User:Ssstephen/Reading: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:32, 7 November 2022

oh this one?

Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines, Lisa Gitelman

Print culture and non print media evolve in mutual inextricability. The phonograph and contemporary inscriptive forms were deeply dependent upon reworkings of the social and economic relations of textuality, of print culture and print capitalism. They engaged literacy practices in toto, the cognitive and the somatic, the semiotic and the social. They helped question authors and readers as subjects and modify the experienced subjectivities of speakers, performers, publishers, and literates. In doing so they kept intervening into dynamic constructions of private and public, community and difference. p13

"Our copyright laws urgently need revision. They are imperfect in definition, confused and inconsistent in expression; they omit provision for many articles which, under modern reproductive processes, are entitled to protection; they impose hardships upon the copyright proprietor which are not essential to the fair protection of the public; they are difficult for the courts to interpret and impossible for the Copyright Office to administer with satisfaction to the public." [1]

Ted Nelson on hypertext

Calligraphy for Computers, AV Hershey

User:Ssstephen/Reading/Calligraphy for Computers

The power of language in Jewish Kabbalah and magic: how to do and undo things with words, Agata Paluch

read on bl.uk

Literary Machines, Ted Nelson

(reading method note: read chapters 1 & 2 with no writing/notetaking, now re-scanning and writing these notes)

TN shows a diagram of "Ordinary" Hypertext which he proposes is a simplification of a (his) bigger more unifying idea. But surely there are more "Weird" Hypertexts? "Different" Hypertexts, "Strange" Hypertexts, "Outside" Hypertexts.

Check out Douglas Engelbart's NLS at Stanford Research Institute.

The reason that it (Project Xanadu) has taken so long is that all of its ultimate features are part of the design

Again this seems super prescriptive to me, not sure if I like that. No room for adaptation of structure, this is apparently the ultimate superstructure. ("unified structure to handle it all", "clean design", etc etc words that start warning signals for me)

TN seems to me to have some hidden/unaddressed desires to make this a corporate or commercial structure, in particular on page 0/6 where he compares Xanadu to Xerox Corporation (even the name dude), and page 0/13 where he offers new recruits "a small chance of fame and fortune".

A diagram of an oppressive hypertext, based on a phrase from Ted Nelson's Literary Machines "repressive hypertext"

THE BOOK STOPS HERE.

Ex TOT DAG: Expanding Tissue of Text, Data and Graphics (p. 0/9)

And publishing--ah consider what publishing will become

I like the optimistic rhetoric though and definitely exciting to read.

Check out The Problems of Hypertext (Chapter 3 of this book?)

This book too is hardly everybody's cup of tea[quote added], since there is not much choice among its sequences

p.1/14 Note: I added the link, it there a protocol for this? I have adapted the more traditional [emphasis added]

Hypertext referred to as "nonsequence". In my experience it is more a multitude of sequences, this is what I assumed the hyper- part meant. p.1/15

"Colored links" p.1/15: Interesting contrast to my interpretation of p.0/2 "Ordinary" Hypertext as part of a prescriptive system.

"Compound hypertext" p.1/16: In general the tone of this chapter sits with me better. I think TN is presenting the same ideas but without the intense rhetoric of the start.

Pictures and diagrams are intrinsically nonsequential

p.16 (mkay)

Talmud as hypertext p.1/16: a body of accumulated comment and controversy Admitting hypertext is not from the future, I'm into this.

It is my belief that this new ability to represent ideas in the fullness of their interconnectedness will lead to easier and better writing, easier and better learning, and a far greater ability to share and communicate the interconnections among tomorrows ideas and problems

p.1/19. Again with the uber-optimistic futuristic rhetoric imo. I get this is still chapter one of the book but I see no space in his language for considering the potential issues of this new system. Where's my hoverboard?

Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski

P63 In Praise of the Cross-Reference

Index card system as authors assistant when cross referencing is used, or communication partner

Conscious and unconscious cross referencing

Clarifying creative prompts

Intentional (re conscious unconscious?) incorrect references can stimulate. Like Denis Diderot in Encyclopedia

Index cards as stars

Index cards as neurons

Index cards as stock prices

Index cards as sex in the city characters

Mapping

Scope/accuracy of a reference... Reference to mathematics vs reference to godels incompleteness theorem. Focus

  “ Every  note  is  only  one  element"

Claude Shannon Entropy

Nikolas Luhmann physical index cards in the late twentieth century (Anonymous . 1929c . “ Kartei ” als Warenzeichen gelöscht! Rationelle Betriebsführung, n.p.) ( Vogt , Victor . 1922 . Die Kartei: Ihre Anlage und Führung. Vol. 5 of Orga-Schriften. 2nd edition , revised by Dr. Porstmann. Berlin : Organisation Verlagsanstalt)

n.p.

