce an estimate of the probability of the whole plan succeding.
graph TD
S([current state - 1.0]) --> P1
P1[step 1 - 0.99] --> P2
P2[step 2 - 0.9] --> P3
P3[step 3 - 0.5] --> P4
P4[step 4 - 0.99] --> goal
goal([plan total - 0.441045])
these numbers and this plan are just throwaway examples to elaborate the point. each step of the plan is some change in the universe we want to see. the current state of the universe is a probability 1.0, that means it is certain that things are the way they are right now. this sounds and in fact is tautological, but it emphasizes the point that if you make no changes, nothing will be different.
a quick look at the above plan shows that step 3 is the most risky, a 50/50 shot of success. so perhaps we can elaborate our plan and include another way that we could accomplish step 3 with the same 50/50 shot of success:
graph TD
S([current state - 1.0]) --> P1
P1[step 1 - 0.99] --> P2
P2[step 2 - 0.9] --> P3A
P2[step 2 - 0.9] --> P3B
P3A[step 3A - 0.5] --> P4
P3B[step 3B - 0.5] --> P4
P4[step 4 - 0.99] --> goal
goal([plan total - 0.6615675])
the new plan succeeds if each step succeeds, except for step 3. now we’ve split that out into two possible paths to success, where the plan succeeds if either step 3a or step 3b succeeds, where each individually is a coin toss, but the probability that at least one of the two will succeed is 0.75. this pulls the plan’s total probability of success up from ~0.44 to ~0.66.
the point is not to get into probability theory and the logic of planning so much as to emphasize that any change you can define well enough can potentially be achieved. the chances of success if you don’t try are exactly 0.0.
plans within plans
for the purpose of expanding our pattern language, each step of a plan could itself be a plan that breaks down the individual tasks needed to achieve that step, and so on, as deep as is helpful to go.
chunking
in human learning the process called chunking is where we learn the specific low-level steps of an activity, and our brain is able to bundle them together such that we don’t need to address each step individually anymore, but can access the chunk as a whole, thereby reducing the amount of mental effort required to perform complex tasks. a good example is driving. when one first learns how to drive, it seems difficult to manage all the various activities that need to be monitored and adjusted to keep the car safely on the road making progress towards a destination. but as one practices, these activities are gradually pushed down below the layer of conscious effort, such that we can get in the car and simply will ourselves to “drive to the store”, and not have to break that down into pieces like “cross-over left and and right hands on the steering wheel so I can turn it more than 90 degrees in any one direction”.
conclusion
in the video linked in the following tweet is @jackbutcher elaborating on the meaning of the above tweet. he emphasizes the idea that if your attention is spread across multiple fronts, you will achieve none of them, whereas if it is focused on a single goal, you are much more likely to achieve that goal. in the context of planning, this would be the equivalent of taking the first step of several plans and never coming back to complete the rest of the steps.
Do less, do more. Idea cameo by @plantimals.https://t.co/8ra8KSAPp0 pic.twitter.com/nXa1P11DlR— jckbtchr (@jackbutcher) March 30, 2020
there’s much more to say about attention, how it can be spent, whether it’s entirely fungible from moment to moment, etc.**attention**
attention is your bandwidth for changing the universe
@plantimals
human attention is the most valuable quantity yet known to humanity. it is the sole link between the platonic realm of ideas and the real world.
every human has a f…
https://plantimals.org/posts/attention/

2021-03-12 01:00:00

**feed friday: the jim rutt show**
no traditions like new traditions.
introducing: feed friday, in which I introduce an RSS feed that I follow and suggest why readers might also be interested in following. the feed could be any kind of RSS feed, a blog, a podcast, or something totally off-the-wall.
the jim rutt show
website: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/
feed: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/feed/podcast/
I first crossed paths with today’s feed by hearing his appearance on the vance crowe podcast. Rutt is the former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, former CEO of Network Solutions, DNS provider in the early days of internet commercialization. Rutt is also involved in several ongoing projects, including BigChainDB.
Rutt is a great host and raconteur in his own right, he is able to land guests that have pushed my notion of what a good, groundbreaking podcast can be. there are philosophers, entrepreneurs, neuroscientists, and a lot more. I find that Rutt’s curiosity and willingness to engage with the specifics of these fields is a satisfying mode for a regular audio exploration of the world and the wonders it contains.**feed friday: the jim rutt show**
no traditions like new traditions.
introducing: feed friday, in which I introduce an RSS feed that I follow and suggest why readers might also be interested in following. the feed could be any kind of RSS feed, a …
https://plantimals.org/posts/the-jim-rutt-show/

