After all, we’ve tried blaming the gays. With, you know, wanting to get married and all. We’ve tried blaming the poor, the pregnant, the Muslim. We’ve blamed the sick, the immigrants, the addicted. We’ve blamed the socialists, the communists, the relativists, the unbelievers, even the scientists.

Now we’ve moved on to babies. And it’s a natural evolution of things, I suppose. Because blame always seems to come to rest on those with the least power.

Well, I’ve got news. Between the poor, the gay, the girls with unwanted pregnancies, the immigrants, the sick, the Muslim, and the babies- well, that’s pretty much most of us. And if I had to pick a side to be on- the aforementioned powerless, or the impotent blamers- well, it wouldn’t be the blamers.

In fact, maybe blame is the problem here. Maybe if we weren’t so busy picking out the next target for blame, we could actually be improving the world in some way.

Maybe there is nothing to blame, but blame itself.

Edit: read Mike’s Haiku in the comments first.  If you’re still not enlightened, then read the post :)

Due to the overwhelming response to my last few posts, I have decided to continue writing about emergence, which I think is very important. This post is dedicated to my parents, who think I’m thinkiess. I think I got it from them.

I’ll start with a (subtly altered) definition:

emergence is the behavior of a system that cannot be explained by examining the system’s components.

Since this post is mostly for my folks (who were, after all, my overwhelming response), I begin with an example about trees: “can’t see the forest for the trees.” A forest can be thought of as an emergent property of a system comprised of many trees. Some of the characteristics of a forest are distinct from the characteristics of a given tree. These characteristics are the emergent properties of a system of trees.

For example, deer do not usually live in trees. They do, however, make their homes in forests. Of course there are some necessary simplifications in this model- a forest is a whole ecology. But that, in turn, is another example of emergence: an ecology is an emergent property of a system of living things. It has properties distinct from the properties of those living things (the whole circle of life thing, for instance).

What I was trying to say in my previous post is that even very small things (like electrons or Higgs Bosons) need to be understood both as the thing that they are, and as emergence from a system. In the case of the very small things, that system may be the very fabric of existence itself, which I assure you is quite distinct from physics, which is the study of the emergent properties of the fabric of existence, not the fabric itself. The study of the fabric itself, we usually call metaphysics, but I personally prefer the term “cosmology.”

That concludes this Emergence E Meeting of the Outer Banks Cosmological Society, unless there is any other business to be presented by or to those in attendance.

Which sort of makes me think, huge crowds like this one are another fun example of emergence.

When we left, I was just asking you to imagine the shortest-possible duration of time. I proposed that this duration would be marked by the singular fact that any duration shorter would be the duration between one instant and another which would occur at the exact same time. If you’ll bear with me, I know it sounds sort of Zeno’s-Paradox-ical right now; I assure you it will become even more so shortly.

The next step in my narrative was to ask you to perform the same thought experiment with a distance: to imagine the shortest-possible distance. This would be marked by a similarly singular fact: any shorter distance would be between two points at the exact same place. The third and last step in the thought experiment is to extend this narrative to size, and to imagine the smallest-possible thing. Any smaller thing would have no size whatsoever.

Now, in our Ad Hoc Meeting of the Outer Banks Cosmological Society, I skipped a few steps, and jumped straight to some largely irrelevant conclusion (I think it was, “gravity is emergent” or something of that sort). But where I really wanted to take the conversation (if one can “take” a conversation somewhere without it becoming a soliloquy) was to an easier point, of which the gravity point is merely one example: anything which can be observed is necessarily an emergent property of a system.

The substrate of existence (if it can be properly considered a substrate) is made up of glorious paradoxes such as have no particular location, no particular duration, no color or sound or temperature or strong and weak nuclear forces. This is true because each of these requires such a phenomenally complex system (trace, for instance, the color elicited by a single photon, in all its intricate wonder), that separated from the system they exhibit an exquisite banality comparable only to something less beautiful than physics, such as poetry.

Anyhow, thanks for the conversation, and hopefully this is enough of a bookmark to pick up where we left off.

Best,
David.

When I’m at a prompt, and I type “ls”, I want the sequence of events to be something like this: I hit enter, and I immediately get a prompt back, which has a unique identifier in it, looking something like this:

> ls
ab17e>

Now, let’s say ls takes a while to respond. Maybe the machine is loaded, maybe the disk is slow, maybe there are a trillion files in that directory. I have a few choices: I can give up, and do this:

ab17e> kill

That just kills the process. “ab17e” is technically the identifier for the results, not the PID, but let’s just say my shell is REALLY smart. So smart it can figure out which process(es) to kill in the background by using this unique identifier.