-

P65 On the Gradual Manufacturing of Thoughts in Storage

poetological - to do with the knowledge of creation? Don't have a dictionary right now

Konrad Gessner possible inventor of index cards

"the production of innovations is always based on the fortifi ed recombination of the existing."

Heinrich von Kliest midwifery of thought (On the Gradual Produc-tion of Thoughts Whilst Speaking 1805) borrowed from Kant

analects --- what is this?

Conversation creates ideas

The Text claims index cards are a valid substitute for the new connections and perspectives offered by a human in conversation. To me this implies the humans creativity is the same as the connections offered by the references; surprising, useful, inspiring, but also predetermined?

Index cards as "precise" "infallible", generally true compared to humans but a) has limits and b) has negative results as well as positive

Kliest - knowledge as a "condition" or state rather than a property

Recombinatory power comes from material nature of cards shuffling juxtaposing etc

"born from the spirit of sloth" index cards as laziness

Index cards as boredom

Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account, Niklas Luhmann

Thinking of the index cards as someone to be communicated with

"One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other. "

Information can only be generated through comparison, OR (insert other logical operators here? Combination as information, XOR as information)

Different goals can lead to better mode informative communication

"The fixed filing place needs no system. It is sufficient that we give every slip a number which is easily seen and that we never change this number and thus the fixed place of the slip"

order is a system though, even chronology? Doesn't take relativity into account, implies some observer with a privileged frame of reference

This isn't just a hypothetical or theoretical limit, consider two authors editing the same wiki page

Multiverse library or multiverse wiki - if someone is already editing the page (or the entire wiki) and a second editor appears (or second observer), the new wiki "timeline" splinters from the last. (options in brackets would splinter much more frequently)

How does version history look in this system?

Could be experimented with a small simple system, maybe a single bit of content and two editors, with metadata for edit/version history

Secondary memory

Long term project, how to retain and enable access, preserve information, allow for expansion in future

Order should be purely formal, does this even makes sense? Can form be isolated?

"Every note is only an element which receives its quality only from the network of links and back-links within the system. " One billion Christians can't be wrong, one billion Muslims cant be wrong, one billion hyperlinks can't be wrong

Combination of order and disorder can (?) arise from formally ordered system

Examine supposedly formal orders, my instinct says they're not

Bookmarks

Bookmark sharing, bookmark searching, bookmark exchange, bookmark folders and structuring

Tags vs links, tags offer bidirectionality and multiple end points, links are just vectors while tags are fields

Accidents are the driving force for evolution

"to isolate these two aspects [ order and disorder] from each other is neither possible nor methodologically meaningful" <-- I like this

"tha accidents of reading"

What unread books can teach us, Oliver Burkeman

how to write a thesis don't have internet right now to find a readable version.

how-the-internet-makes-you-think-youre-smarter-than-you-really-are Another One to check out when I get internet connection

"Start with the title, Introduction and table of contents." Useful for reading and writing I think.

"the line wasn’t there" the blank web page, the imagined memory

Fugitive Libraries, Shannon Mattern

Melissa Adler, study of the politics of library classification

Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Safiya Noble

BlackLivesMatter Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

Should a library be neutral? Neutrality justifies disengagement

Catherine Allen Latimer, Nella Larsen, Regina Anderson Andrews, and Pura Belpré

"Carrollton, Georgia, librarian Edith Foster marked the spines of African-Americans’ books with a triangle, so readers of all races would know which texts were meant for whom"

Patterson Toby Graham, in his history of the struggle to integrate Alabama’s libraries, asks questions that are still pertinent today: “What is the role of a library and a librarian in an intolerant and fearful society? Have librarians been active agents or just passive observers in the ebb and flow of social change and social conscience?”

I am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter

to varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world. the interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. that is the true meaning of the word 'empathy'.