2021-03-11 01:00:00

**long-form content**
when I use the term “long-form content”, I am referring to writing, and sometimes to podcasting, which takes the time to develop an idea, to establish with the consumer of the content a rapport, a durable pattern language which is then used to elucidate something of value to both parties.
we are all starting from a unique and entirely idiosyncratic place in the universe. we share some common experiences as human beings who share a language and biological history, but what those events are like from the first-person perspective for anyone else is still opaque.
so rather than cursing the darkness of inescapable subjectivity, we should be choosing to build bridges connecting archipelago of island universes that is human society.
a way to connect our island universes is to have shared experiences. it is easiest to share subjective experiences with those we live with, family, loved ones, and so on. obviously current events have had a net negative impact on our ability to share first-person experiences as groups of loosely connected people.
long-form content is one way to fill the gap left by the reduction of interpersonal contact. in writing to convey some meaningful ideas to other people, we can keep connected. but there’s something beyond the good social hygiene of maintaining intelligibility to one another. there’s an imperative to have as high-bandwidth communications as possible with one another so we can improve the chances of human flourishing as much as possible.**long-form content**
when I use the term “long-form content”, I am referring to writing, and sometimes to podcasting, which takes the time to develop an idea, to establish with the consumer of the content a rapport, a durable pattern l…
https://plantimals.org/posts/long-form-content/

2021-03-10 01:00:00

**tinukajazojipodi**
a few years ago my daughter asked the question “what is programming?” she was quite young at the time, and heard me referencing the skill for one reason or another. so rather than just explain with words, I got out the laptop and we wrote a program to demonstrate.
programming has always been an enjoyable activity in and of itself for me. I work as a software engineer, and have found that this is not the case for everyone doing the work. but the ability to enjoy the act itself is what allows you to keep up with the field. if the only programming you ever do is that which people are paying you to do “on the job”, you will not discover new things, as employers rarely are willing to risk your time on the clock on wild new ideas. so I wanted to convey this aspect in some way.
at the time I was reading Carl Jung, and was very interested in his method of “automatic writing”. my interpretation of this idea is that one just starts writing, with or without a plan, and allow the ideas that inevitably enter one’s mind to drive the process. it sounds strange, but it’s the most natural thing imaginable once it starts working. so my idea was to just start writing code and see what happened.
we began with a bit of code to make up a new word. the word was chosen from a random set of letters, with an upper and lower bound so the word wouldn’t be too short or too long, with each letter chosen randomly from the full alphabet. there were no other conditions. so we played with these random words a bit, and found that the most enjoyable part was trying to pronounce them. we used the Mac OSX program say to have a hilarious vocoder voice pronounce the nonsense words for us.
this new found activity had its own center of gravity and pulled us in. the program evolved quickly to include specification of different voices to say, to pick a more pronounceable balance of vowels and consonants, and the concept of multiple breaks or words in each phrase.
the resulting program produces and executes commands which look like the list below. if you are using a Mac you can copy and paste any one of these lines into the terminal and hear the result.
say -v Jorge "ocakyfor efobo otyfywad eqiw ehynijuqi"
say -v Damayanti "iba yjixum"
say -v Fred "azomot ula icahihydu ywejahy"
say -v Diego "ucop omydoxy ogu uko ukoroparap ecomut omy aryt upycususab"
say -v Joana "obo avysafunob ikyve omoren"
say -v Lekha "ecinohoko"
in the end we asked the program to name itself, and it came up with tinukajazojipodi. if you are interested in reading the source code, you may do so at github.
I don’t know if it’s possible to convey the joy of creation to another person, or the ability to enjoy programming in itself, but I hope so. it seems worth trying, at least.**tinukajazojipodi**
a few years ago my daughter asked the question “what is programming?” she was quite young at the time, and heard me referencing the skill for one reason or another. so rather than just explain with words, I got out …
https://plantimals.org/posts/tinukajazojipodi/