Alternatively, I could do this:

ab17e> wc
ab17f>

This would run a wordcount on the results of that ls, and assign a new unique identifier to the results of that operation, whenever it becomes available. Now, let’s say for laughs that the ls finally returns. It doesn’t interrupt me where I am, it just populates behind the bookmark it saved for itself earlier, and my screen looks like this:

> ls
foo
bar
baz
ab17e> wc
ab17f>

It’s totally asynchronous, but I don’t have to care about it, and I don’t have to put an & after my ls to make it so, and maybe in most cases I don’t even notice that it’s asynchronous, because my blazing fast machine is so blazing fast.

It’s also a shell that optimizes for my use of the result of whatever I type, and it doesn’t force me to do things all at once, or to do them twice, or to avoid mistakes. In fact, if I get lost in the weeds, I can always go back to a previous result by referring to that unique ID and run something else on it- uniq or sort or whatever, but I don’t have to think about how to get that original list back.

If you think about it for about ten seconds, you will see that this shell is awesome, and maybe you will make it for me. If you do, please call it Pragmatic Shell, and imbue it with some pragmas as well, but I’ll have to write more about that another time.

Google just made his question moot, because App Inventor will probably let him do what he wanted to without rooting (if you don’t know what rooting is, just ignore it for the moment).

But here’s my big beef about all this: “To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer.”

That doesn’t make any effing sense. If you use App Inventor, you are a developer. If you use a spreadsheet, you’re probably a developer. Certainly if you’ve ever written a macro, script, stack, or form, you’re a developer. Just own it, dude.

What Google has done, is make a nifty development environment. The people who use it are developers. Chances are, you’re not going to create the Next Big Thing (TM) using Google’s new juice. Because, statistically speaking, there’s only so much room for a Next Big Thing (TM), and it seems like Google is trying to be the ones who just made it. What, then, will you do with it?

If the world is just and good, you’ll use it for what computers do best: you’ll solve some problem, scratch some itch, meet some need. Hopefully you’ll use it like thousands of hackers used LOGO and BASIC in the seventies and eighties, and hopefully it will send some people down the slippery slope into picking software as a profession.

Because it’s damn fine work if you can get it.

But in the meantime, get the message straight: saying it’s not for developers is sort of like saying that chairs are for people who aren’t sitting.

The universe is emergence.

There is no randomness, because none is needed. Minds are special, but not unique; there can be no super-mind: thought emerges with certain limitations. Constants and the equations they feed are local phenomena, generally useful, but not usefully general. There are rules, but they can only be disproved, never proved.

“There is a God” and “There is no God” are just two ways of saying the same thing, which is that existence has order, and humans can understand that order.

Looking at the parts does not explain the whole, and looking at the whole does not imply the parts.

Philosophical arguments about thingyness and existitude are important and real. They tell us nothing about what we see and touch, but everything about what we do not.

I suppose there is more, but it mostly flows from that first point:

The universe is emergence.

Because, let’s face it, if you’re a new parent, you don’t really have much idea about how much poop there will be, or what it will be like, and part of your decision about what products to use will be informed by it.

For starters, your baby is going to come out and have this nasty, sticky poop that will stain everything for about two days. It’s called meconium, and it’s made out of all the hair that fell off your baby in-utero, I believe. It’s nasty stuff. During these couple days, use disposable diapers. If the baby is born in a hospital, they’ll provide such- use them. If you use them on a reusable diaper or washcloth, they’ll get stained.

At some point, when the kid starts breastfeeding (you should do this if you can, because it’s healthy, it’s free, and it will make the poop a little less stinky), you’ll start getting this golden smear in the diapers, maybe with little bits of curdled milk in it. It won’t smell bad, and it doesn’t even need to be rinsed off of the diapers before they’re washed. If the kid is eating formula, it will be a little stinkier, and a little more formed.

Every kid’s poop will be different. We had one that had pretty well-formed poop after the first meal of solid food, and we had another whose wasn’t until around two. If you’ve got a kid that has messy poops, invest in a sprayer for the back of the toilet. Took about fifteen minutes to install, and saved us a crapload of mess. Pun intended.

But your kid’s poop might not be that messy. My kids have a cousin whose poop just rolls right off the diaper into the toilet. If you’re using reusable diapers, that’s what you do with the poop: flush it. Imagine that.

You’ll need some accessories. You’ll need some washcloths to wash the kid’s butt when you change a diaper. If you’re already doing wash for the reusable diapers, using a disposable washcloth seemed silly to us. You’ll need a waterproof diaper pail (we use a plastic garbage bin) and some waterproof bags that you can buy anywhere people sell cloth diapers. We use two big ones for home, plus three or four more for when we’re out and about.

