Archive for the ‘algorithm’ Category





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And yet, therein lies the the reveal!






























Chaitin on Algorithmic Information, just a math of networks.

Platonic solids are just networks

Real World Fractal Networks

Correlation for Network Connectivity Measures

Various Measurements in Transport Networks (Networks in general)

Brownian Motion, the network of particles

Semantic Networks


Probably Approximately Correct

Probability Waves

Bayes Theorem


Locality of physics

Complexity in economics


Gravity is not a network phenomenon?

Gravity is a network phenomenon?

Useful reframing/rethinking Gravity

Social networks and fields

Cause and effect

Human Decision Making with Concrete and Abstract Rewards

The Internet

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perhaps everything is connected.

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It’s nearly, if not totally, impossible to remove our deeply held biases, values and contextual history from our raw, sensory perceptions of the world. The difficulty to sense more objectively is what perpetuates so many non-truths about the world. Nearly everything we sense and think is distorted by the biological patterns shaped within us by the world and our interaction within the world. It is within this frame of reference I seek to put down, in an obviously flawed ways, what I think to be at least less non-truth than other theories and thoughts floating about out there.

Our most basic means of communication, the words, sounds, gestures and pictures, we use are so filled with bias it’s impossible to commit to their use in an objective way. The best hope I have is to present as many variations across mediums so that what emerges from these communications is perhaps, if not objective, at least more fully representative of various perspectives that at least the trap of obvious one-sided subjectivity is avoided.

And with that warning, let us proceed.

A first exercise is of definitions and clarifying of terms.

Everything is information. From the most basic particles of existence to governments to rocket ships to the abstractions of mathematics – everything is information. Information looped and entangeled within other information. Information trapped within patterns of information by other patterns of information. Particles trapped into behaviors dictated by the laws of physics. Proteins and chemicals replicating into biological entities by the encodings of genetic instruction. Objects of pure quantity expressed in combinations dictated by rules of provable logical inference. Symbols imbued with meaning combined to form words and sentences and stories that stick in the brains of people and come out of their mouths to be reinterpreted over the eons. Faintly remembered events strung together by stories to form history and imagined events of some time that has not come to pass forming a future hope.

More fundamentally… space and time and causality and logic and being itself. All are matters of information. The casual ordering of events in relation to what is different based on the difference of another entity forming the conception of time and space. The coherence within a frame of reference of words strung together with symbols for equal, not equal, for all, and the such coalescing into logic. What is and what isn’t in reference to what’s logically or causally sensible to us becomes the notion of being.

But this is not quite enough.

Recently various categories of research, science and/or philosophic discussion have added ’emergence’ and ‘complexity’ to the pantheon of fundamental concepts from which we can chart our maps of existence and meaning. The unseen in the parts that only shows itself in the collective – the multitude – the interactive, this notion of emergence.

All in – meaning. Meaning is a vague notion of symbolics and representation within the ontological dimensions of space, time, cause, logic, emergence and being. Meaning is proximal, local phenomenon of pattern. In totality, all things considered, that is all of infinity, there is no meaning – there is no pattern. That is, all patterns at play is pure entropy and no meaning is possible on a universal, infinite scale. (As if we can even imagine such a concept). On a local, limited frame of reference meaning emerges from patterns (people, computers, plants, etc) pattern matching (sensing, perceiving, transforming, encoding, processing).

I propose a phrase: existential equivalence. Every investigative thought, every scientific gesture, every act of art, every attempt to send a message, every ritual, every interaction at all with the world at any level is all of similar thing: the encoding and decoding of information within information. This is not a reduction or a reductionist exercise. Quite the contrary. The varieties of symbolic expression in all of existence is REAL, it is a thing. That existence is expressible in an infinite variety is necessary. and it can only be known, even in a limited way, by actual variety of expression. If anything is to exist, it must exist in infinite variety and multiplicity. Everything that exists has existential equivalence. The entirity of existence is relational.

For instance if there is such a concept and sensation of color it must have expression in physical and artistic and literary terms. It exists at all levels implicated there. If a wavelength of light is able to generate a visual and neuronal concept we called red, then red isn’t just the wavelength, nor the wave of light, nor the eye, nor the brain, nor the word… it is all of those things and all of the things we do not yet think or talk or gesture about.

Or consider a computer program. Its existence is a string of words and phrases transcoded into 1s and 0s and into physical logical gates transmitting electrons and back around and on itself into monitor LEDs into human eyes and brains into motor movements of mouse and keyboard and so on. A computer program is the interaction of all the information.

But surely there are such simple things that do not have a universal relationship – an existential equivalence? what is the simplest thing we can think or speak of? a boson? the number 1? a dot? just an abstract 1? It is impossible to wipe the complexity of existence from even these pure abstractions. We only conceive of their simplicity in relation to other concepts we find complex. Their simplicity must be weighed against everything that isn’t simple.