He's not great with words (penetration, universal machines, true) but moving past that this is a beautiful idea. The idea of a soul or identity as distributed and modular. The possibility to at very least simulate eachother. He mentions coarse and fine grained a lot which makes me think of renormalisation, and in a good way. A mathematical approach that doesnt require division to reach truth. Accepting that truth can be found on different scales at different times. The night of the 10th of November 1619.

the myth of watertight boundaries between souls is something whose falsity we all have slight tastes of all the time, but since it is so convenient and so conventional to associate one body with precisely one soul, since it is so deeply tempting and so deeply ingrained to see a body and a soul as being in perfect alignment, we choose to downplay or totally ignored the implications of the everyday manifestations of the [intercirclusion] of souls.

Volumetric Regimes, Possible Bodies

Volumetric Regimes wiki

The So-called Lookalike

read it here A letter Manetta Barends wrote as the so-called designer of this book to a designer, such as the designer of the template used for the entire series, and made me think of a conversation we started to have in Methods yesterday about style.

The series editors insisted that we could take the design of the book into our own hands, as long as we would “follow the template”. They did not specify what this would mean exactly, but made clear that it was important for them that we honored the original design.

I am wondering how to reconnect your template and aesthetics to the way this book is being made?

We found a slab serif font that aligned with the one in your template and we figured out how to replicate the layout’s dynamics and overall structuration.

(emphasis added in all three above)

Aligned in what way, and why? As a fun misunderstanding Manetta then starts to talk about the "face on the cover" by which I thought she meant typeface. When she mentioned this slab-serif face I was already thinking about the implications of honouring the design choices in the template, and this made me think about the implications of using faces based on those from the early ninteenth century (in this book but also generally). If the face is aligned with the template, can it also be aligned with the contributors? Does everything have to be lined up? The spanish for 'line them up' is 'alinearlos' which is a useful term to know if you are trying to work with a designer whose communicates in spanish.

Yesterday (20221005) xpub1 were discussing style briefly while working together as a group. Myself and Bobi had attempted to not put our own formatting onto some texts we were comparing ('designing' and 'editing' respectively). But then when discussing the compared texts as a group, Cara immediately noticed them to be "very xpub". Brought up some thoughts about styles emerging from process and tools, individual and collective styles, and the implied next thought for me would be 'so what?', does it have any effect?

We Have Always Been GeoHackers

read it here Weird coincidence that I read this the day before learning to use the 3D printer. Although it first seemed like something not directly relevant some ties came up even in naming (gcode and gplates), but more interesting was looking at their process as a case study. 'Disobedient bug reporting and disobedient action research' seem like useful tools to me, and maybe are also interesting in relation to Manetta's letter above. I thought this was a good critique of a software environment and environment software.

body of the earth

This essay also references 'Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None' a few times which seems worth looking into.

From Work to Text[ to Sound], Roland Barthes

The title makes it clear already that text good work bad no work me text. When i first got a mobile phone it cost 9c to send a text. This steadily grew to 13c, although never cost as much as an MMS (up to 25c). Presumably the multi media message involved more work than the text, and hence the higher cost. Certainly an MMS usually involves the transfer of much more data than an SMS. Nasdaq defines information cost as

Transactions costs that include the assessment of the investment merits of a financial asset. Related: Search costs.

These days texts dont work in the same way as they used to, messaging has become over the top. An internet connection is required to go over the top, although a cellular network is not.

On B-dog's comparisons with music:

"to play" and "to listen" constituted a virtually undifferentiated activity

Barthes maybe saying that listening without playing is passive, spectating society? The text made me think of the word 'action' a lot, until Roro finally offers it in the cadence 'deferred action', the signifier as the beat that never drops. At sonic acts yesterday i found myself listening and also hearing. Trying hard not to see or read, which is difficult but Very Important Participation. Also attempting to keep silent, which is certainly easier but still a challenge (run through a forest with your hair tied in a braid without breaking a single branch). Sound good text bad because a sound is always part of an environment. You can't hear any thing except the mechanotransduction of your hair follicles, which your body is overcoding to stop you from overfalling and to give you spatial orientation. Sound is space or at very least they are signified in the same text.

Exploratory Programming, Nick Montford

1.7 Free Software and No-Cost Software

Free as in free beer, free speech, free love, free money, free palestine, freebird, free education, free ride, freefall, free willy, freesound.org, free facebook, free Tom Mooney, free your mind, free your mind arnhem, free music, free movies, free movies online, free movies watch now.

