[FRIAM] looking for a word

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Thanks, everyone!  These are all excellent leads.  And, yes, the reason "filtration" is evocative is because the liver filters the blood (as well as the methodological map to indexing structures).  And the space-filling nature of rivers and neural and tree growth, I think, impacts such filtration directly.  It's "fractal" in the sense of optimizing some thing like surface area. My (not a biologist) guess is that all exchange mechanisms use such a "bed". Lungs branch out for gas exchange. The liver branches out and in.  The whole system is the "bed" ... or the "foliage".  What I need is a word for a part of the bed.  We have a word for things like the "trunk" or the "stem".

But "dendrometry" is similar to "persistent homology" in the sense that it's a generic term for the *property* exhibited by some system.  What I'm looking for would be "the *part* of the system with dendrometry = X" or "the part of the system exhibiting the persent homology of X".  So, it has to be a noun.

The ideas like "type X hub" or "convergent node" or "junction node" are more on-target grammatically.  And, I need some directionality to it, too.  The input for the liver acinus is divergent, whereas the output is convergent.  Ideally, I could refer to either of them and just plop a qualifier like con- or div- on the front.

I think it was Roger's "dendrite" idea made me think of "sprout" ... "bushy sprouts" versus "singular sprouts" or somesuch.  But what's the inverse of "sprout"?

I don't know.  I'll be boggled if there isn't *already* a word for this "just branching" or "just de-branching" component of a larger network.


On 08/19/2018 08:10 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> I'm still puzzling over whether Glen has a deeper or more subtle
> structure than the "mere"interpenetrating branching structures implied
> say by capillaries, where the in/out flow is exchanged.  I am sensing
> that there is something "special" about the interface between
> hierarchical flows and diffusion systems?   The veins/arteries
> deliver/remove blood but there is another type of exchange that goes on
> in between which is more than diffusion which sort of implies homogenous
> structure?

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