And so here we have a collosal contradiction. Patterns are a local phenomenon. They aren’t the entirety. And yet I’ve suggested that patterns are existence – all that exists. Unraveling this I am directly saying that patterns interpreting/transcoding/sensing patterns is what exists – creates th world – at all levels. Pure relation, which is only possible at a local level, is existence. Particles only exist in relation to other particles – a gradient. Humans to other humans, to animals, to the planet, to particles. Planets to other massive bodies… and so on, and on, up and down, left to right, back and forward, in and out….

herein lies a beautiful thing – mathematics and computation are a wonderfully efficient symbolic translation methods. This is why computers and mathematics always creep their way into our efforts to make things and make sense of the world. It is why our brains are so damn useful. complex abstract pattern recognizing patterns – these networks of neurons. It is why DNA is so proficient at replication. a “simple”, resilient substrate carrying everything necessary to generate and regenerate these networks of neurons that can then make synthetic networks of pure relation. Whether particles or quantum or digital or biological or chemical there is pure relation, pure patterns among patterns – there is math. It matters not and is completely the point that math and computation can be done in any substrate – between proteins, with pen and paper, on a calculator, in a quantum computer.


why is that? WHY?

In a feat of complete and utter stupid philosophy and unlogic… because it cannot be any other way. Positing a god doesn’t escape this. Positing a multi-verse doesn’t escape this. If any of those things are to exist, they must exist still in relation – they are relation! It’s borderline mystical. Of course it is!

And why does any of this matter? is this just another sound of one hand clapping? a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound? Yes. yes indeed. Those, while used to dismiss the question from the outset actually do call attention to the entirety of the situation. What we conceive of as existence and existing is usually reductively done in by our discrete categorization and our failure to continuously review and revise our categories. The practical implications of this adherence to categories (zoology, isms, religion, gender, nations, science disciplines, etc) is what stunts our path towards knowledge and keeps us in fear.

If we don’t lean into the idea that everything has an existential equivalence we are simply deciding to be ignorant. And in that ignorance we trend towards non-existence. In every day terms if we see the human population only by the color of skin we diminish human existence. If we say and take for truth all of the -isms, reductions, and arbitrary definitions we snuff out relation. If we make any assumptions at all and refuse to question those assumptions, even what we think are so obvious and so simple, we move closer to entropy. If we want to exist at all, we must be mystical and fanatical about sensing relation, resensing it, re-interpreting it. This is not a moral argument. Existence is no more moral than non-existence – except as a local conception.

It really does come down to this (and this is very Camus-like):

If you care at all to exist as you, you must question/express/relate to everything as much as you can before your pattern is fully transcoded into something not you. (we are just food for worms…)

So yes, ask yourself and answer it in infinite variety over and over “if a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?” This is life – it is your existential equivalence to everything else. You relate, therefore, you are. I relate, therefore I am. X is, therefore X relates.

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Certain activities are fundamental to the human endeavor.

The list:
Acquisition of food, shelter and water
Mate attraction and selection
Acquisition or forage of information regarding the first three
Acquisition of goods and services that may make it more efficient to get the first three
Exchange of above three

Only software that deals directly with these activities flourishes into profitable, long term businesses.

I define software here as computer programs running on severs and personal computers and devices.

The race to the bottom in the pricing of information and software and hardware that runs that software ensures that only software businesses that scale beyond all competition can last. Scale means massive and efficient data centers, massive support functions and a steady stream of people talent to keep it all together. And the only activities in the human world that scale enough are those things that are fundamental activities to us all.

Sure there’s a place for boutique and specialist software but typically firms like that are swallowed by the more fundamental firms who bake the function directly into their ecosystem and then they give it away. And this is also why the boutique struggles long term. Those fundamental software builders are always driving the cost down. So even if a boutique is doing ok now it is not sustainable if it is at all relevant. It will be swallowed.

Open source software only reinforces this. In fact it takes this idea to the extreme. The really successful open source projects are always fundamental software (os, browser, web server, data processing) and further drive the price of software to zero.

Scale is the only way to survive in software.

This goes for websites, phone apps, etc. All the sites and apps that focus on niche interests that don’t deal with the fundamental activities above directly either get assimilated into larger apps and sites with broad function or they whiter and die unable to be sustained by a developer.

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Some conflicting reports:

http://humanprogress.org/ (there’s progress!)













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In Defense of The Question Is The Thing

I’ve oft been accused of being all vision with little to no practical finishing capability. That is, people see me as a philosopher not a doer. Perhaps a defense of myself and philosophy/approach isn’t necessary and the world is fine to have tacticians and philosophers and no one is very much put off by this.

I am not satisfied. The usual notion of doing and what is done and what constitutes application is misguided and misunderstood.

The universe is determined yet unpredictable (see complexity theory, cellular automota). Everything that happens and is has anticedents (see behaviorism, computation, physics). Initiatial conditions have dramatic effect on system behavior over time (see chaos theory). These three statements are roughly equivalent or at least very tightly related. And they form the basis of my defense of what it means to do.

