[FRIAM] Automata with FFT

[Steve Smith]

Glen -
> It seems like the Ebook directly from Lulu is cheaper:
>
> https://www.lulu.com/shop/jenny-quillien/delights-muse-on-christopher-alexanders-the-nature-of-order-a-summary-and-personal-interpretation/ebook/product-1nq2m2vd.html?q=Delight%27s+Muse&page=1&pageSize=4 
>
>
> Not that Amazon sucks or anything ... Yay! A New Walmart to destroy 
> small businesses! What will our billionaire overlords think up next?

That's what my grandparents said about /Monkey Wards/ and 
/Sears&Roebuck/ as they used the catalog in their outhouses for what 
they claimed they were good for (this is before clay-coated glossy-paper 
of course).   They were giving the average hilbilly/farmer/rancher/etc 
options that the local dry-goods/hardware/blacksmith couldn't begin to 
compete with, and sure enough they eventually swamped those folks out of 
the game.

I think I'm a bigger luddite than you in this regard but I do appreciate 
your patient pro-active help with all of us to be reminded.   You may 
notice that I usually link to Goodreads which is not as good of a 
reference/review site as I would like (the spotty wisdom/ignorance of 
crowds being what they are).   I personally avoid buying books from 
Amazon, though I did recently discover that the well-respected source of 
quality used books and book information Abe Books was purchased (quietly 
but not silently) by Bezos & Co.  For all I know Goodreads now belongs 
to Bezos or Zuck or even (too plebian for?) Musk.

I was meeting my wife's sister/b-in-law way back in the day (1981?)  in 
Fayetteville AR, when Sam Walton's empire was just beginning to 
metastasize into the world.   They and everyone we met was totally gaga 
over their local-boy-done-good.  They were full of 'murrican-made 
rhetoric and so forth.  I already saw the writing on the wall then, even 
though many small-towns embraced their onslaught they way they did Wards 
and Sears a century before.   In my era the only brand-name services 
where I lived were "service" stations and even those were operated by an 
old man in grubby overalls and you decided on which of the 2 or 3 to 
purchase from based on whether you liked or trusted them and whether or 
not very many of your friends or neighbors had acutely good/bad 
experiences with them, or for many whether they went to the same church 
as you.   Horse sense rules until gossip trumps it?   But these were 
tiny towns, etc.  Even in the small cities (large towns) e.g. Silver 
City/Socorro there were already big chain name grocery stores and 5&10 
stores that everyone flocked to for the larger selection and the 
consistency of service and product quality (consistent sometimes trumps 
good).

On an offline correspondence we have discussed (very lightly) negEntropy 
and the forward march of complex-adaptive-systems.   In this thread we 
have been discussing frequency/scaling, of late. I think that is where 
the "problem" if there is one objectively (there is definitely a problem 
*subjectively*).   The inevitable march of self-organizing systems on 
top of self-organizing systems yields new substrates (where and how we 
shop for things whose where and how of production on top of the where 
and how of materials extraction is obscured to us) which we then (are 
able to and are required to) treat as "simples"/"atomics".

Millennia ago, the formation of "civilization" and "cities", etc.  made 
human beings something of a commodity to one another (or the rich and 
powerful, or the institutions formed around them?).   The factory model 
and interchangeable parts and public schools systems advanced that to a 
higher level.   I may sometimes seem to vilify these things, I now just 
call them "what is" and am loathe to join the coal-rolling diesel-dually 
paired flag waving, (US/Confederate, US/Don't Tread, US/TrumpHumpQ, 
etc), open-carrying parade of my brothers to *protest* the very things 
they depend deeply on, as if to erode the firmament under their own 
feet.  I want to shout "Be careful what you ask for!" when I drive by in 
my electric car, but I don't want to test my run-flat tires against 
their stock of ammunition just aching to be used for something righteous.

In another thread EricS references the "erosion of our institutions" (I 
think he used another word than erosion) and I *think* this is part of 
the larger scale march of negEntropy which is Life Evolving (in the 
large).   The biosphere has been "evolving" as a co-evolution of a very 
large complex set of creatura capable of having large effects on 
(recruiting/subsuming?) the pleroma, but ~10k years ago, Teilhard's 
"Noosphere" began to coagulate on the surface of the language babbling, 
tool-wielding species that is us, and we have now become a very thick 
slime-mold like scum which provides the substrate (or not) for another 
leap in complexity.  The emergence of the Amazons and Aliebabas on top 
of Walmarts and Costcos, and Home Depots and Menards and Krogers which 
exploited a niche created by the Kmarts and TG&Ys and Newberries and  
Piggly Wigglys and Safeways and A&Ps, etc.   seems just to be this march 
of NegEntropy at the next scale.

I'm sympathetic with your constant reminder of "premature registration" 
and in fact would claim as much as it functions as a "bug" in good 
analysis and even design it is a "feature" in this layer-upon-layer 
buildup of complexity.   The urge to pull into a Starbucks or a 
McDonalds because it is convenient and predicatable, even if we know 
they somehow are helping to deforest Argentina and subjugate workers, is 
pretty strong if otherwise superficial.   You and I can (maybe) ignore 
that urge, even turn it into an allergy, but they are flooding the 
streets of the first (and first-aspiring) world.    Many (prematurely or 
inappropriately) register their need for some kind of 
soothing/familiarity onto a food-service experience and for 
branding-affinity or just plain familiarity express it through a 
fast-food or themed-restaurant/donut/coffee-shop experience. Before 
Amazon, it was Barnes and Noble, Hastings, etc. for books which 
(apparently for many) no longer soothe.   Sugar-laced milk-substitutes 
frothed into (ir)responsibly sourced coffee syrup is likely to give way 
to something else (glucose-caffeine-laced Huel?) in a decade or so too.

No end to this rant, so I will just stop.  What I'm really getting at is 
the *pattern*, the *morphodynamics* of evolution of a human-society 
"ecosystem" that is both inevitable (in fact, but not in feature) and 
right out in the open and presumably within our power to at least 
*shape*.   *resisting* Walmart/Amazon *helps* but I don't know what 
precisely to do *beyond* that.

Yesterday, our 5 month old puppy's collar finally got too tight for his 
wellbeing so I was instructed to "pick up a new one" at the pet store.  
All they had were brightly colored, nylon (plastic) jobs that cost $20 
and were almost surely constructed in China and shipped over by the 
100,000 in shipping containers.   I bought one with a wince, and on the 
way home realized that the half-dozen failed or deprecated USB cords I 
was waffling about how to recycle/dispose-of could have quite easily 
(and fashionably) been woven (thank you cub-scouts circa 1966) into a 
perfectly good collar.   Oh well, that would make us seem too much like 
old Hippies...  so 100 years from now that collar and the discarded USB 
cables will be floating in the Pacific Gyre... but our puppy will be 
long, long gone and we nearly as long gone, and it will only be our 
great grandchildren who will care?   The old collar just went down the 
time-capsule pipe that is my spiral staircase... sequestering 
(interesting?) carbon and precious metals one tiny bit at a time.

I said I would stop didn't I?  Inertia!  Talkaholism! Ideaphoria!

- Steve

> On 9/27/22 19:02, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I believe Jenny is still subscribed to this list but probably isn't 
>> following it closely so may not have seen any of this discussion.  I 
>> recommend her personal reflections on Alexander's work: Delight's 
>> Muse 
>> <https://www.amazon.com/DelightS-Christopher-AlexanderS-Nature-Order/dp/143031317X> 
>> .
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20220928/d3a176a1/attachment.html>