Last, but not least, your kid’s butt will be bigger in cloth diapers. Buy clothes that have a little room in the trunk for some junk. Then practice looking smugly superior for when you, a dad, whip out cloth diapers and start changing your kid. All the moms will stand around and marvel, and you’ll feel (justifiably) awesome.

There is a fey princess in Finn Faerie Land named Mary Katroux.  I don’t know if I’m spelling the name right, because it was told to me by a three-year-old and a four-year-old, neither of whom are particularly insistent on the finer points of spelling, though they are Quite Adamant about details.  They’re much more insistent, in fact, about the details of Finn Faerie Land than they are on the particulars of what happened or didn’t happen, which is somewhat different than the kind of stories I’ve grown accustomed to (which is part of why I mentioned before that this is not necessarily a story).

In fact, there are a few things about Finn Faerie Land that are quite different than I’ve grown accustomed to.  For instance, there is a frog from Finn Faerie Land who lives in a magnolia tree with a hollow spot in it.  The frog’s name is Finnbell, and he is no particular color.  He is no particular kind of frog.  And he is not even really a he, because sometimes she is a she, depending upon what she is occupied with, and she is no particular gender of frog.  I’m told this is not a particularly unusual characteristic in frogs, but it still seemed strange to me when I first encountered Finnbell.

Finnbell’s house, it should be noted, is one of the in-between places that the children call Faerie Houses.  Once on our way down to Indian Run, the children saw such a house without a door, and insisted that we make one and bring it back, since in this particular case, it was surely a mistake.  Sometimes when we go by that place now, the door is open.  Other times, it is closed.  It appears the yard is quite well tended, and we found a stag-horn nearby too, which may have been left there by the Piebald Deer.

The Piebald Deer, like Finnbell, is one of the in-betweens, who can be seen quite plainly when sampling delicious plums from our plum tree, if one is patient enough to wait, and lucky enough to be waiting at a time when the Piebald Deer has a sweet tooth.  The Piebald Deer is also friends with Bernie-the-real-dog, who is usually the one that notices that piebald rump hopping into the trees.  Bernie gives chase, but only in good fun- there is no animosity.

Last, but not least, and not really last, are the Kitsune.  At first I thought they were just foxes, but I guess that is part of the magic of the Kitsune, that most people think they are just mangy red dogs who hang around waiting for a chicken to come outside the fence.  Kirby-the-real-dog tolerates the Kitsune, but Bernie-the-real-dog does not like them at all.  Too much hound in that one to be friends with something that looks that much like a fox.

The Kitsune, interestingly enough, also live in faerie houses, usually down at the bottom of a tree.  You can tell a faerie house with Kitsune living in it, because they dig out the door a little bit.  We found one yesterday that had dug down so much that the tree fell over, but it looked like the Kitsune decided to stay anyhow.  We planted a cherry tree only to learn that it is one of the favorite foods of the Kitsune, at least according to Basho, according to Tim Myers.

One difficulty about this not really being a story is that it becomes difficult to know where to stop.  One stops a story at the end, or when the story has a natural pause, but from what I can tell one only stops telling about Finn Faerie Land when something else grabs one’s attention.  Which has happened to me now.

My parents, I guess, knew the eruption was pending, but it was a great surprise to Dan and Doug and I.  I remember vividly that it didn’t get light that morning like it should have, and that ash began falling from the sky.  I remember I was afraid to go outside- to the outhouse.  I remember animals hiding.

Eventually, years later, I remember climbing to the rim of the St. Helens crater, and seeing the magnitude of the blast that sent pieces of a mountain falling out of the sky, three hundred miles away.

It is also passing strange that we bring with us memories from other places.  Standing deep in right field, I remember hundreds of baseball games, thousands of pitches, and the never-ending hope of a ball being hit my way that would magically, somehow, land in my glove, and we would win the game.  I remember Fenway and Yankee Stadium and Camden Yards.  I remember playing catch with my dad, and getting hit by a thrown bat in T-Ball.

The place I find myself tells this story: of drinking beer and telling lies.  I bring with me my own stories, also of drinking beer and telling lies.  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a ball land in the deep grass, and I wonder where the center fielder is.  I hear the crack of a bat on a ball, and I look toward the backstop, but there’s nobody standing at home plate, nobody on the pitcher’s mound, but it is passing strange that the backstop, the pitcher’s mound, and home plate are all there.

I think “ghost” is just our word for what happens when our memories and the memories of a place combine with such potency that we can call to mind fine details.  Of people, of place, of childhood, and old age.  Of joy and sorrow.  Perhaps most of all, of hope.