2021-03-09 01:00:00

**centralized fragility**
without realizing it, we have added a layer to phone numbers. most people don’t remember the digits of other people’s numbers anymore, and some of us struggle even to remember our own at times, since we rarely use them. now we just scroll down a list of names, and tap the one we want. the phone takes care of mapping that name to a number, and does the dialing behind the curtains.
the internet is glued together by a similar, but explicit mapping called DNS, which works by mapping human-readable names, like plantimals.org to IP addresses, which are a set of 4 numbers between 0-254. so something like 192.168.0.1. for most users of the web, if an IP address ever comes to their attention something has gone wrong. and yet, IP addresses are a fundamental building block of the internet. the phone analogy is somewhat broken in that we each maintain our own idiosyncratic mappings of names to numbers, there’s not yet a broadly accepted centralized service to perform this mapping.
the DNS system has worked well. it has allowed the world to bootstrap a useful network of physically distributed computers which generates trillions of dollars in economic value by solving important problems.
but DNS is not perfect. there’s a limited namespace, so if someone is already using plantimals.org, it can’t be used by someone else. this is the point, after all. due to the uneven adoption of the internet by society, there was a land rush for the more desireable names: shorter is better, names of broad categories taken by individual brands in that category, entities with names that don’t usually collide are thrust into the same arena and forced to fight over the now scarce name.
all of those issues can be worked around, but there are two fundamental properties of the DNS system which are worth considering:
1. centralization
2. fragility
when DNS was first implemented, it was a text file called HOSTS.TXT. it is admirable when a paradigm like the file system can solve problems the designers never knew existed. but the original DNS system passed on this conceptually centralized structure to its progeny, the DNS system we have today. that is, a small number of servers controlled by a small number of individuals have the ultimate power over the DNS system. this is a concern because it’s a choke-point for the flow of trillions of dollars of economic activity, and unless it is managed by exceedingly selfless but cautious people, it will be used to benefit those who control it. we’ve been fortunate so far, but there are signs that such beneficence should not be expected to last forever.
fragility is entropy working its way into our lives. things change, people stop paying the bills for a server, home projects are abandoned, companies go out of business. there are a lot of reasons why following a hyperlink could result in a failure to obtain the desired result.
the following analogy, which I [paraphrase from this protoschool lesson](the following analogy, does good work explaining the differences:
You would like to get a book recommended by a friend.
Friend A: go to the Half Price Books in University City, MO, go to the 3rd isle, turn left, top shelf, and pick the 11th book from the left.
vs
Friend B: find the book with ISBN# 978-0-521-19533-1
Friend A is analogous to our current system of DNS and IP addresses. So that if the particular book store closes, is blocked by political boundaries, or someone moved the book, retrieval of the book will fail.
Friend B’s addressing is of the content, rather than the current location of the subject of the message. it’s a contrived example, but if one truly didn’t know the name of the book, or anything else about it other than its previous exactly location in physical space, success in finding the book would be fragile indeed.
it so happens that this concept, content addressing, has been useful in building distributed systems, specifically the inter-planetary file system. I will write more about IPFS shortly, but for now it’s enough to say that the web doesn’t have to be organized in exactly way it is now, and there have been significant inroads towards distributing it and making it more anti-fragile.**centralized fragility**
without realizing it, we have added a layer to phone numbers. most people don’t remember the digits of other people’s numbers anymore, and some of us struggle even to remember our own at times, since we rarely …
https://plantimals.org/posts/centralized-fragility/

2021-03-08 01:00:00

**really simple syndication**
I am immediately distrustful of claims made of simplicity or honesty. usually these properties are self-evident. truly simple or honest people/ideas don’t need to be labeled as such. but “really” simple? probably not.
while I won’t defend the name, I support the goal of RSS, enabling anyone to become a publisher in a light-weight, publish/subscribe framework for human knowledge.
the RSS feed is one way of accomplishing the distribution of content, and one which has been around for a long time. many of you will already be familiar with it, some will be meta-happy to be reading this work about RSS via my RSS feed. I have a lot to say about RSS and its successors, so I’m starting with the basics here.
but why?
for me the “why” is deep and will take some layers to get at. in the immediate sense, RSS is something I use every day. I have a list of collected feeds that I like to read content from. I no longer read print newspapers, though long ago I did. when I have suggested that a replacement for the clearly broken culture of the “news media” is long-form content, RSS feeds are exactly what I was referring to. it is possible to remember each of these sources, and every day type them out and navigate to them to see if there’s new content. one could also favorite them and run down the list daily. but since we all have limited amounts of attention to spend, we’d like to make the most of it, and only spend time on exploring branches that will yield fruits.
one minor improvement of reading feeds over visiting sites is the streamlining of consumption, you slide right past a lot of the distractions designed to lodge you in the hooks of the site, snaring your attention on other content, advertisements, etc. the experience shifts slightly from being about attention grabbing, by any means necessary, to having to compete for your attention by providing content you want.
there’s a lot to say about RSS. I’ll let this be the first instalment of a multi-part conversation. for now, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite blogs, Seth Godin’s Blog and its RSS feed.
here’s what Seth had so say about RSS:
**really simple syndication**
I am immediately distrustful of claims made of simplicity or honesty. usually these properties are self-evident. truly simple or honest people/ideas don’t need to be labeled as such. but “really” simp…
https://plantimals.org/posts/really-simple-syndication/