Further reading from this section: Free Texts Free Verse Free Software Free Software

America, Allen Ginsberg

America why are your libraries full of tears?

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.   
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

Nuestra Herencia: Senior Legacy Project at El Paseo Community Garden, On the Real Film

watch it

Nuestra Herencia

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..

...

....

.....

......

.......

An Invitation for Wildness, Happen Films

watch it

Non-action as a forest-gardener, sun tzu sort of thing

As a forest gardener one of the things that you do come to realise is that you're a bit-player, you're not the main driver out there, and that really your responsibility becomes learning more about how that works, stepping back, being a bit more relaxed about the whole thing and just watching those processes. And even changing the way that you think about harvest and about what you eat or what you need from your garden and so your diet could change as ours has, and rather than looking to eat lettuces we might each alexanders or a perrenial french sorrel.

The more intervention you make, the more mistakes you're likely to make

time-code for story about weed management

The opportunities that need people, its the opposite of industrialisation or intensification where you need hardly any people because machines are doing it, herbicides are doing it. Putting people back into an environment, help them to make it worthwhile and healthy

Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles

Material Metaphors p18

Research in Experimental Documents (RED) team at Xerox PARC, including Anne Balsamo and Richard Gold.

Where is this https://www.academia.edu/9759064/the_what_of_XFR_eXperiments_in_the_future_of_reading (found this one)

Where is this https://www.academia.edu/9759063/The_methods_of_our_madness_research_on_experimental_documents

It aint what you do it's the way that you do it

Technotexts p25

Reflexive Loops

N Kate includes the phrase reflexive loops in her definition of technotexts which is v interesting. A text that creates a feedback loop by connecting the nodes of materiality and inscribed constructions (avoiding the words form and content? which is great if that's what she's doing) necessarily can achieve more than a text that doesn't. Feedback of information at the moment makes me think of emergent complexity, eg video feedback as described by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop, example here and here. Or in the audio world, Karplus Strong synthesis or other techniques that use feedback to an extent that the initial inputs become irrelevant, the emergent sound (or video, or text) having its own properties. Also the recording surface of the body without organs. How can the process of recording and inscribing be creative and what is created or emerges from it? Why does a self-referencing iframe not infinitely loop and crash my machine?

The true difference in nature is not between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but between the real machinic element, which constitutes desiring-production, and the structural whole of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which merely forms a myth and its variants

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus p.102

The Future of Writing, Vilem Flusser

                          





image



                                                  space




                                                                 linear






                                      the grass



             text






                            [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0087 eternal return]




                                                                sound








[[#eternalreturn |eternal return]]




                                                                                                     ‘Well! Once more!’


                                   music


                                       
‘Was THAT—life?’ will I say unto death. 


                                                                  [[#eternalreturn |eternal return]]

As We May Think, Vannevar Bush

(from the Life magazine reproduction, September 1945)

Image: The scientist recording an experiment with a "universal-focus lens" in 1945 was presumably an optimistic or hopeful one, and the title and subtitle seem to follow along with this but for me the idea of "universal-focus" is terrifying and presumably for many people today at least unrealistic. A jpeg (which this article probably isnt, but most likely uses a similar compression format) does not have a universal focus but rather makes compromises (thinking or cognition?) on how much to represent, the resolution and also the frequency of information to represent. Like the human eye it was designed for, the compression algorhythm ignores high frequency data. Alias, the "universal-focus lens" seems to me an unrealistic and unwanted dream.

Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.

Who should witness them? What is witnessing? When you witness a document you write your name on it. "Witness" comes from wit as in knowledge.

Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood.

Does understanding (observing) affect the world? Is reading a form of writing?

Image: A scientist smoking a pipe and holding a large cylindrical flask half full of liquid. They are looking into the flask and attempting to keep a serious face while trying desperately to remember if it is the top or the bottom of the meniscus that should be read. The pipe greatly assists in this attempt as it forces the scientist to keep their lips tightly pursed. This image shows, much more clearly that the previous one, the artefacts of fourier space compression; a splash of high frequency here, a dab of low frequency there, the algorithm's fingerprints poured into its work.

Under [Vannevar Bush's] direction 6,000 scientists worked on such projects as the development of radar and the atomic bomb.

Between the original publishing of this article in the Atlantic July 1945 and this version in September 1945 there was one month which was called August 1945 and it had thirty one days including the 6th of August 1945 and the 9th of August 1945. From here Im finished with the opinions of this Little Boy, but I kept reading the images.

