Computing as the evolution of writing

22.V.1430

computing, or programming are to humankind more like writing2.0.

writing , in implication, was not merely the aquired ability to record data.

It was also very much a programming tool - which with an individual's will
was exercised and accomplished - think contracts, court orders, decrees, wills,
and so on.

The transformative effect writing had on society was thus much more than the
more widespread communication of information. It included creating new social
spaces, and tools for action. Crucially it is through writing that mathematics
and exact engineering and technology were able to arise.

The ability to distribute and store information through was one of the secondary
applications or byproducts (lesser effects) of writing despite being at the root
of the motivation to write.

If the appearance of programming (or equivalently computing) in society at large in the past 60 years is an analogue to the effect of the invention of writing, then despite all the applications
seen so far - at the risk of aping Sir Papa WWW - we are still at the beginning of the computer era in terms of its profound
effect on society.

One of the things that initially stands out about computing is how it insinuated itself into every human activity. Despite being a product of electrical engineering and formal logic*, ie despite being an invention "like any other" it was as indispensible to human activity as others like planning and administration.

writing also became a necessity in every serious activity - from religion to trade everything required record keeping, planning, communication writs.

computing provided - well - computation. But it also xtended the record keeping. it automated record keeping and reduced most human activities to computations made on vast records of data.

Indeed, technically the computer was never more than that. A tool for data processing. like writing.

Both are intimately connected to our cognition and thought processes. We often cannot think without them. (here writing can be expanded to its larger sense which includes graphing or drawing as well - as a representational tool & faculty - an extension of the imagination).

Thus computing - or specifically computer programming - is the evolutionary step following writing.

Where writing has led to the ability to program and maintain civic institutions - from theology to accounting , computing gives the ability to program and automate intellectual activity and systems of knowledge.

*for a picture of the fields that fathered computer science , see http://augmented5th.dyndns.org/doku/doku.php?id=computation.
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things life teaches dept: if the universe were an algorithm

22.V.1430

if the entire universe is an algorithm,
then its entire run and outcome set must be known in advance.

there are good reasons why it is an algorithm, and not only as a collection of cellular automata primitives.

it is an alg, as a process that is controlled by sets of constraints - which are the physical laws.

even for a chaotic process, the constraints of physics , or of nature, apply.

it is an algorithm also in the sense of a dynamic model, we know it is controlled or self-regulating/controlling because the persistence of form of some of its objects , like us, despite a continual flow of matter "through" us. That was pointed out by Wiener in Cybernetics

Since a state function is defined (even if it is unknown) by the domain/range, and because a process itself is a set of state or transitions functions, it mus be viewed as a design, ie no different from other state transition machines, or state machines, or automata - save in complexity of course.

The implication is clear. As an algorithm, a formal (vs. natural) automatic machine, it is designed and like any well-designed system, its behavior and outcomes must have been anticipated and fully understood before its "deployment" :)



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collective unconscious wants gopher

My first encounter with the Internet was via Gopher ca. '91 - '93. I noticed its yielding of relevance to HTTP even before the Internet Commercialization Act of 1995, and more assuredly so afterward. Nostalgia however kept "gopher" hovering in the cloud way in the back of the mind. A couple months ago, I started getting an itch to look up gopher on Wikipedia in anticipation of finding where there is still access.**

Well, after zoning out of the idea every time it hit me when i'm busy over the past two months or so, I looked up gopher at wikipedia.

** There was anticipation because of course there must be access to Gopher still (it's been made GNU GPL anyway, i thought it had always been "open"! but it wasn't) as there are NNTP servers. Because there always should be NNTP servers and every TCP/IP App layer protocol should be kept. This must be contentious for a lot of design thinking where comprehensive backward compability is irrelevant, costly and therefore ridiculous. But I mean we're talking client server protocol implementations that should be tiny (in text and data (mem) complexity), not hulking 3.5'' drives (not to mention 5.25's and tape readers :)), right?

So keeping as many of the useful proven RFC's (ie their protocols) alive is historically cool, maintains diversity in the design idea pool and the variety of media for the choosy / nostalgic users who choose nothing better to do than to write about it like this.

In any case, looking gopher up , I read (this being a recurrent pattern btw) that it so happens there is at present increased interest in gopher: "As of 2008, there are approximately 125 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2,[8] a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100." (ibid.)

So once again, it seems that an idea (in this case the rekindling of interest in gopher) was not just appear here only but instead it was non local, generalized, occuring in several instances more or less in a short interval of time (say the span of 2008 - in my case through late summer and fall). ... Read more