“Now I’m not antiperformance, but I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never be able to credit the questions themselves.” – Robert Irwin, page 90, seeing is forgetting the name of thing one sees

The Question Is The Thing! And by The Question that means the context or the situation or the environment or the purpose. and I don’t mean The Question or purpose as assigned by some absolute authority agent. It is the sense of a particular or relevative instance we consider a question. What is the question at hand?

Identifying and really asking the question at hand drives the activity to and fro. To do is to ask. The very act of seriously asking a question delivers the do, the completion. So what people mistake in me as “vision” is really an insatiable curiousity and need to ask the right question. To do without the question is nothing, it’s directionless motion and random walk. To seriously ask a question every detail of the context is important. To begin answering the question requires the environment to be staged and the materials provided for answers to emerge.

There is no real completion without a constant re-asking of the question. Does this answer the question? Did that answer the question?

So bring it to something a lot of people associate me with: web and software development. In the traditional sense I haven’t written a tremendous amount of code myself. Sure I’ve shipped lots of pet projects, chunks of enterprise systems, scripts here and there, and the occassional well crafted app and large scale system. There’s a view though that unless you wrote every line of code or contributed some brilliant algorithm line for line, you haven’t done anything. The fact is there’s a ton of code written every day on this planet and very little of it would i consider “doing something”. Most of it lacks a question, it’s not asking a question, a real, big, juicy, ambitious question.

Asking the question in software development requires setting the entire environment up to answer it. Literally the configuration of programmer desks, designer tools, lighting, communication cadence, resources, mixing styles and on and on. I do by asking the question and configuring the environment. The act of shipping software takes care of itself if the right question is seriously asked within an environment that let’s answers emerge.

Great questions tend to take the shape of How Does This Really Change the World for the User? What new capability does this give the world? How does this extend the ability of a user to X? What is the user trying to do in the world?

Great environments to birth answers are varied and don’t stay static. The tools, the materials all need to change per the unique nature of the question.

Often the question begs us to create less. Write less code. Tear code out. Leave things alone. Let time pass. Write documentation. Do anything but add more stuff that stuffs the answers further back.

The question and emergent answers aren’t timeless or stuck in time. The context changes the question or shape of the question may change.

Is this to say I’m anti shipping (or anti performance as Irwin put it)? No. Lets put it this way we move too much and ask too little and actual don’t change the world that much. Do the least amount to affect the most is more of what I think is the approach.

The question is The Thing much more than thing that results from work. The question has all the power. It starts and ends there.

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As I watched some of the Republican National Convention, gear up for the DNC, get through my own daily work, read essays, strategize about business, talk to friends and family and synthesize all the data, I just come back to this question What Are We So Afraid Of?

I decided to write this post today specifically because I saw this ridiculous commercial yesterday for ADT Pulse.   http://www.adtpulse.com/  This commercial made it clear that if you aren’t monitoring your home in real time with video all the time everything you know and love was in grave danger!    So, I’ve decided to figure out just how afraid of everything I should be.

Here’s some of what we seem to be afraid about as a culture.

Our jobs: 




Our economy: 




Our government: 




People different than us: 












Technology and Media:





Cancer, Disease:



Medicine, Shots, Vaccines:



God, Heaven and Hell:







Our Children’s Safety:









Large Hadron Collider:



Everything else:


Nothing to Fear?

So is there anything to fear?   are the fears valid?  well, I guess they are valid fears if you don’t have information.   So here’s some information.


Most fears drilled into us aren’t founded on evidence – at least not at the level we fear them:




Unemployment isn’t really that high in this country (or most western countries), especially if you get an education:



You’ll probably have 5-10 employers in your working lifetime so assume you’ll get laid off, fired or go out of business.  There will be other businesses to hire you or you can just make something yourself:



Economy will have short term blips but ultimately continues to churn ahead:



You’re unlikely to be murdered



Children aren’t taken very often (at least in Colorado)



In fact, violence has long been on the decline:



It’s ok if you forget to pray, chances are it probably doesn’t change outcomes:



And humans have been getting tattoos for a long time and the world hasn’t ended:



Oh, and, humans aren’t that different from Bonobos or Chimps, much less other humans.  So, maybe we should rethink that worrying about people that aren’t just like us:



Almost every one of common fears are unwound through perspective changes aka education aka realizing it’s not black and white.    Again, see the S. Pinker History of Violence link above to get an idea of the real impact of just literacy and access to information and what it does to fear.

Is it a big deal that people fear the wrong things?   Yes!   Especially if it leads to suicide bombing, racial profiling, not getting an education and so on.


But, c’mon, aren’t there some things we should fear?



and maybe this too


well maybe this too



In the end, methinks fearing too much is a waste of time because in the end we just don’t know what’s going to happen, right?


Knowing you can’t predict it all (thus prevent it) what’s the point in worrying to the point of being truly scared?



So, no, ADT, I won’t be buying your Pulse product.



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