Images: Ex-lax is presented as the goldilocks zone laxative through three images and accompanying text, not like those "fright!" strong laxatives or "sissy" weak laxatives. Just stay centrist and no-one will get spanked!

Image: The "supersecretary of the coming age" has a big smiley head on it. The line drawing style of the illustration reminds me of operating manuals and assembly instructions. The supersecretary is a tool (hence the big smiley head).

Image: The Mifflin ad is quite frightening. Perhaps this isnt from the original, but this compressed version of the image looks like the woman has a very intense stare. Maybe this is in relation to the poem she recites to herself (to me?) and her intense body rubbing which seems to contradict the slogan "Rub and relax with Mifflin".

Image: An eagle in a circle.

Image: A right foot with three corns.

Image: Coins I thought but then I read they are awards for watchcraft.

Image: Sir Walter Raleigh.

Image: Automobile User's Guide.

Image: Mechanical pencil.

Image: Server room with controller which has pressure gauges and VU meters.

Image: A boy cycles away from his dad, both wave.

Image: A magazine with a picture of a girl on a bike (the boy's bike?)

Image: A bag of Richardson's After Dinner Mints.

Image: Ceci c'est un pipe.

Image: A girl drinking orange juice, and a bottle of orange juice.

Image: A tube of paste called Glider.

Image: A woman smoking indoors.

Image: A person in their underwear.

Image: Fudge.

Image: Robinson Reminders, a pocket memory system (to be used with the mechanical pen?).

Image: A dog wrappen in a suspender.edit: no a sock garter.

Image: A shoe that transforms soldiers into businessmen.

Image: A board game that appears to be a combination of scrabble and pictionary.

Image: Cute puppies.

Image: Another woman smoking (location not specified visually).

Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf, Lisa Gitelman

Response to Lisa Gitelman Near Print and Beyond Paper.pdf

read it here

PDfs variously partake of the form and fixity of print that other digital  text  formats  frequently  do  not.

 The  “look  of  printedness,”  as  I  have  called  it,  has  been  separated from paper and mobilized online, even in the process of producing printed books.

[PDFs] render

Its just a normal PDF.

Finally,  and  at  Adobe’s  instigation,  PDf  1.7  was  adopted  as an open standard by the International Standards Organization in 2008

This would be interesting to study further as an event, what is the context, who were the actors, what were their motivations.

The fixity of print

the  New  York  Times  Information  Bank—another fascinating, short-lived experiment—tried the same kind of thing, but fiche retrieval proved so unreliable that eventually “a person wearing white gloves pulled fiche on demand” and positioned it in front of a video camera.

Tabs opened while reading

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

WYSIWYG WYS>WYG WYS<WYG WYS%WYG WYS&WYG WYS|WYG

folding, smelling, tearing, crumpling, shuffling, and wiping

PDfs are indi-vidually bounded and distinct.

Can a PDF be in itself?

If  it  is  a  common-place  today  that  words  and  images  and  sounds  are  closer  together  than  they  have  ever  been  before—now  that  all  of  them  come  as  data  strings,  in bits and bytes—nonetheless there are important ways that “as compu-tational  data  structures,  images  differ  radically  and  fundamentally  from  electronic  text.”85  The  big  difference,  as  Kirschenbaum  explains,  is  that  unlike digital text, “images remain largely opaque to the algorithmic eyes of the machine.”

9 Not quite text (from a reader’s standpoint) and not entirely image (at the scanner), barcodes like these require a fixity that makes them perfect  content  for  PDfs  as  well  as  for  paper.  So  the  document  persists.

What is the difference between "Portable Document Format Reference Manual" by Adobe Systems and "Beyond Paper: The Official Guide to Adobe Acrobat" by Patrick Ames?

More tabs

1 2 3 4

An Archive of Words, Daniel Rosenberg

read it here

This reminds me of Vuk Cosic's File Extinguisher (which seems to be most easily accessed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine ironically). The File Extinguisher used to also have a map which unfortunately doesn't seem to be archived. The map as an archive is an interesting document as it primarily locates things in relation to eachother. Where do you put something in the archive, what is beside it, what is it far away from?

It will be the foundation for the history of the epistemol-ogy of our contemporary era.