2021-03-06 01:00:00

**fractal localism**
The best way to summarize Fractal Localism … is by its opposite: abstract universalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Principia Politica
Principia Politica is a nascent work (available in draft form) by Nassim Taleb.
Fractal Localism is a way to think about answers to questions on how to interact with complex systems, especially ones in which the agent is immersed. think about scaling one’s interest in solutions to problems based on their proximity and solubility. it has a very stoic feel to it, a sort of categorical imperative of oikeiôsis.**fractal localism**
The best way to summarize Fractal Localism … is by its opposite: abstract universalism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Principia Politica
Principia Politica is a nascent work (available in draft form) by Nassim Taleb.
Fractal …
https://plantimals.org/posts/fractal-localism/

2021-03-05 01:00:00

**gardener vs gardened**
concerns over internet centralization have been present since before it was released to the public. some of those concerns proved to be hyperbolic, some have been prophetic. AOL was once criticized as a “walled garden”, where its users were stunted in their ability to find and curate useful content. it does seem as though there was a residue of castaways left behind by AOL’s ultimate demise, but largely people just left when it became clear that there were far greener grasses outside the wall.
Facebook is as much a walled garden as AOL ever was. it’s possible for one’s internet experience to be entirely cocooned by Facebook. so what’s the harm of providing an all-encompassing internet experience?
walled gardens are nice if you appreciate the fragile, beautiful plants they allow, but less nice if you are one of those plants. the plants are there at the pleasure of the gardener, some will be called weeds and removed, others encouraged to flourish.
I am not arguing against gardens, but instead suggesting we all become gardeners. let’s collect and curate some of good, true, and beautiful ideas.
the garden is a finite game, being a gardener an infinite game. while value accrues to us individually by pursuing that which we find good, true, and beautiful, the most meaningful outcome is sharing that value with others, exploring which subjectivities we hold in common and building new ones. there’s no universal answer, we still need to interact with the rest of society, but it’s up to us to make sure its on our terms, and serving the right value.**gardener vs gardened**
concerns over internet centralization have been present since before it was released to the public. some of those concerns proved to be hyperbolic, some have been prophetic. AOL was once criticized as a “walled garden…
https://plantimals.org/posts/gardener-vs-gardened/