How does "the epistimology of our contemporary era" have a history? I can only understand this as part of a more general history of epistemology, maybe I'm missing the point.

Thomas Aquinas in Roberto Busa Mallet topic modeling software, can this be used to make a Zipfian distribution? Try on John Dee's Liber Loagaeth for example or some of Hildegard's Lingua Ignota

a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by

the a the a  the the the  the a  the the a  a the a  a the  the  a a the  a the a a  a the  the  a a  the the the  the a  a a a  a the a the a the     the a the the  the the the  a a the     a a a a  a the  a a a the  a     a the the the  a a the  a a a  the     the a a  a a  a a a  the a the a  the the the  a a a the  a  a the a  a  the a a     the  a a a a  a     a a a  a  the a the a  a the a  a  the     the the  a  a a a  a a a  a the  the the a  a  a the a the a the     a the the a  a the a a  a  a the  a a a  a     a a a  a  the a  the a a     the a the the  the the the  a a the  a the a     a the  the a  a a a  a the the  a  a the a     the  the the the     the the the  a the a a  the a a     a the the a  a a  the a  the a the  the the a a the the     the a the a  a the  a the a  a     the the the  a a the a     the  a a a a  a     a a the a  a a the  the a  the a  the a the the     a a the a  a the  a the a  the the  the the a a the the     the a the a  a a a a  a the  a the a a  a a the a  the the the  the a  the  a the a the a the  a the a the a the  a the a the a the     a the a  the the the  the the a  a  a the a  the a the a the the     the a the a  a the  a the a  the the the  a the a a  the a the the  the a  a  a the the the the a  a a a     the the the  the a     the  a a a a  a     a the the a  a a a a  the the the  the a  a  the a the a the the

the s the u the p the e the r

the Microfiche Concordance  to  Old  English:  The  High-  Frequency  Words.11  This  marks  a  no-table development in the history of computer- generated concordances

No-table lol.

Ability of Google Search et al to understand or interpret natural language is super interesting. A search algorithm doesn't have the same logic of interpretation as a human, it finds meaning in other places and finds other meanings. Presumably corporate aims are to make this logic emulate human meaninging as much as possible to make it an efficient tool, but it's interesting to think about the alternative knowledge a meaning-making machine could find.

Example of a nested figure with captions. Daniel Rosenberg "An Archive of Words" Science in the Archives: Pasts Presents, Futures, 2017: p.282, University of Chicago Press

Concordance of indeclinables, John of Segovia

It was a forest of words

Strongs Concordance and other concordances of the Bible are aggregated here. A concordance is an external text which creates links within it's target text. This site as an aggregated concordance then creates links between the entries of different concordances, referring to the same target text.

Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata, Matthew Cook

Because a system is universal, some of its properties are undecidable (will it become periodic, will a particular sequence occur)

Because Turing machines are universal, if a compiler exists that can compile any data and program from a turing machine to another computer, then that computer is also universal

Tag systems are universal ACDABBE --> DABBECCDD

Cyclic tag systems can only have a two letter alphabet {Y,N}, but they can emulate tag systems so are also universal.

A glider system from Matthew Cook's paper 'Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata'

A glider system (see image) is a system of moving particles called gliders. In the image you can see diagonal lines which interact with vertical lines (the tape head or data) in the centre, emulating a cyclic tag system. The glider system is running an emulation of the cyclic tag system, which is running an emulation of the tag system. In a way this looks like a vector system to me, of interacting vectors rather than flipping bits.

Lastly you run an emulation of the glider system inside rule 110.

-

Fabric version of this could be really interesting. If you got a round loom with 14n pins (a flat loom maybe would be more flexible, to decide different sizes), you could knit a hat or sock program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOTIAmg0Iow Or does it need to be woven? No idea.

The piece should be a ring so the ends more obviously loop back on themselves. Re: slow computing, computation as labour, This Work of Body / This Body of Work, Meghan Clarke https://www.designacademy.nl/p/study-at-dae/graduation-show/graduation-projects/meghan-clarke Talk to Daniela about double sided knitting, re binary knitting and ternary knitting. So the knitting is the computation; knit the first line of the program then knit further to get the output. A little similar to a quipu, although probably a less efficient system. Are quipus universal?

Programming some A gliders into 110, of increasing width from left to right.

What can you compute on rule 110 (apart from everything)? Can you write a hello world script on a rule 110 computer? Can you add 2+2? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKnSRw_X2w4

First attempts here at coding in the p5.js version of 110 with a few A gliders of increasing widths. Even experimenting on the javascript version of this is so slow, doing this in playing cards or knitting would be incredibly slow. But if it's a statement about computational labour the slowness reveals that.

Stopped at page 13 for now.

The Future Looms, Sadie Plant

Characters in this paper in order of appearance:

Sadie Plant
Mallory
Ada Byron ("the Queen of Engines")
The Prime Minister
William Gibson
Bruce Sterling
Ada Lovelace ("the Queen of Engines")
The Difference Engine
Luce Irigaray
The computer
The loom
The patriarchal present
The end of human history
Freud
Woman
Man
Charles Babbage
Lady Byron ("the Princess of Parallelograms")
Sophia Frend
Moore
Mary Somerville
Dr Dionysus Lardner
The Mechanics Institute
Menabrea
The Analytical Engine
That Brain of mine
William Carpenter
The Devil
Babbage's fairy
Her three children
Her husband
Her mother
A Snail-Shell
A Molecular Laboratory
A.K.
Morrison
Morrison
Jacquard
Jacquard's cards
the Jacquard loom
Weaving
the drawloom
the China of 1000BC
the complex designs common in the silks of this period
one historian
half the threads of the warp
the other
the hands
the shuttle
the thread
the woof
Fernand Bruadel
the Middle Ages
the artificial memories of the printed page
Basyle Bouchon
Falcon, inventor of the punch card
the relentless drive to perfect the punch card system
the Second World War
the Allied military machine
Howard Aiken
Mark 1 ("the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator")
Konrad Zuse
the Z-3
the Z-11
Captain Grace Murray Hopper ("the 'Ada Lovelace' of Mark 1")
her husband
the war
the first high-computer language COBOL
the term "bug"
Norbert Wiener
the governor
the cybernetic system
the Turing Machine
Turing
Manuel de Landa
the decentralized flow of control
Allan Newell
"demons"
"Pandemonium"
Alan Kay
Neith, the Egyptian divinity of weaving
Lucie Lamy
the fate of cottage industries in the Midlands and North of England
Lord Byron
the Frame-Work Bill
the processes which relocated and redefined control
Athena
Isis
the wife
her husband
Margaret Mead
The disruption of family relations caused by the introduction of mechanics
the mother
the strange fluidities of the material
Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
his/the mother
the appearance and the possibility of simulation
the screen, the interface, the messenger
Marshall McLuhan
Quentin Fiore
the patrilineal demand for the reproduction of the same
Thom Jurek
Larry McCaffrey
the materiality of the data space
this actual space
the disguises
Neuromancer's cowboy, Case
a vast thing, beyond knowing
the mimic
herself
the faults of Nature
her own veils ("her camouflage")
the terrifying virtuality of the natural
Michael Heim
Helsel
Roth
the 'subject'
science, machine, woman
Misogyny and technophobia
the end of the twentieth century
a proliferation of screens, lines of communication, media, interfaces, and simulations
Cybernetic feminism
"her own"
the interface
another woman
Darwin
Footnotes ("the marginal zones")
"A.A.L."
the United States Defence Department
ADA
her own name

Ada Lovelace often described her strange intimacy with death... it was no wonder that she was so attracted to the unfamiliar expanses of mathematical worlds.

This story starts mostly with a character assessment of Ada Lovelace as sadgirl.

There is no finite line of demarcation which limits the powers of the Analytical Engine. These powers are co-extensive with our knowledge of the laws of analysis itself, and need be bounded only by our acquaintance with the latter.

Quote from Ada Lovelace. Quite utopian, but I see where the excitement comes from. Outside of a mathematical definition of "limits", there are plenty of limits on the Analytical Engine like quantity of punchcards, computation speed, weight, location, networking capabilities, no USB-C ports, it never existed, etc.

the Analytical Engine weaves Agebraical patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Quote from Ada Lovelace. Interesting that she says the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves, as opposed to thread and yarn. Are all machines running simulations? Certainly these two early examples look like they are.

Basyle Bouchon and Jacques de Vaucanson were two other inventors in the 18éme siecle who invented punched paper roll and the lathe and le Canard Digérateur.

the punch card gave the Analytical Engine foresight

the Analytical Engine will possess a library of its own

Grace Hopper introduced the term "bug" after she found a dead moth interrupting the smooth circuits of Mark 1.