2020-05-26 02:00:00

**timefulness**
the Long Now Foundation, a worthy subject in itself, brought Marcia Bjornerud’s book Timefulness to my attention. I was immediately interested by the prospect of reading a contemporary work on geologic time and hoping for some poetic intersubjective understanding of what it’s like to experience deep time mapped onto physical space. I imagine looking upon the face of a cliff, with many layers of exposed rock, and wandering back in time like leafing through pages in a book.
in the prologue Bjornerud begins with by recounting the experience of a snow day in Wisconsin. this was what hooked me when investigating the book. the first person depiction of what it’s like to experience a transformed landscape: physically, visually, sonically, these are all great landmarks to set out from in the effort of building a pattern language of awe and understanding with the reader. the blanketed quietude, the distorted shapes, the freshness of the landscape, these all serve as points of focus for the unnamed emotion that is recognition of an everyday landscape in a very different context, opening the doors of perception to aspects of time that we normally elide.
the author sees geology as fitting into an uncomfortable niche in the academy. she points out that physics and chemistry are seen as more valuable, that their truths are atemporal, platonic, outside of time, fully abstracted, but that geology and biology cannot be so abstracted and are thus valued less. regardless of how valued geology is relative to physics, I appreciate the observation of the dichotomy between these four fields.
timefulness includes a feeling for distances and proximities in the geography of deep time
the story of continental drift is a strong part of this book. in 1915, Eugene Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift. at that point in time, the evidence he provided was not enough. Wegener showed the obvious but circumstantial evidence of close fit of the contours of the continents, especially south america and africa and the similar rock strata on both sides of those similar contours. while the evidence was hard to dismiss, it was even harder to convince geologists of the reality of his theory without an explanation of the mechanism that drove continental drift. so much like Mendelian genetics, this ultimately valid theory was not fully reckoned with until 50+ years after its initial proposal. not until the discovery of the mid-ocean-ridges and sea floor spreading, was there a plausible mechanism in plate techtonics to explain how continents could move around on the surface of the earth. like Mendel, Wegener was long dead by the time their respective sciences came around to the right belief.
I was able to glean two dichotomies from Timefulness.
sial vs sima
sima is the geologic term for rock that makes up oceanic crust, basalt, mostly made up of silicon and magnesium. oceanic crust is denser, and so floats lower on the surface than its opposite…
sial is the geologic term for rock that makes up continental crust, granite, mostly made up of silicates and aluminum minerals.
the process of plate techtonics, where crust is created at mid-ocean ridges and destroyed at subduction zones, is responsible for concentrating the sial rock and creating continental crust. all continents are agglomerations of exotic terranes.
the dichotomy of sima vs sial is what shapes the face of the earth. if the earth were made up entirely of oceanic crust, or entirely of continental crust, we would either have a barren moonscape planet or a fully oceanic planet. instead, we have a running dialog between continent and ocean stretching back across multiple super-continents. there can be no doubt that this complexity is one of the many and varied forces that give life on earth its richness.
uniformitarianism vs catastrophism
uniformitarianism is the assumption that natural processes operate uniformly over time and space, and as applied to geology, that the current state of the world can be sufficiently explained by the understanding of those processes as they unfold uniformly over time.
catastrophism is the belief that the earth’s current form can be best be explained by sudden events in geologic time, rather than uniform application of natural processes. floods and volcanoes are examples.
the dialectic between these two poles is a good representation of the field of geology. erosion and deposition are key parts of the story, but so are sudden changes in climate, volcanism, and even meteor and comet impacts.**timefulness**
the Long Now Foundation, a worthy subject in itself, brought Marcia Bjornerud’s book Timefulness to my attention. I was immediately interested by the prospect of reading a contemporary work on geologic time and hoping for some…
https://plantimals.org/posts/timefulness-book-review/

2020-05-13 02:00:00

**logistic landscapes**
the logistic landscapes are a series of images captured from the logistic map bifurcation diagram. the diagram is generated as a sequence of vertical slices of the diagram rendered by a custom program for the purpose.
each vertical slice is 2,500 pixels wide by 50,000 pixels tall. the diagram fits on 200 of these vertical slices. the slices are then processed to build a representation which allows a viewer to zoom in and out and pan around in the composite image as if in a map app. explore the logistic map and built some tacit knowledge of its shape from this bifurcation diagram.
these images are landscape photography for math. the places exist in themselves, and I merely appreciate them and capture them through the lens of a computational telescope.
luftschloss
mirv
night bridge
the road
space-elevator cable
phase change
dark radian
**logistic landscapes**
the logistic landscapes are a series of images captured from the logistic map bifurcation diagram. the diagram is generated as a sequence of vertical slices of the diagram rendered by a custom program for the purpose.
eac…
https://plantimals.org/posts/logistic-landscapes/

2020-02-09 05:59:32

**collected wisdoms**
He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
You have to assemble your life yourself, action by action, and be satisfied if each one achieves as much as it can…. if you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself from another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.
Benjamin Franklin
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
**collected wisdoms**
He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.
Marcus Aurelius, Medit…
https://plantimals.org/posts/collected-wisdoms/

2020-02-08 04:40:06

**we carry our fate**
He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
**we carry our fate**
He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.
Marcus Aurelius, Me…
https://plantimals.org/posts/we-carry-our-fate/

2020-02-07 14:31:09

**bridge of chaos**
A snapshot from the logistic map, in the neighborhood of r = (3.65,3.7).
https://plantimals.org/posts/bridge-of-chaos/

2019-09-22 15:47:55

**textures**
460 mya
6 ya
https://plantimals.org/posts/textures/

2019-09-22 15:42:13

**transcendent triangles**
https://plantimals.org/posts/transcendent-triangles/