Only after the introduction of silicon in the 1960s did the decentralized flow of control become an issue, eventually allowing for systems in which "control is always captured by whatever production happens to have its conditions satisfied by the current workspace contents."

How does this distribution of control work in other situations?

Pandemonium is the realm of the self-organising system, the self-arousing machine: systems of control and synthetic intellegence... only with the cybernetic system does self-control no longer entail being placed beneath or under something: there is no "self" to control man#, machine or any other system... the possibility of activity without centralised control, an acency, of sorts, which has no need of a subject position

I guess that answers my question.

"Mechanisation saves time and labour" how does this relate to the labour (and time) of craft, the labour of decoration re Marian Bantjes and William Morris? If artists are not the decorators, who will they be? Re: crappy print.

Who are the women? Those who weave.

A computer that passes the Turning test is always more than a human intelligence, simulation always takes the mimic over the brink.

The Brain Project

permacomputing/ Principles

Available https://permacomputing.net/Principles/

There are a lot of individual principles in this booklet I agree with (shortened below):

"Avoid pseudosimplicity"

"Low complexity is beautiful"

"Abundance thinking". I have some reservations about the post-scarcity reference in this context but mostly this seems like a good spin on that idea.

"Design for descent". This feels a little like a prepper thing to say, which I think may be veering towards conspiracy theories (and also not in my opinion a healthy attitude towards how to solve urgent existential threats in our ecosystem). On the other hand the anti-economic message this might be suggesting is a great idea, and maybe a more specific idea I would agree with is design for deflation.

"Keep it flexible". This entire section I agree with strongly. "In an ideal and elegant system, the three factors (smallness, simplicity and flexibility) support each other." This modularity idea is shown best by (some) computer systems, and I think in fact could be implemented in other aspects of society/permaculture to good effect. Of course this also makes we want to make more modular synths.

"Grow roots to a solid ground". This is a much nicer phrasing than "build on a solid ground", showing the work put in by the organism to reach the solid ground. And also the way it integrates itself into the ecosystem (roots binding the soil are part of what makes the ground solid).

"Amplify awareness".

"You dont need to twiddle with everything in order to understand it".

"Nothing is 'universal'. Even computers, 'universal calculators' that can be readapted to any task, are full of quirks that stem from the cultures that created them. Don't take them as the only way things can be, or as the most 'rational' or 'advanced' way."

"Strict utilitarianism impoverishes. Uselessness also has an important place, so appreciate it".

"Think about technology as a rhizome rather than a highway of progress and constant obsolescence".

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On the other hand I wonder about the overall implication of this shift in approach to computing. Presumably this change in principles is intended to have an effect on computing, the earth and people (the biosphere?). Some of the thoughts in these principles sound anti-progress or anti-learning. Of course a part of this is necessary to achieve sustainability (anti-growth, anti-capitalism, anti-inflation), but to me there also seems to be a risk of stagnation in this idea. "Intelligence amplification was a good goal", are they suggesting we should give up on this goal, that there is enough intelligence in the ecosystem? Or maybe it is not anti-progress but they are suggesting it didnt work? Either way I disagree and think computers have more to offer as intelligence-amplifiers.

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Some individual principles that may be problematic:

"Planned longevity". I get that this is as opposed to planned obsolescence, but other things that we have created recently with long life spans (and half-lives) are proving to be quite problematic, so I think this should be approached with caution.

"Dependencies should be kept low". This is not how an ecosystem works. Maybe a more useful idea would be to keep dependencies small and modular, or to keep dependencies flexible (through standardised interfaces and interactions, and clear, translatable communication).

"Human scale: A reasonable level of complexity for a computing system is that it can be entirely understood by a single person." This seems like an arbitrary measurement at best, and more likely an applied anthropocentric limit. There are plenty of things in the ecosystem that are too complicated for one human to understand (or care for).

"Dont take anything for granted. Especially don't expect the infrastructure such as the power grid and global networking to continue working indefinitely." Again sounding a bit like preppers here. I get that the condition of the earth is in decline and on a disastrous course but should there be a space for that thought in a list of principles for permaculture/permacomputing? From another point of view, the idea of not taking anything for granted brings me back to my point about dependencies, surely a healthy ecosystem should be full of them.

Defense of crappy print, Clara Balaguer and Florian Cramer and Marc van Elburg

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